Trolling and Investigating Trump

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This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show. I am Jack Fowler, here to ask questions of the great man, Victor Davis Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.
He's also the owner of a website, TheBladeOfPersheus, VictorHanson.com. That's the address.
But later in this episode, which is being recorded on Saturday the 4th and is up on Thursday the 9th. Later in the episode, I will suggest to you kindly why you should be subscribing.
Lots to talk about today, Victor, including two sets of major presidential awards that Joe Biden is issuing as he exits for his basement in Delaware.

One is the Presidential Citizens Medal.

The other is the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

And you have some pointed opinions to share on these matters. Then we also have Donald Trump's sentencing by Judge Merchant in New York,

which is happening tomorrow on the 10th of January,

and more Biden stuff on trying to kill offshore drilling.

Lots to talk about today.

And we'll get to this when we come back from these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson show, which is obviously this is a podcast. You're listening to it, but rather new.
It's also being recorded. And if you're on Rumble, you can, I don't know, get it that way.
So go to Rumble. I'm going to hold this up again, Victor.
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Victor, two sets of awards. Let's start with the Presidential Citizens Medal, which have already been awarded.

And the culprits in that include some of your favorite people, Lynn Chaney.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Before we continue, my favorite person is Denzel Washington.

Well, that's a different award.

Okay, but that is a genuine favorite person.

This is sarcastic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

As opposed to sarcastic.

Thank you. My favorite person is Denzel Washington.
Well, that's a different award. Okay, but that is a genuine favorite person.
This is sarcastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
As opposed to sarcastic. Well, we'll get to the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
But Liz Cheney, Chris Dodd, which is a head-scratcher, and Nancy Kassebaum, the former Republican senator from Kansas,

and Benny Thompson with Liz Cheney,

the co-chair or the chair of the January 6th commission.

Anyway, Victor, this is a cast.

Ellie Smeal.

I didn't know she was still alive,

but she was the head of... She's got to be about 85.
Yeah, yeah. She was that point woman on the...
Abortion. Abortion.
Feminism and everything. Anyway, your thoughts on this, Victor? All of these wards, almost all of them, with some exceptions, Denzel, Nancy Kausalbaum, but there is an element of Biden trolling.
I shouldn't say Biden trolling. Biden doesn't know where he is.
He can't finish a sentence. So the people around him, the Obama people, the Jill people, the Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren squad wing, all of those people in the executive branch are making these decisions.
And one of the common themes is they want to troll Donald Trump. So Liz Cheney would never have gotten that award had she not gone after Donald Trump.
And I don't mean just gone after him. I mean devoted her entire life to attacking Donald Trump to the extent that she blew up.
She was the third-ranking member in the House and was being groomed within five years to be the Speaker. And she blew up her entire career because she bet on the wrong horse, the never-Trump horse.
So she was assuming that the Cheney brand would put Donald Trump out of business,

and it had the opposite effect. So she lost a primary in Wyoming, her father's state, even though she had been sort of estranged by being the representative that lived in, for the most part, I think, in Virginia.
But she lost by 40 points. And then she was appointed the co-chair of the January 6th Committee on two requisites.
One, she would not have a political career after that, and she didn't. And two, she had voted to impeach Donald Trump.
So those was why she was selected. And then she could have just said to Kevin McCarthy, bring on all...
No, no, it was only two Republicans were allowed for the first time in House history. And now she's under accusations from the House investigative report that she contacted a witness, Miss Wilkerson, Is that her name? I forgot her name.
The aide, the White House aide, and she tried to talk to her in a manner that she wouldn't have talked to had her counsel been present, and tried to convince her to fire her own lawyer and get a lawyer more suitable to Liz Cheney. That's unethical, if not illegal.
And then there's sizable records, according to the House Committee, of interviews, tapes, videos that are missing, missing. That's above and beyond the idea that the type of witnesses that were called in were not other witnesses that had divergent points of view.

Okay. So she has this reputation, and she has said that Donald Trump is a fascist, he's going to destroy America, and her parents, who used to be the brand name of the established republicanism for 30 years, have come out in support of her.
And so Joe Biden, who couldn't stand the Cheneys, has decided to give her the second highest award, and that's to signal Donald Trump. And then we have the person that, after she lost her election to Donald Trump, almost immediately she bragged that she was joining La Résistance and would try to stop everything he did as president and was one of the architects of the Steele dossier.
We're talking about Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton hired the DNC, hired Christopher Steele, paid him money to find dirt on Donald Trump and hid her footprints by the Perkins Coe paywall and the Fusion GPS paywall.
And then under subpoena, she destroyed over 30,000 emails, some of which were classified according to Comey. And even the ones that weren't destroyed, they were classified emails that were transmitted on an unsecured server.
And then she had a technician actually destroy the actual devices. And then she mocked it by saying that these had been washed.
And she'd act like, oh, wow, you wash it with water, that kind of stuff. So she was an inappropriate person to get that award, to use one of the words.
And they gave her that award to send a signal to Donald Trump. That's the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Yes, and this is a nihilist operation as he leaves. He's putting oil and gas, federal lands, off the market in a way that he thinks will take years to reclaim and will force Donald Trump to go to liberal courts and the judges will against him.
He tried to sell off the wall materials so he couldn't build the wall. There's rumors, rumors, rumors that Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken and Biden, but you can't say Biden.
He doesn't know what he's doing. We're discussing a preemptive hit on Iran before they leave office.
Kind of a payback because allegedly Trump had thought about that and then discounted it before Biden took over. But the whole point I'm making is that he's doing as much as he can to disrupt the transition of Donald Trump.
We have other nominees, don't we? Yeah, we do. Well, some of them are low.
I mean, typical Biden, right? A bunch of cronies from Delaware get these awards. Why? Because they're from Delaware, and they were buddies of his.
They're from Delaware, and they get an award, and there's some quid pro quo there. Yeah.
But also, I'll take one from my own state, former senator here, Chris Dodd. I remember what I remember him from.
Well, we can tell. He and Ted Kennedy used to make sandwiches, sex sandwiches of waitresses.
Remember, she came out during one of the elections, the victim of that so-called sandwich, and she complained. And it was kind of, she got a lot of, Rush Limbaugh brought that up a lot.
And his point wasn't to be lurid, but that the people who were radical feminists had used some woman, a waitress, I think, in a very callous manner, sexually assaulted her, and then treated her as if she was a minion or a servant rather than respecting somebody who was waiting on them and then of course he had a lot of financial irregularities which i think prompted his resignation and he was the son of the senior dog when i was growing up who also had to resign under what financial to be to be just to be precise Chris Dodd got into trouble on scamming on mortgages so he decided not to run for re-election yes polling and here in Connecticut showed that he was going to going to lose so he dropped out of that and his father who was a great anti-communist, and he was one of the lawyers at Nuremberg, the Nuremberg trials, but he got into some trouble back in the 60s. He did run as an independent for re-election but lost that.
I think Ribikoff won that scene. Yes, and Chris Dodd made a lot of money.
He was the head of the motion pictures industry for five years. Right, after Jack Valenti.
That Jack Valenti had done. They usually give that job to a Democratic retread.
Right. Well, some of the other awardees, Benny Thompson, of course, and these are the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Benny Thompson. And he's, he's, that was the irony that they selected him as the chairman of the January 6th committee to investigate attempts to delay the counting or the ratification of the Electoral College.
And he had done exactly that himself as a perpetrator in 2004 when George W. Bush had won clearly the state of Ohio.
There had been people from England, and this election had come in to stop George W. Bush, the Hitlerian figure.
John Kerry was furious. And then Barbara Boxer, and I think 33 House members chose.
She, of course, was not involved directly, but she was the spearhead in the Senate. But they voted not to accept the results of the Ohio election and therefore not the electors.
And had they run, their wish was to what? It would throw the voting into the House of Representatives. It's exactly what they impeached Donald Trump for doing, trying to disrupt the voting of the Electoral College and cast doubt upon the integrity of the election.
That's what Benny Thompson basically did, and then they made him, it was juveniles who will police the police. He was now the person who was going to make sure that nobody did what he did.
So he's awarded for that, I suppose. Yeah.
And we know that there's a lot of questions about his directorship, about the makeup of the committee that he chaired and what happened to all the documents that could be reviewed by an audit, and they seem to be missing some of them. This is the Democrat way of data just disappearing.
Victor, the aforementioned other than Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton Presidential Medal of Freedom, highest honor that a president can be bestowed on a private citizen. The other was Presidential Citizens Medal.
I'm not really sure what the distinction for the second one, what earns you that. As for the Medal of Freedom, there are 19.
They have not been given out yet. I'm not sure what day they will be given.
But actually, I'm looking at the press release. We're recording on the 4th.
They're being given out today as we're talking. So, Hillary Clinton, but some of the others, on the upside, let's get the good out of the way.
Denzel Washington. Go ahead.
Do you want to say anything about that? Well, I like Denzel Washington. I like him for some of the movies that people thought were not his best performances,

such as The Book of Eli and my favorite, Man on Fire. Some of those scenes where he's ad-libbing.

Time, I got all the time in the world as he walks away and the person blows up.

And then I even liked him in that series that everybody thought was kind of mediocre, The Equalizer, the first one. He was so good in that.
He was kind of, he's my age, so he's a little over the hill, but he did some kind of rigmarole where it tick, tick, tick, tick. And he didn't require a lot of physical exertion to disarm his.
And, of course, the thugs in those were always going to be white, toothless, Russian-accented, oligarchical people with orthodox crosses all over them. Some were Italians.
Some were Italian. But I like Denzel.
He's a master actor. I like him because he's a good actor.
Well, there are a couple in here that are middle fingers in weird ways, I think, to the Trumps. And one is giving an award to Robert Kennedy, who's been dead now for 50 years.
Robert Kennedy was a good man, but he's been dead for many decades. And it's odd that Joe Biden then would give him posthumously a medal at this particular year.
And I think the point of it was to remind everybody that his oldest son, Robert F. Kennedy, with the exact same name, is now an apostate.
And maybe even to have Bobby Kennedy have to go to the Biden White House and then suffer the opprobrium of a liberal audience that will jeer at him or give him dirty looks or suggest that he's an apostate. So that was the impetus behind that award.
Another weird one, George Romney, also dead for many years. It's another trolling.
Mitt Romney is now, he was one of the most vocal never Trumpers. He was the one that had some of the most memorable soundbites about Trump failed this, he failed that, he's a con artist.
And then Trump got back at him by going through that ritual that he might consider for Secretary of State, which apparently Romney took for, he wanted it, and he was paraded around Trump Tower, then he was unceremoniously rejected. And then he resurfaced for Utah.
I don't think he would have won that Utah election, except Trump advisors said to him, you're going to need every vote in the Senate, and, you know, in theory, you could lose Utah. I don't think he could have with another candidate.
But he came out and he endorsed Romney and Romney turned right around and attacked him again, which is kind of strange. And then finally, he had no public support.
He probably would have been primaried or lost re-election. And then he was a never-Trumper.
He didn't vote for Trump. But he said something a little weird at the end to the effect that these nominees were Trumps.
He won the election. Why wouldn't he point people he wanted? In other words, he didn't quite go full-scale never-Trump.
But that was another selection that sent a message to Donald Trump. Right.
Two other, one's a little more obvious than the other to my mind. The first one is George Soros, who's now getting the presidential medal.
George Soros, well, George Soros did more than any single American citizen to destroy the rule of law in the United States. He systematically spent tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, and he pre-selected our major cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, St.
Louis, that had high crime problems.

And he deliberately, under the radar, almost stealthily gave millions of dollars to these offices. And usually the district attorney's race is not a marquee race, and so people don't pay it much attention, and they just vote Democratic or Republican.
But he financed these radical, critical, legal, critical race theory candidates with the prime intention that they would not charge arrested criminals with crimes. If they did charge them, they would find a way to drop the charges or have them acquitted.
And if they were convicted, they would not be given much time. And a crime wave, as we remember now, 2000, 2821, spiked 22.
And he was one of the people responsible for it. He had a checkered career anyway.
He was declared a felon by France. And I think, and my listeners, all of our listeners can correct me if I'm wrong, he is not allowed to go back into France without being subject to arrest.
But he did more than any individual to fund this Jacobin revolution that we're doing now. And so he's been rewarded with it.
Just as a footnote, when he gave that award to Romney, it was to troll Donald Trump. And it was also a reminder that when Mitt Romney ran in 2012 against Barack Obama and Joe Biden, that was one of the dirtiest campaigns in recent memory.
What they did to Mitt Romney, they reduced kind of a old

fashioned aristocratic financier, play by the rules, rhino Republican into a stark raving

criminal almost. They went to the, what did they, what did Biden and Obama do? They said that

he was a hazer in his high school years.

He put a dog on a cage and tortured it as he drove across the country.

His wife, who had multiple sclerosis, was a privileged equestrian.

He had an elevator in his home.

He had two or three Cadillacs or American luxury cars.

He didn't talk to his garbage man who came by and

was remorseful that Mitt hadn't talked to him as if any of those people talked to their garbage man. It was a very dirty, dirty, dirty campaign.
And now for Biden to bite his tongue, it only reveals that my hatred of Donald Trump and my way of tweaking him

by awarding one of his arch enemies trumps the fact that I'm a little embarrassed that I tried to destroy that very person I'm honored in the most despicable way I could in 2012. At least my team did.
who also marched

not forget he marched with the BLM

uh 2012. At least my team did.
Who also marched. Not forget he marched with the BLM protesters.
Yeah, he thought that was really cool to do that. I got in a big argument once with my friend Christopher Hitchens.
Christopher Hitchens, when Mitt Romney was running for president in 2008-12, talked to me. Actually, he came out here and he ranted and raved about holy underwear.
Do you remember that topic that came up with Mitt Romney, that people of the Mormon faith wore particular? The magical underpants. Yes.
And Christopher kept writing about that. And I said, why do you go into that? So you made the point once, why keep doing it? And he was trying to give me this strong argument that this was a sign of irrationality and religious zealotry and extremism that would cloud his judgment.
I said, there's all sorts of zealotry. You could not like the United States.
That's a type of secular zealotry. and I said that's all sorts of zealotry you could not like the United States that's a type of secular zealotry and I said that would be like me saying again and again and again that Obama claimed he ate a dog in Indonesia so he's a dog eater and I think I mentioned that once on television or in a column but why say it every time make the point and move on I think it's a very sensitive issue, Victor, for Mormons, and that's why it's a button to push.
Yeah, I don't think that... So what I'm getting at is the left really went after Mitt Romney, and Mitt Romney in 2012 made a pilgrimage to Trump Tower to seek private citizen Donald Trump's endorsement.
And there's a good, just as a sidelight, it was posted on Powerline by Scott Johnson, who's always perceptive. But there was a good tape in 2005 when they were remodeling, I remember that, the UN, and they came in with this horrific bill of $1.5 billion, and they wanted to get someone, because we were paying 70% of the cost, and so they wanted to get a New York builder, they being the Senate, and they, at that time, called in, I think he was a 58-year-old Donald Trump, to say, you build it, and he explained, and you should look at that tape, everyone.
It's amazing the amount of detail, recall at his fingertips. He gives you the exact price per square foot.
He gives you the breakdown of marble versus terrazzo flooring. And he comes to conclusions that he could have done it, or anybody of comparable size and ability in New York could have done somewhere between $400 million and $700 million, half of what the United States paid most of the bill for.
But my point is that there was a time when people treated Trump as a normal person. Yes.
Hillary Clinton invited him to his daughter's wedding. You know? Yeah.
Two other names on this list, Victor. I said one, but I can't resist it.
I just saw Bill Nye, the science guy, who is such a... What? I mean, what a...
Yeah, he's not a science guy. He's an ideologue.
The other person, I think, to troll Trump was Anna Wintour, the long-time editor of Vogue magazine. She made it a point that Melania would never be on the cover.
Exactly. I think Melania will be on the cover of Vogue in the next four years.
Each person, there was also a chef there that had a big fight with Trump that was put on the list as well. He had a Hispanic name, I think.
But the point is, if you look at all of them, you can find a common denominator that it was trying to tweak. You know, it's a tough race.
So, you know, Biden is saying to Trump, you know, I'm going to try to embarrass you as much as I can. I'm sure Trump is going to do it.
What they don't understand is that in this transition, they are billing a case post-election. Why Donald Trump's nominees are going to be approved.
The FBI reaction, at least initially, to the New Orleans killing, the Middle East stuff, the, this Judge Mershon, which we'll talk about, sentings in Donald Trump, the nihilist transition and spitefulness, they're all giving ammunition to Donald Trump to be pretty tough when he comes in. So I can't think of any, Republicans have 53 senators.
I can't think of after what you saw with the FBI when their assistant special agent in New Orleans, first thing out of her mouth is the DEI indoctrinated, this is not terrorism, when it was clearly terrorism. That is an argument for Kash Patel to be confirmed.
And I think I said to Sammy, any person who does not vote for Kash, or Pete Hegseth, or Tulsi Gabbard, is going to feel the wrath of the American people and the Republican Party, especially, especially if any of them voted, and I think most of the dissident Republicans voted to confirm Alejandro Mayorkas, to take just one example, or Pete Buttigieg to take another. So if they voted to approve these hard left incompetents, and they turn around and vote against these people.
Another thing to make very clear, Cash is getting a lot of complaints, but according to left-wing dogma, you fire a white Christopher Ray, an old-time person without any military experience. He was a lawyer in the Bush administration way back.
He had no real law enforcement experience when he went to the FBI as a legal counsel. But my point is, you fire in DEI terms a white guy, then you bring in a person of color who has much more experience,

and then you oppose him.

Or then you say that we don't have national security experience

at the Secretary of Defense,

and yet you're bringing somebody in that's actually been in combat

and been decorated.

And then you're saying that the Director of National Intelligence, the current one, hasn't had military experience, but you're bringing in, I guess she's a colonel in the reserves, Chelsea Gabbard. So these people all have military or investigatory intelligence experience, and yet you're claiming they're unqualified, or they don't know the nitty-gritty at the ground level, and that's what qualifies them to be there.
It's pigmentary and chromosomal checklists that rule these things. Actually, Victor, a buddy of mine sent me an email today about, when you see what about New Orleans, to see the police chief there are you really inspired by law enforcement when they hire I think she was fired she had some police sub leadership role in Chicago and then she was fired in Oakland they sued her for something and then she was fired in Oakland.
They sued her for something. And then she was an FBI consultant.
She's a DEI person, and she basically couldn't explain why these protocols that are usually put in place on New Year's Eve to protect people from exactly what happened, they weren't there. And she's one of these people that is, when they're culpable and they're bureaucrats, they give long, angry denunciations, sort of like the Secret Service guy with a flat top.
Remember when he starts yelling and screaming? When they press in. Anytime you see a career bureaucrat or somebody who's run an agency and they've been culpable and they get angry or they start, they should go.
Like the woman who was running Secret Service? Secret Service, same thing. They just think that they can double down and be machismo-like or something.
They have to go. No one claims responsibility or takes, says, yep, I screwed up.
And you will not hear that from this crowd. Well, Victor, you mentioned before some of the things Biden is doing going out the door, and one of them has to do with energy.
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We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show recording on Saturday the 4th. This particular episode is up on Thursday the 9th.
Let me save up Victor's website, the Blade of Persis. VictorHanson.com is the web address.
You should be going there regularly and even subscribing. What's subscribing? Five bucks a month.
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Here's a headline, Victor. In last-ditch executive order, Biden plans to permanently handicap Trump's offshore drilling agenda.
And here's just the beginning of this article. President Joe Biden is expected to permanently block new offshore and oil and gas development in U.S.
coastal waters, a last-ditch effort to cement his climate legacy in the final weeks in the White House. Bloomberg reported Thursday the executive order would prohibit the sale of new drilling rights in sections of America's outer continental shelf.
Sources familiar with the plan told Bloomberg. The move comes as Democratic lawmakers and environmental organizations have urged Biden to, quote, maximize permanent protections, end quote, against offshore drilling.
drilling. Victor, whatever this executive order, which may have been issued in between the time

we're talking and when this podcast is up, is applicable to some existing federal law that makes it seem as if Trump cannot issue an executive order. Why didn't he just do it on October 1st? There's two things to remember about that.
He didn't do it on October 1st because he knew that it would destroy the Democratic campaign as much as he disliked Harris. And the second thing to remember about it, it's a preview of what would have happened if Kamala Harris had won.
So everybody remember what she's now on record for.

She's on record for supporting fracking,

increased leases of gas and oil by private concerns.

She's for a more deterrent foreign policy.

And, of course, two things, subcategory. She's not doing any of that now, of course.
And her boss is now contradicting the Harris 2.0 of the campaign. And the only reason they're doing that is to hurt Donald Trump.
But they don't have any ideology, Jack, other than power. I know that when they came in, Joe Biden had that tough guy, as he always says, don't do this or this, but they ask him about fracking.
Remember at one of those outdoor press conferences, would you ban fracking? Yes, I ban fracking. Are you going to put a limit or a horizon on fossil fuels? Are you going to phase them out? Yes, I am.
I'm tough. And then he got in and he tried to do that the first year.
And during his inflationary spiral, gasoline went up here in California. I filled up in Los Angeles at $6 a gallon.
And here in the Central Valley, it was $5.50 at one point., no one could afford it. And then he panicked right before the 2022 midterms.
So he began scrambling as fast as he could. Can't you frack? Can't you horizontal drill? Here's more leases, and I'm going to drain the strategic petroleum reserve for one or two million barrels to lower the price.
And he got it down below 50%. He never filled it back up.
Trump will have to do that. But the point I'm making was he didn't really have any consistent ideology other than if he had his druthers, yes, he'd like to be a left-wing Green New Deal, new Green Deal, whatever.
But it was about power. So he was willing.
When he left office and he's leaving now, if you actually look at the amount of natural gas and oil that is being pumped, it is comparable to the top years of the Trump administration. What I'm saying is that from mid-2022, when he was in danger of losing the Congress, they came to him, his handlers, and said, you've got to just be quiet about energy and secretly pump and drain, pump and drain, pump and drain, and get the price of gas down before the midterm, or we're going to lose congressional and Senate seats.
And that's what he did. And that's one of the reasons, one of many, he tried to, you remember,

legalize marijuana, give student loan amnesties.

He did all that on the eve of the student debt, on the eve of the election.

But my point is he didn't really, he doesn't have a strong opinion about anything.

It's just about whatever they tell him to maintain power, at least during the elections. And so now it's just spite.
He's a miserable person. He really is.
He was always that way before he became demented. He had racist tendencies.
He was a plagiarist. He lied about everything.
We've gone into this before about the circumstances of his first wife's death and how he defamed the truck driver who tried to avoid the accident. And his family has been crooked from the word go.
They have all sorts of accumulated wealth that is not explicable by the salaries they earn. And we all know that.
And I think that just as a preview, we're not done yet because this will come out on the 7th. There's 13 more days and I would not be surprised.
I'm not predicting that, but I would not be surprised if 24 hours before he leaves office, some other members of the Biden family are getting pardons.

Yeah, yeah.

By the way, Victor, amongst the criticisms you just leveled at him,

his pretension for great intelligence is one of them.

I mean, top of his class and all this hoo-ha. But I recommend, if folks haven't seen Michael Pack's documentary on Clarence Thomas and the great interaction, Joe Biden questioning Thomas at the Supreme Court hearings, and Thomas, you know, 30 years later, whatever, he was asked, what do you think he was sayingce Thomas is kind of, I don't have the slightest clue what he was getting at.
You had the plagiarist and the person who was put on law school suspension for plagiarizing and who had lied to the American people that he got a scholarship and he was on the top of his class. All of that was lies and amorality.
and then he's lecturing Clarence Thomas that he's basically not an authentic black liberal and therefore not qualified to be in the Supreme Court. He's disgusting.
He's going to go down. I know all these presidential, they're saying he ranks 13th or something, Trump's last, but that's not the last word.
He's going to go down eventually where he should be as probably the worst. And I say that as no fan of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton or Obama.
But I will say that Bill Clinton was the only president since 1970 when Richard Nixon balanced the budget with the help of Newt Genrich. Genrich and Clinton did balance the budget for four years, and they got our national debt down to, I think, 37 percent of GDP.
It's 120 now. So I give him credit for that.
I don't give any credit for Barack Obama. I think that was an utter disaster.
But Joe Biden makes Barack Obama look like Jefferson or Washington in comparison.

What do you make of Biden's blocking of the sale of U.S. steel to Japan, Nippon steel?

Somebody joked on Twitter, well, if the Japanese had put his son on a board, there would have been no problem. Trump probably was for that too.
I think the unions are controlling that. The company that is going to buy U.S.
steel will own, I guess it's almost 90% of steelmaking. And they're kind of in bed with the unions.
and they feel that they're going to, even though they're not profitable and they don't have a lot of money themselves, they feel that under Trump there's going to be tariffs, and they're going to have a guaranteed market share, and they can raise their prices, and that all may be true, and therefore it'll be an American product with American ownership, American unions. I have no problem with that.
But I don't know to what degree the Japanese were sincere when they said that they would come in, they would honor the union contracts, they would invest a couple of billion dollars to modernize all the ossified equipment and assembly line production lines, etc., and they would not interfere in the free market or use Japanese nationalism or something. Again, with all these things like this, there's an argument that you should let them buy it, but then you have to ask the other question.
So do we have a comparable successful American company and a Japanese company that is not as successful? Well, let's say that if Elon Musk wanted to go into Japan and buy Nissan, which is struggling, or if Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos wanted to go in Japan, he wanted to take over all mail-in shopping, would the Japanese government allow that? If they would, I have no problem. But if they would say this is encroaching on Japanese sovereignty, then I do have a problem.
And I don't know the answer to that. But I suspect that Japan would not allow that to happen.
And again, it's this post-war mentality that the United States, because it had been so prosperous, emerging from World War II, when it was producing 90% of the ships for post-war shipping, the Liberty and the Freedom ships, and it had about 90% of refined gasoline. Europe was in shambles.
There was no China then. It was a mess.
Russia had lost 20 people and was devastated. The two big economic powerhouses, Japan and Germany, were flattened.
We were just, as I said, like a colossus standing over these impoverished. And everybody said, you've got a Marshall Plan, and you subsidize NATO.
You've got the GATT agreements. You go in, and you use that big, big surplus, that big, huge domestic market, and you subsidize all the rest of us until we catch up.
And we never stopped doing it, even when we were poor. So there's that still post-war mentality that the United States can always afford it.
You can always afford illegal immigration. You can always afford the remittances, saying $120 billion, that's nothing in your multi-trillion dollar economy.
You can always allow the Europeans to dump stuff here, China to dump stuff, but you can't reciprocate because if you do that, you're a protectionist or you're vindictive. I'm a free marketer, Victor, but you just talked about shipbuilding.
Well, we need to build, right? Our Navy needs many more ships. Are there any shipyards left to build them in? I know there are just a couple.
Three or four? Just a couple. Yeah.
I think there's three or four, and there's short labor and expertise. This is a nation that, because of the ship building plants in places like Oakland and Seattle and Portland and Boston, all down the east and west coast, that when it started the war in 1941, its navy, I think, was the third largest.
And by 1945, the American navy was larger than all of the navies in the world combined. All of the navies, 7,000 ships.
We can't even make 300 now. So we had the best shipyards in the world.
We had the best designs. If you look at American carriers in World War II, the Iowa-class battleships, the heavy cruisers, the destroyers, the brilliant idea.
Our submarines were technically, and they were engineered far better even than German U-boats, at least the normal models of German U-boats. And we came up with brilliant ideas like destroyer escorts, escort carriers.
It's so sad to see all of that generation's brilliance just be squandered so that now we can't even make a ship without

eight or nine years and it's cost overruns mechanically there's problems we're backlogged rise and fall of societies you know yeah well let's talk about a society that seems to be falling, that would be

England,

Britain.

You mentioned Elon Musk before. Elon Musk has been using X to engage in some social media battle with some of the leadership of England.
This all has to do with this grooming, which we've known about. We've talked about it before.
But this is an endemic or pandemic or whatever. It's just throughout British society, but covered up by the labor governments.
Actually, I think maybe the Tory governments before that weren't doing that much of a job. The current prime minister, Keir Starmer, was once the head of the Crown Prosecution Office that was supposed to look into some of these more egregious grooming scandals.
And the current head of this, I forget her name, she's some minister, is prohibiting this. This is a big deal.
This is a big deal. It's a big deal.
Elon Musk has really gone to town and brought attention to it. But if you read some of the papers, Telegraph, but especially the Daily Mail, you can't repeat it on the air what they did to the women.
And they're not women. They're girls.
12, 13, 14. They were using, I can't even get into it, devices to sexually torment.
It wasn't that they wanted to just groom them and pimp them out or to have sex with older men. It was to humiliate them and hurt them physically and rape them again and again, and to do so with the assumption that anybody who objected would either suffer a lost election or the whole powers of British culture would go after them as a racist.
It was another example of what we talked about, about DEI. Make no mistake about it, if these were young immigrant girls, 12 or 13 or 14, and these were white British that were doing that, they would have been executed in Britain.
Another thing to remember, this also was a class idea. The people who objected to it were put in jail, and the people who were being preyed upon were lower and poor white people in the inner cities.
If there had been a Pakistani Muslim ring of aristocratic rapists, and they had enhanced or enticed, I shouldn't say enhanced, but they had enticed or allured the 12- or 13-year-old daughters of the royal family or the ruling parties in parliament. They would have been outraged.
But the idea was these are illiberal, white, ignorant, cockney people, and their kids are out of control. They're drinking.
They're promiscuous. They get what they deserve.
So what? And we're not going to go after poor immigrants that take advantage of the pathologies of the white lower classes. It's really a horrific story.
And people who objected to this, as you know, were jailed, especially if you did so on social media.

I think somebody sent me something where he pointed out, I have no way of ascertaining the veracity of it,

that in the huge rush of 150 million people, there were something like 400 or 500 people who were arrested for violations of state dogma. They were put in jail for their expression.
And in England of 60, 65 million people, there were more people put in jail for incorrect expression than there was in Russia. And I don't know if that says anything or just an artifact of the different types of surveillance or categories of people who were prosecuted, but something has gone wrong and written.
And it gets back, I think, to the idea that they don't have a written constitution like we do, but more importantly, they don't have a Bill of Rights. So we have refuge in the First Amendment, and they don't.
And the thing about it is they're very capable at what they do, but when they import bad ideas, and they imported this bad ideas from the United States, they don't have a grassroots... They did with Brexit, but that was rare, but they don't have anything like the Tea Party.
Even on the left, Occupy Wall Street, as crazy as that was, but they don't have a, there's not a tradition of the, I should say, hoi polloi organizing from the bottom up. Nigel Farage, but that again is Brexit.
And they think he's crazy. And when you see it in Europe, the alternative for Germany, I know there's some crazy people in that, but that is not a Nazi organization.
And so they go after these grassroots populist groups, and they demonize them. And they try to do it here, but they're not as successful, because we have a lot of prairie fire traditions.
So in England, once they get a bad idea, and it becomes institutionalized, and there's pushback from the bottom about it, it doesn't work. Well, this...
It's, you know, just to finish, it's kind of this Escalian, Hesiodic, those are figures in Greek literature who talked about hubris, then incurs ate or chaos, and then that leads to nemesis. And the way they look at it, all of the post-colonial peoples that we exploited, this is the left mindset, we were arrogant in the 19th century, our great-great-great-grandfathers 150 years ago.
Yes, we spread the rule of law, jurisprudence, habeas corpus, the English language, etc., but we were still culpable. So we have to let in people from the Caribbean, and from Africa, and from Asia, and from the Middle East, and mostly people of different faiths, Islam, and then we have to suffer their idiosyncratic customs.
And we have no right to inflict our traditions upon them. And there's no one in Britain except a few conservatives.
I'm fortunate to note, too, I work with Andrew Roberts, the historian, and Neil Ferguson, the historian, and they're wonderful in their writings, but no one ever says, for all the faults of Britain, there was never a society like 18th and 19th century Britain that eliminated the slave trade, that was the forefront of women's suffrage movements, that had these brilliant writers across the spectrum that were talking about needed social change, that people, whether it's Chesterton or Dickens or any of them, they were brilliant people. And they created these whole disciplines.
And as a classicist, I can tell you that they're just things they did. The Liddell and Scott monumental project to make a lexicon of classical Greek or the Lewis and Short Dictionary or the Ashmolean Museum.
No one ever did anything like that. China didn't, Russia didn't, Africa didn't.
We haven't. And so it's very sad to see themselves hate themselves so much that they would allow an immigrant population to come in and prey on people based on their nationality and race and then expect to be exempt from any consequences.
And that's exactly what happened. Politically, Victor, this is landing on the Labor Party, which took over not all that long ago, last year.
But the madness went on during the reign of the conservatives, quote-unquote conservatives. I don't even know what the hell a conservative is.
I don't think there is a conservative party really in Europe, especially in Britain. The conservatives are, the Tories are not conservative.
Neil Farage, not, the Farage party. UKIP, originally was UKIP, now it's the reform party yeah yeah reform is that what it is yeah yeah that is a conservative party yeah but usually they're they're on cultural issues abortion affirmative action whatever they're indistinguishable from the Labor Party.
But it's really sad to see this hatred of your own culture, which permeated the world. So when you look at the world today and you ask yourself, why are people wearing suits and ties in China? Or why is there something called the International Criminal Court, whether you like it or not,

or why is there a concept that everybody wants to have,

you're judged whether you have habeas court.

These all derive either from the United States or from Britain,

and if it's from the United States, it's from the British influence.

And if you look at the countries in the Western Hemisphere,

there's two that stand out that have the rule of law and they are prosperous and they're secure, and that's Canada and the United States. It has nothing to do with race, but all the other two have two things in common.
They were not colonized by the British government. The original settlers did not come from the English-speaking British domains, and they were part of the Spanish Empire that had, no offense Jack, but religious intolerance.
You had to be Catholic to go anywhere in Latin America if you were a settler and they were largely male dominated early settlers and there was you know there was just a different a medievalism about them that was not true of Canada the United States so what I'm getting at is anywhere that the British Empire whether it's Australia or New Zealand or the United States or Canada, was able to colonize India, they had a leg up. Nobody likes to be colonized.
We were colonized, but it depends on who's colonizing you. And it's not Germany, it's not France.
It's not China. It's not Russia.
It's different, the British. Yes.
And I think, you know, people don't recognize that. Well, Victor, we have two other things.
Hopefully we'll have time to bring it up. But before the break, let's get to one of them.
And that is, today, when people are first listening to this program, will be January 9th. On January 10th, Judge Merchant is supposedly, is going to sentence Donald Trump.
This is over the Stormy Daniels case. Victor, have about it? Well, they being the left has been telling everybody that Donald Trump is the first convicted felon, and people who are legal scholars said, stop, wait, hold off.
You're not technically a felon until you have been sentenced for a felony. So it was very important for the left, even though Donald Trump won the election and even though the law fair has been exposed to be a weaponization, bastardization of the legal system, it was very important for the left to be able to say that Donald Trump is a convicted felon as he enters office.
So he did two things.

He decided that he would sentence him when he should have just dropped the case, and he wanted to do it before January 20th. So now that Donald Trump will take the oath of office, all of the left megaphones will say Donald Trump is a convicted felon according to your own definition.
That's one thing. Two, he says he's not going to sentence him, but there is sort of a sort of Damocles hanging over him that we don't really know what the sentence is so that when he leaves office as a private citizen, I guess you could reestablish something.
It's really unclear what he's going to do, but there might be some suggestion he's going to stay the sentencing and then invoke it later on. But if you look at the Judge Kaplan in the E.
Jean Carroll case, which was, I think, the most atrocious of all of them, that lawsuit. By the way, it was funded by Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn hard left, multi-billionaire, it would have never gone.
By the way, it would have never gone unless the New York legislature hadn't changed the law and said there's no statute of limitations on sexual assault. And any federal tax inquiry, we will turn over.

You have to turn over your New York tax records.

Those pieces of legislation were designed to destroy Donald Trump.

Neither did, but that was their intent.

But Kaplan, remember, said, well, you didn't convict him of rape, but sexual assault, which could be Joe Biden whispering in somebody's ear, right? It's the same thing. And that's what ABC, you know, in fairness to ABC, all Stephanopoulos did was just mimic what the judge improperly did.
So it was his fault. I mean, Stephanopoulos doesn't need to be defended because he was culpable.
But he said, I think, 11 times that Donald Trump committed rape. But that's exactly more or less what the judge improperly did when he wasn't convicted of rape.
So my point is, he was a completely bankrupt judge. And then you had the Latita James, which is a horrible thing.
And that judge, N'Goran, remember him? He always smarted off from the cameras. The Deutsche Bank testified.
We gave him the loan. The assets were valid.
In fact, Mar-a-Lago was undervalued. He paid the loan off on time.
He made us a tidy profit. We would like to loan him money again.
And they said, you don't know what you're talking about. We know better about business, Judge Ingorand, so we're going to convict him.
So they did. And then he thought, how can I get in the papers? If we just do a 10 million, I'll fine him.
It was over 400 million before it was reduced. And then we get to the third judge, Judge Mershon.
So everybody said to him, there's nothing wrong with having a nondisclosure form. Everybody does it.
Everybody who is promiscuous, who has done something that when they later go into public life and they don't want a brother or cousin, they go to them and say, look, he said, she said, we had this Tres, we had this business, would you just sign this and I will pay you? And they do it. In this case, she was paid and there's no problem.
And then the feds looked at it because it was in the papers. And Alvin Bragg then got elected on promising to get Donald Trump.
And he said this was a campaign finance violation. He spent money to her and he didn't report that as expense.
And the feds, because this is a federal law, said, are you crazy? We're not going to do this. We'd have to go back to every Democratic politician there is.
They all have nondisclosure forms. You want to start that? You want to uncover that rock and see what's underneath it? No.
Alvin Bragg, he cooked up a new idea that I can exercise federal control even though I'm not a federal official. And then they got this Judge Mershon who had donated small, but nevertheless was a partisan, but more importantly, who had a daughter broadcasting to everyone within democratic circles.
Hey, everybody, I'm a campaign consultant. And guess what? My dad is trying Donald Trump and will sentence Donald Trump.

And if you give me money, the Mershon name and the association will make you on the tip of the spear of Trump derangement syndrome. And that is worth something.
And then she made millions of dollars by marketing her father's name. And he never disqualified himself.
So then he just went to town, and this is besides Fannie Willis and that judge, was his name McAfee or something? He was even worse. He wouldn't even throw out the phone call and the Nathan Wade mess and the Fannie Willis perjury, and then you got Jack Smith.
So the whole thing is all predicated on if Donald Trump had have said after January 6th, you know what, it's controversial. I've run for president two times.
Ron DeSantis is doing well. Nick, I'm just not going to run.
I don't think he should have said that, but if he had have said that, there would have been not one of these cases. Had he said, I'm not Donald Trump.
They said, if he had said this, try me if you can just get one other person to be charged with the same crime. Because I know that a lot of politicians call registers out and whine.
I know that Stacey Abrams claimed she was governor for two years. She sued to overturn the election.
Go after her. Go after Benny Thompson, if you're Jack Smith.
Or if he said, there's people in New York, are you telling me that no one ever make mistakes the value of collateral? And you're going to, if he had just said that, and he wasn't Donald Trump, they would have never gone after him. So it was all directed at destroying him.
And the irony about this whole thing is, Donald Trump is going into office, and everybody is saying to Donald Trump the following on the left, hey, do not weaponize the judge's system. I'm talking like Joe Biden now, Jack.
But do not weaponize the system. Don't play fire with fire, tit for tat.
You've got to be above it all. And then this stuff keeps happening.
And the abuse keeps coming. And a lot of people are saying, you know what? These people will never learn.
So if Liz Cheney did tamper with a witness, or there's some suggestion she did? Or if she and Benny Thompson destroyed federal property to disguise the narrow scope of their investigation, we're going to have somebody look into it. If these judges were coordinated these suits, if it is true, as alleged, that Nathan Wade went into the White House to talk to legal counsel on the day that Jack Smith was appointed,

on the day that Mr. Coangelo left the Department of Judges to go work, or he would go work.

He didn't announce it the same day for Alvin Bragg, who came to the department after working for Latita James.

And we can subpoena all of the communications.

And there was a conspiracy to charge Donald Trump in local, state, and federal courts almost simultaneously, then we're going to investigate it and see if there's a fraction. I think they're going to do that.
And I think they're going to have broad public support for what they did. I really do.
And I think that all these people are terrified because they know if they had been Donald Trump themselves

and they had known what they suffered from themselves,

and if they were now in power themselves, then they would say,

oh, my God, he's going to go after us because I sure as hell would if I was him.

Well, Victor, we may have time for one more topic, although maybe not, but we'll see.

We'll see when we come back from these final important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show, recording on Saturday, January 4th. This episode is up on January 9th.
By the way, Victor, today is, I believe, federal workers are off today on the 9th because of Jimmy Carter's funeral.

There was a kind of a little psychodrama that Donald Trump got angry because he thought that flying the half-mask, flying the flag at half-masked, which had been a democratic

talking point.

Remember, last time he was inaugurated, people felt that was a national day of mourning.

So some people in federal agencies tried to lower the flag, at least that was reported. So he felt that having this 20-day period of half-mask flag was intended all the way into inauguration, so that he would go and take the oath while looking at the flag that was at half mask.
And the intent would be not to remind people of the loss of a U.S. president, but to, in double entendre fashion, signal everybody that the left was really using this to show that the country was in mourning for the inauguration of Donald Trump.
Well, quick, I'll be quick. We talked before about offshore drilling.
This is also about offshore energy, windmills, wind turbines that are in the northeast. All these dead whales are turning up on shores.
Whereas Most people believe they're freaked out by the turbines and all the kind of brain wave screwing around. They do for the whales.
And on top of it, you have all these seabirds being que cuisinarted. And you would think, Victor, that the environmental groups that are so ready and willing to stop anything would be against this, right? Save the whales.
No, I wouldn't, Jack. Yeah.
Well, this group is called the Save Right Whales Coalition has It's done the study of all these, like the New England Aquarium, the Mystic Aquarium, the Delaware Center for Inland Bays, the Environmental League of Massachusetts, it's Woodhull Oceanographic Institute. All of these places are supporting the wind industry.
Of course, because it's an ideological problem, and that is what we were talking about. It's like the commissars in Russia.
Once you put ideology as the arbiter of everything, then hypocrisy abounds. So now there's a, I don't know if it's written, but it's been printed in their minds.

There's a hierarchy of diversity, equity, inclusion, green commandments.

And they rank.

I don't know whether being black, Trump's being a radical environmentalist,

or solar and wind, Trump being gay.

But there is there.

So when you bump up against the, this has nothing to do with the actual facts on the ground.

I'm going to go. and wind, Trump being gay, but there it is there.
So when you bump up against the, this has nothing to do with the actual facts on the ground. So to an environmentalist, he says, well, on the one hand, if you have an intense solar experiment in the desert and it's vaporizing endangered birds, but it is wind and solar, which is what we want, how do we adjudicate this? Well, we'll go down to the window of solar and then we'll just wave out the worry about eagles being torched.
Or if we're out in the San Joaquin Valley and we need farmland because we want to lower prices for the poor and we're leftists, but on the other hand, we want a solar farm. We'll just take all the farm line out and we'll put in thousands of acres of solar panels.
And the same thing with animals and wind power. So high up on these zealot trees is this green, the world is going to end in 10 years, fatalism, carbon fuels are destructive.
It reminded me of a story I think I might have said to. There was a poor guy in a truck driving on the Stanford campus, or near the Stanford campus, and he was full of clippings.
He was a landscape guy, Mexican-American guy, and I was following him. And he had, as he went up this little low grade, you know, his carburetor was, not carburetor, fuel injection.
It was an older pickup, though. It was spouting white smoke.
And he was slowing down. I think his engine had lost compression.
Maybe it was head gasket had blown or the muffler had a hole.

I don't know what it was. I think it was the exhaust manifold.
But anyway,

I turned on to campus. I got to my office.
I asked one of my employees. That was kind of weird.

And it came to my knowledge later that 11 people had called.

Really? So there was no empathy people had called. Oh, really?

So there was no empathy for the guy pulled over, right, that it was polluting,

that he was a poor person, he was cutting people's grass, he was trying to get home or whatever.

They had ratted that guy out to environmental,

and when I turned off, there were a policeman coming in

with a blinking red light to sight him.

So in the hierarchy of isms and ologies of the left, poor people of DEI, the downtrodden, don't rank as much as boutique environmentalism. And I could see that with the COVID, too, and the masking.
Well, that was a tough call on the hierarchy of... Remember remember when after George Floyd, there were 80,000 people went out and violated the curfew and the COVID and they didn't have masks and they were breathing on themselves, but they didn't know what to do.
So the leftist group of public health officials signed a petition saying that it was more important for the mental health of their workers to protest in favor of George Floyd to honor his memory than it is to follow the COVID stringent lockdowns. And this is another example.
Anytime you have an ideology that superimposes itself on reason, sometimes religion, but mostly it's on the left in our era. Sometimes it's been on the right, but it's just full of paradoxes and inconsistencies.
Well, a spoonful of sugar helps this go down for them, too, because the wind companies are giving big donations to them. It kind of reminds me of Peter Daszak.
Everybody should also remember that when you are given exemption and there is no deterrence, then the company will always go violate the law. So if you're going to turn over wind and solar and say they can violate endangered species or animal treatment laws, they're going to do it in full force because they know there's nothing to fear.
Or if you have somebody who was appointed not on an americratic basis to a position or was led into a university without americratic data, GPA or SAT or whatever, and they're there, that's not the end of it. That is the beginning because that person believes that they let me in or they hired me or they appointed me to a position which I'm not qualified for, but they are so guilty and they are so easily awed that they must have done something wrong or they wouldn't be so weak, and I have nothing but contempt for them.
And that person thinks that their magnanimity to me is going to be reciprocated with kindness. No, it's going to be interpreted as weakness to be exploited further, and that's what happens with DEI.
So nobody, and same thing with illegal immigration.

Once you make a whole group of people exempt

and you let them in and you call them victims,

that's not the end of it.

They're going to say, oh, the United States let me in.

Oh, they bought me, they give me free health care.

They give me free education.

They give me free food.

They give me free housing. They do it because they're Yankees that owe me.
And that's the attitude. And it doesn't stop until you say everybody follows the law regardless of ideology.
So if they just said to the wind and solar, you're going to follow the same endangered species or natural habitat legislation that oil companies, coal companies, natural gas companies have to follow. And I think we're coming to the point where if we don't do that, it's going to be utter chaos.
So if you say that 600 jurisdictions don't have to follow immigration laws because they're so noble and the idea of illegal immigration, the downtrodden poor, and people of color coming in and they've been discriminated, so you're not going to turn them over when they commit horrendous crimes to ICE, then you're going to see somebody in a red state say, you know what, I'm not going to, if that's what they feel and you can nullify it and we're back to the old Confederacy. If you want to come in and buy a .44 Magnum,

I'm not going to withhold it for 30 days and federal handguns.

Just take it.

Or, you know what, if I'm billdozing a building and I'm in, I don't know,

Provo, Utah, and there's a three-toed crazy lizard that has a nest here

and he's got a spot on his nose and some guy with a Ph from Berkeley says he's an endangered toad or lizard, I'm going to smash the SOB and not tell anybody. Because you know what? We're a sanctuary city from the endangered species list.
And if you think that is nullifying federal law, you're exactly right. And we're doing it just like South Carolina did in 1832 because San Francisco does it and Seattle does it.
And they all do it. Someone should do that to the Delta smelt.
Yeah, I'll just finish by saying in one cynical fashion, Jack, the Biden administration has given the Trump administration a windfall. Because think about the legacy they're giving to Donald Trump.
They're saying to Donald Trump the following. If you want to drain that strategic petroleum reserve and get prices really low, you go ahead and do it in 2026.
You can do it. If you think that the law people are not acting in a way you want them to, then Donald Trump can say, what's wrong with Pam Bondi? Why hasn't she indicted anybody, as Joe Biden did? And if you think you want to go after Hillary, or you want to go after Liz, or you want to go after, then what you do is you get everybody, you call them into the White House, and you get a prosecutor from Mississippi, you get one from Florida, you get one from, I don't know, Idaho, and you get them all together, and you say, hey, Nathan, you're going to do this on election interference.
Hey, maybe Fannie is going to help you out, Latita, and maybe Jack can help out. We can appoint a Jack, and maybe Mr.
Coangelo can do this. And that's what you do.
And then when somebody says that you're coordinating state and local federal prosecutions to go after political appointments, you say, yep, that's exactly what I'm doing because I inherited that statute, that protocol from the Biden administration. And if Donald Trump says, you know, I'm going to put, you know, they got mad at Jared, but I think I'm going to put Eric Jr.
on my presidential one when I go to China. I'm going to say, Eric, you've got to cut a lot of deals because Ivanka and everybody needs a cut.
And you're going to make money for them on your expertise, let's say on the Internet. You're an Internet expert.
And believe me, Eric Trump knows a lot more about the Internet than Hunter Crackhead Biden knew about energy. So that's what he's bequeathed, and they have no moral leg.
This was the most corrupt presidency, and I hope that doesn't happen. I'm not advocating that, but I can't think of a moral stance, a defendable moral position that wouldn't be hypocritical on the left now after what they've done.
Maybe we'll read a story in, I don't know, maybe what if Kash Patel were to do this? He's going to say, you know, is there something called blue sky? Is it leftist enterprise? Yeah. Maybe he could say, oh, I want truth social.
I'm going to get a bunch of FBI agents, and they're going to work with Truth Social to ban left-wing alternative news and monitor them, and then we're going to suppress the news any way we can. My FBI, Kash Patel, is partnering with right-wing social media.
Would they like that? That's what they did. That's exactly.
We know it's going to happen, Jack, when all of a sudden, in the midterms or maybe the next, let's just say the midterms, about a week after, before the balloting starts, 51 former intelligence authorities swear that fill in the blanks that this is a hallmark of Chinese disinformation or something. So they have opened the gates of hell and I hope that the demons have all gone out, but they have no moral leg to stand on now after what they've done to this country the last four years.
And I hope, I'm not advocating that he uses the same weapons. I hope he doesn't.
And he says, you know, I can't do what they did to me, otherwise we spiral into tit-for-tat into a third-world hellhole. But I might have to do one or two examples to remind them what they've done.
I'm all for that. Ta-da.
I was trying to look up, and I can't find it, we'll do it another time, when Kash Patel was on this show with you, I want to recommend to our listeners to go Well, I read his book, and his book was I would say it was punitive. It was retaliatory.
And he made the point that people had broken the law and they felt they had done so with exemption and they had to be punished. I think his punishment is what I like right now about cash is, have you heard these stories about all these people are so furious they're going to resign? Good.
And they always are announced in the media, like, 10-year veteran blank, blank, blank has said that there's many people like him in the Washington, D.C. office that just can't stand Kash Patel, and they're going to send him.
And you think promises, promises. So then he's probably going to do if he's smart, and he's very, very smart.
He's going to look at all of the old FBI guys, you know, in their 60s that had to quit because of this DEI nonsense and lawbreaking. And he's going to say, you know what? I need a director here.
I need an assistant director. Come on back.
And then they will know exactly what went wrong with the FBI. The Omegas will be the Alphas and the Alphas will be the Omegas.
Well, it'll be a fun 2025. It will be.
Everybody will be so pessimistic. It's going to be a wonderful schadenfreude or something along that line.
That's why they're so scared. Well, as we end the show, I want to say save the whales, and then I do want to thank folks who have written to me and said, hey, I am getting Civil Thoughts, which is a free weekly email newsletter.
I write for the Center for Civil Society, and I recommend 14 articles I've come across the previous week that I think you'd enjoy. So how do you get it? Go to civiltoughts.com, sign up.
It's totally free, and we are not selling your name. Now, we thank those who take the time on Apple and on Victor's website.
Well, on Apple, you can rate the show. I think there's like 7,500 folks who have done such.
I looked at today. I don't know what it means.
Amazon's Audible on NewsPod. We were number four in the country, so I don't know if that, I'm sure it's not that high in other surveys, but on Audible, Amazon today, this morning, I think it was NBC, and then 48 Hours, and then another one, and then we were there.
Take the win, Victor. Take the win.
That's because of the listeners, not me. Yeah, true.
Well, okay. They're not here to listen to me.
I was shocked when you said you own a website. I don't think I own it, do I? I never owned it.
I never bought it. Well...
I don't own anything. Except a money-losing 40-acre raisin.
Somebody owns the place. An ancient house.
I never thought of myself as owning anything. Well, okay.
So you're paying taxes. Every once in a while someone calls and says, are you interested in merchandising your website or your podcast? I have no idea what they're talking about.
You know what I mean? I don't. No, I'm not.
I don't even know what you're talking about. Oh, thank goodness.
You know what? You are a great... I know you don't do them anymore, but you are quite a businessman and an entrepreneur.
I know the Victor Davis Hanson tours you did every year. Do you ever remember, just to finish that show, In Living Color? Oh, yeah.
It was the Wayans Brothers. It was brilliant.
And they had a character on it who was from Jamaica. And they made fun of him because he had like 19 jobs.
Well, someone said that about 10 years ago. Because, you know, I write a column.
I make a little. And then I have a full-time job.
And then we do the podcast. I'm doing a daily signal.
I have to do speaking, but I'm kind of like a Jamaican who does all of these different... And you know where that's from? It's from farming because I can remember the bank, the Production Credit Association and the Federal Land Bank.
And they'd always say this to me, where are your revenue streams, Mr. Hanson? Now you have plums, they're no good.
You have peaches, they're no good. The table great markets crash.
Your raisins, do you have an off-sort, don't you teach now? Yes, I do teach. And you make 21,000? Can you do anything else? I said, well, I can write a book.
Do they have any market value? I said, no, I don't think so. Well, can you write a book that has market value? And finally, when I did this one, And this guy, cranky guy, said, this is the end and I'm talking too long.
He said, no, I don't think so. Well, can you write a book that has market value? And finally, when I did this one, this guy, cranky guy, said, this is the end and I'm talking too long.
He said, as I walked out of the Federal Land Bank, he said to me, Mr. Hanson, can I ask you something? And I said, yes.
He said, you have a Ph.D. in something? Yes, classical languages.
And you wrote a a book and i said yeah he said in theory you could write a book that made some money i said yes so why in the hell are you getting out in the tractor and paying me twenty dollars an hour for the fun of pulling a tandem disc on 105 degrees all day i said what do you mean And I've just totaled up all your losses this year and you probably worked 3,000 hours and I did the math and you paid me $28 an hour for the joy of getting out there and getting your brains cooked. How's that? Now, can't you go into your little library and write a book and make some money and do something else? because whatever you are, you're not a very good farmer.

And I said, damn, holy mackerel, that's a good idea, Mr. Blank,

and I'm going to go do that.

And I went back and I wrote Western Way of War.

This guy deserves a more fuller profile on the Blaine of Curseus.

I liked him.

Everybody didn't like him because they called him after the James Bond character, Dr. No.
Can I have a loan to plan a north? Nope. I liked him a lot.
He taught me a lot. I only met him three or four times.
And a couple of times, that was my dad. He was an old Scandinavian.
And he taught me a lot about business and misdirected dreams and got me back to reality. It was painful to be told I was an idiot, but I appreciated that.
Well, let me tell you what someone else has to say as we close out the show, the comment on The Blade of Perseus, which you don't own, I guess. It's from Jacob Nauer, who wrote this a couple days ago.
It's the last day of the year, and thinking back, I've listened to so much VDH and Sammy and Jack over the year. I enjoy it very much.
You guys are wonderful, truly. For myself, I wish to read more of VDH's books over the coming year, and I also hope VDH starts impersonating the left even more.
It's so funny. God bless VDH, Sammy, and Jack.
Thank you, Jacob. Thank you, everyone who raised the show.
I inherited that, Jack, ability for being in academia for 30 years and having to go to so many meetings where he said, Wow, you know, Victor, one could argue in theory that what we're doing is just a retrograde reactionary. It's reactionary.
One could argue. I had to listen to that for 30 years.
Yeah. Well, that and the skinny arm students.
You do them pretty well, too. All right, my friend.
God bless. It's good to get all the wisdom from you.
Thanks, folks, for listening, and we will be back soon with another episode of The Victor Davis Hanson Show. Thank you, everybody, for listening, and you have to shut me up.
I ran it too long this time. I'll promise to be here.
It's your show. You can do whatever you want.
Okay. Thank you.
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