Trump Will Win This Tariff War and Other Pressing News

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I'm Jack Fowler, the man lucky enough to be the host, but you're here to listen to the tea slurping, but wisdom dispensing Victor Davis Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. We're recording on Tuesday, April 8th.
This episode will be up on Thursday the 10th. Normally, Victor and I record our shows on on the weekend and a lot has happened between now, between the weekend and today, Tuesday.
Yesterday was supposed to be a calamitous day for America's economy. It wasn't today.
Stock market is up. We normally don't play off today's headlines, but I think we should.
So let's start the show today getting Victor's take on the economy. And then also, Victor, who we all know has been pretty ill for the last couple of weeks, crazily, I don't know how he did it.
I don't know how he does, he produced so much, but on kind of a moment's notice, cranked out a long essay for the free press on tariffs, and that has started some back-and-forth discussion between you, Victor, and one of your colleagues, two of her Neil Ferguson. So we're going to get your take on the piece and the reaction to it.
And then we have, gosh, plenty more topics. I think one I'd like to hear your thoughts on are the folks rallying around this Texas teenager who murdered,

well, I don't know if he's been officially charged with murder, but stabbed to death another boy.

And all of a sudden, GoFundMe efforts have started with six-figure donations already for the kid,

the one who did the stabbing.

So those things and some more when we come back from these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Neglected to say I should have, Victor, since we have so many new listeners.

Victor's got a website, thebladeofperseus, victorhanson.com.

At the end of the show, I'll tell you why you should be subscribing.

Victor, let's first take on quickly today's headlines. Oh, there are two headlines, by the way.
I forgot to mention the Supreme Court action. So let's start off with today, U.S.
stocks jump as trading partners rush to negotiate tariffs. Victor, yesterday, Monday, some people were saying it was going to be Black Monday for America's economy, the the world's economy your thoughts on all this breaking stuff well you know i was uh i've been battling this post flu and sinus and the free press people called me and said could you get something tomorrow on it and i thought this will be better than the awful doxycylid that i'm getting.
So I decided to write 3,000 words. And I didn't understand this panic.
My colleague disagreed with me, Neil Ferguson. I have the utmost respect.
He's a personal friend of mine. I like him.
But he took a different point that this was a catastrophic move, etc. But let go through some points very quickly number one we have been running a deficit for 50 years and people will write me and say well victor do you uh don't you think that it was pretty good when we're running deficits yes but there were other factors involved it wasn't that it was bad for everybody but we were the reserve currency of the world.
So we could print and do whatever we wanted. But the deficit was bad.
And don't listen to poor Victor, the raisin farmer from Sauma. Listen to Warren Buffett, who in 2003, I read his newsletter.
He said, if we don't address this, it's going to let them get investments here, and we're not going to get investments there. And he was against it, Paul Krugman.
Paul Krugman can be predictable on the sense that whatever a Republican president does, he switches and says it's bad. But at one time he said mercantilism is good, or at least it's fine.
And of course, Fox News is having a circus with playing Nancy Pelosi. And when she was 55 and these eloquent, I thought, man, when I listened to her and she explained why China was ripping us off, I thought, hire her.
Just get that tape. Even if she doesn't want to go buy the rights to

that tape and start putting commercials on it because she is a very eloquent spokesman for trumpism and so it and the second thing i mean my point is that most of the democratic party was for exactly what Trump is doing. Number two,'t we get spokespeople in europe in india in china in japan and south korea who say we got to do what the united states has been doing they man they are running the world and it's because of that trillion dollar deficit.
In 50 years, they've run deficits. And

we stupid people have been running these surpluses. We didn't understand it was hurting us, but we're all going to do.
United States, would you please put tariffs on your products? Just think if the EU or the Japanese or the Canadians said this, please we we tried tariffs. You had deficits and you're richer than we are.
So we're going to do what you do. Our goal is to run about, I don't know, 100, 200 billion dollar deficit.
You know why? Because we've learned from you. It'll make us more competitive.
We'll put kind of like creative destruction and all these European steel companies and Japanese. They'll go out of business with foreign competition unless they get competitive.
And when you guys dump all this stuff in and we have no protectionist tariffs or no tariffs, it'll make people get cheaper prices. And you know what else is going to be good? If you in America subsidize your exports like we used to do, you won't be able to afford it.
We weren't able to afford it. So we're going to trade places with you.
That doesn't happen, of course, because these people are not blank, blank, stupid. The third thing is, I didn't understand.
I mean, Bill Ackman was tweeting. He even attacked me kind of in a polite way and said, but they go back and forth.
They gyrate, gyrate, gyrate, gyrate, depending on the stock market. And my point is this.
Now, number four, who has a record of being more conducive, favorable to Wall Street? The opposition or Donald Trump? When he was president, the stock market jumped 65%. He went after Dodd-Frank.
He deregulated. He cut tax.
He had a calm foreign policy that there were not disruptions that would hurt the stock market. He was everything they wanted.
They got him back. They look at what he's been doing.
Oh, the border. Why, there's not one illegal alien literally after 10,000 were coming in a day.
Oh, foreign policy red sea's navigable again oh iran is trapped and begging begging and its appendages are all been decapitated oh uh wow somebody's talking about getting a piece in ukraine maybe even flipping russia away from China. Wow.
I just looked at the inflation rate in March. It's 1.6 or 2.6, excuse me.
It's going down. Oh, I just looked at the job reports, 100,000 more jobs than they anticipated.
So my point is past and present Trump, contemporary Trump, it's been good for the stock market. They're not going anywhere.
Unless they want to have Jasmine Crockett directing their foreign policy with the help of the brilliant AOC and Bernie Sanders, that's the people who will direct it. So why are they panicking? And the answer is they're panicking.
They panicked in 1929 when they got caught leveraging stocks. They got caught in 2008 when they were doing subprime mortgages.
And they're just volatile people. And as our Secretary of the Treasury, Bassan, said, he said 87, but I think it's 93% of all from what the business insider know conservative venue.
10% own 93% of the market capitalization. The other 50%, and then, you know, there's about 40%.
They have some stocks. They have the other 7%.
And then there's 50%, the people I see every day in Salma, California and Southwest Fresno, they have 1% of the market capitalization. So you're talking about a panic of investors, academics, media, professional class, you name it.
The upper upper that are heavily invested in the stock market and

who doubled their from the day trump went in office to the day biden left and that time we were told wages have been extra extra astronomical and they did go up under trump and biden because the inflation they went up 35 so here's a stock market who made three times more money than the average wage workers wages who went up only three times only 30 why they went up 100 and then they get a little correction that puts their portfolio back to what it was in January 2023. And the next thing we hear that Donald Trump ruined the economy, da-da-da-da-da-da.
And they don't understand that most people in the world, A, would rather have trade balance or surpluses, B, have protection and have been ripping the United States off, and C, will cut a deal. And it's the musical chairs mentality.
And that is when the music stops, everybody wants a chair to jump into the American economy. And those that don't cut a deal will be left out.
Do I have to finish this rant? A couple of suggestions. Yes.
Donald Trump just needs one big fish. He cuts a deal with Japan, South Korea, India, the EU, maybe even China.
China today said they were willing to negotiate. And he gets near parity.
So if the EU is running $200 billion or Japan is running $100 billion, he gets to something where it looks like it'll be maybe a $10 billion deficit. That one big deal will calm the stock market for good.
And more importantly, it'll set off a stampede to make a deal because nobody wants to be without a deal because if they look at these other countries that have that have got their tariffs down and they think they're going to fight with us within a tariff war they're going to be uncompetitive they're going to be uncompetitive and they know that And that's why kevin hassert was on the television this morning say that 70 70 different entities governments nations want to cut a deal so that is very that is what's going to happen i have a little bit of advice for donald trump i mentioned it on another video i understand that these countries are insidious they're Machiavellian. One of the ways they run up their surpluses is they claim their tariffs are low, why they jack up VAT taxes, excise taxes, phony health and security regulations.
Australia says our beef can't come in because of mad cow down from Canada 25 years ago, although they changed that in 2019. The Europeans say, oh, you dip your chickens in chlorine or something.
Thank God we do when we dress them out. But they have all these little kooky rules that keep us out rather than tariffs.
So Trump is saying, I'm going to be holistic. We're going to do it all at once once the problem with that is if you tell everybody that this is reciprocity so a country like israel says zero tariffs or australia says zero tariffs or vietnam says zero and then these countries like navarro has said well we don't it's not going to be that way with vietnam because they do other things yes but in, to sell this thing, you've got to stick to if a country has a zero tariff, then we should have a zero tariff.
Round two, then say that zero tariff will reduce the trade imbalance. It won't end it because they have insidious things I just mentioned, and we are going to address that in round two but for right now do not try to put tariffs on countries tariffs on ours even though there's a good logic to do that because we won't sell with the people that was a pretty good uh rant as rants go victor thank you before we you're most because of of the worst thing I've ever taken in my life, doxycyllin.
Is that it? Yes, I got doxed. Speaking of pharmaceuticals, listen, Americans are fed up with big pharma controlling health care, raising prices, restricting access, and making it harder to get the medications they need, that's why more people are turning to all family pharmacy.
You've probably heard of them. They're a family-owned pharmacy in Florida that does things differently.
They put you first, giving you the freedom to order what you need, when you need it, so you're never without essential medications. from ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to antibiotics, daily maintenance meds,

and emergency kits. they make sure you have access to the treatments you need without restrictions.
They know how important it is to stay prepared, which is why they make it easy to stock up and order treatments in bulk. It's simple.
Just order online and they ship your meds to your door. You don't even need your doctor involved.
They work directly with licensed doctors to get you the prescriptions you need. Visit their website today.
Get 10% off your order. Go to allfamilypharmacy.com slash Victor and use the code Victor10.
That's V-I-C-T-O-R-1-0. Again, that's allfamilypharmacy.com slash Victor.

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Victor, before we... Well, no, we are moving on.
So another headline is the Supreme Court, 5-4, rules on the Trump administration's Venezuelan deportations. They uphold Trump's plan.
Judge Bosberg loses, although I don't think we've heard the last of him. No, we've never heard the last of him.
What are your thoughts on this? He's he's a narcissist egomaniac and it's going to be interesting to see whether this case uh will provide precedent for related cases of district judges the 300 or 350 left-wing judges that are cherry-picked for one purpose that is to warp the law and stop the Trump administration. I was a little bit concerned that Amy Comey Barrett voted.
And that's the second time she's done that. And now if I was curious what the left wing.
So I went and looked at things like in the New Republic and they really like her her now they think they have flipped her and that she's the new david suitor i don't think that's quite true it's unfair to her at this early date but i don't know basically the court said that everybody believes that the you can't just deport somebody without a hearing.

But this is what I don't understand. If you come in illegally and if you break the law, nobody's trying to punish you.
You just are returned and you have to get out. So what do I mean by that? I mean the following, that if I walk down my avenue and I go into somebody's house without permission and I'm sitting at dinner and the person comes home and says, you've got to get out, and they call the sheriff, I don't think the sheriff's going to say, we have to have a restraining order or an injunction to get Victor out of my house.
I think they're going to say, who owns the house? They'll find out that I came in illegally and they're going to say, you got to get out. And then if there's any penalty or anything, but you got to get out, Victor.
You came in and resided illegally. So my point is, I don't understand is TRAN, M13, I don't really care their affiliation.
If they came into the country illegally and they broke the law and they're not refugees, then why can't – and even if they are refugees, they didn't apply for refugee status in their home country, which is now the rule. Why do you have to worry? Just say go.
There's no case. We just, I know that when I lived in Greece, you had to get a visa, and you had two choices.
You could go in and spend the whole day in the 70s with the dictatorship people and go through the rigmarole and get a student visa or a lot of students just did this they every 90 days they would flip out of the country and come back in for their 90 day de facto and i was at the airport once with a guy and he said i screwed up and i said what how did you screw up and he said i stayed five months and didn't go out of the country. So when we went out, we were on Turkey.
And guess what happened? They said, come here, mister. You can't leave the country because you don't have the proper.
You didn't. You stayed too long here.
And they were going to fine you. So they took him into a room and they had to pay a fine.
And then they let him go. And he said, this is unfair.
And I said, you broke the rules. You broke the rules.
You knew that. I didn't get a trial.
No, it doesn't matter. You broke the rules.
It's not a legal matter. It's just a rule.
It's like being pulled over going 80 miles in a 40 mile. You don't argue and say, do you have an injunction? You broke the rules.
And law enforcement can deal with that and write you a fine. And you can appeal it, I suppose.
But it's not going to mean that you can say, well, I was weaving all over the road at 80 miles an hour and I need a trial. No, you get removed.
We tow away your car if you're under intoxication. Then you go to jail and then you can do it.
So that's what the judges said. We have the right to get rid of them.
We just don't know where we do it. They have the right to do it.
Do they get the right to appeal here or do they get the right to appeal home? I think they're going to say it's about that gangbanger who's now says he's married and upright citizen he's and they all he's the new cause celeb but he can apply to come back where he is just you know come back although there is another rule i think it's an executive order rule that if you came here illegally you can and you're detained and you're deported, you cannot apply for a legal residency for 10 years. Yeah.
And that is really having an effect on people that are actually self-deporting. I know some people, Victor, for whatever reason, did something wrong in another country.
Maybe they didn't cross the border illegally. Say Switzerland is one country with the religious prostitutization and got thrown out and don't you you're never welcome here again and and i think they know that you know they there's no question like okay everybody knows the public is behind it everybody this is all about all these things are public common sense common sense yeah and you know when, you know, when China said today, we're going to be cutting off, we're going to be cutting off rare minerals to the United States.
Okay, but, you know, in Montana or Tehachapi, we have tons of them. So common sense would say, blank you.
We will develop our own. We should have been doing that.
But, of course, Biden. I shouldn't say Biden.
The Biden matrix. Whatever.
Yes. Whatever it is.
Whoever was propping him up. Yes.
Yes. The wax and effigy.
The person who poured him into a mold and let him sit there. Anyway, we have to be commonsensical.
And once we are commonsensical, all good things come forth from that. And we protect our interests.
Anything that pharmaceuticals, rare earth mineral, oil, we protect and make sure they can't hurt us in a natural disaster or a cyber attack or electromagnetic attack or a war. And that's why I mentioned this in this free press article.
There were reasons that were just economic, purely economic, why you want to have key industries self-sustaining. I remember during the first part of the COVID, do you remember when one Chinese official said, I will try to wink, nod, get those protective devices that we make masks.
Remember that? They were talking about slowing it down. Ha ha.
You know, it's, it reminds me of my kids. They all, we had a family member who very graciously would take all the kids up to the lake, like 12 of them, my three and the first cousins.
And then they didn't want to go home. So they were out in boats and little boats.
And my other, the adults who were related to me said, time to get in the van and go home. And they go, can't hear you.
Can't hear you. They paddle.
Oh, we're going to come home, but we can't hear you. That was what the Chinese were doing.
Yes, we're going to send you your protective equipment, but we didn't really get the official request. So we don't want any of that.
And there's a lot of reasons historically why we're not saying we like what the Greeks called autarkia, self-reliance or self-sufficiency. It's the economic version in Greek of autonomia, of political self-sufficiency.
But it's an old idea. And I think nobody's saying that we're protectionists.
I'm just saying that Trump is going to win this trade war. And it's not even a trade war he's going to win it for a variety of reasons one he's got the majority of the american people that it's not that they don't like stocks they may look for a company and they say i hope my company's stock is pretty good they understand it's important the stock market is for investment and their own jobs but they don't sit by their phone and look at it every minute because they don't have any.
They have 1%, 50% have 1% of the market capitalization and the other 40% have about 6% or 7%. So they understand there's a neuroticism at work and they they're more interested in jobs, jobs, and jobs are going up.
And inflation is holding steady. And oil prices are going down, their gas bill.
So they think it's pretty good. And the world wants to cut deals.
And you know, that's funny. All these people are writing, this is the is the end of trump this is this when these countries cut deal what does bernie sanders say what does tim waltz say what does chuck sumer say well don't do that why are you cutting a deal with trump oh all you're going to do is make trump look better that he's going to get more investment in the United States and less money going out, and it'll be harder to beat in the midterm.
Why are you doing this? That's all they can say. Anyway, he's going to win this, and all he has to do is cut a couple of big deals and start the stampede and not try to do 110 percent perfection the first round get the eu to really give us some good deals so we get that 200 billion down to 40 or 30 and then we'll go after them next year and say you know what that's not enough we've got to get the value out of tax yeah which is just you know we're subsid socialism abroad.
We've been doing that for a long time with their defense. Yeah.
Well, Victor, we have a couple of other topics to talk about. You talked about the pinup boy there for Venezuelan deportation, but we have a murder, alleged murderer in the U.S.
We have a poll about, you know, leftist love of murder. So let's get to that.
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We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson show. Victor's website, the Blade of Perseus.
If you go there, you will find Papalooza. I don't know what the word is.
I can't think of it anymore. Anyway, anything and everything about Victor.
Links to his articles and essays and his appearances, archives of these podcasts. Links to his books and links to the ultra pieces he writes twice a week.
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VictorHanson.com. Here's the thing I'm going to spring on you, Victor, because I saw a link to this article today in Reason Magazine, and it makes me think what you've just said.
What does the less than, well, the 50% or actually the vast majority of Americans care about? And it's something the Trump administration is addressing, and this has to do with regulations. And it says in February, Trump's, this is Department of Energy, postponed three Biden-era efficiency rules related to central air conditioning, heat pumps, walking coolers, freezers, gas tankless water heater.
It also carved a special regulatory category, freeing tankless heaters from Biden's near ban. Just last week, the Department of Energy cut four more rules outright, impacting ceiling fans, dehumidifiers, external power supplies, and the electric motors that power almost everything.
This isn't just red tape slashed. It's a rare win for choice and function over dogma.
Victor, these are the things that people deal with every minute of every day in their house, in their life. And here is some effort by the Trump administration to stop the torture or to let you have washing machines that really clean, dishwashers that clean etc so i just want to mention this as a you know it's uh all that adds cost to houses and i have a cabin in the mountains that runs on a tankless natural gas water heater It was put in in 2006.
Still runs fine. It's efficient.

And you can't buy it now because of the biden rules it's i had a swimming pool um pump and filter pump and pump side by side, put in in 1991. That was from a book I wrote.
My kids begged me to use my $12,000 advance, which I did. We built it for $12,000.
And here's the point. That thing ran from 1991 to 2004.
And then it started to do it i took the pump out i took it into the local pump i had it rewound i put it back and it was running perfectly and then somewhere around 2016 uh maybe 2009 the obama administration had a new rule for electric pumps for efficiency, for global warming. And they came out and the pool person said, we're not allowed to replace these or do anything.
So you're going to have to have these. They put them in, these new efficient, they burned out two years, put another one, burned out three years.
I've had about seven of them. And so what I'm thinking is I should have just taken those old pumps, saved them and put them back in and said, don't look at them.
It's none of your business. But this is a bureaucratic torture.
Yeah, I know. Same thing with diesel engines.
I had a neighbor, I won't mention anything about him because it was was very tragic but he stopped about four years ago and he came into my yard and he said look at this beautiful diesel uh two-ton pickup flatbed and i said yeah that's really great and he said i had it all rebuilt and it's all rebuilt for California smog.

And I said, well, why are you telling me?

He said, they're going to outlaw it in eight years.

And they're going to, because of the cubic inches or something, it was too big.

Anyway, and I said, well, that's too bad.

He said, I spent $40,000.

And he said, I've done this. I've got all my other diesel old stuff, and I got them all rebuilt because I can't afford new stuff.
And now they're all going to be out of compliance with new smog. I'm not saying that was a contributing factor to it, but I think I told you that.
I really liked him. He was a wonderful person.
He left his tractor in my shed at night because of the rise of illegal aliens. We had everybody vandalizing.
So if you were going to leave your – if you were – you know, he had a place next to me, my neighbor. But he would leave his tractor hidden in the – you know, if he's working all night long and something went wrong with it, he would just park it.
And then get there in the morning because he didn't have a shed. So then he came to me and said, could I put it in your shed? I said, absolutely.
So he put this beautiful John Deere every night when it was here, and it stayed here for six weeks. And I felt so bad, I tried to find it, and he killed himself.
And his son then came and got it and said they were looking for all equipment.

And he had told me there's no point in doing this.

I'm not saying that that was reflective, but when they make these rules arbitrarily,

these elite people, the California Air Resources Board, all these academics and people,

they make all these rules, but they never ask, how much does it cost? How much does it affect somebody who's not making a profit? What does it do to them psychologically without any warning to change? And why don't you try to start with the idea we want to make it easier on these people? And given the fact that China is producing two coal-fired plants per month still, and that is our shared atmosphere, what does it do to destroy somebody's life by saying that it's remodeled beautiful diesel thing will be out of compliance in three years? And they do that. They do that.
They do that. And that's one of the things that this revolution is about, this counter revolution.
When that doge, it's about all those people with those stupid little degrees and alphabet letters behind. And then they start going, wow, we decided that this person should be doing this and you should do it.
And no, they don't ever have to be on the receiving end. And so California is the worst about it.
But don't disrupt people's lives that are in the 50% that own 1% of the market capitalization. Please don't do that.
And that's the people who do it. The people who are going paranoid right now, I mentioned this at Megyn Kelly.
When I was a little kid, Jack, we went toedish grandfather's farm 10 miles away every um every saturday and he was completely self-sufficient and everything lamb beef but he had chickens so he had a big stumps for the dinner so he would take the hatchet and go bam and you know what happened the chicken moved and i say grandpa that's so that that's a ghost because it didn't run like the cartoons, but it did. It walked a couple of steps.
And I thought of that today when I was looking at the Wall Street with Megyn Kelly. I did it yesterday.
I thought, these are people just like that chicken. They have no head anymore.
They've lost their brains and they're flapping around and they're moving, but're not thinking and they you know they don't think about is trump better for wall street or worse than the alternative is donald trump good the first term what is the data what is the inflation rate what is the oil price what is the you know what is the job growth they don't think oh God, my investment. What am I going to do? It's just crazy.
Amen. Well, you know, it's even crazier, Victor.
So I was going to bring up a victim. The mindset of the left still when it comes to making heroes of criminals.
So here are two headlines. I'll just give you these and, Victor, mash them together in your thoughts.
The first is a poll. This is a piece from I'm looking at Newsmax survey.
55% of leftists say Trump murder would be justified. A majority of self-identified leftists said that would be at least somewhat justified to murder President

Donald Trump. According to a new survey, the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutger University Social Perception Lab on Monday released results of a survey to assess support for political violence in the U.S.
Of course, targeting Elon Musk is also fine. Now, the other story.
This is, I think most Americans now know of this terrible incident in Texas, call it an incident, where a Carmelo Anthony stabbed to death. Austin Metcalf died in the arms of his twin brother.
This was at a track meet at a high school in Frisco. Now, here's the headline female ceo makes shock claim about boy 17 stabbed a track meet as donations to killer in quotes hit 170 000 i'm sure it's much higher today the c uh this look long story short there is a go fund me thing for this Carmelo Anthony that of two days ago, had already had $170,000 in it.
This poor boy, he was being bullied. I don't understand.
I do understand, I should say, the glorification of these hoodlums. It's the whole Mangione.
It's the whole. floyd you know saint george floyd yeah there's certain criteria that when we idolize um people who have commit horrific crimes they have to check a few boxes first of all the victim should be a white male that makes it about the transcript of the trans shooter in tennessee, we've now got that information.
And he dash she has said in there that she hated white people. She loved black people.
She hated children. She and that's the one they suppressed.
I mean, she and because they wanted to protect the killer and not the victims. But usually the victim is a white male.
Number two, usually they make some statement that I can't believe. I think the parents usually have the second ingredient is I don't know what happened.
He's a straight A student. He's the most peaceful person in the world.
He would never would never do that and then third the evidence belies everything they've said so i understand parents and that are grieving said he was a great student he's not like that but why would you go to a track meet with a knife why would you do that i've been to a lot of events in high school i would never think of carrying a knife, number one. At that age, when you have two sides, you know what I mean? It was kind of a rule in high school.
The worst thing you could do would be to walk over to the other side of the contest. Why would you do that? So the facts we know is that this young man carried a knife

and he sat in an area of which his affiliation, his school was competing against the opposition. Why do that? And there got an argument when he was saying things, people said, would you please leave, you're on the wrong side.

That escalated.

And he stabbed a student twin.

He was a twin. His brother was right.
He didn't stab him in the shoulder. He didn't stab him in the leg.
He didn't stab him in the hand. He put his knife right through his heart, and he died almost pretty instantly.
So he now has said that, yes, he did it, but he, and of course, what is he going to say? I was being threatened. So he was being threatened by an unarmed man in a place he didn't belong when he was provocative enough to offend people, which would have resulted in normal times in some type of raw fight.
That would have been the end of it. But he decided, A, to bring a knife, and B, to use it, and C, to use it in a way that went right through a person's heart and guaranteed.
So what I'm getting at is all of the choices were in his hands. A, just don't bring a knife.
No, excuse me excuse me a just don't go over to the other side where you'll provoke somebody b if you do provoke somebody at least don't take a knife c if you use the knife and you're going to stab somebody don't hit him in the heart and he violated all of that and you know what abouts that everybody says you can't do what about this or what about them or roles reverse but i guarantee you if at that track meet this young white male athlete decided that he was going to go to the other side the opposition which and sit with a bunch of african-american youth and start cheering for his team and causing a ruckus. And one of them said, you don't belong here.
And he pulled out a knife and stabbed him in the heart. I don't think he would be getting one penny on GoFundMe.
And he would be charged. There would be no discussion of discussion.
So everybody knows that.

Some cities might even be burning.

Yeah.

So that's the problem.

Although I know that Jasmine Crockett said today, what did she say?

We're done picking cotton when she was talking about illegal immigration.

That if there's not any illegal aliens here, we're not going to be doing cotton anymore.

Jasmine, I have a bet with you.

Who has picked cotton you or me when i was a young boy my father had a part-time job in 1959 60 61 farming his father's little 40 acres and there was something called a cotton allotment you remember that you had to get permission from the government so he was farming alfalfa with this old broken down john deere tractor and he had a 12 acre cotton allotment and so there was what happened is they had this primitive uh cotton picker it would go through and then that we would make, we had nothing. And so then we had these big kind of linen bags.
And they gave us, my mom gave us. So then I was about seven, eight.
And we went out and cleaned. And then there was a guy who came.
He was a gleaner and he had a little scale. But we and about five people went out and gleaned the 12 acres.
It really cuts your fingers. But I did that for at least two or three times in two or three crops.
So when she says, you think that Jasmine Crockett has ever picked cotton? I don't understand what I'm getting at is I'm not trying to be difficult. No, this has been one of my favorite moments ever, learning the – I did.

And confronting her with it.

That's terrific.

It was William F. Hansen farming for Frank Hansen in Kingsburg, California.

And my two brothers and I actually – it was one of my earliest –

how much of that little felt weighed when you put it in a bag and number two how the the hull the tusk can really cut you and the people that were doing it were not black they were poor white people oklahoma diaspora in other words after you pick you did your primitive 75 effective you rent a guy comes in and he mechanically picked the cotton then people who were very poor sprung up and my parents said you're going to go work with those people so we did and my point is though that jasmine crockett uh where where do people get this idea that what happened way in the past gives you some type of victimization because you can say that we were the same? She has nothing in common with the black experience. She went to a prep school.
She has no history of being oppressed economically, socially. She's got this, the more inane she sounds, the more attention she gets.
She's got a gaga press that has no standards. She's a performance artist.
Yeah, she issues threats to people, she talks about race. She's a racist.
She uses the word white in deprecatory fashion. But, you know, I would never say, well, we won World War II.
We white people because, you know, there was discrimination and segregation and people all won World War II. Women won World War II.
People who were black that were not allowed in combat helped win World War II. But why did she just pick this? We're not going to pick cotton anymore.
You never pick one bowl of cotton likely in your life. and just because you're black does not entile you to piggyback on the exploitation of blacks generation ago.
I know that that's, you're not supposed to say that, but that's what she's doing. Yeah, absolutely.
People are sick of it. They're really sick of it.
Well, Victor, we're going to head into a break here in a minute. And when we come out of it, we'll talk about the declining political fortunes or esteem of Barack Obama.
We'll round out the show that way. But before we get to the break, if we just have like one or two minutes, not a rant, but there is still not an ambassador named to Cyprus.
And this has been an issue of importance to you. It has been.
It has been. I don't usually get fixations.
But traditionally, Cyprus was a little different. It's a very complex situation because in 1974, the Turkish government came and invaded it illegally.
And there was a Greek kind of a right-wing group that – the Greek word is enosis. And they wanted to unite with the mainland dictatorship.
And that effort failed. But of the 20% that were Turkish, maybe it was 18% in the northern, excuse me, yes, in the area facing Turkey.
The Turkish army, a NATO power, attacked another NATO power, Greece, and it invaded and it ethnically cleansed that prime real estate and drove the Greeks out of the north. Bella Pais is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Famagusta, etc.
And in any case, Nicosia, there's a green line, and it's been occupied illegally ever since. And so it's a place where Russian oligarchs, they're, I don't want to say ill-gotten, I'm not going to be judged, but it's kind of like Trieste or one of those places like Casablanca in the movies.
It's very tricky. And it's strategically located right in the Mediterranean with Egypt and the Middle East and Europe.
Kind of like Malta. So they always have a, not always, but usually they have a diplomatic expert.
But if Donald Trump were to pick someone that, A, had recognition and knew how the public works and understood America, but was also an engineer and was not some wild-eyed academic, but was a scientist in a sense, but more importantly, grew up in Cyprus and is a fanatic pro-USA for decades and was actually very rare for a college president, was sympathetic to Donald Trump and voted for him. And was done a disservice to the Me Too because somebody on campus, I won't get into it, was accused of doing something and the president put a committee, which is all presidents do, and they thought instead they should have had him arrested or something.
But my point is Max Nikias would be the ideal appointment for Cyprus. I just would like to see a person in these key slots that was not a donor.
I understand donors are very important. I'm not making that argument because nobody would give money if there wasn't recognition for their...
Victor, I looked into this a little. The ambassador has always been, except for one I think was murdered in the 70s, have all been career foreign service officers.

I know.

I think Trump, who's a disruptor, needs to disrupt that.

He needs to pick somebody that he can get up on the phone and say, Max, what the hell is going on with these Russian oligarchs?

What's the deal with Turkey?

Can I trust Turkey? What are they doing here? What's the situation with military bases? Do the British still have a place? All that stuff he would know backwards and forwards. And then if he went on a trip to Greece or something, he'd say, I'm in Athens or I'm in Nicosia.
Max, I need you to translate for me. Just come over here and you know about three or four different dialects of Greek.
Come on. And then if he was talking, he said, Max, you were USC's president for a decade.
You raised more money than anybody did per year in history. What's wrong with higher? There were so many advantages that he could bring to the table that I would think it would be a wonderful appointment.
It would reflect well on Trump, and he would have a loyalist that he could call in terms of diplomacy, higher education. It's just a win-win-win for him.
There you go. That is a great, if there's a hobby horse to be had, that's a great one.

Now, Victor, we're going to take a break.

We're going to get your thoughts on a Miranda Divine column on Barack Obama.

And we'll do that when we come back from these final important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson show. Victor, wait a minute.
I have to ask you one other subject just quickly. Quickly, San Francisco speeding fines are now to be based on income.
So if you're rich, your traffic ticket is going to be maybe 80% more than if, I don't know if you're homeless, how you could be driving a car if you're homeless.

Maybe the car is your home.

But can you – They're copying the British.

They have a sentencing that they do it by race in Britain.

Depending on your race, you get a more – I think Britain's lost, by the way.

I don't think they're going to –

Oh, my gosh.

Is that true?

They really have race-based tickets?

They're fighting that.

There's a big controversy.

They were going to predicate sentencing on race. And I don't understand, you know, does that mean Gavin when he's Gavin or Gavin's wife gets to pay more? Is that the idea? Yeah.
Usually people who support that are very wealthy and they do it for psychological reasons so they feel good about themselves but it's always predicated on the fact that the sums are so small that it won't hurt them individually and then they act like they're magnanimous but you tinker with the stock market right the different And you go down three percent then these very magnanimous people who love mankind want to go out and lynch donald yeah well speaking of declining things let's talk about your favorite ex-president one of your so miranda devine the great columnist for the new york post who was on this podcast once, headline, Democrats refuse Barack Obama's election meddling as former president's influence within the desperate party withers. I'll just read this quickly.
Barack Obama has lost his mojo, ruined his brand. It used to be said that President Joe Biden was serving former President Obama's third term, that his former boss was controlling him from the home he had bought in D.C.'s ritzy Calorama neighborhood.
The feeling was that Obama was the real leader of the Democrat Party and his wife, Michelle, was the secret weapon they would whip out in 2024 to replace Biden. Well, none of it has come to pass.
And judging by his irrelevant poll numbers, Obama's star has long faded. In a CNN poll last month, Obama received only 4% support from Democrats who were asked which leader best represents the party lagging behind AOC, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders sanders ouch what happened to barack uh well barack uh well we know what happened to him and we want to know the cause of that so what happened to him he had boasted that when he was asked if he ever thought about a third term that famous or infamous statement well if i could just sit down here in the basement and call it in and didn't have to do anything i love that kind of stuff so he gave the game away that he was remotely directing the wax and effigy uh he and his cohort uh brock obama i mean brock obama and his cohort were directing joe biden the wax and effigy but then the question arises how did he lose influence so precipitously well he just said that you know joe's got to leave and then we're gonna have a i don't i don't really want a rival like uh kamala harris you know i we're gonna have an open an open uh convention uh we'll do the detail and they just said, nope, that's not gonna happen, we're going to have an open convention.
We'll do the detail. And they just said, nope, that's not going to happen.
We're going to. And Joe Biden does not like the Obamas.
Remember, they don't like it because Barack Obama famously said, don't ever underestimate the ability of Joe Biden to F something up. And so they don't like each other.
And Biden is really angry because in 2016, he said that it was his turn to be president. And then basically Obama, you know, Joe, you lost your mind.
We're going to get Hillary. So anyway, they have bad blood.
So then by diktat, he thought Harris was not going to win. He was right about that.
And Biden was not going to win. So Barack and Michelle were going to oversee an open convention, or they're going to do a tele, and they were going to pick somebody who could beg them, maybe Josh Shapiro, maybe Gab, who knows.
And that didn't happen. She cut them off at the pass.
She went out and called all the donors, within 30 days she raised i don't know half a billion dollars 100 million in any case uh then she leveraged poor joe i don't know if we knew what he was saying to endorse her and the bombas were out and then and then they thought well we're not going to endorse her but then as she started to get neck and neck they thought and so then they jumped in the race and of course being brock obama had to go to young african-american men and say you know yeah i don't know you guys know what's good for you you know you don't know what's good for you let me tell you what's good for you vote for You vote for, you know, a black woman. It's for the people, not Donald Trump.
And they resent. Everybody heard that resented him with good cause.
So then he had he was demonstrably impotent in this election. He did not do one thing.
His presence and he campaigned. He got into all of those invective at the convention michelle and he said horrible things about trump although they kind of piled it up and some subsequent pick uh appearances together uh funeral yeah carter's funeral yeah carter's funeral maybe at the inauguration a little bit but my point is that they thought they were going to have influence they had none they they were kind of disgraced and then the people started saying why didn't we listen to him because a he's not that smart and he didn't understand the dynamics of the race and you don't tell people that uh you need barack obama to tell them what's good for marxist false consciousness that's what he was doing and then the big killer is this is a guy who said on when they were asking him if he was going to run as a senator way back in 2007 he said something to the effect and people can check it they said oh would you Well, if i was going to run i'd take it seriously i just wouldn't do it to get public publicity and money you know and get out of there and make a bunch of money i would want to do it community organizer so that's exactly the opposite of what he did so the last year he was polling below for 50 and he decided that people liked him more they didn't see or hear him.
And that is true. So he thought it was brilliant what he came up with.
I think David Axelrod probably was the architect of this. They just said, let Hillary and Trump dominate the 2015-16 media, and they will destroy each other's popularity.
And you just sit back and play golf and be the king and just keep out of it and be Olympian. And he did.
And people started liking him every time they saw him in his Bermuda shorts and sunglasses and golf cart. And what was he doing, Jack? Well, he was cutting deals inside the White House for Netflix and all this stuff, using the last twilight of his office to get the leverage to make a lot of money.

so he comes out in 2017 and we don't see him although he first thing didn't he go to David Geffen's yacht with a bunch?

I don't know what he did.

But anyway, he and Michelle reportedly had cut deals for somewhere between $150 and $300 million.

Almost immediately, that mansion in Chicago where most presidents go back home,

Bush went to the Crawford Ranch, Reagan went back to the L.A. suburbs, not Barack.
He didn't go back to his mansion. He spent $9 or $10 million on Colorama, that chic neighborhood mansion in Washington.
That was not enough. Then he had to get a sweetheart deal for, what, 20 acres and Martha's Vineyard near the ocean.
I thought, Barack Barack you can't buy near the ocean because you told us that global warming was going to rise the level of the ocean it's going to be when I didn't mean that but I was just saying now I'm an owner I didn't know so he got that so now he had three homes and then he had to have the Hawaii beach house which was i guess immune from global warming water rise and then he had to have the Hawaii beach house, which was, I guess, immune from global warming, water rise. And then he had all of these little, what, exemptions from building codes and people were angry that he was cutting off access and drainage.
So he built the fourth mansion. And then every time he showed up somewhere, he was on a private jet.
I can understand that. He's an ex-prespresident but the point i'm making is he was the elite that he always was his big point was he loved to flash his ivy league credentials they loved to be on the cutting edge of fashion and culture they liked the corporate world and the investor class and they were in the past mad that they were moochers moochers now they weren't moochers they connived and leveraged their own fortune and they have these beautiful mansions and they're not getting along and so now the rumors are that they have separate bedrooms that all of these internet rumors that he was gay or bi are coming back to haunt him although there are rumors that he is interested in jennifer ast and brad pitt's ex-consort i don't know what i don't even want to engage in but uh the problem with him is that he was always arrogant and he always talked to people and he was superficial and he said it himself when they asked him what was his chief liability he said i'm lazy i'm lazy and he is he wasn't like bill clinton and when you talk when bill clinton got on the stage and somebody said something like what's the trade deficit and he would say something like oh it's 28 billion point two and it's going to rise by three and a half percent whatever he was he really read and he had a photographic memory obama didn't even do that he he didn't yeah i think his greatest talent was helping republicans get elected in state legislatures and governors 2010 boy and what was it fort they lost over his eight-year tenure 1400 seats and uh need more of that hey victor we're we're you got a hard stop here so we're gonna have to let let that that that wasn't a rant that was just short sheer wisdom and analysis but we have a lot of uh listeners new listeners again and viewers viewers.
Thank you on Rumble, on YouTube, people who listen to the podcast on Victor's website, on the mothership of the website, which is justthenews.com and Rumble. So many comments from people.
And I have two I would like to share today. And one is from a commenter on the Blade of Perseus, your website.

It's Thomas O'Brien.

And he writes, here's the irony.

If the wise and street smart Trump proves to be correct with his reciprocal tariff strategy,

there will be no congratulations from the highly skeptical legacy media.

They will simply move on being naysayers and attempted saboteurs of his next thinking out of the box policy. God bless you, Donald J.
Trump. That's Thomas O'Brien.
And then one other comment. It's from YouTube.
And you remember when we recorded our last show, Victor, I mentioned at the end, Bill Kaufman, my friend, and he had written me about somebody up in the tree. And sure as heck heck I checked out the YouTube, the news YouTube posting and it's from Aaron, he says, Victor and Jack I'm the guy in the bucket truck that Bill Kaufman mentioned I do watch on YouTube I also tell everyone I know that they should be watching Victor, Jack and Sammy and that's signed's signed Aaron.
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool. I know Aaron reads now, he reads Civil Thoughts.
What's that? That is the free weekly email newsletter. It comes out every Friday that I write for the Center for Civil Society, which we are trying to strengthen civil society.
And that's the heartbeat of America, civil society. So Civil Thoughts is 14 recommended readings.

Subscribe.

Go to civilthoughts.com.

Sign up.

Again, it's totally free.

We do not sell your name.

You'll just, I hope, enjoy the suggested readings.

So, Victor, you've been, as usual, terrific.

You're looking a little better, and that's great.

Thank you. I'm going to get my – I'm going to get back this week now that i'm off doxy death and uh i like that first reader just to finish um because what we're going to see is he's going to win this trade thing and he's right now in the bar room of Shane fighting the cattle barons.

And then after he wins, Timmy or whatever his name is going to run after him and say, Shane, come back. And he said, you know, there's no living with a gun.
And he's going to go off into the Teton. I don't know.
I don't mean right now. But he's going to do a lot of very good things for this country.
And he is not going to have a Barack Obama retirement or even a Joe Biden retirement. He'll be lucky if people these people are crazy.
My biggest fear for Donald Trump, and I'll be frank about it, is that when you keep saying and that we talked, we didn't get to the poll. We'll do that next time, the federalists picked it up.
I think there was one from Rutgers University that had a high number of left-wing people self-identified. Yeah, 55%.
We had no problem seeing him dead. And when you have that publicized and you have all of that, he's an A this and he's this and this.
And after two assassinations, you are sending a message to millions of crazy people. And there are millions in a nation of 345 million that if you were to do this, you would pull pretty well, especially coming after Mangione and that creepy guy.
Right. And they are playing with fire.
So they have in in their mind there's only one way they can stop donald trump and that is not through an election they can impeach him that didn't work they can use lawfare that didn't work they can take him off the ballot that didn't work they can raid his home that didn't work they can try to kill They tried twice. They, the crazy left-wing element.
And I'm afraid that that's going to happen again. They're going to try it again.
That's why he was one of the best moves he made was to get the Secret Service under the direction of somebody he could trust. Yeah.
Oh, my gosh. That lady was a horror show.
Yeah. I forget her name, but she was she was what a hey let's end on a happy note yes not that that victor mentioned shane and i think everyone has an assignment if you haven't seen shane you should go see it not only is it one of the best movies ever made i think it's one of it i know it's one of george stevens is a wonderful director yeah beautiful.
And that bar fight when Joe comes in with the ax handle. Oh my gosh.
That is, that is terrific. Well, Victor, you've been great.
Thank you so much for sharing all your wisdom folks. Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listening. Coming up in the next couple of days is the great Sammy wink with Victor.
I know Victor just had an interview with Michael Walsh, my dear old friend, and I look forward to listening to that. But we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Bye-bye. Thank you, everybody, for listening and viewing.
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