Putin and Zelensky: In Search of the DMZ

This is unconstitutional.

Have you heard some biased journalist, maybe on a podcast or a YouTube show, say this?

Probably.

Do you just take their word for it?

Which begs another question, have you ever taken the time to read and understand for yourself the meaning of the United States Constitution?

Most haven't.

That's why I'm excited that Hillsdale College is offering a brand new free online course called The Federalist.

This terrific course explains how the United States Constitution established a government strong enough to secure the rights of citizens and safe enough to wield that power.

And today it's our responsibility to pay attention, to be vigilant, as our founders might say, in order to preserve and protect Republican self-government.

Hillsdale's online course, The Federalist, includes 10 lectures, each about 30 minutes long.

You can take the course at your own pace.

There's no cost to sign up.

They're remarkably well produced and engaging, and a must for anyone like me who's never really delved into the Federalist Papers.

Enroll here at no cost.

Go right now to hillsdale.edu slash VDH to enroll.

Again, there's no cost and it's easy to get started.

That's hillsdale.edu slash VDH to enroll for free.

Hillsdale.edu slash VDH.

Hello, ladies and hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

We are recording on Sunday, August 17th.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, the possessor of an important website, The Blade of Perseus.

VictorHanson.com is the address.

You should go there early and often like they vote in Chicago.

And you should even subscribe.

And later in today's episode, I will tell you why I believe you should subscribe.

Victor, we're in two strange places.

One is literal strange places.

You are or strange as a new to our viewers and listeners.

You are elsewhere in California.

I'm 7,200 feet up.

in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

And I can't believe that the internet is working so far.

It is, but that's why we're doing this on Zoom today.

Yeah.

Right.

And I'm trying to

rearrange my, I created an office at my house.

So the background's a little different from how we normally do, but so what?

Anyway, we're glad

that you're available here.

And so we've got some important things to talk about today.

One is we're today's episode, as we record, again, it's Sunday, we're going to get Victor's take on what happened with Putin and Trump in Alaska on Friday.

We do this knowing that the day after we talk, Monday, which is the day before this episode is up on the air, which is Tuesday,

Premier or President, or what that strongman, I guess we should call him Zelensky from Ukraine will be meeting with Donald Trump.

So that'll put a little different dynamic, obviously, on the peace talks, on the ceasefire talks, on the Ukraine.

Russian war.

But we're going to get Victor's take at least on what he thought happened in Alaska when we come back from these important messages.

Why drop a fortune on basics when you don't have to?

Quince has the good stuff, high-quality fabrics, classic fits, and lightweight layers for warm weather, all at prices that make sense.

Everything I've ordered from Quince has been nothing but solid.

Quince has closet staples you'll want to reach for over and over again, like cashmere and cotton sweaters from just fifty dollars breathable flow-knit polos and comfortable lightweight pants that somehow work for both weekend hangs and dress-up dinners the best part everything with quince is half the cost of similar brands by working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen quince gives you luxury pieces without the markup and quince only works with factories that use safe safe ethical and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes.

My favorite piece this summer is a linen blazer which is perfect for any day in the office or even recording podcasts.

It's beautiful and comfortable and a classic fit and the best thing is it's affordable price.

You just can't beat Quince.

Keep it classic and cool with long-lasting staples from Quince.

Go to quince.com slash Victor for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.

That's Quince, Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash Victor to get free shipping and 365-day returns.

Quince.com slash Victor.

And we'd like to thank Quince for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game?

Well, with a name-your-price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills.

Try it at Progressive.com.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates.

Price and coverage match limited by state law, not available in all states.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So, Victor, explaining

how we're straddling time and space continuums here for

your wisdom, but

let's get your take on Sunday the 17th.

What happened on Friday the 15th?

Well, Trump didn't get his ceasefire.

They did have a long three-hour talk.

They were supposed to have a QA with media.

They did not.

Each gave a statement.

Putin's was three or four times as long as Trump's, and he went first.

And

I would characterize it, he gave a long litany of Russia-America cooperation from World War II, 19th century stuff, all irrelevant.

And then he mentioned that he didn't want any last-minute shenanigans on his willingness to discuss a peace.

It's pretty clear he does not want a ceasefire.

He wants a comprehensive settlement.

And

Donald Trump then said most of the

sticking points were resolved, but two or three major ones were not.

He said nice things about Putin.

Putin said that he wouldn't have invaded if Trump had not been president.

I don't know whether that meant

he was admitting that he was afraid of Donald Trump's mercurial response or

he felt that the Russian collusion hoax

promulgated by Obama and by Biden had precipitated his invasion.

And

being that Trump was the victim, not the creator of those anti-Russian hoaxes, maybe he meant that.

I don't know.

Here's the parameters.

I think we all know what they are.

Ukraine will not be in NATO.

Ukraine will have to have some wherewithal, in addition to its present munitions and force, to deter Putin.

The sticking points are over the institutionalizing of the Donbass acquisition in 2014 and the progress westward that Putin has made versus the Crimea, which is a dead letter.

It will be given to Putin formally.

I don't think Ukraine will say it's yours.

They'll just say it's not going to be negotiated or a matter of the use of arms.

He gets that little prize.

He gets the prize.

It It says, I kept them out of NATO.

Big deal.

They were never going to go into NATO.

And now the big issue left, Jack, is

if you stop them fighting now, he has most of the Donetsk and Donbass, but he doesn't have all of it.

He's 50 to 100 miles westward of where he started, but

his

exterior lines are expanding.

Ukraine's interior lines are contracting.

Ukraine is pretty stubborn.

And everybody knows that both sides are exhausted.

There's been a million and a half dead, wounded, missing, captive.

Ukraine has less ability to withstand those losses than Russia, but Russia has taken a worldwide hit to its economy.

And Putin is obviously scared of the current sanctions and the possibility

of a secondary boycott.

So where are we?

They're going to meet in three to four weeks and in the meantime both sides will try to gain advantage or leverage on the battlefield.

Unfortunately, more people will die and then we will decide where they are in situ and then we'll have some kind of peace where they withdraw to a prearranged border and then Ukraine will do its best to make a Magino line, you know, that's an unfortunate reference, a Magino line defensive earthworks to keep them out and then the Europeans will beat their chest and say, we're going to guarantee their security.

And they'll be loud.

And then privately, they'll call up Trump and said, Look, come on, man,

you've got to back us up.

You've got to secure us.

You've got to give us troops.

And the MAGA base will not tolerate that.

We'll probably give them more aid, maybe logistical support, air support.

I don't know.

But

the left went bananas.

I was watching Nicole Wallace.

She was was using profanity on the air, Jack, about Trump had said nice things about Putin.

And then my colleague,

former Ambassador McFaul, railed about Trump praising Putin.

I would just like to remind everybody

that when FDR decided to send Linlees along with Churchill in June of late June of 1941, immediately following the Nazi betrayal betrayal of the Molotov-Ribbon Pact and invasion of the Soviet Union.

At that point,

that point, Stalin had killed 20 million of his own people in the Great Famine, the show trials, the Roundups, and he had invaded free Poland and stolen half of it with Hitler in 1939, and he had attacked an independent

Finland and grabbed 10% of it, and he had given him the fuel and the food to bomb and burn London.

That's what Stalin had done, and yet FDR went over there at Yalta in 1944 and praised him, called him Uncle Joe, laughed with him.

We supplied 30%.

Trump is not giving any money or aid to the Russians.

We preside 30%,

along with the British, of Stalin's ability to fight the Germans.

And we did it.

We do it again.

It was real politique.

If that's not enough for the critics, I would remind everybody in 1972, Richard Nixon went to China to triangulate China against Russia, vice versa.

And he met and was very cordial and spoke highly of the greatest mass murder of the 20th century, Mao Zedong, with the blood of 70 million people on his hands.

So the idea that Donald Trump doesn't say, as Joe Biden did, he's a murderous thug, he's a criminal, he's a dictator.

So I guess he was supposed to say, well, thank you, Vladimir.

You're a murderous dictator and a thug.

You understand that?

And then that would make Nicole Wallace and MSNBC and Biden and

McFaul and everybody happy, I guess.

But he didn't do that.

He did what Nixon and FDR did.

And he spoke highly of a person with blood on his hands for the greater good of stopping the bloodletting.

And that's what he did.

And he may or may not be successful.

You can't trust Putin, but Putin

has suffered a defeat, and he wants to at least tell the oligarchs and the military people who could put him out of business back in Moscow that he has a large section

of

20% of Ukraine, maybe that he didn't have at all before.

And that's what he's going to use to justify a million dead, wounded Russians.

Well, Victor, Victor, I have a

question to bounce off you related to FDR, but first sticking with the Friday in Alaska,

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, I think it was he, him, who wore this CCC P-shirt.

And this is one of the, you know, the issues gives, I think, some ammunition to

the left and even many on the right who still think of Russia in 2025 as if it was the Soviet Union in 1972.

And it's not.

It's not a great country, but it's not the land of Stalin.

But him,

Lavrov doing that, I think was a terrible thing.

And

maybe he's a wise heine.

I won't say the other word.

But

any thoughts on

yeah, I mean, it was pathetic.

I guess they served chicken Kiev to the reporters, too, to remind them that they almost shook Kiev.

They kind of got out done when they flew, Trump flew over the B-2, the B-2 bombers right over Putin's head that had just bombed

Iran, and then he had the F-22s and the F-35s parked all around the tarmac.

So

nobody's saying that these people are not killers and thugs.

But they're not in the same league as Mao and Stalin that we cuddled up to for the interest of the United States.

And that's what Trump is trying to do.

He's trying to stop this war and eventually

turn Russia against China

rather than have them unite against the United States.

And how do you do that?

Well, you don't go and call somebody what he is, a murderous thug, which everybody wanted him to do.

So

he didn't get you.

I guess they wanted him to do what Jake Sullivan and Blinken did in Angry, just sit there like this.

I'm so sorry, Vladimir.

Oh, please hit me again.

Oh, I'm ashamed.

That kind of stuff.

I would like to remind everybody

with the Chinese.

Yeah,

his

foreign minister.

But I would like to remind everybody, when Trump said this was not his doing, everybody thought, well, why is he saying that?

Well, he's saying that because he wants to remind everybody that Putin took, went into Georgia and took Osachia under George W.

Bush in 2008.

He took the Crimea and the Donbass in 2014 under Obama.

He did it under Bush because Bush was bogged down in Iraq.

He did it under Obama because Obama two years earlier, a year and a half earlier in South Korea and Seoul had said, tell Vladimir to

Medeved, he had said, tell Vladimir if he's flexible,

I'll be flexible on missile defense if he gives me space for my last election.

Meaning, hey, Vladimir, if you're going to invade Ukraine, don't do it while I'm up for election, and I'll cancel that missile defense that's so important to Eastern Europe.

And they both kept their bargain.

And then he invaded under Joe Biden and tried to take Kiev.

So he didn't under Donald Trump.

It wasn't Donald Trump Trump who pushed the jacuzzi button in 2009 in Geneva.

That was Hillary Clinton who said Russian reset.

Bush has been too mean to the Russians.

We're going to have a reset.

It wasn't Trump who invited

Russia back into the Middle East after 35 years, hiatus.

That was John Kerry.

Remember him?

Oh, we're going to have the Russians help us get rid of WMD from Syria.

Remember that, everybody?

was.

It wasn't Donald Trump who went over to Ukraine,

got in the middle of it, and said, I want

this Attorney General fired, or I'm going to use foreign aid as if it's my own personal purse because you're looking at my son.

That was the subtext.

It wasn't Donald Trump who said, no offensive weapons for Zelensky, none for Ukraine.

That was Obama and Biden, not Trump.

And so if you look at this whole sordid history of the triangle, United States, Russia, Ukraine, it was

not Trump's fingerprints on any of the things that caused this war.

He was not Victoria Newland trying and are

the Clinton and Bush administrations that were finagling around to get Ukraine a change of government and to get them into NATO.

He didn't do any of that.

That was kind of a provocation.

He, I don't know, you could say that

he was not the one

who

let Vladimir Putin continue with an asymmetrical missile deal.

He didn't tell the Germans, go ahead and

Nordstrom too, go ahead and buy stuff from Putin.

He said, don't do it.

So I don't get the criticism because he didn't insult Putin.

He has no record of appeasing Putin.

That was all Obama and Biden and the people under them.

And they did the worst of the thing.

Yeah, they did the worst of both things.

They tried to appease Putin under reset and flatter him.

And then when he saw that magnanimity, his weakness to be exploited, then they started lecturing him on democracy.

You better help these dissidents.

You better listen to Garry Kasparov.

You better do this.

He's not going to do any of that.

He's a thug.

And so they didn't have the force to back up.

So the worst thing you can do is speak shrilly and loudly with a twig.

And that's what they did.

And it didn't work.

And under their regimes,

he invaded and took what he has now.

And they're never going to get it back.

And they can talk all they want about on MSNBC and clapper.

Oh, he's a Russian puppet.

He's an asset.

But none of them have the intelligence or the guts to tell the truth, that they're not going to get back the Crimea.

They're not going to get back the Donbass,

and they're not going to get him out of Ukraine.

They're just not going to do it.

I wish they could do it, but they can't.

Europe can't do it.

Europe can talk all they want about, oh, you know, we don't need the United States.

They insulted Zelensky.

We're going to do that.

They're not going to do anything, nothing.

And they're not going to get the Ukrainians to get an expeditionary army and attack the Russians and their home ground to get them out of Crimea.

They're not going to do that.

So

just be honest.

The other thing is, very quickly,

I'm very critical of Putin.

I wish he had not have gone in there.

It was a criminal act.

I wish he would get out of Ukraine.

I would like Ukraine to get as much territory as it possibly can back.

But the borders of Ukraine are not set in stone.

And this is an old, it's like the Balkans.

It really is.

In 1939, if we said the word Ukraine, it would not be where it is now.

About a third to a half of it was Polish.

And Stalin invaded he invaded then Roman Catholic Polish-speaking what is now Western Ukraine, and he stole it along with Hitler.

And after the war, when Hitler was defeated, they said to Stalin, get out and give us back Roman-speaking.

And he said, there is no more Roman-speaking,

Roman Catholic, Polish-speaking Poland.

It doesn't exist.

It's now Soviet Ukraine.

If you want land for your new Poland, steal it from the Germans.

So take the defeated Nazi territories of Pomerania and Prussia and give it to Poland.

And that's exactly what they did.

As far as the eastern eastern boundaries it was Nikita Khrushchev who said

these are the boundaries of Ukraine and Ukraine is now an autonomous Soviet republic.

He did that for I don't know in the 50s he never thought the Soviet Union was going to fall apart.

As far as the Crimea

it declared its independence right after the Cold War, independent from Russia and from Ukraine.

And the question was who was going to grab it first and the Ukrainians grabbed it first and it gave up its three-year autonomy and joined Ukraine.

And then the other part of it is I have no idea what the demography is now, but before the war there was a sizable number of Russians in Crimea and

Russian speakers in the Donbass.

So it's

it would be, I mean, it's not the same, but it's kind of like Castro in 1962 and then Nikita Khrushchev sending the missile components to use a proxy to hurt us and we didn't want anything to do with it.

I'm not saying it's the same, but when you have a superpower rivalry and you have a proxy on the doorstep of Russia, you've got to be very careful about it.

And we had a proxy on our doorstep that the Russians were using to hurt us.

If you know, Chi right now decides he's going to go visit Canada and play up Canada's Carney statement the other day that he's going to recognize Palestinians.

He thinks that he has to go it alone.

He doesn't consider the United States a strategic partner.

That's basically what he said.

And Chi came into Toronto and put his arm around.

We wouldn't like that.

Right.

Well, Victor, I have a question for you about Zelensky before we head into our break.

But first, I want to tell our listeners that total control

over their money, it is closer than you think.

Right now, 134 countries representing 98% of the world's economy are building central bank digital currencies.

These systems are designed to make every transaction visible, trackable, and controllable by government authorities.

It's a level of financial oversight that mirrors the tactics used by authoritarian regimes throughout history.

Look at China.

260 million citizens are already using a digital won, yuan.

I'll never get that right, that can expire if not spent by government deadlines.

And it's not just theory.

The IMF admits these currencies can be programmed to decide what people are allowed to own.

Once cash disappears, so does the last real protection individuals have had against financial control for thousands of years.

And that's why our friends at American Alternative Assets put together a must-read guide, The Digital Dollar Trap, How CBDCs Threaten Your Financial Freedom.

This free report explains how digital currencies represent one of the greatest threats to personal liberty and why physical gold and physical silver may be the last line of defense.

Call 8332 USA Gold or visit victorlovesgold.com to claim your copy now.

That's 833-287-2465 or VictorLovesGold.com.

History has shown us what happens when governments gain control.

Don't let it happen again.

And we thank our very good friends at American Alternative Assets for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, quick thing on Zelensky,

who has been president.

What happened to the last presidential

elections in Ukraine?

And as you mentioned before, Franklin Roosevelt.

Yeah, don't.

What if Franklin Roosevelt, no, what if there was no election in 1944?

The excuse being, well, we're in the midst of a war.

What if Abraham Lincoln said in 1864, no elections, we're in the midst of a civil war?

Winston Churchill not only had an election while while the Japanese theater was still raging, but he lost it.

And the man who saved Europe from the Nazis was deposed after he defeated the Nazis.

And Clement Attlee, who was kind of an incompetent, was then in charge of the British war effort in World War II against the Japanese.

It wasn't even fair.

Attlee was the one who was in charge at Potsdam, not Churchill, who...

saved Britain.

So, yeah, I mean, we don't ask those questions.

We're not supposed to ask those questions.

We don't mention Ukrainian corruption.

We don't mention the fact that he banned opposition parties.

We don't mention the fact he suspended elections.

We do not mention the fact he's banned most media that's not government controlled or government favorably inclined to government.

So we don't ask any of those things.

We think the Russian Orthodox Church, too, has been banned.

And we don't do what we did to Israel.

We don't say, get a ceasefire right now.

We don't say to him, no collateral damage, no collateral damage.

We don't say to him, be proportionate, no disproportionality, don't do that.

We don't do any of that.

Why aren't you texting Russians in apartment buildings when you hit Crimea?

We don't do any of that.

And, you know,

it's kind of...

strange how the left and everybody in Europe especially, they attack Israel.

They're declaring that they're going to recognize a Hamas-controlled Palestinian state in Gaza.

And

they're really tough on Israel, but they say they're really pro-Ukrainian and tough on Russia, but

they don't have the same type of rhetoric toward Russia

because they can't do anything about Russia, because Russia is a thuggish, murderous, tough state.

And Netanyahu is a liberal, democratic, Western nation.

And they know that it's consensual and has a free press and it listens to them.

And so they bully Israel and it's only 11 million people.

And so they're cowards and they're bullies.

They pick on this little Western country that is liberal and then they don't dare say anything about Putin.

They say it

in the abstract, but they don't, you know, I don't see anybody in Europe saying, well, this week we're going to make two big important statements.

One, we're recognizing a complete autonomous Palestinian state.

Take that, Netanyahu.

And now we demand and we are recognizing a full Ukraine, an independent autonomous Ukraine with the borders prior to 2014.

Take that, Putin.

They're not saying that, are they?

No.

No, they don't want to tell Russia what to do because they're scared stiff of Russia because they know that Russia would say to them, okay, how many divisions you have?

Stalin asked that of the Pope once when he lectured Russia.

How many divisions do you guys have?

And we know that in the case of Netanyahu, he sends a minister over there and says, you know, what are you guys picking on us for?

So it's a different situation.

They kind of kicked Zelensky out of the White House.

with

that big explosive meeting.

I did a daily, I guess it was Daily Telegraph interview and

I did a Piers Morgan interview.

But anyway, I watched earlier interviews as I was waiting in the virtual green room and I watched all these British intellectuals just giddy saying the Americans have blown it.

They've shown their real Russian colors.

They're out of it.

Now it's time for us to

stand up.

And, you know, Britain's got to start deploying peacekeepers along with our French allies and Germany.

I'm thinking,

all eight

operable German tanks, what, 50 aircraft that are operable, go ahead and do it and see what Putin says.

So the only time,

I mean,

when they want American natural gas or liquefied natural gas or they want security guarantees and they're nice.

But

usually the Western Europeans at least are they talk a great game, but they're remember the no-fly zones that they were all going to.

This was the big thing that after Saddam violated the Schwarzkopf agreements and he started flying, killing Kurds, and he was flying.

So then George H.W.

Bush said, We're going to get our allies, we're going to have no-fly zones.

The French and the British are going to help.

How did that work out?

They kind of peeled off

and said, Well, no, Victor, you can do it.

We're not going to do it.

So, anyway,

well, we

are our allies.

We love them.

Hey, Victor, we're going to get your take on,

wow, two things, Doreen St.

Felix or Felise.

I'm not sure how she says her name.

And then the return of Subway Sandwiches in national stories.

And we're going to get to those two issues when we come back from these important messages.

Hi, I'm Kristen Bell.

And if you know my husband, Dax, then you also know he loves shopping for for a car.

Selling a car?

Not so much.

We're really doing this, huh?

Thankfully, Carvana makes it easy.

Answer a few questions, put in your VIN or license, and done.

We sold ours in minutes this morning, and they'll come pick it up and pay us this afternoon.

Bye-bye, Trucky.

Of course, we kept the favorite.

Hello, other Trucky.

Sell your car with Carvana today.

Terms and conditions apply.

Oh, hey.

Hey, thanks for meeting me here on such short notice.

This place isn't bugged, is it?

Bugged?

Wait, Jamie, what's going on?

Oh, it's just, you're my only lawyer friend, and I need your professional opinion.

Do you see that brand new Hyundai Tucson out there?

Yeah.

That's all I paid for it.

Uh, I think I need to get back to you on that.

Do you know what you want?

Yeah, I do now.

Deal so right, it almost feels wrong.

Get the car or SUV you've always wanted, plus America's best warranty, at the Hyundai Getaway sales event.

The guilt is real, but so is the savings.

Listen, I don't want to get in your business, but if that's all she paid for it, I'll have what she's having.

It's a great day for a new Hyundai at the Hyundai Getaway Sales Event going on now.

Get 0% APR for 60 months, plus zero payments for 90 days on all Hyundai Palisade, Santa Fe, and Santa Fe hybrid models.

And check out our other great deals at your Hyundai Dealer today.

Offer in September 2nd.

Call 562-314-4603 for details.

we are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, recording on Sunday, August 17th.

This particular episode is up on August 19th.

Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus, it commands your subscription.

Why?

Because every week, in addition to all the tremendous amount of free material you will find there, links to Victor's writings, to these podcasts, the archives of them, Victor's other appearances, his books, etc.,

Victor writes two exclusive pieces for The Blade of Perseus and one exclusive video.

And to read them, to see it, you need to subscribe.

It's $65 a year.

That's discounted from the monthly charge of $6.50.

Go to victorhanson.com and sign up.

And you will be glad you did.

And you will be sad you had not done so already.

Now, by the way, Victor, before we get to Doreen St.

Felix, the catch,

it's interesting you talked about the British journalist, the BBC journalist Gleeful.

And I couldn't unlock it yesterday because I don't have a subscription to the Daily Mail, but there was a headline about Boris Johnson attacking Trump and saying he was like Trump's stand or his actions in Alaska were vomit-inducing.

And what is it about these guys that just take,

I mean, I don't mind if they do it.

I don't mind if they do it.

So they're basically saying here and in Europe, you've got to be tough with Putin.

You've got to insult him.

You've got to get angry.

Okay, fine.

Then what?

Then he storms out and you're going to do what exactly?

I can tell you what you're going to do.

You're going to get your eight leopard tanks and your Belgian two fighter planes and you're going to get everybody to drop their cappuccino cups in Florence and

fly over there.

And then you're going to do what exactly?

You're going to force Putin to get out of Ukraine?

I don't think so.

The only person that can force him to do anything is the United States.

And the only thing that we can do short of force is something that Biden didn't even dare nor Obama think of.

And that's a secondary boycott.

And that is a tough measure.

If you say to the Indians and the Chinese, which are basically, if you think about it, 45% of the population of the world, and you say to them, we're not going to buy one thing from you, and you're not buying one thing from us because you buy Russian oil.

That is going to really hurt the world economy and us.

And maybe it's necessary, but that is the only person that can do that is Donald Trump.

And he said he would do it.

And that's tougher than anything that anybody had envisioned, including the Europeans.

Boris Johnson can say all he wants, but if I were Boris Johnson, I would be worried about

the British government locking up people for saying things like illegal immigration is a cancer on our society,

or having Pakistani rape gangs

molest girls with virtual impunity because they're supposedly a politically correct group, or I would ask them exactly

how you're going to defend yourself if you alienate the United States.

That's all I would say.

And I'm going to figure out.

Some small questions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, they don't understand the American mindset.

You know, they really don't.

I was just thinking in my own family.

My grandfather was 27 years old.

He was on a little 40-acre,

and they said, you know what?

The French and the Germans, the French and the British have lost over 2 million casualties.

They can't keep the Germans.

Hey, Mr.

Hansen, you're going to go all the way up to Washington and train,

and then we're going to put you on a ship, and you're going to go over there and you're going to fight to save the French and the British.

Okay.

And then you're going to come back two and a half years later with half your lungs and be disabled the rest of your life.

And then your son, 23 years later, is going to drop his studies and he's going to go over with your other grandson, with your nephew, and they're going to go over there and one of them is going to die on Okinawa to stop the Japanese and the other one is going to fly 40 mission.

And these are all these wars that we're in America going to get involved in.

And then we're going to send another generation during the Cold War and places like Korea and Vietnam to stop the Soviets from what?

Overrunning Europe, essentially.

And then we're going to hear that we are appeasing them.

And I think everybody's tired of that.

And I'm not saying I'm an isolationist.

I'm just saying that the only way to get Putin to stop the killing is for Donald Trump to pressure him.

And he would like to turn China against him and him against China.

And he would like to threaten him with a secondary boycott.

And he would like, first of all, to give him one last chance to have a DMZ ceasefire leading to a peace.

To get that, you do what FDR did.

You don't ruin the Stalin relationship when you're in the middle of a war, or you do,

you know, basically what Richard Nixon did.

He flew to China.

Mao did not fly to the United States.

He flew to China and he tried to persuade him malifiously and compliment him.

And he was, he and Stalin made Putin look like an amateur as far as the body count.

Absolutely.

Well, Victor, we have a story about race and journalism.

and I just want to put a little background.

We remember the great outrage and the controversy, the uproar when the New York Times wanted to publish and did publish, I don't know if I put wanted in quotes, Tom Cotton's op-ed a few years ago, how berserk the media went.

Now,

a few years later, here's the headline.

New Yorkers, Doreen St.

Felix, deletes X account after racist tweets resurface.

Doreen St.

Felix, a staff writer at the far-left New Yorker, deleted her X account this week after a countless number of racist tweets were uncovered.

I'm reading a piece from Breitbart here.

St.

Felix, who has been with the New Yorker since 2017, has not commented on her objectively racist views, views that not only denigrate an entire race of people based on their skin color, only on their skin color, but put forth an equally grotesque opinion of her own ethnicity awards, her and those who look like her, a racial supremacy.

What's most revealing this time about the state of our wretched legacy media is that just a year or so after St.

Felix openly expressed these racist and supremacist views, she was hired by the New Yorker and even earned a place on Forbes' 30 under 30 list.

And here's just one tweet that she put, and this was in April of 2015.

TBH, to be honest, whiteness fills me with a lot of hate.

Can't really be a prude about it anymore.

I'm often angry and hateful about it.

And Victor, I think that was one of the nicer tweets that this

says she didn't ever want to have a baby that was half white.

Right.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Absolutely.

We talked earlier, and I had done a daily signal video about President Wood at Sacramento State University, who said he got very angry.

We mentioned on this broadcast as well, that

he said, quote, I want to eliminate whiteness.

He said well I said it in 2017 when I was a professor not a president we never said you said it as president we said you as president have said that

eliminate whiteness and then he tried to get it get out of it

to save his job which I don't think was ever in danger and then of course we had Ellie Mostel that talking head legal expert who said right after, I think it was right after COVID, that when he came back out of the quarantine, he just didn't want to see white people anymore.

He was tired of them.

We had the, was it the Texas official, Jack, that when the poor small children died in the Texas flood,

she sort of said, well, these were all white enclaves anyway along the river.

Right.

Then we had the city councilwoman.

in Cincinnati that said that the white people that were on the ground and being kicked to death almost deserved the beat down.

She said that.

And then we had Al Sharpton weighing in, as he always does on the federalization of the Washington Police Force.

This is the architect of the Tawana Brawley

race hoax.

He was the one that told when after a Jewish person was killed, get on your yarmox and come over here if you want to fight.

So it's an old idea, but what's weird about it today is

in a period where if you look at per capita income of black women, for example, in the workforce, it's almost comparable to white women or white male.

I think

it's the same as white males.

If you look at ethnic groups

by per capita income, I think so-called whites are eighth or ninth, well behind Indians, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans,

et cetera, Arab Americans.

And so to see in this post-DEI, post-affirmative action world, not just racial slurs, but just pure expression of racial hatred coming from people who are all privileged.

How much more privileged can you be to be a writer at The New Yorker, or how much more privileged can you be to be the president of Sacramento State and yet,

you know, or a professor at UC San Diego in his earlier incarnation.

So it's almost as if, you know, we had that Ta Nahisi Coates,

you know, and all you have to be racist to be anti-racist.

And he was the one that talked about the talk he gave.

It's weird that we created through these set-aside programs this whole professional class of elites, and everybody thought they were going to emulate Martin Luther King and his movement at a time when they were very oppressed economically, racially, socially, culturally, legally, and yet when those oppressions had ended, you would think the beneficiaries of the civil rights movement would be,

I don't know, they would be magnanimous, they would be friendly, they would think that race is incidental.

No, they not only showcased their race, but they did it in a way that was hateful and racist.

against so-called white people.

They do it because,

you know, right after George Floyd, you remember the dinners where white women would pay black women to host them at dinner and then they would sit around the table while they were called all these names and then they would kind of shake their, it was almost like Orwell's 1982 minutes of screaming or torture.

It's a symptom that

the black left-wing elite thinks that the so-called white population is all like the MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, or the women on the view elites, and they're not.

So the people in East Palestine, Ohio, or Bakersfield, California are not guilty of anything and they don't feel they're guilty of anything.

They just want to live and let live.

And they probably have a lot more non-white friends than the people in the white elite that love to be attacked and humiliated or don't complain or object when they are attacked or humiliated.

And so

it's going to continue until somebody holds these people accountable.

If that woman was fired, but don't hold your breath.

Remember Jory Reed, who spouts that anti-white

racism and hatred, and it was exposed to her, from her, that

her website or social media account, remember she went after the Florida governor Charlie Crist, said he was gay and that was creepy and all this homophobic.

And yet, what did the establishment do when she said a flat out lie?

Somebody hacked my social media.

And then there was no, there was an investigation that proved false.

Did they say that you just compounded your racism with a flat out lie?

They no more did that than they did it to Juicy Smollett.

The moment they hit her about Juicy Smollett, Kamala Harris said, this is horrible.

It's a modern lynching.

And then, you know, Nancy Pelosi, then when you had the evidence of the

attackers, quote unquote, of Juicy Smolton buying the bleach, the hats, everything on tape, and you had the canceled checks that he paid them to do it, and then the story was impossible unless you believe he violated the laws of chemistry and the bleach wouldn't freeze in subarctic temperatures.

They still didn't apologize.

He still didn't apologize, and nobody held him to account.

And the only reason he was even given a slight slap on the wrist is that somebody intervened

from the state and appointed a real prosecutor rather than the joke prosecutor and racist prosecutor in Cook County.

So

it's I just don't think it's sustainable.

I really don't, in a multiracial society.

We talked about that with the Sac State president.

You can't just say these things again and again and again at a time when anybody else who said them would be career finished and be all done with.

And,

you know.

I remember, Victor, watching the flick in the channels and

the Baltimore riots were happening because that guy died in the back of the van.

What about the van?

Yeah, I remember that.

And somehow or other, this was my fault and it was your fault and was the fault of a truck driver from Arkansas, et cetera, because of who we are.

And not to

create a prototype.

I work hard, go to work every day.

I'm active in my community.

I'm charitable.

And I come home and I turn on the TV and the media is saying I'm a racist and I'm to blame for this event.

You're here.

I'm to blame for Michael Brown.

Michael Brown.

Remember the CNN house walked out.

Hands up, don't shoot.

That was a complete lie.

Even the

everybody said it was a complete lie.

There was no evidence.

Even the eyewitnesses said that he didn't say that.

So

they just jumped to that.

Just like.

Yeah, it just gets to a point where enough of this.

Yeah, everybody's sick of the Duke La Crosse.

They're sick of the Covington kids.

They're sick of George

Zimmerman.

And he was the white Hispanic, a new category, the New York Times.

So it would not be brown on black violence.

It had to be white violence.

They were sick of, remember Henry Louis Gates and his little shackles he gave

because he locked himself out of his house and somebody didn't know who he was, and all of a sudden that was a civil rights that led to the Beer Summit, all of this stuff.

And it's all promulgated on the idea that

a

generation,

six, five generation, I mean, this is 1964, 65 Civil Rights Act, so you're talking about 60 years, so three generations beyond that.

A young kid who's 18

until the Supreme Court ruling is enforced, I'm not sure it's enforced, will not get into university

because of his skin.

And then we had, as a collary story, Jack, Pete Buttigig.

Sean Duffy pointed out that when he inherited the Department of Transportation, he found that what Buttigig had lowered the standards for air traffic controllers, so from

what was considered well-qualified or qualified, it went down by five or six points or ten points on the test.

So basically, he was saying to reduce the number of meritocratic white male air traffic controllers, I'm going to take a gamble and risk everybody's collective safety by allowing people who are not as qualified as exemplified by a test, an empirical test.

We're not going to go by the test results.

We're going to go by the color of a person's skin.

And you know what?

The likelihood is you guys in that plane will never know who's in the control tower and you probably won't get a crash because there's computer guided avionics, so it's no big thing.

But I'm going to take, you're a lab rat, I'm going to experiment on you, not me.

I fly private as a Department of Transportation official.

That was basically his attitude.

Yeah, Victor, can I add to that that there was an exponential effect of that, that

after all that lowering the test, then those who passed the test, there was

a much higher washout rate of 30%.

So that means the lack of air traffic controllers

is it's not that they're lower quality.

They're just not there because these who got in on the buddhist rule uh

never made the cut at the end of the day so we're all at risk

it reminds me in 2019 right before the coveted lockdown and

in the last year before they abolished the sat or the last year and a half before they abolished it stanford university I had a press release.

It was picked up by the San Jose Mercury that they were bragging that 60 60 to 70 percent of those rare students who achieved a perfect SAT scores were rejected by Stanford.

And that was released by the university to show that they were not going to be bound by silly standards of merit on disinterested tests.

That was supposed to show that they were fully committed to diversity, equity, inclusion.

All it did was just give the ammunition to the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that they were racist and they were using race to not merit to admit people.

And they finally got down, I think, until the new president to 9% of their

entering class were white males.

That was what they wanted.

Well, Victor, you mentioned

Juicy.

I love how you say his name.

Juicy Smollett reminds us of Subway.

No, Juicy, the juicy part.

And I want to bring up a story but first i want to uh let our our friends many new viewers and listeners to to the victor davis hansen show about our friends at best hotgrill.com and if you're tired of replacing your grill every couple of years you'll want to check out the hot fast solair infrared grill from best hotgrill.com solair makes these amazing american grills that heat up to 1000 degrees in just three minutes soler infrared grills eliminate flare-ups and consistently make juicy, flavorful food.

The SolAir infrared grills heat your food directly, not the air around the food, like conventional grills do.

SolAir has been making infrared grills for 20 years and has really dialed in the design.

Experience the SolAir infrared grill firsthand with the SolAir demo rental program.

You can try Sol Air before you buy with the foods your family enjoys without a salesman breathing down your neck.

And see why Solair is the last grill you will ever buy.

Learn more at best hotgrill.com.

That's besthotgrill.com.

Try before you buy with the Solair demo rental program at besthotgrill.com.

And we thank the good people from Solair for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor, to torture those who listen even more, the sound of my voice.

I want to read this quickly.

Headline, dramatic video

shows feds rearresting Subway Sandwich Slinger after he pelted officer with Hero in D.C.

The Justice Department worker accused of throwing a Subway sandwich at a federal agent was re-arrested by an armed team of at least a half dozen U.S.

Marshals in a dramatic Wednesday night raid new video show.

Sean Charles Dunn, 37, was cuffed a second time inside his apartment about a mile northwest of the White House after being slapped.

with a felony assault

charge.

Footage of the raid was posted by the White House on X Thursday evening with the caption, quote, nighttime routine, Operation Make DC Safe Again, Edition.

Well, Victor, I just love the fact that the Subway Sandwich, which was a tool, a weapon in the Juicy Smollett alleged abduction beatdown,

was

here used in a federal crime.

Anyway,

he's a DOJ worker, and

what do you think, Victor?

He gets what's coming to him.

Yeah, he did uh

I think any of us who were pulled over by an officer especially a federal officer if we touched him that's an assault on him we'd never do that but what they're trying to do is restore deterrence because as you know with the ICE federal officers

Congress women and men go up and push them they spit at them people get away with everything.

They throw stuff at them and nothing happens to them.

And then people get hurt and some of them have been attacked and shot.

So what they're trying to say is if you're a

you you know, if you're especially an upper middle class person and you think that because of your status you're going to be able to just throw a sandwich into somebody's face and hit them with it, you're not going to be able to get

away with it.

I will say that

I was surprised in the Juicy Smollett because he said that he went out for a subway

sandwich break at one or two in the morning.

He got his sandwich and then he deftly held it with one hand.

Why

he had his cell phone apparently in the other or maybe in his pocket, but then he said he whopped their rear ends given his, I guess, his martial arts expertise and the fact that these two guys were, what, 6'3, solid muscle, and Juicy is not known as a physical specimen, but given his deft martial arts skills, he knocked them away and he dodged the frozen...

Oh, no, it didn't freeze because the laws of chemistry didn't apply at 20 below zero when he threw the bleach on them because they were trying to bleach him and make him white, these African, and they were from Africa, these Africans that he had hired.

to assault him and turn him white, but they did somehow, while he was fighting them and still had the sandwich in his hand and his his cell phone, which he would not turn over to the police, they put a noose around his neck.

And I don't know how they did that.

And then when they were shown in a hardware store buying rope and bleach and red caps to besmirch MAGA people,

and they had a canceled check from Juicy, and they testified that he had scouted out the scene and went through the theatrics of what would happen.

No one was, anybody who believed believed the truth was considered a racist.

So

well, I don't think, you know, I'm getting pessimistic about all of this stuff.

Right.

And

human nature being what it is, it's the only thing that makes people lawful or act apparently civically and a civically

as a citizen is the threat of punishment.

And we don't do it anymore, especially in the big cities.

And,

you know, it's just funny because just today and yesterday I heard that

two people I knew really well and they've been lived their whole lives in where I live,

they're leaving

California.

And I saw Gavin Newsom the other day and he was doing his little shtick about threatening Trump and

he's going to call a quarter million dollar, quarter billion dollar election

if the people, and he thinks the people, two-thirds of them will vote to disband the nonpartisan but actually left-wing partisan

commission that

regulates or adjudicates the size of congressional districts and their shape, not the size, but the shape.

It's just the whole state is in free-for-all.

And all of these blue states are in free-for-all.

It's something we don't really talk about, Jack, but 13 or 14 million people have left California in the last 12 or 13 years.

And these, we know who they are because we have their tax records.

And they're the upper professional classes.

And businesses, over 300 major corporations have left.

And at this time, and the population really hasn't changed, hasn't grown, but we are importing a lot of very poor people who are dependent on federal and state largesse.

As I said, 40% of the state is on Medi-Cal

and 50% of all births are on Medi-Cal.

But to pay for all that, you need upper-middle-class taxpayers, and they don't want to stay here, apparently, anymore.

And Gavin Newsom is not talking about any of this.

Instead, he does his head jiggle and his arm jiggle and the F word and the S word.

And it's.

Victor, I saw some poll that 61% of Californians support the independent commission.

Yeah, they do.

They do.

And Arnold's out there against it, against decommissioning the commission he helped create, which was hijacked.

The funny thing is,

as I said, 40 percent of votes in most elections go Republican or for the Republican candidate, and we only have 17 percent representation, Republican, in the 52-member congressional caucus.

and he wants to, I guess he thinks 17% is too much, and he wants to get rid of five seats, that is, play two Republicans off against each other to get rid of them to get down to five seats.

And he thinks that's going to win over California, that idea.

And then, of course,

you know, you can argue that Texas did something extraordinary because they were underrepresented as Republicans, but unlike California, they had the population and

they were a majority Republican state and they wanted that majority to be reflective of the actual percentage of voters that vote Republican.

And they can get away with it because they have a, as I said, a majority.

Republicans can't get away with it here.

There's no way that they can increase their congressional representation to represent their actual numbers.

But instead,

Gavin Newsom wants to destroy a Democratic-backed commission so that they go from 17% of their actual strength congressionally down to, I guess,

8%.

I don't think that's going to work.

If he loses that, and he's the governor of a major state, the biggest state, and he's running for president and he comes up with this crackpot idea and he can't convince his own left-wing constituency that voted 60% for Kamala Harris, then I think he's all through as a candidate.

Yeah.

But is the leftist way?

I mean, there's no deviation allowed.

In college, you can't have one Victor Davis Hansen would not be permitted today in many a college campus.

You could not have one Victor Davis Hansen columnist at many a newspaper.

It cannot tolerate any deviation from the left.

So

he is a textbook

leftist.

Like I said, I would go to the Stanford studio, and they have two studios, to do occasional Fox when the Hoover studio was closed because it closes at 5 Pacific.

And I would listen to my Stanford faculty colleagues rant and rail about all of these hoaxes, the disinformation laptop.

And I would just shudder.

I think, how can this person go on CNN or MSNBC and claim that Donald Trump is a Russian asset?

There's no evidence.

And they were fine.

And then I was told that I could not go on it unless I wrote out in advance what I was going to say.

And then when they wanted to censor me, along with Scott Atlas and Neil Ferguson, I had to sit down and look at all the transcripts of things I'd said on Tucker Carlson's show to see if I'd ever once said, I doubt the

I doubt the

2020 vote tally, which I never said.

And I just think of all how

these people who are so sophisticated, they have all these degrees, all these letters after their names, all these titles.

They're so liberal-minded, but they're not.

And they're very dangerous people sometimes when they get into a pact.

As does Trump learned.

He did compliment afterwards.

Remember when I guess it was Brett Burry said, what do you think when Hillary Clinton said that you might win the,

she would urge you to win the Nobel Prize if you pull it off?

But she had conditions.

You can't give, you know, if if he doesn't give any territory to Putin.

Well,

our Lord and Savior could not do that.

You know what I mean?

Nobody could do that.

And yet, and then Donald Trump said, that's very nice of her.

And they said, well, how can you be so, Sean said, how can you be so magnanimous to somebody that tried to do so wrong?

And he goes, yeah, she really tried to destroy me.

And then he quoted Frederick Nietzsche, basically.

He said that whatever she did made me stronger.

I have a chapter in this book I just finished on the Trump Return called Nietzsche and Trump.

And boy, that was a learning experience for me to go through every single law fair, every single aspect of the raid, everything they went to destroy him.

It's just incredible

that he's still here.

Well, he said proof of the broader theme of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?

I think that's one explanation for it.

Hey, Victor, we're around in the turn here into the home stretch.

We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we'll get your thoughts,

your reflections on talking about books on The Dying Citizen, which you started to write or were in the midst of writing about five years ago.

I'm interested in your thoughts on that book as it might stand today.

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

When it's this hot, you need a snack that's cool, fun, and delicious, like Maimochi ice cream.

Maimochi is little scoops of ice cream and flavors like strawberry, mango, and cookies and cream wrapped in soft dough.

It's creamy on the inside and chewy on the outside, like a sweet ice cream dumpling.

Maimochi is gluten-free and only 70 calories apiece.

The perfect guilt-free snack.

This summer, grab a purple box of Maimochi ice cream and feel joyfully chill with the coolest treat around.

When it comes to fitness, what's real?

How about when it really truly fits your life?

That's how Anytime Fitness sees it.

Because our coaches see you.

It's how they build personal plans that work wherever you are and focus on everything that matters-from fitness to nutrition to recovery.

All so you can push yourself further than ever or just through the next rep.

It's total 360 support for a real difference.

That's Anytime Fitness.

That's Real AF.

Visit anytimefitness.com.

We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So, Victor,

I'm not, I didn't imply, I don't mean to imply the dying citizen is not as it is written, and you added to it too.

You had a second, your revised edition are not still terrific books.

I just wondered if how you assess the dying citizen.

That's the title you used when

you started writing this.

Is the citizen still dying?

Is he in better shape, worse shape, still in the ICU, if we can use these analogies?

What's your take on that?

Well, most of the initiatives of the new administration is to,

I think, save citizenship.

But in that book, I said there were six areas that were killing citizenship.

Three were pre-modern, three were post-modern.

So one of them was we conflated residency with citizenship, i.e., when you have an open, but

gosh, I was writing that in

20

or 20 years.

2019, 2019?

Yeah, and I had no idea that Joe Biden would let in 10,000 people a day and 12 million would come in and are still here for the most part, maybe 10 million, plus 20 million others.

And I would come home from Israel last year and see a person taken into a room room who didn't have his passport when I had seen on the news that day 10,000 people crossing the border without a passport.

So I think

that was prescient.

And then I also said that we were becoming peasants.

The middle class was losing their earning power.

And it sure did under Joe Biden with a 30% inflation of staple goods over four years

and the inability to buy houses and the high interest.

I also said third, that

not only were citizens becoming peasants and had very little differences than residents,

but

when you looked at what a citizen could do and what a resident can do, there was almost no difference.

The only thing I said in the book was that a resident couldn't run for office and hold office, and a citizen could.

Otherwise, they could go back across across the border, they could serve in the military, they can get welfare, they can serve in a campaign which is against the law, but which Christopher Steele obviously had influence.

But I see now that there's people who want to run for office and they're considering it in liberal enclaves that are not U.S.

citizens.

They're here either as green card holders or illegal aliens.

And I think they can run for office in some school board elections as well as as vote so

you know

and then I said there were postmodern challenges that the evolutionaries wanted to pack the court there's that came up again during Biden that they wanted to get rid of the filibuster that came up again they wanted to get rid of the electoral college somebody just yesterday said that on the Democratic side again

and then they wanted to bring in two states Puerto Rico and change Washington, D.C.

That just came in.

Didn't James Carville say that just the other day?

So they want to change the system.

And then I also said that they were the unelected, were dangerous.

That was the administrative state.

And I think we got a good glimpse of that when we exposed what USAID had been doing or what James Comey and James Clapper and John Brennan or Mark Milley or Anthony Fauci.

These were all people that

they weren't as active or we didn't know exactly what they were doing when I wrote the book, but I knew enough about them.

I was very worried.

But the idea that we have the unelected exercise more power than elected officials, that was one of the themes.

And I had a cosmopolitan.

The last chapter said that we are surrendering our sovereignty as citizens to the International Criminal Court, the UN Commission on Human Rights, the Paris

Climate Accords,

things like NAFTA,

Davos, et cetera.

And that, I think, only got worse.

And Trump has reversed some of this, but it's only, you know, we'll see, it's only eight months.

And so.

I think a lot of it was a worry that things are getting worse, but I had no idea that as I was writing it,

Biden would within a year be president and as a waxen effigy be controlled by these hard leftists that would try to diminish citizenship.

And then I didn't realize they would be open about it.

They don't believe in citizenship.

They really do believe illegal aliens should be exactly the same as citizen.

There's no doubt about it.

I thought democracy died in darkness, not in plain sight.

Democracy dies in darkness.

The left keeps talking about redistricting congressional districts to reflect the actual proportion of political sympathies in the state is killing democracy.

And these are the people who raided Mar-Lago.

They tried to get him off the ballot in 25 states.

They indicted him for 93

counts, all of them bogus, coordinated by the White House.

They impeached him twice.

They tried to try him as a private citizen, which we'd never have done before.

They sure gave Trump a lot of precedence, you know what I mean?

If he wants to conduct a Wyatt Earth revenge tour,

all he can say is, well, I think I'm going to call in, let me see, it's November 18th.

Let's get,

hmm, let's get Pam Bondi to get her third highest ranking person and send him into, I don't know, Utah, Wyoming, or Montana to indict Gavin Newsome, likely candidate, or go after the Biden family.

Or, well, you know what?

I don't think that Biden really turned back all of his files.

Let's raid his home with a SWAT team.

Or let's make sure that, I don't know, Josh Shapiro is not going to be on the ballot in 25 states.

Or maybe

one of the Bidens took a loan out and he didn't.

give the accurate assessment of his collateral, even though the bank had no problems when he paid it back.

Let's go after him.

You know, let's go after everybody in the United States after they lost a close election, called the

election officials and said, come on, man, I know there's votes out there.

You didn't count.

Let's indict them for that.

Yeah.

Maybe we should put together a conservative celebrity video, Victor, on

pressing the left.

Hey,

we are crossing the finish line here.

So there are other topics we could have gotten to, but we will get to when we record again.

I appreciate, Victor, all the wisdom you shared.

I want to thank folks who

take the time.

7,200 feet, our little signal went out over the Sierra Nevada Mountain.

Yeah,

it's amazing,

the technology.

I'm still a pencil and eraser guy.

But

we have so many new viewers through YouTube, Rumble, and listeners to the podcast.

And thanks all.

Many Many people now, hundreds, hundreds, hundreds a week are leaving comments.

And the great Sammy Wink and I try to go through them.

I want to read two.

One is

from Robert

Gundlaugh 4341,

who writes, so thankful for the dedication of Victor, one of very few people who expand my knowledge almost every time I listen to him, used to pick up produce all over the Central Valley in my truck driver days.

So I have an idealized vision of him out there on his farm, contrasted with Stanford.

Talk about contrast.

That's a big contrast, I confess to that contrast.

And then another one from when we talked last time, and I mentioned a movie you were talking about when you were in high school and running some student elections there.

And it reminded me of this great movie, Napoleon Dynamite.

And Summer Lake Photog, 8239 wrote, Great show.

Vote for Pedro.

VDH should watch Napoleon Dynamite and do a segment on it.

Oh, oh, yeah.

Southern Idaho is like the Central Valley in the 70s.

It's a great movie.

It's a silly movie, but

just really genuinely funny.

And I want to thank people who write to me, email me at

regarding Civil Thoughts.

That's the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society, where we are trying to strengthen civil society.

It comes out every Friday.

Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up, and what you'll get is my 14 recommended readings of great articles I've come across the previous week.

And I think you'll enjoy it.

It's free.

We're not selling your name.

And

give it a shot.

Again, Victor's website is theblade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

If you're on Facebook, the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club is a great group of friends.

So check that out.

Victor's got his own page on Facebook, VDH's Morning Cup.

And if you're on X, his handle is at

V D Hansen.

Victor, you've been terrific.

Thank you very much for everything, all the wisdom you shared.

Thanks, folks, for watching and listening.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for hearing us and viewing us.

And we'll get back very shortly to you all.

Thanks again.

Shopify helps you sell at every stage of your business.

Like that, let's put it online and see what happens, Stage.

And the site is live.

That we opened a store and need a fast checkout stage.

Thanks.

You're all set.

That count it up and ship it around the globe, stage.

This one's going to Thailand.

And that, wait, did we just hit a million orders?

Stage.

Whatever your stage, businesses that grow grow with Shopify.

Sign up for your $1 a month trial at shopify.com/slash listen.