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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We are recording on Sunday, the 3rd of August.

This episode will be up on Tuesday, August 5th.

Victor Davis Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He's got a website, The Blade of Perseus.

The web address is victorhanson.com.

If you're a fan of Victor, you should be going there.

And in fact, you should be subscribing.

And I will tell you why later in today's episode, why you should be subscribing.

So,

a ton of topics to get Victor's wisdom on and his take on.

And the first one, I'm going to ask Victor if he is

possibly black, if he's possibly Latino, and if he's possibly white.

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

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

Victor,

you saw, everyone saw, everyone heard the story of Erin Burnett of CNN,

who, when she was describing the, as it was rolling out, the mass murder.

gunman in New York City last week, midtown Manhattan, murdered four people,

that he was possibly white.

Anyone who has eyes to see, Victor, even that one photo of this guy walking through the plaza in front of this building, no one would have said that.

But for some reason, Aaron Burnett and for some reason CNN thought it important to inject this absurd race angle into this breaking story.

What's your take on this, Victor?

She's a dinosaur.

Events have passed her over.

The last time anybody did did stuff like that on a major

that had major ramifications,

it was when Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin pranced around in front of Congress.

I think it was in 2022.

And they gave the nation lectures on Professor Kendi's book on what they called that trifecta of white rage, white privilege, and white supremacy, and that they were going to ferret it out.

They were playing for the Democratic members of the Congress.

And then they issued the promised report.

The report, of course, came out.

I think it was released sometime the next December on a Friday night and found nothing.

But the point they did is they destroyed recruitment for about three years, four years.

In other words, for all what, forget what the generals and admirals said.

It wasn't fatness, drugs, tattoos, gangs, competition from business.

It was the attack on a rural, middle-class, working white male profile who, as I always say, died twice their numbers in the demographic in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And so

they didn't want to

join.

In fact, there's about three or four peer-reviewed articles that the shortfall in military recruitment was almost entirely 90% attributable to that group.

Not gays, not women, not Latinos, not black, that group.

And so when

people at CNN who have about a 500,000 person audience keep doing that,

I guess they're going to get an audience of self-hating white elites and mostly

self-hating, white-hating

minority elites, because they're sure not going to get anybody on there when they see this guy, and he's walking across

Manhattan with a gun, and he's obviously African American, and then they zoom into his picture, and the reporter and the anchor talk about that he's a presumably white male.

Then, the only answer is that they want him to be a white male.

And they want him to be a white male because that fulfills their narrative that they are, in her case, a wealthy, privileged, elite white woman who

from her perch in a nice zip code with good security and a lot of money can pontificate about all these terrible white racists, and therefore they just have to fulfill that narrative everywhere they can.

And the problem with that narrative is it's counterintuitive now.

It's not happening.

If you look at the rare interracial crimes between black on white or white on black, it's about 8% of violent crimes that are reported to the FBI.

And by the way, the FBI data really can't be trusted anymore because certain jurisdictions are open about the fact that they're not going to send their crime statistics to the FBI because it ends up on national websites and confirms narratives that they don't want to be

read or heard about.

But in any case, if you look at it, it's African Americans

attack whites in cases of murder about six to one, five to one, and then assault and other things like robberies about three to five to one.

If you look at hate crimes

in terms of percentage of the population, non-whites have a higher percentage as perpetrators than do whites percentage-wise, not in actual numbers.

And so

they're talking about a narrative where they want to suggest something that is not statistically probable,

or at least not as probable as the alternative.

And everybody knows it.

Everybody knows it.

So why would they want to hear that unless they're very elite, wealthy, and they feel for career purposes that it enhances their trajectories?

And I can understand it when you're in the academic world and you trash whites and you say this at the faculty senate and then everybody thinks, wow, he's a really great performance art virtue signaler, and I might be chairman of the department or I'll be on a task force.

But it doesn't work in the real world.

People

are not self-hating, self-hating.

And so

everybody's tired of it.

And when there is no more DEI, there's going to be pockets.

There's going to be pockets of resistance.

They're going to use change names to preserve it.

They're going to do everything because there's hundreds of thousands of people's careers who invested in racial

prejudice and bias and preferences.

But it's going on the way out because the people don't want it.

There's a new narrative now, by the way, that African Americans and

Hispanics have been polling that they don't like DEI because they think it hurts them.

And I think they're correct on that.

Because

when a person through merit makes a career

success or achieves it, and somebody says he made it because of DEI, that's insulting.

But it's not necessarily unsuspected that your person wouldn't conjure that.

The other thing they don't understand is there's millions of lives of people.

that

did not get jobs that were qualified because of the color of their skin.

And most of these people came into adulthood way after the era of civil rights and affirmative action.

And they didn't, so they don't understand why they were prejudiced against, because in their postmodern world of the 21st century, they didn't see racism.

That's why they created all these words, systemic, insidious, etc., etc.

to show you that only special people like Professor Kendi could spot it.

It was like air.

You can't see it, but it's everywhere.

That's what racism was supposedly to be.

I can remember, not that I ever suffered, but I got a Ph.D.

as a white male at Stanford.

I got it in 1975.

There were

four other white males in the class, and they asked us,

they had asked us first year to come in and sign an affidavit and said, under the new, this is 1975 when I entered, you will not get a job.

Please sign.

We are not legally culpable.

That's what they said, the department.

I signed it.

And when I

graduated,

I applied to 17 jobs

and I had my thesis finished, which is odd at 25.

And

there was a very famous historian, Emilio Gaba, was looking at it to publish, and he did publish it a year or two later.

But my point is this.

I got form letters.

I didn't even get

at the American Philological Association, I think I had three interviews, and one person from the Naval Academy just said, we're not going to hire you.

I said, why?

I said, you did a great interview.

We need to get a classicist that has a military history background.

You're about the only one in the entire poll.

who writes about ancient warfare.

That's exactly what we're looking for.

But we're looking for a woman and we're going to hire a woman.

And if you repeat this, I'm going to deny it.

And I said, well, why did you tell?

I'm telling you for your own good.

Don't sit by your mailbox in Central California.

I think you're going to get a letter.

That's what he said.

And he was right.

And so,

you know, I talked to all these guys.

One of the most brilliant people in that program was Larry Woodlock.

He was a brilliant philologist, and he just said, this is not going to work.

So I'm going to go to law school.

Another person who came from the steel mills of Ohio and had trouble in graduate school, he just quit.

And then I just came back, and I was lucky.

You know, Jefferson said, a farm is always a refuge for failure.

So I came back.

I remember the first week, a guy,

I called him Mad Dog.

He was crazy.

He's a Mexican guy.

He goes, Big Dear, you go all the way to school on the coast, and here you are pruning.

You're working like us.

You should have just stayed foot.

You make no more money than I do.

I said,

I want to correct that.

I make make less than you do because we're losing money.

So be honest.

But

it embitters people.

And then I applied at Cal State Fresno and there was an older professor.

His name was El Murnaj.

He was a German and Latin teacher.

He said, I'm going to stay here for six years.

And when I go, we're going to hire a woman.

So there's no chance you'll ever come to Cal State nearby your farm.

And that was just the way it was.

When I hired Bruce Thornton, the dean, I won't mention his name, I was the head of the committee.

He had a wonderful teaching record.

He already had a book published, and he said to me, you're not going to hire this white male.

I'm not going to waste this position on him.

I said, he's got a great teaching, he's got teaching, but I don't care.

You're not going to do it.

And I said, well, you do your worst and I'll do my best and we'll see who wins.

And we did hire him, but it was only through contortions and something.

But my point is, I'm trying to say, Jack, is that all of us went through that whole period, and then we were insulted by telling us, well, there was no prejudice,

there was no non-merocratic, it was just diversity, and you guys had it all made

your way.

And I'm thinking, no, the people who had it all their way were the people that were hiring us in their 60s and 70s and came of age in the 1950s and 60s when there were hardly any minorities in the gene pool and there was very little competition and you could get hired as a professor, ABD, all but dissertation, almost within three years of going to graduate.

And they were mediocre.

So

when I would be interviewed by people, they wouldn't have any books.

Or my colleagues had no books, no publication.

They were white, but yet they were lecturing everybody why we had to be diverse.

And I'd always say the same thing to them.

Once you resign, step down and let somebody who's diverse have your place.

It was a whole rotten system.

And what I'm getting on this tangent, Jack, is that when somebody does that, this is a vestigial

incident.

There's no support anymore from anybody for racial preferences and for racial chauvinism.

And all these dinosaurs think they can get away with it.

Look at the view,

look at the careers of Joy Reed, look at the careers of Don Lamon.

Look at the careers of all these race hustlers.

They're going nowhere.

Yeah, but do you think

the prehistoric DEI, so we're going on 50 years of DEI from your own experience?

At least.

So

it's not going to hit a brick wall and die overnight.

Do you think 10 years from now, the hiring will still be sort of akin to what you yourself went?

You know why?

It's starting to affect left-wing people.

And that's the problem.

Left-wing people

who are wealthy and are from the right zip codes.

Once the DEI came and trumped affirmative action and it changed the selection processes

so that it wasn't just middle-class white kids from Bakersfield or Dayton, Ohio who couldn't get a job, but it started to affect them.

And what do I mean by that?

Stanford University bragged on their website they only took 9% of white males.

So my point with all this, these excursus, rants, whatever we call them, is there were a lot of people over the last 50 years, not necessarily me, although I felt that affirmative action had hurt my career, but I was solidly middle class.

But there were people who were not solidly middle class, especially where I grew up as part of an area where the Oklahoma diaspora has kind of settled, poor people from the South, that were white and in many cases did not have the means of people who were non-white, and yet they were discriminated against, and their lives were changed by it.

And the white elites that were not affected because they had the means, the zip codes, the networking to circle around affirmative actions, at least until lately.

Lately, when you have 9% of white males at Stanford admitted, you can be very wealthy and very connected, and there's not enough room for your kid, and now they're they're turning on DEI.

But that's my point, Jack, is that I think that DEI has a record of a lot of people angry at it.

And it was like sort of a rotten door, and it looks really pretty, and then somebody kicks it and it shatters.

Well, if it's got people angry, and then you got Harmie Dylan and others targeting these institutions for doing just that,

yeah,

headway is being and will continue to be made.

But personally, I just think it's going to take a while to leach out of this system.

But hey, Victor, we have another race-related matter to get your opinion on, and then we've got a number of foreign policy issues to talk about later in today's episode.

But before we get there, I want to talk to our friends and viewers, and we have so many new viewers.

Thanks, folks, for joining us.

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Victor, we talked briefly before we began recording, and I apologize to our viewers and listeners for my, I have some issues on this and with

ye old.

And that's because you're not strategically located in an urban metropolis as I am currently in southwest Fresno County.

That's true.

Yes.

You know, I know you are teeming.

How about the population of Salmon?

12,000.

It's the six-bedroom community of Fresno.

I think it's 20,000.

And it's creeping very close to my farm.

Well,

okay.

There was a really troubling video, short video I saw earlier today on Instagram.

And it's of Dr.

Luke Wood.

He is the president of Sacramento State, and

he was being being interviewed just the other day, and he talked about how he wants to eliminate whiteness.

He believes whiteness is an ideology.

Asked about, well, do you want to get rid of white people?

No.

Well, are white people evil?

No.

Well, if they're not evil, what's wrong?

What's this about whiteness?

Victor,

two things.

One, that this was...

This interview, I think, happened three or four days ago, and it's gotten barely any news is an interesting thing.

And the second thing, of course, as we've talked about in many other incidents, if this was school president Victor Davis Hanson talking about wanting to eliminate

blackness or a Latino ness or whatever.

I wouldn't be fired.

Yeah.

How can any

So if you're a white professor and you're in a controversial tenure decision and it goes up to the

dean, the provost, and ultimately up to the president and he comes and wants to talk to you and he's on record that he thinks whiteness has to be destroyed and you're white.

What are you going to do?

What do you think?

And of course the old rule, if you just reverse the rule, we saw that with the Cincinnati beatdown.

The old rule, if anybody had said that about blackness and you know, a lot of African Americans have said that, that it's one thing to be black in the toxic sense and it's one thing to be just black.

And maybe that's what he meant by analogies, what whiteness is a bad form of whiteness but he sure didn't mean that and the African-American interreg interrogator or you know interlocutor he was kind of surprised he said well how can you want to destroy whiteness without destroying the source of it white people

so what do they mean by whiteness and from what I can tell about critical race theory it goes something like this very quickly that there are certain norms in

Western civilization, especially in the British version that was so dominant in America, that we assume are normal and good and resulted in this prosperous, freest, most affluent country in the world.

And they are things like punctuality,

written contracts,

transparency, independent judiciary, all these things.

And certain people look at this system and they feel they haven't done as well in it because

that

the prejudice that people have toward other groups, and it goes back to Socrates talked about it in Plato's Laws when he said birds of a feather flock together.

But they blame that on the system, so he wants to destroy it and then do what?

Replace it with blackness or brownness or yellowness?

I don't know.

He doesn't really say, although he's on record as a black educator, that you have to praise people, even though by white standards

they

are not necessarily deserving of meritocratic praise.

And what he means is that

what are we getting at?

It's critical race theory, is what he's an adherent of.

And it basically says that society's norms that make the United States function and made it the greatest, freest, wealthiest, most powerful country in the world, fairest, I would say, are all rigged by wealthy white men from the foundation of the Republic or Jefferson.

They imbued our system with their value.

That is true.

But when we look at other systems, I just want to know what he wants to replace it with.

We have an Aztec tradition in...

Mexico.

I can tell you there are certain things about Aztec culture that have evolved.

Would he like

try there was

Chaka Zulu.

He killed over a million of his own people.

Would we want Zulu culture?

What are the other traditions that have evolved that replace this?

So when he says whiteness, can he give me a black paradigm, what blackness is that superior or should or its equivalent should replace it?

And what is it?

They always do the same thing.

They never define it.

Why don't they define what whiteness is?

They don't.

He's just angry that he feels that this system has not benefited black people the way it has white people, even though it has.

It has in spectacular fashion.

Because, as I said, if you look at per capita income of black women, it's almost the same as white women.

If you look at this person, obviously, and I've read his resume, I've heard of him by traditional standards of scholarship.

I don't think he's very impressive,

But by his

critical race theory standards, apparently he is, because

he was picked there for a reason, I guess, to reflect a quote-unquote diverse student body.

And

what's he want to do?

So you can't have a person there who says he wants to destroy or get rid of or eradicate whiteness.

That's too Hitlerian.

The left always accuses people of being Hitler.

Now you have someone who voices a

racial eliminationist rhetoric.

And he can split all the hairs between whiteness and white people.

But whiteness comes from somebody, and that's white people.

And so when he says to a white person,

I want to eliminate whiteness, the white person says, well, I kind of like it.

And you want to eliminate me?

Just like if you say, I want to eliminate blackness, you go to a black person, I want to eliminate blackness.

Well, I kind of like being black.

I like blackness that radiates from being black.

You want to eliminate me?

So they won't do anything because

academia attracts a certain type of timidity in people's characters.

And he won't do it.

The board of regent, the board of overseers, the board of regents, the CSU regents, they'll look at this and they'll go like this.

Okay, what is the downside of firing this guy and what is the upside of ignoring it?

No brainer.

Do I want to be pilloried, attacked on the internet, doxed?

No, canceled.

So that's what they're going to do.

And all it's going to do is create greater cynicism, just like the lack of coverage of the Cincinnati beatdown or the city council woman who said they deserved it, just like the Jesse Smallet, the Duke La Crosse.

It's just, it's not going to end.

And as I said in this rant, Jack,

what they have to be careful of, they, the DEI people, is they are getting very close to offending their white creators of DEI.

DEI was created by white people, wealthy white people, and it was created for two purposes or two conditions.

One, they would never be

exposed or affected by their ideology.

They're from zip codes, they're from families, they're from income brackets

that have

exemptions, they have deterrence, they have protection, they have armor.

So they all have affirmative action.

I saw it my entire life, 50 years in academia almost,

45 years, and you can see it.

And their idea was, well, I want to have affirmative action for you, but I'm a philosophy professor that I'm just too valuable.

Or I live in Pacific Palisades.

I'm Diane Feinstein or I'm Nancy Pelosi or I'm Gavin Newsom and my family's wealthy and I have connections and we can get around affirmative action.

But some stupid guy down there in Delano or Bakersfield who came from Oklahoma and

he doesn't have a college degree and his family or they have a southern,

they're the people who are racist and we'll just take away from them if they are American.

It destroyed the lower middle classes.

entree

to universities on merit.

I had a lot of bright kids who were white and had top test scores and straight A's and they did not get into top flight schools.

They did well at Fresno State, but they would have done well at Stanford because they were white.

It was so overt when I had classics graduates, I'd have four or five of them and I would go tell the white male, you're not going to get in to this one, this one.

They say, well, but I can read Latin and Greek and I did better in the test than she did or he did.

And they're Hispanic or black or Asian.

And I said, yes, but I will do all I can to level the playing field.

But I could never level it entirely.

I would call the people, I would talk about economic deprivation.

This kid had nothing.

He had single parents.

He was poor.

He was a white.

His grandmother raised him.

It didn't matter.

And so that's why it's not going to last, because people are sick of it.

And this guy should be fired.

He should be fired, and he should

get out of academia where he can't do any

you can have these people, they just spout this racial hatred and they have positions of influence and power and they get away with it.

And they would never get away with it if the tables were turned.

And by the way,

I think you can argue now on the demographics of California that there is no majority ethnic or racial tribe.

I think we're something like 46%

Hispanic, 42%

white,

15%

Asian, and maybe 3%

black.

And so he's overrepresented.

That's what in his own language he would be overrepresented.

If you count the number of black faculty at the CSU system, they're greater than 3% according to his demographic demagoguery.

He's overrepresented.

So we'll see.

Yeah.

Well, there won't be anything.

We'll see how the media

covers this a week from now.

Well,

our media will

give it attention.

Hey, Victor, we have a couple of foreign policy,

important foreign policy matters to get your take on, and we'll do that when we come back from these important messages.

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Victor, a couple of topics.

Well, let's start off with the rush to recognize Palestine as a state.

Well, you know, here's the payback for October 7th.

We have France, we have England and Canada, and probably a boatload of other nations getting on board to recognize Palestine as a state.

Yeah, well, that is in direct

as a direct relationship with this propaganda that everybody's starving in Gaza and it's genocide when

no one offers an alternative paragraph.

All Israel and the West would say to the people of Gaza and the United Nations and all of these people

who want to recognize it, just tell us one of two things.

You think it's okay for the mass murders of October 7th to resume power and operate Gaza without free elections and murder their opponents as they have done for 19 years?

Is that what you want?

Or do you think that you want to give the people of Gaza a chance to have their own government without Hamas who are responsible?

That is the Israeli position.

So you tell Israel

you tell Israel, this is how you d distribute food

without having Hamas hijack it or get credit for it or run Gaza.

Just tell us that, because they're illegitimate.

They've never been elected after their first and final election.

Just tell us.

But it's easy to say genocide, genocide, genocide, but give us the alternative.

How do you, if you're the UN,

and we know from the UN that they have hired Hamas terrorists in their agencies, how do you distribute food for the people of Gaza, help rebuild them without this terrorist click?

Which, by the way, I think pulls,

everybody said it was down to 30%.

I think it's back up over 50%.

So it's not going to happen.

So then you're telling Israel,

you know, what are you going to do?

Well, what they're not going to do is do what they did before October 7th.

That is, make a little wall and stay back away from Gaza and say, we're going to get every Jew out of Gaza.

It's your country.

You've got a beautiful coastline.

You've You've got your wonderful Egyptian neighbors.

You've got all this UN and European money.

And good luck.

And just see you wouldn't want to be you, but make your own Emirates or Kuwait or Ghata right here.

That's what they were doing before.

And the people that ran Gaza said, no, we want to kill Jews.

And we want to rape them and behead them and mutilate them.

And that's what we're here for.

So Israel said, we're not going to do that anymore.

And there we are.

And so Israel is trying to distribute food.

Anybody who takes it from it is going to be shot or killed or harassed.

So now they're dropping it from the sky.

I mean, it's just a mess.

And

the Europeans are saying, oh, I can't, I have no solution for this.

I don't want to put anybody there.

I understand you can't distribute food without Hamas.

I don't support in theory Hamas, but I don't want to stop Hamas,

so I have no theory and they don't listen to me anyway, but the Jews do.

They're Western and they care what I say, so I'm going to performance art virtue signal that we're having no

genocide.

And that's the word we're going to use.

I don't think genocide is people who take

we're going to hit a Hamas leader and he's in a high rise and it's sitting on top of the lower floors that are a hospital, so we're going to text everybody in the room: please leave in 15 minutes because we're going to commit genocide on you.

That's basically what Israel did.

It gave people text warnings, but that's what it's all about.

And the Europeans want to do that.

That's fine.

It's their business.

Donald Trump said if the Canadians want to do it, they'll have to pay a larger tariff.

He's starting to use tariffs in a way that I'm not sure is wise and hasn't been envisioned before, but whether it's penalizing Venezuela or now Canada.

But these people in a weird way asked for it.

Think of all the things that Canadians have problems right now.

And if you're a Canadian, I'm not trying to bash you, but you're spending 1.37%

of your GDP on NATO.

You have, for 11 years, deliberately, flagrantly, insidiously failed to make your contribution.

You are running a $63 billion surplus with the United States on trade, which is supposed to be the North American Free Trade Association up with the idea.

No surpluses, no debt.

Everything would even out.

You haven't been policing the border.

So of all those critical issues between us, why would you endorse a Palestinian terrorist state?

Because that's what it is.

Is that a pressing need of the Canadian people?

Your Canadian dollar has fallen.

It's about lower or the same as ours?

Lower.

Why do you do things like that?

It's the idea that we always go after the misdemeanor because we can't deal with a felony.

The felony is your economy is stagnant.

You've got a very tenuous relationship with this country.

You're not meeting your defense obligations.

You're running up a surplus with your best friend.

And now you want to recognize a Palestinian state and by de facto Hamas.

And Hamas has just backed out of the hostage negotiations once you did that, and the Europeans did that because they think they can leverage the world now.

And

that was what you really needed, huh?

That's what you really needed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Plus, the battle for Western civilization is happening there, and these folks are all shopping in there.

That's great.

Somebody wrote me an email and said, Victor, it's Gondor.

That's what Israel is, right on the border of Mordor.

I don't know if that's true or not, but that was kind of a dramatic illusion somebody sent me the other day.

But

the Europeans, they have fertility problems, they have open border problems, they have unassimilated Islamic problems, they have energy problems, and

the world's becoming a bipolar world again.

There's China and the United States, and China has an antipathetical system to ours, and both systems are gaining power and economic clout,

and the rest of the world is just...

And we don't want that to happen.

We have our Western half in Europe and the former British Commonwealth.

But my gosh, when they can't make a moral difference between a constitutional system with elections and tolerance and two million Arabs.

I'm going to ask the Canadians.

Two million Arabs live inside Israel.

I've been to those villages.

They're not even villages.

And I can tell you they are freer and more affluent than anywhere I've seen other than the Gulf.

So my point is this.

How many Jews live like Arabs do in Israel, in Gaza?

How many do?

None.

None.

What if you were a Jew and just said,

well, I'm kind of, I don't know.

It's kind of got a biblical homeland.

There's a lot of very famous places in the Bible in Gaza, so I'm just going to walk across the border and I'm going going to pay a fair price for that house out in the country at Gaza and I'm going to live there.

How long would you live?

I don't think you'd live there very long at all.

The other thing that's coming up, Jack, it's a peripheral matter.

There'll be people in the United States who want to emulate that.

Peter Berkowitz, a colleague of mine, has a review of the work of Tony Jute, who died.

You remember him?

He was a commentator on the Middle East.

I think he was a European and lived in America, SAS.

But he was talking about two types of Jews, and I think Tom Friedman had said that.

And what you're seeing in the United States right now is a bifurcation of the Jewish community, 70% of which is on record of being liberal.

And it's been working a long time, but they're shocked at the anti-Semitism.

They're shocked at what they see on campuses.

They're shocked at the demonization of Israel.

And there's two reactions.

One is, this is the historical homeland of Jews, and we insist on being treated like anybody else.

And the other is, Netanyahu, Netanyahu, he's our Trump.

He's our Trump.

We've got to disown him.

We've got to disown the Hasidic Jews.

We've got to disown the Orthodox Jews.

These are not liberal people.

They're fanatics.

And, you know, I'm non-observant, and I'm liberal.

And all.

I've lost all my friends on the faculty.

I don't get invited to these parties on the Upper West Side.

If I just trash Israel and say that I'm really ashamed of being Jewish, they will accept me and I will be back in the left-wing fold.

But I've got to do that.

I've got to split off from the 30% that support Israel, and I've just got to trash Israel and Netanyahu.

And good luck.

Look through history and tell me how many times that's worked.

Yeah.

Hey, Richter, we're going to shift up to Russia in a second.

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Victor, this morning's headlines in the Daily Mail, and again, we're recording on Sunday the 3rd, and this episode will be up on Tuesday the 5th.

Russia's terrifying, quote, dead hand, end quote, threat as

spiraling nuclear rhetoric leaves the world on the brink.

Donald Trump had sent a couple of nuclear subs that away.

This morning, Dmitry Medvedev, who I think had been the president of the country

in between Putins,

I think he's the one that Barack Obama said tell

me what to do.

He serves as the country's security council, and he said the U.S.

president should recall his favorite movies about the walking dead and remember how dangerous the so-called dead hand could be.

Victor, are we looking at Brinksmanship?

Are we looking at menace rhetoric?

I remember what that brilliant

Stanley Kubic movie

Doctor Strangelove or How I Stopped Worrying and Loved the Bomb.

And it was about the doomsday machine.

It was beyond the control of the Soviet operator.

There were stories or rumors that the Soviets had done some kind of

doomsday machine that if the operator was wiped out in the Kremlin basement, then

all these missiles went off.

I don't think it's true, but it may be.

And who knows in the age of artificial intelligence.

But as we said

else we've said elsewhere that Dmitri is that his name, first name, Dmitri?

Is it Medeved?

He ha he ca he was in trouble because he was Prime Minister, then he switched with Putin as President.

And he was on that famous hot mic with Obama.

Tell d tell Vladimir if you'll da-da-da-da, which they fulfilled, as I said, the bargain.

But the point I'm making is that

he got in hot water for being the liberal or the reformer or the good side of Putin.

So then he went to the darker side, and now he's to the right of Putin.

He's a very useful idiot.

So

when Putin wants to voice the extreme position, the scary one, and he's the one that usually says they're going to hit London, they're going to use tactical nuclear weapons.

If the Ukrainians sink another ship in the Black Sea, they're going to go after the Kiev and wipe it out.

All that stuff comes from him.

The problem is that 99% of it is rhetoric and comedy, but we don't know which time the 1%, which is true,

is there, especially after Russia's lost 1 million dead.

I had somebody write and said, that's not right, Victor.

It's casualties, not fatalities.

Dead, wounded, missing, captured.

1 million, and the growing.

I think it was a hundred thousand since the first of the year or larger.

So we're getting to the point of this Verdun-like battle that Putin is going to get desperate to stop it.

And he can't stop it because he hasn't, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, showed the people around him that run and can depose him, that run the country, that it was worth it.

As I said earlier, Czech

Vladimir, we had Crimea already.

Yes, but I institutionalized it.

So we had it, Vladimir.

Vladimir, we had the Donbass already.

But I institutionalized or Czech.

We had it, Vladimir.

But I am sure that they're not in NATO.

Czech.

They weren't going to go in NATO anyway, Vladimir.

But I went 40 to 50 miles westward.

Vladimir, you lost a million Russian casualties to gain 40 to 100 miles of this country that will be perfectly fine, and you drove it even further to the west, and it's created a very lethal arms industry.

It's not worth it, Vladimir.

So you either go back to the battlefield and you go to Kiev and take at least half the country, or we're going to get rid of you because you haven't performed the way that we thought you.

And that's where his dilemma is.

He's looking at that magic boundary that allows him to say that he won.

And he's not going to get it.

So he just keeps killing people, mostly his own.

It's about a three to one casualty ratio.

And we'll see what happens.

And Donald Trump has had a come to,

I don't mean to be sacrilegious, a come to Jesus moment.

Because he understood that, according to his own art of the deal philosophy, you have to act crazy and

off-put your adversary in a negotiation.

He's done that.

You have to praise him alternately so you don't alien him.

He's done that, but you also have to have leverage.

And when you say you're going to come into office and solve the thing on the first day, and that Zelensky is corrupt, and that Joe Biden didn't know what all have elements of truth, if not the truth, you still don't have leverage against Putin.

He thinks you're going to cut a deal and give him half of Ukraine.

So, what you have to do is re-establish deterrence, and he's done that with Iran and beefing up the military, all good.

And now he's restored the

aid to Ukraine, good, and he's taken on, I mean, the mega base doesn't like that.

It's very costly.

Donald Trump's very dollar conscious.

But he's got to get that leverage to cut a deal.

And the deal he has to cut is he has to tell Putin, you're not going any farther west.

It's just not going to happen.

And then people in the mega base will say, okay, Victor, we don't really want to die, so he doesn't go farther west.

That's his problem.

Yes, but we saw what happened to Afghanistan, which was far less important.

Nobody in their right mind cares about the Taliban.

We do care about the women and reformers who were either shackled into their homes or killed by the Taliban, but it's not a strategic piece.

It had value, Baglam Air Force Base, but it was not strategically a part of Europe, as Ukraine is.

And you lose Ukraine, it will be like losing Kabul, only on steroids.

It'll destroy NATO's credibility, and yet to keep feeding it so it survives is contrary to the whole idea that you're protecting American borders rather than some far-off country's borders.

And so it's a, and this is why Trump, he rants on, everybody said, well, he's just ranting on true social, and then he always ends the same way.

This was not my war.

I inherited it.

There was no war on my tenure.

There was war on Bush's, there was war on Obama's, there was war on Biden's, but there was no war on my tenure for a reason.

Now I inherit this method from Joe Sleepy Biden.

And that's what he's that's his problem.

That's why he gets frustrated.

Well,

right.

Well, Victor, he has peace accomplishments, and we're going to get your thoughts on that and on the breaking news from earlier.

It was either earlier today or yesterday that Jack Smith is now in crosshairs.

And we will

don't cry, Victor.

We're going to take a break.

You can go find the Kleenex that you need for your tears.

So we'll get to this right after these final important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor, let me read this from a Fox News headline: Cambodia to nominate Trump for Nobel Peace Prize for ceasefire with Thailand.

So in the middle of the story, it goes, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last month that he has nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

And Pakistani officials said in June they would recommend him for the award for his role in helping to end its conflict in India.

Trump urged a ceasefire last week when he spoke to the leaders of Cambodia and Thailand and threatened that the U.S.

would not get back to the trading table with the Southeast Asian countries until the fighting stops.

A ceasefire was negotiated in Malaysia on Monday, ending the heaviest conflict between the two countries in over a decade.

The Nobel Peace Prize, Victor, as we know, has been given.

Have you ever read the Nobel Prize?

Still

expectations.

Some sense of meeting.

As soon as he got elected, you know, in 2009, they gave it to him.

It says for, it says something,

it has no data.

There's no achievements.

There's no record of anything he did.

It just says for

helping facilitate or lessening tensions in the world among the world leaders.

He was the one we have been waiting for.

So maybe just as mere earlier

piece of explosion.

He stopped the war temporarily from the Congo and Rwanda.

He stopped the Thai-Cambodia war.

He put put himself right in the middle of an intractable Pakistani-Indian conflict where they were each threatening to go DEF CON 1 to nuclear weapons.

He stopped that.

I think you could argue that there is no Iranian-Israel war and there's not going to be any missiles exchange because once he came into office, he basically told the Iranians, we're not vindictive, we don't want to go after you, but we're going to let Israel take off the gloves.

Whatever they need to do, they're going to take care of business.

And if they don't have the wherewithal to get rid of your nuclear program, we'll do it.

And they did.

And Iran is defanged, it's anemic.

So there is a general peace in that area.

At least the Gulf states are ecstatic.

So if you look at all that, he's done it.

And there were some very famous persons that got very angry, an international diplomat, by the very idea that these people in the Congo, or Rwanda, or Thailand, or Cambodia, or India, or Pakistan are saying that Donald Trump deserves

the Nobel Prize.

Can you imagine Trump getting the Nobel Prize in Stockholm?

Oh my gosh.

Can you imagine if he got it in the O'Donnell walk?

He looked pretty handsome.

He's too much.

By the way, Victor, back on you, and we're going to talk about Jack Smith in a minute, back on the Ukraine issue.

He is, it seems to me,

of many people, our old friends too, from various publications, who

want

all in against Russia.

They don't ever really talk about what you mentioned before, the non-white account.

But Donald Trump does.

I just finished

today.

I have a landmark.

I just finished a complete rough draft of

this book that's coming out from Basic Books, Comeback, the Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and His MAGA MAGA agenda.

And I got a whole section just on that, on the Ukraine war.

I went through all of the literature.

No one, not left, has ever talked about the human cause.

I looked out about 10 Trump references to rallies, to interviews, to truth social posting.

Every one of them is, we've got to stop this insane waste.

This is just horrible.

We're killing, these people are dying.

They just, every night.

And then Trump, he even posted, remember when he said, I went into the First Lady Melania and I said, I had a wonderful talk with Trump, Vladimir Putin.

We get along great.

And then Melania said to me, and this is Trump posting this, that's funny.

He just blew up another

building last night and killed a bunch of people.

And he said, all he does is talk, talk, talk.

I think he's, you know, playing me.

He said that.

But he always talks about the human cost.

A lot of the cynics, well, he's a builder, Victor.

It doesn't make good business.

I don't care what the reason is.

He's talking in humanitarian terms about something that is larger in its lethality and

deleterious effects on human life than the Battle of Stalingrad.

The Battle of Stalingrad had about a million casualties,

and this has about, on both sides, over a million fatalities, probably.

So

it's Verdun, it's Assam, it's Stalingrad, and it's going on, and no one cares.

And he does talk about ending the killing.

And he means that.

He does mean that killing of Ukrainians, killing of Russians.

It's

yeah,

I think it's very sincere.

And I'm kind of surprised some old friends just don't

draw attention to it.

Because if you draw attention to it, you have to.

I think there's a lot of people where I work that will be inflamed about Israel.

And then you think, well, look,

Gaza is

two weeks in Ukraine.

And they'll say, well, we can't control Putin, but we can control Netanyahu or something like that.

And

so, you know, and then there's this asymmetry.

Israel's got to be proportionate.

That's proportionate.

So they lost 1,200 people tragically, so so they should have killed maybe no more than 1,200.

Ukraine, the only way they're going to win is be disproportionate.

There should be a ceasefire.

Netanyahu has to have a ceasefire.

No, Ukraine, no ceasefire.

You can't deal with the Russians that way.

There's collateral damage.

They have to text people in Israel.

Oh.

The Ukrainians hit a bridge in Crimea and there were a bunch of cars that went off into the old...

That's okay.

They're just Russians.

That's how they think.

It's the weirdest thing in the world.

As I said, I used to walk or ride a bike around the Stanford neighborhood.

I swear, it was by 2022, all the this house doesn't stand for racism, no racism in this house, George Floyd, was we stand with Ukraine.

It was like an instant.

It's like, well, that cause is over.

Let me go find another cause I know nothing about, and then broadcast my virtue.

And they don't look at it at all.

It's a human catastrophe.

And if you think it you think there has to be a solution, then tell us the solution, please.

Just give us a solution.

You tell me the strategy.

Do you want to take out,

I don't know, you want to give them missiles and bombers so they go in and bomb the Russian that's what you're going to have to do to win.

And I think in the Cold War there was a little rule that said when you have a proxy war between two nuclear powers, you do not

use your proxy to hit the country or threaten your rival.

So Cuba's a proxy, but you don't arm Cuba with nuclear missiles to hit the U.S.

mainland.

And then the Russians said, okay, then you don't use Turkey to use nuclear missiles to hit us, and we took them out.

Vietnam, we don't use Vietnam to hurt the

Russian mainland or the Chinese mainland that was supplying them.

That was all established in 1950 when MacArthur wanted to either use depleted uranium radioactive material and sow the border between along the Yalu River so the Chinese couldn't come across, or he wanted 30, we didn't have 30, I don't, maybe we did by that time, nuclear weapons to bomb the Manchurian

depots,

loading zones, assembly areas, and factories.

And Ike said, and he wanted theater commanders to have the ability to use nuclear weapons.

And Ike said, Truman said no, and then Ike said no.

Ike in 53 said no, Truman said no, and MacArthur kept saying

there's no substitute for victory, and Truman said, you're gone.

And then Ridgway said, we don't need nuclear weapons to achieve, get back to 38 parallel.

But my point is that

That has already been established that when you have a proxy war, you can't arm the proxy to hit strategic targets in your nuclear arrival's country, even if that's justified strategically and morally.

And that makes it difficult.

And they don't talk about that.

They don't talk about that.

Well,

Victor, let's wrap this up today with your thoughts about the fact that former special prosecutor, maybe we should even have called him an illegal

special prosecutor.

There seems to be no basis for his position.

But he is under investigation for two things: for violating the Hatch Act and for improperly using his special prosecutorial powers to interfere with the 2024 elections.

And I'm sure there are other reasons for him being in the cross-community.

He's got so much legal thoughts on that, Victor.

When he was appointed,

remember when he was appointed?

He was appointed, everyone, on the same day,

just two weeks after, I think it was November 15th or 18th of 2022.

It followed two weeks.

Donald Trump says, I'm going to run for president in 2024.

Two weeks later, the Obama hit team, excuse me, the Biden hit team gets going.

So on the same day,

they bring in Nathan Wade from Fannie Wilson's courtroom, and he spends all day in the White House counsel.

Hey, Nathan, what are we going to do now?

What's the progress?

What's the chances you're going to get him in jail?

The same day, Michael Coangelo, who had come into the DOJ under Merrick Garland from Letita James, hey, come in here.

You did a great job with Letita.

You really hurt him.

You got a

$400 million fine.

Hey, it's time for you to go back and get back into the game.

So you're going to go quit today, and you're going to go join Alvin Bragg.

That day, there was a trifecta, and they appointed Mr.

Smith special counsel.

And then what did he do?

It was no time at all that he speeded up the schedule of

interrogatories,

interviews, scheduled indictments to get Donald Trump, and then he wanted it to coincide with the campaign year.

And he accelerated that.

People of the Wall Street Journal, like Kim Strassel had written all about that.

And then he charged him.

Why was he appointed?

He was appointed because of the Mar-Lago raid initially and January 6th.

His two sources of indictments were insurrection of which Donald Trump had never been convicted.

He had never been charged.

He had never, no, there was no one who ever said he was an insurrectionist.

Excuse me, no prosecutor who ever thought he could convict him.

If you're an insurrectionist, you don't say, I expect you people to go peacefully and patriotically over there.

And when they don't, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, I think it's time to come home, and there's nobody armed, etc.

It's a buffoonish riot, yes.

But there was no evidence that it was insurrection.

He didn't even,

he got zero there.

So then he turned his attention to the Mar-Lago raid.

And he tried to make the argument that of the 14,000 documents that the FBI took, and remember they scattered a lot on the ground and they brought little stickers that said confidential and they put them all around in

photoshopped

kind of a physical photoshop, they got 102 classified documents.

That's aside from the fact that

Donald Trump can say, classified documents, you are no longer classified.

Kind of with a magic wand.

Presidents have that right to declassify them.

They should go through the formal steps.

But it's legally contested whether they still can declassify things that they took

as opposed to Joe Biden.

So he was getting this case and then all of a sudden people said to Joe Biden, hey,

we got a problem because

Jack Smith, appointed by Merrick Garland, Joe, he's...

He's going after Trump.

They've got about 102 classified files, and they're going after him as a felony.

They want to put him in jail.

But, Joe, you've been a

you were a U.S.

senator for 30-something years.

And for vice president, you took out all that stuff.

And you didn't just put it in a well-secured Mar-lago with a guardhouse.

You put it

in your garage.

We even got a picture of a box falling over with stuff in it.

You put it in your

vice presidential office in D.C.

You put it in your home.

And you know what, Joe?

It's even worse.

Your ghostwriter, who had no security clearance, you were on tape saying, I'll get in trouble for this, and you discussed your classified material you illegally took home to write your memoirs.

He did.

And worse, Joe, he destroyed it.

If they asked for it, he wiped it clean because he was afraid it was going to be hacked.

So We got a problem.

So then at that point, remember what Joe Biden said?

Hello, I'm the lawyer for President Biden, and unlike Donald Trump, he was very bothered by the fact that it slipped his mind that he might have a few classified documents, but not flagrantly so and not in a resistatory.

He didn't resist like Donald Trump.

He came forward.

No, he came forward after 35 years only because

people were going to say to him, you hypocrite, you're going after the ex-president and your likely rival in the next presidential election to destroy him, and now you've got more culpability and exposure than he does, so you better volunteer so you can at least say you volunteered and Trump resisted.

And that's what he did.

And then we had Robert Hurr, and Robert Hurr was

castigated for being too hard, but he basically said, if you listen to that tape, the guy doesn't know where he is.

And if he testifies, he's going to seem like an old, befuddled man, and no jury will convict him.

Mr.

Hurr, you're a lawyer, a prosecutor.

It's not your job to psychoanalyze the jury and predicate your indictment on whether you think it'll be an easy or hard case.

It's based on the evidence, whether he did something wrong, and he obviously did.

So your job is to make the case to the jury, even if you think you're going to lose, if that's the right legal thing to do.

And yet he didn't.

And he let off his ghost rider.

And so then they went to Donald Trump and they found nothing.

And you know

that thing was going to go out because it was never going to work.

You can't have a a sitting president and an ex-president and two twin special prosecutors, and one is giving, telling the country that the President of the United States is demented, therefore he can't be convicted, and the other person is cognizant, therefore he can be convicted when they have the same exposure.

And then people said almost immediately,

Okay,

so Mr.

Hur, the President of the United States is too cognitively disabled to perform the functions of a defendant in a courtroom, but it's okay that that same person has his finger on the nuclear button.

Is that what you're telling us?

And then they said the Democrats, remember all the Adam shit, oh, this is terrible.

He's slurred.

And you thought, well, why don't you guys celebrate that he let Joe Biden off?

No, no, no, he defamed him.

Camilla Harris, I saw him.

He's

clear as a bell, sharp as a tattle.

And then they said, just release the interviews.

And then what was really dirty is when Her said that he didn't know the date in which his son

Bo

Biden died

and he wanted to know if he was vice president or what.

And

Joe Biden came out to that.

That is terrible.

He brought that up.

He brought that up.

The way it wasn't, when you look at the transcript, not the transcript, but the tape, it was Joe Biden who brought it up.

Joe Biden brought it up.

He said, oh, yeah, that was

when

Bo Biden was, I was,

he bought it up.

So the whole thing was a mess from the very beginning.

And then there's a final little fillip to it, Jack, is that when he was in trouble and people were sorry to say that he had been unprofessional, he went to a law firm and got, what, $150,000 plus in free legal advice who was not billed for it.

He didn't report it as income.

And he didn't

report it as a gift as special counsels have to, so that they're not disinterested.

And then, of course, we had his wife.

And I'm doing this by memory because,

but his wife, I think, was a left-wing filmmaker.

Didn't she make a puff piece about Michelle Obama, a documentary?

Yeah, I think she did.

So he was not disinterested at all.

And he had had that record.

Was the guy's name McConnell, the Virginia governor that he went after, Bob

McConnell?

Yeah.

He was a good governor.

Oh, yeah.

And they

probably missed

a Mac wrong name, but he was the governor of Virginia.

He was on his way up

to Republican circles.

He was being mentioned as a possible Republican presidential candidate, and they went after him and said that he's got he took gifts and he was a crook, and he wasn't.

And who was the special prosecutor?

Smith.

And he got a conviction, and it was overturned by the Supreme Court nine to zero.

Nine to zero.

And then

they brought him in because

he had a reputation of being a partisan bulldog.

And they thought, even if he's incompetent like he was before with the Virginia governor, he is tenacious, and he will tie Donald Trump up, and he will do anything to embarrass him, and he will schedule this trial and all of the mechanisms of discovery and cross-examination and exchange of documents.

He will make sure that it's right during the peak of the campaign season.

And that's why they appointed him.

And Merrick Garden said, I'm an independent.

No,

Joe Biden, on a number of occasions, as reported in the media, was sort of playing murder in the cathedral.

Who will relieve me?

When will Merrick Garden relieve me of this man?

Right.

You know, begging him to indict him.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Beckett.

Great movie, by the way.

Richard Burton was

so good in that movie.

He was awesome.

Inspire came from the core.

Of course, Beckett.

Yeah, Beckett was a priest, and

I think that performance was one of the best performances ever of a priest in a movie.

And Burton,

I think, wasn't.

He was a raging

atheist.

There's something about him.

He had

cynicism about all of his roles.

He was cynical or he skeptical.

He really transmitted that.

He effused that.

And that was really good.

He was classically trained.

I'm just getting off topic, but we've been watching Foyle's War, you know, those that.

Oh, my gosh, Michael Critchen, that actor.

He is absolutely.

Yeah, that's a terrific show.

I mean, I like the American cowboy and actor, but gosh, when you look at those British people like Anthony Hopkins or Michael Critchin or Richard Burton or Gary Oldman, they are in a class of it by themselves.

Gary Oldman is an absolute certifiable genius, you know, as an actor.

And so

hats off to the British.

I mean they have all sorts of trouble in their country with immigration.

They have all sorts of trouble with everything but

energy and the economy, but one thing they do not have trouble with is producing the world's greatest actors.

Yeah, amen.

Well, Victor, Victor, we're crossing the finish line here.

I want to thank our

many new listeners, many new viewers.

One of the shows the other day, you and the great Sammy Wink, like 220,000 people.

So if you're coming back, thanks.

I apologize for the

Star Hard.

My wife and I bought a Tesla.

And we have, I'm speaking on Starlink.

For all the fall of Elon Musk, I still admire him.

I admire everything he's done.

He overreached in politics.

We should be forgiven.

I hope he and Trump can get along.

They're going to need each other for the midterm.

So go patronize him and get a Starlink.

Well, patronize, I will.

Again, urge our

friends there to patronize your website, the Blader Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

I want to thank folks who patronize the thing I do, Civil Thoughts.

I do that for the Center for Civil Society.

And what is the that?

Well, Civil Thoughts is a free weekly email newsletter.

It comes out every Friday, 14 recommended readings, totally free, not selling your name.

I know you're going to like it.

I get a lot of emails from folks who watch this show, listen to this show, who are subscribing and they truly enjoy it.

Go to civil thoughts.com and sign up.

It's easy.

Peasy.

The other day, Victor, as many shows, you talked about farming.

And here's one comment we'll read to

Take Us Out.

It's from Kathleen M5936, and she writes, Mr.

Hansen, farmers have something that their wealthy bosses will probably never have, a truly intimate relationship with God.

They know that growing food requires both parties to relate and love each other.

Both God and the farmer need to show up every day wearing the best version of themselves as possible.

The farmer cannot do it without God and the great farmer.

That's his.

I walk out in the automatic.

I think that's a good thing.

I think we have sentiment amongst many.

We get up to a thousand comments on

that episode.

So we try to look at them, folks.

So, Kathleen, you, and everyone else who sends in your thoughts, greatly appreciate it.

Victor, you have been terrific, as ever.

We will be back soon with another episode.

Thank you, everybody, for the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.