The Economy on the Upswing and Fracturing Democrat Party

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.

Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is our Friday news roundup where we look at all of the news of the week, and we've got lots of things.

Trump has returned from Scotland.

We've had an attack in Cincinnati,

a shooting in Midtown Manhattan, and those will be the first stories that we'll look at.

So stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Delete Me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable.

Data brokers make a profit off your data.

Your data is a commodity.

Anyone on the web can buy your private details.

This can lead to identity theft, phishing attempts, and harassment.

But now you can protect your privacy with DeleteMe.

Have you ever been a victim of identity theft, harassment, doxing?

If you haven't, you probably know someone who has.

DeleteMe can help.

DeleteMe is a subscription service that removes your personal info from hundreds of data brokers.

Delete Me isn't just a one-time service.

Delete Me is always working for you, constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want on the internet.

Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me, now at a special discount for our listeners.

Today, get 20% off your Delete Me plan by texting Victor264000.

The only way to get 20% off is to text Victor to 64000.

That's a Victor to 64000 message and data rates they apply.

This is unconstitutional.

Have you heard some biased journalists, 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 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.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

For everybody who is new to it, Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com.

And the name of the website is the Blade of Perseus.

And we've got special

subscription material at $6.50 a month or $65 a year, two articles and a podcast, not a podcast, but a short video for each week is what our ultra, VDH Ultra subscribers get with their subscriptions.

So please come to the website and join us there.

So Victor,

we've got Trump returning from Scotland.

He's made a great deal with Europe.

His economy, the statistics have come out this week.

It's growing at a very

robust, I mean it's not overgrowing, it's a very healthy economic growth rate of 3%.

And that was beyond what Jerome Powell had estimated at 1.2, I think he said the economy would be growing.

And there's lots of controversy going on with Jerome Powell.

So I'll take anything on those

triumphs of Donald Trump.

Well, there's three issues.

One is the actual state of the economy.

One is what the media, and I'm here delineating the left-wing media, says the economy is.

And then there's Jerome Powell, how he reacts to it.

So there's three or four indicators of economic health.

One is GDP, gross domestic product that's annualized at each month's point.

As you said, the forecasts were way below 2% GDP.

And 2% GDP is kind of the standard.

Anything below is kind of recessionary.

Anything above is good.

It came in at 3%.

That was good.

It doesn't show a huge boom that might cause inflation.

It doesn't show that we're anywhere near the recession that was predicted by this time.

Inflation came in at about 2.7.

I think it was announced today at the end of July.

Last month it was 2.6.

It's well below what Donald Trump inherited at 3.0.

For the annualized first seven months of the year, it's about 2.5.

So that's good.

The

stock market is at an all-time high.

Still is.

If you look at the accounts, surplus, and deficits that go into the Treasury in May, we had kind kind of a record.

We hadn't had that in about eight years, that more money came into the revenue as revenue than went out as debits.

So there was actual plus.

People have tried to contextualize that, but that's true.

And then we get to the final indicator is job growth.

There was 150,000 jobs, and we're right around 4% unemployment, 4.1.

And that was not supposed to happen either.

So then we get to the perception of it.

Well, let me just sum up what the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post and the New York Times said

in March and then now.

So they said in March that we were going to be in a trade war by summer, that tariffs have never worked, they never will work, and they will collapse the international economy.

They said that our immigration policies would strip us of key workers and that the exclusionary immigration policies of Donald Trump would hurt the economy.

They said the uncertainty had caused a near-record dip in the Wall Street

Dow Jones and Standard ⁇ Poor's, and therefore it would only get worse.

Bottom line, recession by August.

Now we're in August, so what are they saying?

Maya culpo, mea culpo, mea maxima culpa, we were wrong.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

What they're saying is

Well, that May surplus debt, that's just an out

liar.

It never really happens

because May more money comes in.

As the end of the year comes around, the big deficits start to show.

Maybe.

But why not just say

May, it's not really representative, but it hasn't happened in eight years, which is true.

They didn't say that.

And when they looked at GDP, they said, well, 3%,

but that's because Donald Trump scared off

importers and we're exporting more than isn't that good?

We're not.

In other words, they were saying your GDP is 3%, and that's because you're not on schedule to run up a $1 trillion trade deficit.

So

I could go on, but you get the picture that all the good news,

these main media organs, and I should say, by the way, it's the Democratic Party.

Chuck Schumer said that the figures were all fixed, even though they were disinterested institutions.

And we had representatives come on and said they're fake because they have no answer to it.

But my point is this, that even the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, or especially the New York Times are trying to contextualize the good news by saying we really won't ever have a month like May again as far as surplus.

The GDP is just warped because of tariffs.

The jobless stuff is going to get worse because we're deporting people.

And the inflation rate's going to spike because all these nations are going to jack up their prices.

If they jack up their prices, they're going to lose the U.S.

market.

That's Mr.

Wall Street Journal, Economist Guru, the reason why we have 2.7, which creeped up a little bit,

and it didn't go to what you told us it was, because they know there's a magic number that they can't go beyond in prices.

Or you will not buy a Mercedes, or you will not buy a Lexus, or you will not buy a imported computer if you get too high.

And we don't know what their profit profit market is, but as I've said a hundred times, it was somewhere around 15 to 20 to 25 percent.

So that when you hit that 15 percent tariff, they got angry.

And then they said two things to themselves.

I'm saying, who are they?

The Chinese, the Japanese, the South Koreans, the Europeans.

They said two things.

Oh my gosh, we here in the EU have been running up $250 billion trade surpluses.

So at least Trump didn't say, well, you guys have to pay us back for the trillions of dollars that we took from you, and we did take it from you.

And number two is, yeah, we'll whine and cry, but actually, we're making 20, 25 percent in that huge market, which accounts for much of our exports.

And if we have to pay the 15 percent, we're going to tell everybody it's going to cause a trade war, we're going to go broke, but we will still make money without increasing our prices.

So then we get to the final group, and that's Jerome Powell.

And the problem that Trump has with him, and our listeners have with him, he's not consistent.

The Fed lowers interest rates when they're worried about a recession.

And they think there's uncertainty in the market, and we need to get liquidity so people will spend money and jack up the economy.

They raise interest rates.

It's pretty high now.

Mortgages on the 30-year fixed mortgages are usually around 7%.

To even get below 6%, you've got to get a 15-year mortgage.

But the point is, when they think there's going to be a recession, they cut.

But here's the problem.

In this period I just delineated in March and April, when everybody was saying we were headed for a recession, and Jerome Powell was saying that we were headed for he did not lower interest rates.

He did not lower interest rates.

So now when the economy is still the same, and if you look at GDP, inflation, job growth,

it's pretty much the stock market after May, it's still steady.

He has not cut interest rates because now he's flipped and said, well, I'm worried about inflation because sooner or later these Europeans and Japanese and South Koreans are going to raise their prices and that's going to allow American companies to raise, but it hasn't happened.

And why is this all important?

It's all important for a very simple reason.

Donald Trump has

big, beautiful bill deregulates, it institutionalizes tax cuts, it gives greater tax cuts.

It's all predicated on energy development, cutting

the Green New Deal overhead,

fast-tracking permits, getting rid of regulations in some cases, deporting a million people, Build the wall who were on public assistance, et cetera.

Okay.

That is a long term bet that the economy will be stimulated and grow, but short and therefore it will create more revenue and we will get closer to getting the deficit down.

But short term short term, it means less federal revenue when you cut people's taxes and they don't pay as much.

Okay.

So in that short term, i.e.

midterms, in the next, oh, I don't know, 15 months, he

wants to tell the American people that he didn't expand the $1.9 trillion deficit that he inherited.

So what he needs is revenue, revenue, revenue.

He has made a bet that the tariffs at a reasonable 15%

will not, will not get the Europeans out or the Japanese out.

They'll stay in the market and they will not raise prices, but they will pay the tariff.

Scott Bassant, who's the most reasonable and sober of his economic advisors, along with Kevin Hassard, a former colleague of mine whom I have the utmost admiration for, they're talking about $300 billion to $340 billion in revenue by the end of the year from tariffs.

I don't know if that's accurate or not, but that's what people have suggested.

And I'm discounting some of the wilder people who said $700 billion.

In addition, we pay $3 billion

a day in interest,

larger at the end of the year than the defense budget.

We're paying $1.1 trillion in interest.

If Donald Trump could get him to lower it by a point or a point and a half, you could see $200 to $300 billion saved from the Treasury without having to pay out that interest.

Bottom line, he gets $700

billion cut from the deficit.

The deficit is roughly $2 billion.

So he can say, in my first year,

my first year, this has never happened before, in the first year,

I rebooted the economy, I cut taxes, and I lowered the deficit by 33% in a single year.

That's what I did.

And that would be an amazing achievement going into the midterm.

If you don't like Donald Trump and you don't want him to succeed, then you won't budge on the interest rates and you will tell everybody that the figures are rigged and you'll talk about something else like the Epstein letter.

And that's where we are.

Yes, and I think Jerome Powell specifically seems to be against Donald Trump, but that makes him against the American people because he is doing things that are antithetical to the health and welfare, I mean the economic health and welfare of the American people.

And that's what really gets me upset about him.

I think that's a good question.

Well, what you're saying is if you're a young couple and you're 30 years old and you're in California or Blue State or anywhere and you're looking at

a million dollars in California, but let's say $500,000 for a home and you're going to get a 30-year mortgage and you're paying 7%

versus 5%,

then you're talking $600 or $700.

And that goes beyond budget, so you don't buy and you sit and you sit and you sit waiting for interest rates to go down.

And that slows up the whole economy.

It sure does.

And I think a small family of two children probably spends a good $400 or $500

a week on food for them if

they're lucky to have that kind of money.

And that makes a difference.

And what's so weird about it is

the left was always for lower interest rates.

Their mantra was that what do interest rates mean, everybody?

Interest means the people who have money in their T-bills or federal savings accounts or just bank accounts.

When the interest goes up, the rich get richer.

However, when you cut interest rates, then the people who owe money to the rich people, they get a break because they don't have to pay as high interest.

Even credit card interest goes down.

So this is a redistribution of money.

And we on the left like interest rate, except when it's a matter of Donald Trump, then we violate our own principles and we want the rich to get richer who have capital and they get interest.

My grandfather once told me on the farm,

he said, Two things, I'll never forget it, because my parents were trying to get a mortgage to help on the raisin crop of 1976, right before he died.

And he said, you can never make it in farming if you pay more than 5% on a mortgage or a loan.

At one point, we were paying 19% on a crop loan in 1983, and we had long-term debt on land that was 8%, 8.8%.

The second thing he told me is, and this is really important,

he was very frugal, very frugal, and he went through the depression making $30 a ton on raisins, $30 a ton.

And he had a crippled daughter and two other daughters.

His wife in those days didn't work, my grandma.

Here's what he said.

The world of Victor is divided into two types of people, those who pay interest and those who get interest.

And make sure that at some point in your 30s or 40s, he said, I never did because I had a mortgage

and I couldn't get it paid until 1952 when I was in my 60s.

But make sure by the time you're in your 40s that you're getting interest.

and you're not paying it.

Unfortunately, I didn't get over that hump until my late 50s.

When I got to the point where I didn't owe money on mortgages or credit cards or et cetera.

But it's a good rule to hold everybody.

Make sure that at some point in your 30s you're getting interest and not paying it out and you will be okay.

Yes.

Well, it sounds to me like it's more of a life story to end up not paying interest anymore in your 50s.

The average American, over 50% of Americans, I cited this in the Dying Citizen, die with an aggregate of owing $10,000.

Wow, that's incredible.

People don't understand one of the reasons that credit card usage, the interest rate, is so high.

It's because of two reasons.

Besides, if you want to make the argument that the credit card companies are greedy, I'd rather look at it that it's in their own interest to get as many people to borrow, and you don't get as many people to borrow when you're borrowing at 19%.

But it's one, a lot of people don't pay their credit card bills.

And two, there's a lot of people who die and they owe their credit card, and their state has nothing.

And so they lose that.

And a lot of people plan on that, too, by the way.

Yeah.

Victor, there is one product that we sell that I use morning and night, and that is Vibriance.

The ingredients in Vibriance Super C serum can replace your day creams, eye creams, night creams, neck creams, wrinkle creams, and dark spot reducers made in the USA with the highest quality ingredients, including vitamin C,

hyaluronic acid, vitamin B5, and vitamin E, Super C Serum delivers noticeable results.

Simplify your skincare routine, get a healthier complexion, and minimize wrinkles and aged spots with Vibrance.

And if you don't find it better than your current skincare routine, you'll get a full refund.

Go to vibrance.com/slash Victor to save up to 37%

off and free shipping.

That's Vibrance, V-I-B-R-I-A-N-C-E, vibrance.com slash Victor.

And we'd like to thank Vibrance for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

And I would like to thank Vibrance for their products, which I love.

All right, Victor, so let's turn to the grim incident in Cincinnati.

And even in Midtown New York, we had two.

One was a brawl and a a beating of some people in Cincinnati in the early hours of the morning.

It seemed that there were no cops really in the vicinity.

The people seemed angry, or the

police chief, at least, was angry that only one person in a crowd that they said numbered around 100

called the police.

What else was it?

The

police chief also blamed social media.

In Midtown Manhattan, you had a guy walking around in Midtown with an

AR, was it AR-15?

Yeah, who are you to judge that he can't walk around with an AR-15?

God, it was the biggest gun I ever saw.

And then went into a building, and of course, he shot and killed four people.

He seemed to have thought

he had been associated with the NFL.

I don't know if he was trying out with them or what,

but he

was targeting them, but he got the wrong people.

But he had a traumatic brain encephalitis, we were told.

That's what his suicide note.

And he said he watched a documentary, and therefore,

what?

And then they said that he was upset.

They said, I'm getting so sick of this that somebody

thinking of Luigi Mangioni, they kill somebody and they destroy

dozens of lives around the person, and they do it out of evil.

And then we're told, well, the target

did this.

That was like the Sarnoff brothers.

One of them was on Rolling Stone as kind of a charismatic killer, I guess.

But in this case of the person who went into the NFL headquarters, he ended up shooting four people, a police person.

He didn't even get to the floor that he wanted to get.

He just murdered people for the hell of it.

Excuse me, the heck of it.

He murdered people.

And

he should be considered a murderer first and somebody with mental problems second.

Because the people who are dead and their relatives and the pregnant wife of the NYPD, they don't care whether he was crazy or not.

All they know is he's evil and he destroyed their lives.

Getting to the other

problem in the beatdown.

So you had a white male middle-aged and a young African American male.

It was after a festival, people supposedly were drinking, and they had an altercation.

And we don't know what was said between them.

Some people said that they exchanged racial insults or profanities, or one person spit at the other, so the other person slapped him.

Whatever it was, it did not remain isolated.

What is shocking is the people who tried to separate them and have calm were middle-aged white women and men, and they were sucker-punched by the crowd.

At that point, there was a hysteria that ensued.

All of the African-American youth in the immediate vicinity did one of two things.

A, they didn't call the police, they didn't try to intervene, they didn't,

and many of them started

videoing it with,

I guess, play-by-play sports type announcement.

moderation as moderators.

I don't mean moderation in the other way.

They were moderating it.

And here's what was, they were cheering it on.

Oh, wow.

Ooh, look at that.

Oh, man.

And

these two people in particular, a woman was sucker punched, knocked on the ground, and the other man was knocked on the ground.

And that did not, I guess,

affect the crowd thinking, oh, my God, they might be dead.

It was instead, oh, my God, they're on the ground.

It's not fair that I don't get to kick them in the head.

And then you had these people body slamming themselves on people who they thought were dead.

So what ended this?

Was it because the Good Samaritans?

No.

Was it because the police intervened?

No.

Was it everybody called 9-11?

No.

It stopped because the people they were hitting looked like they were dead and it's like, well, we want to beat up these white people and kill them and look, they look dead to me.

And that's why it stopped.

Then we had the reaction.

First thing,

so we have a lot of people in the United States who comment on white, black, black, white, Hispanic, white, Hispanic, black, all the interracial crimes.

And we know who they are.

They're Camilla Harris.

She commented on Juicy Small.

This is systematic racism.

Juicy was attacked by white MAGA people.

You know, there's very fine people on both sides.

Remember the Charlotte misinterpretation?

And we have Al Sharpton and Tawana Brawley.

And we have Joy Reed that white people are evil.

And we have Jasmine Crock.

Crickets, they didn't didn't say a word.

They didn't come out.

I thought, wow, you were so noisy during the Jussie Smollett caper.

Wow.

When Michael Ford lied, when people lied about Michael Ford in Missouri and they said, oh, he said, hands up, don't shoot, and they murdered him.

That was a lie.

You came out on that.

That was Michael Brown.

Michael Brown.

Yes, not Michael Ford.

Excuse me.

But they lied about that.

Remember the NASCAR news story?

That was a big lie.

They jumped on the Duke La Crosse.

That was a big lie.

Do you remember the Covington kids, supposedly white racists that belittled a poor little Native American Vietnam veteran?

That was a total lie.

Do we remember, I mentioned Tawana Brawley.

Do you remember George Zimmerman?

And they did everything in the world to say that a Hispanic man and a black man were not fighting and one kill.

They said he was a white Hispanic because his mother was Latino and his father was white.

Did they ever say that Barack Obama was a white African American because his mother...

No.

So my point is that, and all of these racial things, which I just mentioned, were all fake.

There was no, everybody weighed in.

This one was real

because the people who filmed it were on the side of the people that were doing the felonies.

They didn't doctor the video.

Did any of them?

No, they didn't say anything.

So then we turned to the city council.

One of the city council members, an African-American woman, said, well, I'm glad we found out that it started with a white man hit a black man.

Well, yeah, they were fighting.

But you didn't say anything about what happened this nanosecond after that when African-American youth tried to kill people.

And then,

gosh, the city, the mayor, if I was the mayor in a perfect world, the mayor and the chief of police should resign.

What did they say caused it?

They said social media caused it.

They genned it up.

Everybody was taking videos to post, so they either didn't do anything or we didn't have enough good Samaritans.

We only had one call.

I think you should have had one officer out there at three in the morning when there's a big crowd right downtown, Miss Police Chief.

Or they said, they were drunk.

Hey,

police chief, people are drunk all the time.

I haven't seen a racially gang beat down recently, but I have seen a lot of drunk people in my life.

And then they said, it was a festival.

Okay, so I've seen a lot of festivals.

I usually don't see black teenagers trying to kill middle-aged white people when they're unconscious on the ground at festivals.

And

so they gave us every single excuse except the real

reason.

The real reason is, for some strange reason, a number of African American youth felt, as they watched this, that once the fight transcended one or two

people with a traditional disagreement, and a person was sucker-punched and fell down, then it was open season.

In other words, they had a pre-existing hatred of white people, A, and B, they had no fear of deterrence.

They either felt there were not enough white people since they were wanting to start a racial brawl to deter them, no one was armed apparently, and the police were nowhere to be seen, and therefore they could

reify their hatred of white people and try to kill them.

or beat them census.

Now the question then is, well, why do they hate white people?

They hate, I don't have that answer

because when I look at economic growth and the per-median income of black women versus white women, it's not that much different anymore.

And the African-American community in the United States is by far the wealthiest black community in the world.

It's much richer than any per capita black African nation.

I don't have that answer, but I do have an answer of why they acted out on whatever they felt.

They felt that in the post-George Floyd era, when you swarm a store and you steal, you're not going to be charged.

And when they look at January 6th and they see people were put in jail for one or two years for walking around the Capitol without using violence, that was an illegal misdemeanor to enter a federal building.

Some of them got a year, two years, some of them got five years for we don't even know what they did.

And then they look at the 14,000 that were arrested in 2020 when 35 people were killed, 14,000 people arrested, 1,500 officers

injured, $2 to $4 billion in damage, police precinct, federal courthouse, iconic church, all tort, nothing.

So then they had the idea that,

well, in our grievance society, we have made a Marxist binary between oppressed and oppressor.

And I'm on the oppressed side, and therefore I'm entitled to repertory treatment.

Those people are on the oppressor side.

Now, they may be poorer than I am.

They may have a worse life than I did.

It doesn't matter.

I can go kick them in the head, and I can try to kill them, and nothing will happen.

And that's the operating principle.

If you think I'm extreme, we had two other incidents.

You raised one.

So this African-American

killer that went into the NFL, he was part Japanese American, too.

So he was mixed race, but it was very clear.

They had the picture of him before they had the identity.

CNN announced that he was a white male.

That's the first thing they said.

And I saw that on the little Chiron or, you know,

I thought, and I heard the person say it.

I said, are you insane?

He's male, but he's about.

He may be male, but he's certainly not white.

And why are you saying that?

Well, we know why you're saying it, because this disrupts your narrative of a binary, and you want to make all black people innocent victims and all white people oppressors.

And this doesn't compute.

Another thing that didn't happen, no one ever quotes

Al Sharpton doesn't come forward, Jasmine Crockett, Joy Reed doesn't say, you know what?

At some point, we need to look at the crime statistics.

53% of all murders are committed by 13% of the black community, but more likely about 50% are black males that compose 6%.

Why is that 6% killing people?

Is it really the historical legacy of Jim Crow and

slavery and racism?

Because if you're arguing that, then you would say that the murder rate is much worse earlier because we have repertory programs,

DEI, affirmative action, incomes have sword.

And I don't think that is.

And the answer is that there are systemic dysfunctions in the black community that no one wants to talk about.

There's a lack of parenthood,

two parent families.

The black male is not marrying at the same rate as other people whose marriages are going down.

And by the way, in the 1950s, as

Thomas Sowell, my friend and colleague, has shown,

the racial disparities were not very great.

As far as illegitimacy, our broken families, our divorce rates, our absent fathers, the black community under worse conditions was not that much different than the white community.

But people and then people should say

in rare,

I think it's rare, it's about 7% of violent assaults, as I remember.

Blacks are, depending on the crime, murder, assault, robbery, three to five times more likely as 6%,

it's mostly black males, 6 or 7% of the population to attack victims that comprise roughly 70% of them.

Does everybody hear what I just said?

That in felony assaults, the perpetrator,

these are rare interracial assaults.

As I said, less than 8% of all assaults.

But in that 8%,

a black perpetrator is supposed to be, is found to be, is reported to be 3 to 5 times more likely to hurt a white victim than a white perpetrator is to hurt the black victim.

And that is stunning, not just because it's 3 to 5 times asymmetrical, but because the demographic is so different.

If you have 67 to 70% of the population white, then you would think there'd be a lot more white perpetrators than blacks, and that's not happening.

And so nobody discusses that as a larger context or background because to do what I just did, I'll probably, when I finish this podcast, get a note from Stanford University or somebody and say that I'm a racist for telling the truth.

And I tell the truth only because we need to talk about it.

Because we're becoming...

becoming a tribal society and any time when race is essential or not and it's not incidental to who you are, then everybody goes tribal.

And it's like nuclear proliferation.

Once somebody gets the bomb, the next person, for deterrence sake, gets the bomb.

So if you say, I'm a Latina, or I'm Latinx,

or I'm black, or I'm African, and that's the primary essentialism of your identity and not incidental, then an Asian person is going to say, well, I'm Asian.

And if the Asian person, then finally, so-called European Americans are going to say, well, we're a minority in California, so I'm going to be a European, and I want a European affinity graduate affinity graduate.

I want a European dorm.

Do you really want to go down there?

Because then you're going to have a race war and a tribal war.

And we're almost to that point.

That's why Donald Trump, the greatest thing he did, is to get rid of DEI, because that was racial essentialism.

The other thing, very quickly, we had Sidney Sweeney's ad.

So we had this attractive, I don't think she's the most beautiful woman, but she's very attractive for a young 27-year-old actress dash model, very talented.

She cuts a gene commercial for,

what is it, what's the called American something?

American Eagle, yeah.

American Eagle fashion accessories, pants, jeans.

And we know Brooke Shields did one, and this American company, American Eagle, has had other people of different races on there.

But in her case, they wanted to make a play on words.

So she looks very sexy in her tight jeans, and they say she's got great genes.

And they spelled

G as genes.

In other words, she's good-looking by birth.

And then they crossed that out and put parentheses with a J.

Ha ha.

We meant play on words.

Kind of stupid ad.

But what it's really saying to the young people who buy these jeans is, we're so sick of political correctness.

We can say whatever we want.

And the fact is, this woman is really hot.

So we're going to say she's hot.

And she's hot because

not because sex is socially constructed or not because she decides she's a man because she's naturally beautiful.

It didn't say that all white women are naturally beautiful, but immediately the left then wanted seized on, oh, this is Hitlerian.

You guys are fascists.

It was very funny.

You're a eugenicist.

Editorial comment to the left.

Eugenics movement was part of the pseudo-scientific

fumes from Darwinism.

In the late 19th century, in England and America, once Darwin said there was something called natural selection and there were genes that were inherited and your looks or brains or your shape or appearance came from your species and your genus, species, and your individuality.

There were people who seized on that and said, well, if there's bigger turtles because they have two big turtle parents, then maybe humans are like that.

Well, they are.

Then why don't we just start

selecting people?

Let's get rid of all of the mentally ill people, all this.

And who were the people who did that?

Were they rock conservatives?

No, they didn't like abortion.

And there was Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.

I think she died in...

20th century, I don't know, not too long ago, actually.

She was born about 1880.

And she came up with the idea that you should abort people.

Kind of like, can I say this?

Justice

Ginsburg.

When she had an interview, as I called with a New Yorker, and she said, what's the problem?

Why are all these right-wing people mad about abortion?

I think we're aborting the right people.

She was a eugenicist in that sense.

And who else?

Oh,

it was Woodrow Wilson.

He really empowered eugenics.

President of Stanford University was a eugenicist.

And Woodrow Wilson, I guess he was a right-wing Republican?

No, he was a liberal, progressive, Democrat.

So all you out there saying that the ad is eugenics, it's your eugenics movement, and it's not.

Second,

is it false?

Is she

hot?

Is she good-looking?

Yes.

Are good looks and

I don't know.

I guess if they put a overweight, homely person, male or female, and they did that, what would you say?

I guess it would be a joke, and people say, Yeah, it's genes, all right.

So,

what does it reflect?

Is what I'm getting.

It reflects at a desperate effort to divide and divide and alienate and anger people to obtain political power by the left.

That's the whole story of the history of the left, from Mao's China to

Lenin's Soviet Union, to National Socialism in Germany to

left-wing factions in the ancient world.

They don't have a message that people want.

So they have to divide people and stir them up.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break for an ad and then come back and talk a little bit about the Democratic Party, the old guard, and the new guard.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

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 $50,

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, ethical, and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes.

My favorite piece this summer is a linen 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.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is on social media at X.

His handle is at V D Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

So if social media is the way you get your news, please come join him there.

So Victor, I wanted to talk a little bit about the old guard and the new.

Corey Booker is probably the most strident example this week.

Getting up, they were trying to pass a bill on funding police, and he got up in protest of the bill and did one of his rants and talked about how the late-night people are bending the knee to the government, that universities

should be standing up for free speech, and they're not doing that, and that he is the one that is protecting the Constitution in the face of what's going on with the government against universities.

As the Reverend Jeremiah Wright used to say, no, no, no, no, no,

Corey, Spartacus.

Could you ask yourself, Corey, three questions?

Every time you've acted like a stark, raving, mad lunatic and shouted, what were the results of it?

Did it lead to anything during the Kavanaugh hearings when you started to talk about Spartacus?

Did that help?

When you decided to find a way not to have to urinate or defecate for 26 hours with your filibuster, did you actually filibuster a law?

Nope.

And now, when you're screaming and yelling about what is this going to lead, did you go and say, I screamed and yelled and I found a way to delay the bill?

No, you didn't do any of that.

So, how can you possibly claim that you're effective?

And by the way,

you're talking about, he's angry about the dismantling of DI.

You're the son of corporate parents.

You grew up in affluence, affluence, compared to anybody of any other race, in a very, shall we say, as, can I quote Mom Dami, a affluent and whiter neighborhood.

And second,

you got a full scholarship to Stanford University, and you played football.

Everything about your life has been privileged.

So why are you screaming and yelling about the unfairness of America?

It doesn't make any sense and it's not effective.

And so when you look at,

does anybody really think, wow, Hikeham Jeffries had a baseball bat?

That means he's committed.

I'm going to vote Democratic.

Of course not.

Oh, wow.

I saw the House Democratic women.

They were using kickboxing techniques.

Oh, Jasmine Crockett said the S and the F word and the white word.

I'm going to vote Democratic.

No.

Chuck Schumer screamed and yelled.

Is that going to no?

It doesn't work.

You don't have power.

You don't have power in the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court.

All you have are lower district judges, and you've used that to the max, and the Supreme Court's on to you.

And you're losing the power that you exercise power without power.

And that is the media.

There's an

alternate media.

You have no more

NPR, PBS.

If you want them to stay left, you'll have to pay for it.

Same thing with late-night TV and all the lawsuits.

You're losing the media,

you're losing the universities, they've been called to account, you're losing the border question, you're losing the institutions, you're losing all of your, what you used to call soft power.

So they're angry.

Angry.

Yes, can I add to that, though, that

they're missing

what the truth is, and they're detached from reality meaning this he says that late night has bowed the knee to the government because Colbert is going to be thrown off but the reality is it's not making any money that's why Colbert is disappearing and so

it's an analysis

not making greedy money

so their duty if you're an evil corporation and you're greedy making money is to subsidize more humanitarian, kinder, smarter people to teach the dummies like us what's really going on.

That's how they think.

So they've said that.

Oh, that corporation isn't making money.

No, we're supposed to subsidize at the tune of $40 million a year, and half of that loss goes to that Nincompoon Colbert who has zero talent and channeled a shtick maybe years ago that he was going to make fun of Bill O'Reilly as if he's a conservative into what?

He's had one Republican in the history of his show on.

Oh, it was Liz Cheney.

So he's a mediocrity and the whole genre is gone and Gutfeld comes along and he looks at late night and he says, you don't need to be live.

You don't have to have the attention just on you.

You don't have to have a hard political.

I'm just going to get a bunch of weird people.

They're going to be maybe center-right, but not necessarily.

I'm going to get them all on mine, four of them, and I'm going to let them talk as much as I do.

And I'm going to get them from all walks of life.

They're not just going to be celebrities or left-wing politicians or writers.

They're going to be wrestling people.

They're going to be sports announcers.

They're going to be stand-up comedians.

And I'm just going to let them go whatever they want to say.

And that revolutionized late-night talk shows.

And he's out, he's

Colbert's getting the larger.

No, as I said earlier with Jack, he's Howard Beale, Peter Finch on network.

He's just screaming, oh, I have a thing

and the world's coming to an end.

Oh, I'm going to be fired.

Oh, I'm going to do a urination joke.

I'll do a defecation joke.

I'll do this.

And then people are saying, I heard that last night.

I heard it the week before.

Stephen Colbert, you're just, why don't you just quit?

So when he knows that

he has his big 401k account and he knows that they have to honor his contract.

They were very smart what they did.

Everybody said they were stupid and scared because they let him stay a year.

No, no, no.

They knew that guy.

They knew he was going to go on there and blast them and blast them.

And they were willing to take a hit temporarily where the ratings will go down.

And then at one point, he'll quit, or they'll have to fire him, and he will be destroyed.

And he will shell.

And that's what's happening already he never went above gut felt even with all the attention that he got and

he's not funny and it's boring and he's basically saying oh my gosh they took away my show and my 20 million dollar salary and they don't these awful people only gave me a budget of a hundred million dollars and now they're mad because i i just lost them forty million That's not much.

That's his argument.

Yeah.

Well, the other thing about what Corey Booker was saying was that the universities have given up on free speech.

And it's just so easy for people to see that anti-Semitism and violence against Jews and disrupting and violent actions on a university is not free speech.

And anybody can go online and see that.

And I think that's where this young guard in the Democratic Party are losing.

And I think that we've got the old guard out of the world.

We don't want free speech.

Judge Duncan came to Stanford Law School.

Stanford Law School supposedly was the top one or two law schools.

Well, I know it was because Sam Bankman Freed's parents were both faculty members there, so that must show you something.

And they had a federal judge, and he came and he was speaking, and the Stanford,

not all of the law students, they started screaming and yelling at him.

horrible things and shouted him down.

But they had a DEI.

Stanford Law, there is such a thing, a DEI administrator.

And instead of saying, be quiet, we respect free speech on the left, she hijacked his talk and said, basically,

be quiet, Judge Duncan.

I'm the speaker now, and I'm going to give you a lecture about why free speech is not free speech.

And then she did, and then they shouted more, and she revved the crowd up.

And as

he walked out, they yelled, I hope your daughter's raped.

And worse.

And that is Stanford's version of free speech.

And I can tell you that

I'll give you an example of Stanford's idea of free speech.

I go to, I used to go to the Stanford all-campus studio.

If I was there and Fox said, we'd like you to come on.

Hoover has a studio, but it closes at 5 o'clock Pacific.

So you can't really do nighttime very often.

There's a very good person that works there and she's so wonderful.

If it's a 5 o'clock show, she was willing to stay a little longer on her own time.

But the main studio was supposedly open.

I have gone there in my 20 years numerous times to do FOC, and I have listened to in the green room, where you can see people from the Stanford faculty ranting and raving in a very partisan manner on MSNBC or CNN.

On two occasions, I was told that if I come on Fox News, I would have to write out in advance what I'm saying.

Yes, they have ideas they call talking points.

This is the topic you may, but I would say 50% of the time,

late breaking news or somebody goes on too long or goes on too short, that's not the topic.

You have to be ready to talk about anything.

And how in the world can you write out, and you're supposed to read it?

Hello, ho, I'm Victor Hanson.

And Victor, what do you think about the recent tariffs?

Well, I want to talk about GDP and I'm going to read it.

That's what they were expecting.

I said, I can't do that.

Fox wouldn't do it, of course.

And I didn't go on.

And then I complained, and they said, well, we don't do that.

Come back.

And then I did it again, and they did the same thing.

The then director, not the beloved

John Racian or current director, Condoleezza Rice, but someone whose name will not be mentioned, the interim director between the two, I asked him, Well, are you going to call?

And he said, well, how do you get yourself in these situations?

And so I complained.

And then they said, we don't do that.

I said, you did it twice.

I'll never do this again.

And I don't do it again.

But that's Stanford's idea of free speech.

And due process, ask a person, a very wonderful

entrepreneur, Joe Lonsdale, how they treated him with due process.

Or another friend that I know very well who's a donor that was not given due process.

When I say due process, I'm talking protections of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment when somebody accuses you of something.

And

ask

Jay Botcharia, who was censored by the Stanford faculty, or Scott Atlas, who was trying to road out, ran out on a rail almost by Stanford.

So these universities don't believe in free speech.

Corey Booker knows that because he was at Stanford.

He knows that they don't believe.

And all Donald Trump is saying, Corey, you hear what he's saying to you?

Be Hillsdale.

To quote

our great leader Mao, let let a thousand Hillsdales bloom.

Let them bloom.

Hillsdale here, Stanford's going to be Hillsdale, mega, mega Hillsdale.

All you have to do is not take federal money.

Hillsdale doesn't take federal money.

You go after Hillsdale, and you said, well, you can't take federal money, but you can't allow a student to be there on a federal loan program.

Because that's a secondary boycott.

Yes, it was secondary boycott of Hillsdale.

So Hillsdale said, okay, you mean somebody who fought first country and almost died in Afghanistan who wants to come to Hillsdale, you won't let him use the GI bill?

No, no, no.

So

all you have to do, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, just say, blank you,

we are going to run our DI program and be committed to our values, and we don't need your blank, blank.

Just take a line out of Treasurer of Sierra Madre.

Badges, Badges, we don't have no stinking badges.

We don't have no stinking federal money.

Get rid of it.

We're going to raise it.

And you know why you don't do that?

Because you have these five, six, seven billion dollar budgets, and you depend on gouging the federal government for 55 percent of grants for 150, 200 million.

You have direct federal aid for a billion.

You overcharge your Chinese and Middle East illiberal students by 110 percent of tuition.

And you have these big endowments you brag about.

Oh, we are Stanford, we have 35 billion.

Oh, Harvard, we have 50.

Oh, Yale,

you don't.

That's the theoretical level.

That's like me saying, Victor, you have a 40-acre almond orchard.

Well, I think it's worth, I don't know, I heard once in a while that an almond orchard near the city limits sold for $40,000.

Okay, Victor,

put it on the market and see what you get, especially if you've got a lot of debts debts and you've got to get the money quick.

Oh, that crazy Hansen guy thinks he's going to get 40 because somebody five years ago got it.

Uh-uh.

We're not going to pay that.

He's broke.

He'll come down to 20 very quickly.

That's what's wrong with them.

And so they're borrowing, and a lot of the money is targeted.

I'm Victor Hanson.

I want to give a, I don't know, $10 million to Harvard for an agrarian studies program.

I will give you $10 million to hire a professor and a half that hates America and will talk about farming.

And they said, okay, Mr.

Hansen, here is your $10 million.

And now they say,

we have a $50 billion endowment.

Can we take Victor's Tinton?

No, no, no, no, no.

You cannot take it for the operating budget general fund.

So they don't have as much money as they say they do.

And they're not, a lot of

donors, some Jewish Americans that don't want to subsidize anti-Semitism are not giving like they used to.

Other people are sick of them.

Other people are saying, you know what, my kid would be better off at Georgia Tech than Stanford.

They learn more.

And other people say your DEI program is a joke.

Your curriculum is watered down.

Everybody gets 80% get A's at Yale.

It's not really a university anymore.

It's just a name.

It's a cattle brand.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit more about this Democratic Party and the old guard of the Democratic Party is addressing those Corey bookers out there.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Buying a car in Carvana was so easy.

I was able to finance it through them.

I just...

Whoa, wait, you mean finance?

Yeah, finance.

Got pre-qualified for a Carvana auto loan, entered my terms, and shot from thousands of great car options all within my budget.

That's cool, but financing through Carvana was so easy.

Financed.

Done.

And I get to pick up my car from their Carvana vending machine tomorrow.

Financed.

Right, that's what I said.

You can spend time trying to pronounce financing, or you can actually finance and buy your car today on Carvana.

Financing subject to credit approval, additional terms and conditions may apply.

You know, they say it's not what you say, but how you say it.

And when it comes to making an impact, nothing speaks louder than your actions.

For those who lead by example, who adapt and overcome, there's a vehicle that matches your drive.

The Range Rover Sport.

The Range Rover Sport is a perfect blend of power, poise, and performance.

With its assertive stance and refined driving experience, it's designed to make a statement.

Want to elevate your drive, activate noise cancellation and cabin air purification for a pure, unadulterated drive, and with terrain response, you're ready to take on challenging landscapes with confidence.

Plus, choose from a range of powerful engines, including a plug-in hybrid option.

Ready to make your mark?

Explore Range Rover Sport at RangeRover.com/slash US slash sport.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

You can find these podcasts on YouTube and on Rumble and on Spotify.

It's called the Victor Davis-Hansen Show on Spotify at Spotify.

So make sure you note that difference because there are other and older

Spotify accounts.

So Victor, I think that the Democratic Party, this actually what we're talking about illustrates their pro part of their problem.

And that is that we saw this week Chris Matthews talking to some podcaster, I believe, and he was saying that the Democratic Party is detached from reality, or that their leadership is, and that they needed to get tough again as well.

And James Carville has basically been saying the same thing.

So they've got these old guys that are saying we've lost all the men because we don't represent a party of people that are really working and producing and

have any of those masculine attributes, I guess you would say.

And

we need, there's no way to get them back, but to be like that.

And we can't be as detached from reality as Corey Booker is or Jasmine Crockett is.

And I was like, that's remarkable because they all hate Donald Trump.

I've talked to one or two of them.

There's Bill Marr.

is like Chris Matthews, right?

Is like James Carville.

They're old-fashioned liberal Democrats.

And there's there's about three subtexts to their advice.

Number one, as white male old guys, they never thought that the

hydra that they created during the Obama administration, remember, they loved Obama.

Chris Matthews, I think, said that he got a thrill up his leg every time he heard Obama's mellophilous voice.

Yes, so they never really thought that when they talked about DEI and white privilege and white rage and they started doing that and they opened the borders and the message was demography is destiny and the new democratic majority.

Remember they said that, not Tucker Carlson, the great replacement.

He didn't say that.

They said he was racially fixated.

It was them.

They were the ones that were, they never thought it would apply to them.

But we're liberal.

But under Clinton, we were liberals.

No, under Clinton, you were considered fascist now because you wanted closed borders, you wanted a balanced budget, you wanted 100,000 police officers, you said abortion should be legal, safe, dash, rare.

And that is fascism today.

So you are surprised that you birthed a Frankenstinian monster and instead of saying to Dr.

Frankenstein, you guys, thank you for

Setting up the Democratic Party.

They started clobbering you and killed their creator.

And that's what's happened.

And now they don't know what to do because these people hate their guts.

And you can throw in Chuck Schumer, too,

to AOC and Rashida Talib and Ilyan Omar and Jazz and Clockett.

He is a Jewish-American, old-fashioned fuddy-duddy.

And he probably

supports Israel more than he lets on, and they hate anybody who supports Israel.

And there's an anti-Semitic strain.

And if you don't, I mean, who's the person who said it's the Benjamin's baby?

I think that was, was that Elien Omar?

I think it was.

So they have a history of anti-they, they birthed Jeremiah Wright.

And remember the Jewish weapon they created that could smell Arabs, a missile that would go around and then attack these fantasies right out of Elijah Muhammad's dark mind.

So

anyway,

they're out.

They're kind of like, I keep using that image.

One of my favorite Greek plays is Euripides Bacchae, and there's a scene where the prophet Tiresias, old, traditional, and Cadmus the king, old, traditional.

They see Dionysus, and they think they're fornicating up in Mount Cathyron, and they're drunk, and women are walking around nude, and they want to get in with it and dance.

And they come out and they can hardly move.

They have arthritis and everything, and they're trying to be cool.

These were these guys.

They're the Tyrese.

They're kind of like

there's no party for us anymore.

So we have to convince these people to be Bill Clinton.

And they're not going to be Bill Clinton because they're radical Jacobins that hate the country.

They want to destroy it as it is.

They want to create some kind of open borders,

socialists, mandami, defund the police,

and then just blame half the populate, say these are white oppressors and we're all oppressed.

Mr.

Carvell, Mr.

Matthews, and

Mr.

Maher, take an example.

They believe that if you come from Mishokan illegally and you set one foot in the United States, and you don't know anything about the United States, nor does the United States

know anything about you, that that first second before you meet any white monster, that you are a victim and you are deserving

generous entitlements.

And if you're in California or most states,

you are entitled for your children to be given discount rates, even though they may be illegal.

And you can get a discount.

If you're a young man, 18, you set your foot, you say, I suddenly, the weirdest thing happened.

I wanted to go to the United States and everybody hates me.

They're racist.

So I'm going to stay and get in-state discount at one-third.

And if there's an American who lives one foot in Nevada, American citizen, he wants to come to the same state college as I do, he's got to pay the full out-of-state three times as much.

That's how sick they are.

That's what they believe.

They don't want these people in their party.

These people have no influence in their party.

They're like somebody who's drunk.

in a Lamborghini, they think, and they've got their foot on the pedal and they're going 150 miles over a cliff.

And there's somebody like Bill Maher and Chris Matthews that are at the edge of the criff waving a red flag.

They don't care, they want to go over the cliff.

All right, Victor, it sounds like we're coming on a really hard break.

Your dog out

announcing it.

So let's just read a few comments from Rumble this time.

I went to

Avery 17

says, and this is on a Jack in Your podcast, you know, I believe Professor Hansen is a brilliant man, and I have learned from him.

However, I like that.

However,

I know.

It seems he is all in favor of all that is AI.

Yes, question mark.

AI?

Artificial intelligence?

Yeah, hold on.

Yeah, I don't know.

As we know, technology is always a double-edged sword, so to speak.

I am very concerned about the surveillance aspect of AI coming from Palanter and ideas being advocated by folks like Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel, etc.

Victor, do you have concerns about this?

Yes, I do.

I would certainly be interested to hear your views.

I think you are, with all due deference and politeness, I think you're mistaken in my reference to AI.

I mentioned maybe on two occasions, AI and robotics in one context.

I said that we were in a period of economic unknowns.

We didn't know the effect of the tariffs or what the profit margin was or whether

efficiency, deregulation, more energy, how great the economy would grow.

And I added as a Philip,

we don't know the effect of AI and robotics.

And AI, I think,

at this juncture will create more profit.

I didn't say profit would be bad or good generator.

I just said that it's going to create more.

I have never used AI until a very close friend of mine about four weeks ago said, have you ever gone AI on Google?

And I noticed that little AI thing appears on Google, but I don't really pay any attention to it.

So he said, go on Guak, G-R.

And he said, you know, you've had some illness, say,

chronic sinus infection, cause.

And I did.

And it had all of these weird things in it.

You know, you might consider using a drop of of shampoo.

You might consider a drop of I.

It was really in.

So, what I'm getting at is that it's getting to the point where a lot of people are using it.

Am I worried about it?

I'm worried about it because it has the potential to create a free-thinking, autonomous AI mind, something like 2001.

You know what I mean?

So, and I

would

be more specific.

Dear reader, go to the end of everything that was published last year, read the epilogue, and I talked about

the dangers of AI, and I said there was an Air Force

simulated test where a rocket went off

to

attack someone, and they wanted to see what would happen if they built into the guidance system or the AI to protect it from incoming rockets, right?

So they devised all of these paradigms that the rocket would have AI defenses against anti-rockets.

And guess what?

When they hit the kill button to end the simulation, the AI rocket doubled back toward them.

It wasn't real, it was commuter, but that AI was thinking on its own.

Well, the existential threat to me is not a rocket coming in.

It's somebody who wants to blow me up, so I'm going to go blow them up.

So, yes, reader, I'm very worried.

Well, Victor, thank you, and thanks to our readers.

I'm sorry, we're on a very hard stop here, and of course, our dogs have been helpful in announcing it.

And I'd like to thank Victor for all his wisdom today, and our audience for joining us.

Thank you, everybody, for listening and viewing, and we'll see you next time.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.