Trump’s New Tack with Putin and Bongino’s Cryptic Remarks

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Hello, ladies.

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

We are recording on Monday, the 28th of July.

It's a hot and stinky day here in Milford, Connecticut, and I assume it's hot out there in Selma, California.

It's always hot in the San Joaquin Valley.

Even when it's cold.

But it's dry, Jack.

It's dry hot.

Oh, well, there you go.

Good.

The tires.

Our 106 is tolerable in a way that your 90 is not.

Yeah, but your tires melt, right?

Yeah.

Ours don't.

So

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, and he's the possessor of a really cool, important website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its address is victorhanson.com.

Go there early and often, like they vote in Chicago and subscribe, And I'll tell you why later.

You should be subscribing.

Victor, some breaking news today.

Again, Monday, the 28th.

Donald Trump has had it.

Well, close to having had it with Vladimir Putin.

We'll get your take on that, on the trade deal he negotiated with the European Union.

We have this

really troubling race fight.

Well, I think it's race.

In Cincinnati

late last week,

Dan Bongino, the FBI, has issued another troubling statement about the whole Epstein affair.

And there's some more European matters to take on.

And we'll start off with Putin, and we'll do that when we come back from these important messages.

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Back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So, Victor, Donald Trump was, I saw a clip a little bit ago.

He was with

Prime Minister Starmer.

I guess maybe he's in Scotland still, but

he said

he's talked to Vladimir Putin frequently.

He's gotten the impression things would be done.

50 Days was a deadline of sorts that Trump gave to settle this.

That 50 days is still some number off.

And Donald Trump said today,

you know what?

Putin is not

doing anything to advance a peace, and I'm going to give it 10 to 12 days.

And by the way, 10 to 12 days is August 7th, August 9th.

What will happen those days, not sure.

Anyway, Victor, that's the new background.

Your take.

Well, that's a reduction of, remember, the 50-day

deadline.

You know, in a weird way, this is going to work out for Donald Trump because

his mega-base was restive after the Iran 27-minute or 30-minute incursion and the Epstein flip-flop.

But he can legitimately say that he risked a lot of exposure by bending backwards to Vladimir Putin.

That includes the blow-up with Zelensky and the Oval Office with J.D.

Vance, etc.

So his feed days to the base are pretty clear that I tried to do everything I could

to get a settlement and and be neutral in it when most people in the West thought that he should not have been neutral, that he should have tilted for Ukraine.

I'm not going to get into that, but my point is he's basically saying, you can't, I'm an art of the deal guy, and you can't deal with this man unless you have cards to play.

And I'm not going to give up my cards anymore by saying that we're going to have an agreement, an agreement.

But notice what he also did was really smart.

Whereas Biden didn't talk to Putin and call him a killer and a murderer.

Trump said

it was very clever what he said.

He said, you know, we had great conversation.

He was so nice.

We got along.

And then he killed people right afterwards.

And he had said that essentially earlier with Melania.

He said, well, he doesn't listen to you.

He kills people.

So he's now can say to MAGA, I did everything I could, and I took a lot of heat.

Remember, it was people like John Brennan who said he was a traitor over the NATO thing and then kissing up to Putin years ago.

And then

Clapper, who is unfortunately back in the news, called Trump a Russian asset, basically called him a traitor.

So he had a lot of exposure also, if I could use that term again, from the Russian collusion hoax, that he really couldn't,

you know, be

a disinterested

negotiator with Putin because everybody on the left had fabricated all these charges that he was Putin's puppet.

So now the whole thing is now resolved.

It's very clear he gave Putin every single chance possible to cut a deal.

So then the question is: why didn't Putin cut a deal?

And the answer that we've discussed before is he's lost a million dead, wounded, and missing Russians.

There's stories almost every day in the media about young people who are used as cannon fodder.

They only get two weeks of training.

Our guys get six months.

They're put in impossible situations.

And even though Ukraine only has about 28 million people, Russia has 144,

at some point, Putin apparently feels that he has not justified the special military operation in the eyes of the military and the apparatus, the oligarchic class that runs Russia.

And what that means is they're saying, if I could just ad-lib a minute, if I was an oligarch or a Russian general, I'd say, Vladimir,

So what have you got for the million dead and world pariah status?

What have you got?

Just tell me, dead and wounded, a million people for the special military operation.

What have you got?

There is no more Wagner Group.

We got rid of them.

They were useful.

We had Crimea.

They were never going to get back Crimea.

You can say that they institutionalized it, but we were never going to give it back.

We didn't need this.

We were never going to give back the Donbass.

And I know that now they said they promised that Ukraine will not be a NATO, but we knew that.

Even the NATO members quietly had contacted us in Russia and said, you know, they're not going to be a a NATO.

We don't want them a NATO.

So what did we get?

And Putin's saying, well, I'm 40, 60, 80 miles westward.

You got a million people for 80 miles?

And so the point I'm making is that he has a magical

point on the map where he can justify to the Russians that in a cost-to-benefit analysis, this was worth it.

And he's not there yet, he thinks.

And he's not going to get there.

And then Donald Trump is basically telling the MAGA people, I have to continue to supply them weapons, even though I don't want to, and I want to get this thing over with, for two reasons.

Number one, as I said,

I have no leverage with Putin.

He does not respect magnanimity.

He interprets magnanimity as weakness to be exploited, not kindness to be reciprocated.

And number two, do you really want an Afghan Kabul pull out on my watch?

Because if I cut them completely off, Russia is going to go back westward all the way to Kiev and we're going to lose this and we're going to get an albatross around our neck, just like Biden did with Afghanistan.

So I'm not going to be the guy who lost Ukraine.

So that's where we are right now.

And the question is

at what point

there's a third thing I should mention.

He just cut a big deal with the Europeans.

And

we can get into that later.

But it was a very important deal, and it's all predicated on what he did with the Japanese and South Koreans.

And that is that all these people that were running these asymmetrical surpluses, and Europe was up to 250-plus billion with us, I think, or maybe it was 200.

The point is that they had a magic profit margin that we didn't even know what it was.

But we guessed that if it was 25% tariff, they wouldn't make any money and it wouldn't ever work.

20%, they wouldn't.

But right around 15,

they felt in a cost-to-benefit analysis they could pay the 15% stay in this huge consumer market invest more money to assemble things here and still make a profit and part of that deal was that they came to the table in part because Donald Trump was much more reasonable about NATO they had called him daddy they had gone up to five percent and the last thing that Trump wanted to do after

cutting this deal was get back on the bad side of the Europeans and get in a big fight over Ukraine and cut Ukraine off, because that would have destroyed this trade deal.

It really would have.

So, what he's saying now is

the Europeans and we and us are good friends on Ukraine and on trade.

I will have leverage now to pressure Putin and mega people to stick with me because I'm not going to hang Kabul around our necks and be the ones.

And that's where he is.

Yeah.

Well, let's talk about that trade deal, Victor.

And here's the headline from the Daily Mail, which this was reported on yesterday, Sunday, the 27th.

President Donald Trump announced a sweeping trade agreement with the European Union on Sunday, setting a baseline 15% tariff on European imports, including automobiles.

while keeping existing 50 percent duties on steel and aluminum in place.

As part of the deal, the EU committed to purchasing $750 billion in U.S.

energy products.

Trump announced the agreement during a press conference with the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

The EU will purchase three-quarters of a trillion dollars in U.S.

energy while also investing $600 billion in America on top of existing investments.

Additionally, EU countries will be setting tariffs on U.S.

goods at 0%,

and Europe agreed to, quote, purchase a vast amount of military equipment, Trump said, end quote.

Maybe Victor in part,

plying, I mean,

the deal is a good thing in itself, but the energy thing may be also applicable to the Ukraine situation.

Part of

the reluctance of frackers

to expand

their product on federal leasing, because Doug Burdom has been really good about it.

You know, it's not going to take you two years to get a federal lease.

I can do it in a month or so.

And EPA is the same way.

But the frackers are saying, well, you know what?

Prices are not all that great now, and we put all this money in it and we'll have an oversupply.

We need markets.

So I think part of it is Trump is telling them we're going to have a huge export, liquefied natural gas export to Europe, and you'll have a steady customer for a long time and you can make a profit on that.

And that's so that was very important.

And then it's part of the idea that Europe we know under the table, or in the case of Germany openly, is still buying natural gas in various ways, methods from Russia.

So it's a very good, it's all connected.

And

it brings up a larger point.

You know, Jack, I don't want to beat this horse to death.

I know everybody's listening getting tired of this, but I'm very disappointed in the Wall Street Journal's news.

Not the op-ed.

I really like Holman Jenkins.

I love

Gerald Baker.

I think Kim Strassel's unrivaled.

I like them all.

I like Barton Swama a lot.

But the news division, when I read these articles, I look at the writers and then I double-click them and see where they came from.

And they all come from Politico, Washington Post, or New York Times.

And so when you read these, and sometimes the editorial board itself, they can't give him any credit at all.

Today there's an op-ed about how bad the immigration, how cruel it is, and what's cruel is letting in 12 million people a year.

But this op-ed writer is a guest writer, Neera Tandrin, I think her name is.

But my point is, when you read

the Wall Street Journal, even when there's this great news, they're attacking the European trade thing today.

And they're saying, no, it's not such a great deal.

He didn't get this.

He didn't get that.

And when you look at March and April stories, we should be in a recession now.

The stock market should have crashed.

We should have been in stagflation.

Real wages should be down.

The deficit should be ballooning.

There will be no revenue from from tariffs.

And then you read the actuality.

Scott Bassanus is

forecasting a third of a trillion dollars in tariff revenue.

And job growth is good.

And inflation is not spiring out of control.

And it looks like there'll be good GDP.

So all of this is good news, and nobody will

will recognize it.

And, you know, I have the utmost respect for my colleagues at the Hoover Institution, whom I've learned about economics for the last 20 years, but

all of the economic orthodoxy was that Trump was going to blow up the economy because tariffs are terrible.

And

what's really strange is I want to make two points very quickly.

One is

the same people who are damning tariffs are for secondary boycotts of Russia, which would be effective to pressure Putin.

But if you want a trade war and you want to blow up the economy, then you tell India

we're going to have zero trade with you.

And you tell China zero trade, and you tell Germany zero trade unless you stop every drop of Russian oil.

And we know they're getting Russian oil, and we know it's central to their economies.

So I can't understand how you can square that circle and say, oh, it's terrifying 15%.

And then, oh, let's have a worldwide global secondary boycott.

It doesn't make any that will destroy the economy.

Second thing is, and I've said this before too: we're on uncharted territory with all these things.

I recently listened to something that Doug Bergam said.

He suggested that we might have $15 trillion

in promised foreign investment.

Remember, everybody, everything in Silicon Valley, Facebook,

Google,

if you count X,

all of those places together, together, Oracle, you name it,

$9 trillion in market capitalization.

So what we're basically saying is almost double a Silicon Valley will be spread out over the whole United States.

What will be the effect of that?

If you ask an economist, they have certain formulas that for every billion dollars you get maybe 500 to 5,000 jobs, not specific.

$15 trillion as far as jobs go is incredible, especially we haven't calibrated AI and robotics that are now making quantum leaps.

We haven't

factored in a third of a trillion dollars in tariff revenues.

We have not factored in, we have one

million less illegal aliens on state, local, and federal entitlements, and there's going to be a lot fewer.

We haven't

factored into that equation.

If you go to EPA or as I said, Interior or the Department of Energy and you want to drill a well or you want to make a pipeline or you want to make a highway, instead of two years for a permit, you can probably get it in a month or two.

All of that has economic ramifications that are no one knows, no one knows what they will be because we've never done it before.

No president has ever done this.

No president has ever had all these trade deals.

No but president has both deregulated and cut taxes and had these types of trade deal and this level of foreign investment

or cut government this much.

So

the only thing I'm critical is when Trump was pointing out that we could have this huge revenue of one-third of a trillion dollars.

He said he would like to think about a tax rebate or tax cut.

I wouldn't do that.

We have $1.9 trillion trade deficit, maybe $37 trillion in aggregate debt.

If he could lower the interest rate by a point and a half, he would save $1 billion

maybe a day or a third of a trillion per year, and with another third of a trillion for tariffs,

then he's got two-thirds of a trillion dollars, and

he's a third of the way cutting the deficit.

So that's what he should be doing.

And

if he could cut the deficit in one year by a trillion dollars, that's an amazing achievement.

And that's what we should,

I don't think it does any good after you've already assigned tax cuts to give people more rebates.

Yeah, well,

we have a little - I'd like to ask you another Uncharted Waters

matter and something else about where to spend the revenue.

But first, Victor, for our listeners and viewers, do you know there were over 200,000 people watching your most recent episode with the great Sammy Wink?

It's amazing.

Thank all the new people who have come to the show.

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Victor, two things about unchartered territory.

No, one thing

is

all these tectonic plates are shifting while we have this really deepening

fertility and demographic, I think, crisis.

And the other matter

is where to spend money.

We're going to talk about this at greater length on the next episode, but we have just gotten some very grim news about how close the social security system is to collapsing.

So, any thoughts on that before we head into the break?

Well,

as to, we were about 2.0

at the millennium during the end of the Clinton and the beginning of the George W.

Bush.

And I don't know whether it was the 2008 recession or the whole climate change AOC narrative that you don't have children or the bi-coastal blue state model that you're an upscale metrosexual, that life is so wonderful and you're so brilliant and moral.

You don't need to have children.

Who'd want to waste their

life changing diapers or up all night?

But we're in a crisis because the latest fertility said it's not even 1.6.

We're down to European levels.

The last few months, it's like 1.45,

which is catastrophic to a civilization.

It means your population is aging and it's shrinking.

And the problem with that is related to Social Security because then you have a larger and larger pool of older people and the smaller and smaller people who are still in the productive workforce that pay the taxes.

So what's the solution?

I don't think it's politically acceptable to just raise the payroll tax, which you'd have to do, you know, up to 8 or 9 percent, given that

you can't deduct the salt deductions in these blue states.

And there are conservative voters in these congressional districts.

And when you look at California, It's not very hard to pay 13 percent, 10 percent, 12 percent, plus the 38 percent federal, plus the payroll.

So you're really getting high.

So what's the solution?

The solution is you're going to have to, I think, if you look at the number of people who are on the Social Security payrolls for so-called disability, it's gone from 7% skyrocket.

And you have people who are not here lawfully on it.

And we give Social Security disability to people who say they have attention deficit disorder.

So we're going to have to clamp down on that to people who are truly disabled, number one.

I say that, you know, I grew up with my mother's sister, Lila, that was living in the house that I'm living in.

She had polio at the age of seven.

They took her to the Shriners Hospital.

She had 18 surgeries.

It made it worse.

They broke every bone in her body and tried to reform them in a straight line.

It was a crazy theory.

But my point is, I can remember she could not walk.

She was humped over, if I could use such a horrible simile as the hunchback of Notre Dame.

She was so in such pain.

She was a wonderful person.

And I remember my grandfather having me put her into a wheelchair and going to the Social Security office in Fresno and trying to explain that she was disabled.

And they said things like, well, maybe you should get a power wheelchair and she can go get a job and go buy it.

It was crazy.

It was so hard for her to get disability each year.

And the idea you just hand it out now, that's one thing.

And then the other people who are affluent, I don't know how you define affluent, $500,000 a year, $200,000,

you can come up with an acceptable number.

You could say to them,

once you, everything that you put into Social Security has been paid back to you plus an interest on your money of 5%,

at that point

You would have to pay a very high tax on it if you were that affluent.

And if somebody said, well, that's not fair, it's against the spirit of free market, why should you punish the successful?

I agree with that.

But come up with a better idea then, unless you think that cutting these people off who are gaming the system on disability.

But if somebody said to me,

well, you're 71 and you're getting Social Security, and in three years, all the money you paid when you were dirt poor will be paid back to you plus 5%.

And from now on, that was a good investment for you, Victor.

And from now on, if you want more money from the government to pay out to you when you have a pretty good salary, and I would say, well, how do you know I'm going to have it next year?

And there's all these intricacies and complexities, but you could have a tax on it as long as your salary was at a certain level.

If it's a choice between me and somebody in East Palestine or Salma, California who's on Social Security and they're flat broke, and I have to pay a higher higher tax if I were to stay at the income, I would be willing to do it to save the system.

But my point is, I'm willing to hear anything, but I do not think the idea we're just going to keep increasing the benefits, and without

that's the problem.

Everybody's talking about

we're going to give this and we're going to cut this and we're going to give this person that and cut this person.

And nobody's talking about civilizational

lessons that you can't keep doing that or the society will collapse from default.

Yeah.

You know,

the point you make about the loafers, I'll call them loafers, the disabled who probably could be

able-bodied or working.

And

I used to be on a housing authority here in Milford, Connecticut, and it was the poor, and then it was the seniors.

And then the senior housing became senior and disabled.

And what was disabled?

Well, a drug dealer, 29-year-old drug dealer.

Not in a good deal.

I agree with you.

I just got back from, I won't mention where or

what town or what, but when I go to a

pharmacy and I get in line to get a prescription filled,

I would tell you that one out of every two people

is turned down because their documentation is either fraudulent or multiple or they're trying to use somebody else's Medi-Cal card.

And then when you have

40% of all Californians are on Medi-Cal

and 50% of all births are on Medi-Cal

and you have the highest number of what they call undocumented, we used to have half of all undocumented in California, then what happens is the system

is broke.

There was a very funny story yesterday, not yesterday, last week, in the Fresno Bee.

And you know what it was?

McClatchy.

You know the McClatchy B.

Yeah, McClatchy.

Very left-wing.

Yeah, very left-wing.

Sacramento Modesto, Fresno Bee.

They're almost defunct now.

There's no news.

It used to be a wonderful newspaper, although it was hard left, but today it's just

nothing.

But anyway, online they were lamenting the fact that due to Donald Trump's deportations and self-deportation incentives, there was not enough people at the local emergency rooms and health centers.

And this was very disturbing because people were not getting enough care.

In other words, all you American citizens out there, you can go into the ER and you can go to your provider and it's not as crowded as it was.

And this is terrible because it means that we're not giving care to illegal aliens.

Giving it to the suckers instead.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, it's been easy to be moral in somebody else's dime or somebody else's health.

But, you know, I can tell you that before Biden,

if I went to a particular specialist, I won't say what kind of specialist, I would go into the office, there were three people in the waiting room, and I spent 15 minutes talking about general health.

He gave me 25 minutes, complete thing.

Now,

you can't find a seat in the waiting room.

Most people do not speak English as their native language, if at all.

And when you go in there, you get three to five minutes.

And tell me that doesn't impact or influence the health care of citizens.

It does.

But it doesn't if you're Nancy Pelosi or you're Chuck Schumer or Elizabeth Warren with Concierge or Federal Top Flight Healthcare.

Well, Victor, we're going to talk about Dan Bongino.

What else?

Black on crime.

And we're going to do that when we come back from these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on Monday the 28th.

And this particular episode will be up on the 29th.

Hey, Victor, I know you're.

I know you're...

Well, you've talked about your own health.

so frequently and you are heading to

hopefully have the last treatment for your treatment.

Prolonged, prolonged treatment.

I don't want to, I'm not going to name who my surgeon, but he's very good.

And it was just an unexpected

bone growth.

And then I've had immune problems.

So it's been seven weeks today

since my surgery.

And I've had another procedure in between, but I'm confident always.

I have a wonderful wife who says to me,

you're going to be fine.

One day you're going to wake up up and your sinuses are gonna be like air tunnels, and you're gonna have no pain, you're gonna be a renaissance.

And Eeyore says, Oh, I heard so I can't sleep.

I haven't, oh, get over it.

You'll be sleeping like a baby soon.

Well, let us let's.

I wanted to,

I'll give you two Catholic things here, Victor, and then we'll move on.

You know, it was just at that Napa Institute, the big Catholic

annual gathering up at Napa.

So,

the patron saint for safe surgery is St.

Luke.

St.

Luke.

And the patron saint for healing is St.

Raphael, the Archangel.

I did not know the Archangel Ralphia.

There's four, right?

You've corrected me on this before.

Yeah,

Raphael, Uriel, Michael.

Yeah.

I think Michael was the one that was supposed to come down to the 7,000 trapped in Hagia Sophia on

Black Tuesday, May 29, 1453.

They waited for him, but he didn't come.

Well, he's the one that kicked

Lucifer's heiney.

He won't say ass.

Yeah, he did.

And he was a lesser angel.

Archangels are lesser than

the level that Lucifer was at.

But anyway, we're praying for them to take care of you.

Now, let's talk about Dan Bongino, okay?

Because this is the Epstein story, and this is another Daily Mail

story.

Embattled FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino revealed, he has discovered matters that have, quote, shocked me down to my core, end quote.

During his time in office, Bongino shared a cryptic message to his social media in which he vowed to uncover the truth amid mounting criticism of his handling of the Epstein files.

He added, We cannot run a republic like this.

I'll never be the same.

After learning what I've learned, we are going to conduct these righteous and proper investigations by the book and in accordance with the law.

We are going to get the answers we all deserve, as with any investigation.

I cannot

predict where it will land, but I can promise you an honest and dignified effort at a truth.

Not my truth or your truth, but the truth.

And he's talking not cryptically, but directly and explicitly in reference to the Epstein files, right?

Yes, correct.

Yes.

I don't, and he's also

defending himself from unjust criticism from the mega base that he had promised a complete

transparency and they didn't do that.

We've discussed this before that we thought that the light, and I think that's been confirmed, that there were people that came in contact with Jeffrey Epstein that appear in his own communications, emails, texts, phone records, or

the two criminal prosecutions that convicted him.

Names came up, Bill Gates,

everybody came up, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton.

The question is: how many people actually went on the plane down?

I guess what I'm saying is there's gradations.

Anybody who comes, I mean, the most 170 names means nothing.

I mean, you go to the airport and somebody takes a picture of you without your permission, and then it's on the internet.

That's happened to me a bunch of times.

Yeah, the thing you mentioned with.

I was on your cruise once, Jack, if I could interject this.

My cruise, yeah.

Yes, your nationally view, well-organized cruises.

Thank you.

thank you.

You had the speakers, as every cruise does, speak with people, remember?

And there was a guy there, and he said, what do you think about this person?

What do you think about this?

And he was recording it.

And I didn't know that.

And the next thing I knew, he put it on the internet.

Victor Hansen, I had dinner with him.

He said this and this and that.

And I never knew the person.

And then the internet people criticized him.

But the point is, you can find yourself in those situations all the time.

So

if Bongino is correct, what he'll tell us is that the following people were more like these people went to the island, these people were on the airplane, these people just interacted with him, these people had this, to the degree that he can do that without violating privacy or court statutes or court orders.

And then let us all figure it out ourselves.

Let us all just chase this thing if you're interested in it.

But I really do believe that, and I'm not vested with anybody in the Trump administration.

I don't talk to people in the Trump administration regularly, or if at all.

So my point is, I do think that to the degree there was a conspiracy,

Jeffrey Epstein, killed himself because he was looking at 30 years in prison as a child molester pedophile, which meant that he was not going to live very long in a state or federal prison.

And he used his influence money to

somebody didn't watch him hang himself.

And that was

did you ever appear on any of Bongino's

podcast?

He's a very good podcaster, but his brand is tough, hard-hitting, uncompromising,

kind of investigative potting.

And so, when he was now a member of the establishment, I think that made it uncomfortable for him, especially that he, of all people, would be charged with complicity in a cover-up,

which he threatened to resign, as you remember.

And he had a big fight with Pam Bondi.

But just if

he's asked about it, instead of saying the Democrat, the Democrats, remember, had people on there like Bill Clinton

that were mentioned and

Bill Gates, and they did not, I want to repeat that, they did not want to release anything under Merrick Garland.

They could have done this.

It could have been all over by now.

And second, if they had one iota, they had to make up an entire fake dossier about Trump just to get him urinating on a prostitute's bed in Moscow.

That shows you how desperate they were for that fantasy.

If they had one little bit on Donald Trump and Epstein, they would have released it.

You can guarantee it.

It would have been leaked like James Comey leaked everything else.

And it didn't.

So what Trump should do, I think he should just say, we're going to let it all out, and I trust the American people will eventually come to a sober and judicious conclusion.

As for me, I, as a New York business person, met all kinds of people.

I met Diddy.

I met this.

I met everybody.

Some were good, some were bad, some I didn't know any about.

I kicked him out of Mar-lago when he came over when I found out he was inappropriately touching a friend's daughter.

And more importantly, I did this before he was indicted and convicted twice.

So I didn't know what his actual status was.

When I did know, I was done with him.

But if you're asking me, why did I even know the guy, or why did because I knew everybody, and that's the type of business

that you do in New York and Manhattan.

He went to Hillary Clinton's daughter's wedding.

Right?

He did.

Absolutely.

So

that's what he needs to do if he comes up, rather than just say, forget it.

And

I think that's why, in the polls that are rebounding for him on the economy, et cetera, that he's still a little bit down with independence.

And I think that's part of it, Epstein, because there's no other explanation.

The other thing is that he's vulnerable, and we've talked about that before.

If you look at the polls, they all support deportation.

They all support secure borders.

They all support legal-only immigration.

But the left wing has demagogued this so much about people being put in cages and Auschwitz that it that deportation is hurting him.

Tom Holman's a great guy, and he just says, if I see a felon and I'm after him and he's hanging out at Home Depot and he's with four other illegal aliens, what am I supposed to do?

Oh, by the way, you four people, because you're not a felon but you're lawbreakers, I'm just going to let you go.

Can't do that.

So, but I think it would be good if he just said, as I said before, if you've been here five years, if you have no criminal record, if you're not on public assistance, if you're able-bodied, if you're willing to pay a thousand-dollar fine, if you're willing to get a green card every year and be renewed and have a background shut, we'll give you a green card.

And that might be five to six million people.

And that would take out the criticism.

It would help Trump, because then he could say, after he did that, and the left continued the criticism, and they would, he would say, oh,

well, given that if you were not a lawbreaker or you were not on federal assistance or state assistance,

you're supporting people who broke the law, and they're still here, and you don't want me to deport them, and you want people who are on the welfare dime, you want to support them.

Because I gave an outline of people who could get a green card.

And once everybody made that decision, the people who didn't make that decision are either on welfare or they don't want to admit that they have a criminal record.

So you're defending it.

So it would really strengthen the moral case for

illegal immigration, deportation, etc.

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Victor,

it's really blown up today this story about the

Rumble

quasi-riot,

black-on-white crime, and that seems to be what it definitely was.

On Friday night after

a jazz concert festival in downtown Cincinnati, a mob of, it was a

white guy, I think close to middle-age.

He wasn't a teenager, and he wasn't 50.

He looked like about 50 plus, I thought.

Okay, well, then a woman, and they were just surrounded, beaten up, kicked, head stomped, a woman sucker punched.

So on social media, there was some guy,

I think the

X

handle is End Wokeness, put out a video of it, and then no reporting.

He listed major news sources, zero reports, zero reports.

Actually, I looked at the Cincinnati, the old Cincinnati Inquirer, their space on X.

There was nothing about it.

The Cincinnati police have a page on X.

They put up things all the time, nothing about this.

So, Victor, yeah, hey, let's be honest, if it was a white mob beating up a black man and a black woman, this would have been

a massive story.

Exasperated about this because

they remember not just

the rioting or the racial discord over past incidents, but they have a memory.

We go back to Tawana Brawley,

supposedly raped or treated badly by an innocent,

and that was all a fake that Al Sharpton never really accounted for, atoned for.

They remember the Duke La Crosse people that were destroyed by that, and all the Duke faculty that championed the so-called stripper who then shot her boyfriend and confessed that she had made that all up.

They remember the Covington kids and the Native American Vietnam veteran

who was not a Vietnam veteran and had prompted that whole confrontation.

And the Covington kids were successful in court, at least the prime person was.

They remember George Floyd and they remember tragically that he

died, but they don't remember that he was a career felon, that he put a gun into a woman's pregnant stomach in a home invasion, that he'd been stopped for the same thing a year before.

He was high on fentanyl.

He had a record that he,

had he not been trying to traffic counterfeit currency, he would have never been stopped.

Had he not resisted arrest and just said, you know, officer, I'm going to get into the car and just got into the car.

He would have been fine.

If he had not been on fentanyl, he would have been alive, I think.

That doesn't excuse necessarily the behavior, but even that was was cloudy about whether that was an accepted practice and what degree uh his knee was on it.

They remember George Zimmerun and they remember the white Hispanic label so that the media could turn that into white on black when it was a Hispanic man and a black man, young person.

They remember the Photoshop picture that made his uh real injuries look cosmetically okay because they didn't want the idea that poor Trevon pounded the guy's head.

They remember Michael Ford and they remember all of the CNN and MSN people walking out of the studio shouting, hands up, don't shoot.

They remember that that was found to be completely made up.

So my point is that there were not anything like this on the other side.

They were all concocted.

Or there were circumstances in the case of George Floyd that didn't warrant him having angel wings and a halo, as you saw in murals.

But this thing could have just been isolated.

If it was isolated between a black man and a white man, and there are people in the left who are saying that's what it was about originally, and somebody said that he used a racial expletive.

Somebody said, well, no, he was spit on and pushed the guy back, and then the guy.

It doesn't matter.

That's a one-on-one encounter.

But what we're talking about are all these people,

a dozen or so, who then jumped in.

and there were three things that bothered people about the videos.

One was,

by and large, all of the black

attackers were young, and two,

all of the people who were their victims were middle-aged.

Three, in some cases, a woman was sucker-punched, knocked down.

Four, when these people hit the pavement, people then body slammed themselves on top of them.

They kicked their head.

They were trying to kill them when they were defenseless.

Number five,

women jumped in and were just as culpable as men, hitting a woman on the ground and males.

Six, there was glee in the background by people were high-fiving and cheering this on.

And so

we'll see.

The mayor, the vice mayor, I think, was culpable, and she said to the, well, this is just, you know a private fight and I don't think it's going to work this time I really don't think they're going to work people are going to say well if the roles are reversed this would have been a riot by now and

the FBI it's not going to work because

Harmette Dillon is the head of the civil rights thing and she's going to watch this and it's very clear from that

video there's a racial component to it.

And they're going to watch that.

And two, three,

we're at the end of the DEI era.

What do I mean by that?

I think we've gone as far as we can by identity politics.

So we are 70% white, 30%

non-white, and we're all trying to identify at least the 30%

in some tribal fashion.

I am, speaking as a Latino, speaking as a black,

I'm Asian.

I'm this, I'm that, I'm gay, I'm trans.

It doesn't work.

Look at India, multiracial democracy, Brazil, multi-racial.

It doesn't work when you have caste and tribal rivalries and dissension.

So

once you go down that tribal path and you say that you're not responsible for your behavior because

critical legal theory, critical racial theory says you steal a pair of sneakers, it's only against the law because rich white people don't have to steal sneakers.

So when I steal it in the San Francisco store, it's not shoplifting.

Or I can say this and that about you and I can say white this and white this and white this because I'm victimized.

We're 60 years into the civil rights movement and affirmative action.

We got two generations of people who grew up

under affirmative action, DEI, etc.

So they're not

aware of the immediate

systemic racism.

And I know people say it still exists, but it doesn't in the way that it did.

And the idea that you're going to say that you are a protected group of people and you're not going to be accountable for your behavior in the way that other people are, it doesn't work anymore.

So if you're Stanford University and you're listening to this and you have the audacity to put on your website three years in a row that you let in 9% white males when they make up about 34% of the demographic, that doesn't work anymore.

Are you going to call your graduation an affinity graduation ceremony?

Oh, it's not racist because it's 99% targeted at one race because they can go to the regular.

Try that with European graduate.

Oh, we're going to have a European American affinity.

That would last about one nanosecond.

And you say, well, that's the majority.

No, in California, so-called European Americans are a minority.

It doesn't work.

And theme houses are segregated dorms, and safe spaces are segregated spaces.

And the hyphenation

salad bowl approach did not work.

And what it did is it gave exemption for certain groups to feel that they would not be subject to the full force of the law.

And it trickles down.

It really does.

Once you say to somebody, I'm going to let you into this university on the basis of your race, somebody's going to say, well, why did you let them in on the basis?

Oh, because they have suffered, their grandfather suffered, or we think they're systemic racism or insidious racism.

Oh, so then you're going to drop standards, give them special preferences.

Then the person next on the economics, well, how about me?

I'm not going to go to college, but I need to get special preferences.

And then the person below that, I need special.

And it filters down that you will not be subject to the full force of the law because of your race or tribe or gender or sexual orientation.

It doesn't work.

And so

what they need to do is they don't need to single these people out.

They just need to say,

who is this woman who kicked this man in the head?

Who is this guy who tried to rifle through this guy's wallet?

Who is this guy who body slammed him?

Who are these people?

Eight, ten?

You're going to be charged with felony assault.

And in some cases, attempt to commit murder.

That's all it was when they tried to kick a person in the head who's out there.

Stomp his head on the street?

Yeah.

What do you think is going to happen?

And then we'll see what they do.

Even J.D.

Vance, I was surprised.

He weighed in on it.

He really did.

And he said, I don't know what started this, and I don't know who's to blame to triggering this, but I do know who's to blame when you start to sucker punch a woman.

And he said, where I come from, that's the worst of all things to do.

And so they need to throw the book at them to re-establish deterrence.

And believe me,

the media can suppress this story and they can say all they want, but

they're on the wrong side, as they use that word, on the the wrong side of history on this one, because people have come to the point,

everybody, 26% of black males voted for Trump, 55% of Hispanic males, and part of that vote is they're sick and tired of this.

It's not a racial thing, it's a message to particular groups that you have a blank check and you're not going to face.

At the same time this happened, we had a Walmart white guy who went in homeless, another protected group of people, apparently, and he stabbed and almost killed six or seven people and it wounded another four.

And a black Marine was there.

And he just took out his gun and he pointed it and said, drop it.

And he saved a lot of people's life.

And that guy is a hero.

So it's not a racial thing per se, but it is when you have people of a particular racial group committing acts that are felonious in the middle.

of the public with the expectation that it's neat and they're laughing about it and nobody's going to do anything And as soon as you see a white person on the ground, you're going to swarm them.

And I think too many people are going to say if the roles are reversed, we would have a riot right now.

And they're not going to put up with it anymore.

And I don't mean just white people.

I'm talking about conservative blacks.

I'm talking about moderate blacks.

I'm talking about Latino.

They're sick of it.

They're sick of what the left has done with race.

Yeah, and it's a lie against the reality of what life is like.

I think if you and I had been born maybe 50 years earlier than we had been born, our nieces and nephews and grandchildren would have been the same as us.

But we were born when we were born.

My nieces, I don't have any grandchildren, not yet, but my nieces and nephews are

black, Filipino, Dominican, Japanese.

Well, I'm missing a few.

I'm missing

representatives of the United Nations there.

But this is what America is like.

My older brother was married to a Mexican woman who's now deceased.

My twin brother has two children that are half Hispanic.

My wife's family, my gosh, one of her brothers was married to a black woman.

One of her brothers is married to someone from the Philippines.

One of his brothers is married to someone who's Hispanic.

And that's true of everybody now.

You'd have to have a DNA card to establish your actual features.

And the problem is that

there's too many

victimized, oppressed for the number of oppressors and victimizers.

In other words, everybody wants to have a con and say that I am

a victim because of this ancestor or this thing or this thing, and therefore I deserve special attention.

Nowhere, by the way, is this more clear

with Mr.

Momdami.

This is a a guy who is a member of a very successful ethnic group, and I have the greatest admiration from people from India, but they are the most affluent group statistically on per capita income.

And he has been privileged beyond belief with his mother, a documentary multi-millionaire filmmaker, and his father, an endowed professor.

And he has the gumption to say that he's going to target whiter neighborhoods.

Why doesn't he say I'm going to target Indian American neighborhoods and go down the list of affluence till I get to number eight, which is average white per capita income?

And he has the gumption to claim that he's an African American because he grew up in Uganda as a non-African American citizen.

So he tried to game the system.

And it's...

If a guy like that will play the race card in a cynical fashion, in a make-believe fashion, you can see how corrupt the whole thing is.

It's completely corrupt.

And there's not enough

the damage that was done,

if you look at just what Mark Milley did and Lloyd Austin and that Senate testimony when they said that they were going to look at Professor Kendi, they were going to look at systematic racism, systemic racism,

white rage, white privilege, white supremacy, and then timidly, quietly, the Pentagon issued a complete report where they found no such evidence of those accusations about a year and a half later.

I think it was in December.

And my point is, suddenly they said,

wow, we're down 55,000 recruits.

People are obese.

People are drugs.

People are gangs.

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

You targeted a particular demographic that we've talked about has a heroic record disproportionately to their demographics in combat.

And you basically accused them when they were not guilty of anything.

And they didn't want to join.

They wanted no part of you until you got rid of it, and then they came back.

This multi-generational group of people,

basically, from rural, all the statistics show they're from rural America.

And so, my point is that I think we're in an age now that we either have to, do we want to be India, or we want to be Brazil, or we want to be the United States?

Because it doesn't work when you self-identify by your race.

And after the George Floyd thing, I could not believe

where I work and associations that I belong to and friends that I knew.

This was the phenomenon that I detected.

I'm not going to mention institutions, names, boards, or friends, but it was something like this.

Well, did you know that I was suffering all this time?

Did you know that, Victor?

Did you know that?

No, I didn't.

You make a very good salary and you're very happy and

you're married to someone of a different race.

I didn't understand.

Well, did you know what it was like to be this and that?

And I said, Well,

you're in California, the group that's the oppressor is the minority.

Oh, and I said, Don't you think it has to do with economics, maybe?

Not just

do you really think somebody from the Oklahoma diaspora is your enemy because they happen to be white, who's dirt poor?

And so I was shocked about that.

Everybody came forward to cash in on the post George Floyd, I am a victim.

And it was amazing to see all these successful upper-class people who had been fully integrated and happy and we were all moving toward making race incidental, not essential to who we were, suddenly revert in a very retrograde fashion to their tribe.

I had a very good friend, I won't get into it.

that I'm not close to anymore because suddenly they gave me a litany of all the things that were wrong that I had not observed.

I had another person, I won't mention it, but

they were Asian.

I won't mention anything about them.

And they said, did I realize how racist the United States was?

And I said, well, you know, Asians, if you look at the top five ethnic groups, Japanese Americans, Indian Americans, then Japanese, Southeast,

Chinese Americans, Taiwanese, they're all at the top income groups.

Apparently, they feel that this is the best place in the world to be because they are the richest, most successful of all Americans, and they have been subject to only discrimination by DEI.

The DEI people do not want Asians to qualify.

Try being a black guy in China.

Yeah, and

they have sued with the subtext being that you are

prejudicing us so that you can give exemptions for other minority groups because we are deemed too successful.

So anyway, this person was telling me all of this about, and you know, and then we got into Hiroshima, then we got into Nagasaki, the Japanese internment, then we got into, you name it.

And finally, I just said,

oh.

So I'm named after a person who was just from a farm.

They had nothing.

They were poor.

And he was just minding his own business.

He tried to go to college on a scholarship.

He just, and then after Pearl Harbor, suddenly the government says, we need you in the Marine Corps to go fight these people who have been at war for 10 years in China and attacked us and

will kill 15 million Chinese civilians

and are butchering people and beheading them if they catch them prisoner.

And you're going to go over from your little farm all the way across the world and fight them after they attacked you.

and I'm supposed to feel sorry for that, that he somehow did something wrong because he got killed on Okinawa, I'm not going to put up with that.

And it's, I'm not, I think everybody's going to have to just say, you know what?

I don't judge people by the color of their skin.

I can demonstrate that.

I do not judge them on their tribe, their sex, their sexual orientation.

Now you can make anything you want out of that.

And you can call me any name in the world.

It has zero effect.

It reflects on you, the racist.

You're the racist, not me.

And if everybody did that of every different race, it would disappear.

And that

they tried it with Donald Trump.

They said he was a racist, racist, racist.

And he, you know, he knew Sharp and he was friends with Diddy.

He was anybody.

He didn't care.

It was all business to him.

And they kept saying that.

And then all of a sudden,

you know, Mitt Romney is, he's the voice of moderation.

John McCain is the voice of moderation.

The Bushes are the voice of moderation.

And all of a sudden, Donald Trump outpulls them in the election with blacks and Hispanics.

How is that possible?

Maybe he just treated people like people.

Maybe the Wall Street Journal will tell us, Victor.

I can't talk about the Wall Street Journal.

I just read it today, and I had a big article about

really, Jack, really, really, really,

really, really, really,

the European trade deal really really is a bad deal because we didn't get this and the recession and trade war we talked about could still happen New York Times had an article today

poor Europe we'd have to feel how Europe is suffering from this we were mean to Europe and gosh the Wall Street Journal when you as I said like a broken record.

I know people are going to write me and say, Victor, we get it, but I have the utmost respect for the

opinion writers.

I love Holman Jenkins.

Gerald Baker is one of the smartest guys.

I've read

Barton Swame's Swame.

Is that it?

Swame?

Swain.

Don't forget Bill McGurn.

Yeah.

Bill McGurn is wonderful, and the queen of all of them is Kim Strassel.

And they're great.

But when I look at the news and I think,

I always click the name, Jack, and I say to myself, when I click this person's name, well, am I going to find Politico, Politico, Washington Post, or New York Times?

And I'm never wrong, really, that that's who they've imported in their news.

So today, you know, it's, oh, this thing is not going to work, or the immigration was very cruel.

It was so cruel.

It's, it's, I don't quite get it.

I mean, at one point, won't somebody at the Wall Street Journal, won't some blue-chip economist come forward and say, I want to apologize to the American people.

We are in uncharted territory.

I told you in March that we would be in a recession now.

I told you that the stock market would hit bottom by now.

I told you there would be a decrease in job growth.

I told you we'd have rampant stagflation or inflation.

I told you there would be no revenue coming in from tariffs.

I told you,

no, you were wrong.

Just tell us.

Tell us that you were wrong.

They won't.

And

we're in uncharted waters, as we keep saying.

We don't know what the profit level of the Chinese or the Japanese or the Germans was on an American market, but apparently it was more than enough for them to pay a 15% tariff and get this big market and still make a profit without jacking up the price.

We don't know what the effect of foreign investment, but as I said earlier, if Silicon Valley is $9 trillion in market capitalization, then what is $10 or $15 trillion in foreign investment going to do to the economy?

Well, Victor.

Victor,

we are in chartered waters for this podcast, so

we have to close down.

We're not going to close down just yet, but we can take one more time.

We're running late.

Yeah,

one more announcement and then one more question, and we'll get to that question when we come up.

I ran it too long.

I was

doing all these things.

It's the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

You get to do whatever you want.

All right.

We'll be right back.

And we are back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Quick thing, Victor, about the reporters, and then I want to ask you about European Union's War on Farmers, is there are not, we aren't far gone from the days of the front page or Gal Friday when the reporters were, you know, just guys from common America, not the products of the most elite schools.

And I think Columbia School of Journalism.

Yeah, which is,

oh my gosh, they are so freaking left there.

Okay, here's the last question.

Oh, wait, wait.

Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus.

VictorHanson.com, do subscribe.

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VictorHanson.com.

Victor, here's the headline from the European Conservative, great publication, The EU's War on Farmers, quoting from it.

Presumably, it's difficult to understand the importance of dusk till dawn, dirty, hands-on labor, when your only

brush with soil is the potted plants in your climate-controlled office in Brussels.

Yet the decisions drafted by out-of-touch Eurocrats have the power to wipe out not just the livelihoods, but also generations of family legacies.

On a more practical note, the EU's careless treatment of farmers also threatens the continent's food security.

Where does the EU think dinner will come from if Europe's farms have all been driven out of business or forcibly shut down?

There's much more here, Victor, but there are some onerous regulations.

And we've talked about this in the past, real efforts to

actually shut farming down in Europe.

So any thoughts on that as a farmer?

We have a stereotype that,

Europeans are quaint with their little farms.

I can tell you that I went to Europe the last 21 summers in a row and probably if you add off the year maybe 40 times and one of the things I always do is look at farms and I look at the equipment and then I farm myself and I can tell you that if I had a sulfur machine here in California at Gustafusson it was a nightmare.

If I had an Italian simple sulfur machine it was brilliant.

If If you want to get an excavator that lays drip pipe, you go to Holland.

If you want in Napa Valley and you want to have six-foot wide rows, you can get a sophisticated Italian.

My point is, Jack, is that they're very sophisticated farmers, and they're very dependent because labor is so high and so scarce on labor-saving devices.

So, in some ways, there are equals, or even in some areas,

even more advanced mechanically than we are.

And they're importing a lot of top-flight farm equipment.

But my point is, they're very good farmers.

And that means that, as in the United States, about one or two percent of people, the population, we have about three million people here in the United States producing food.

So what happens is nobody knows what they're doing.

They just expect this cheap food to be everywhere.

And in Europe, the same thing.

And then they keep making laws or they keep demonizing, they're trying to tell them what to do, but they don't know what farming's like because nobody does it anymore.

And as someone who's did it full-time for five years, and then for the first 18 years of my life, I worked for my grandfather and parents on the farm, and then

another 15 years I taught school and farm.

I think I've done every task there is on farming, from driving a massey,

I drove a Massey 265, so I was going nuts with a tandem disc.

I put on Paraquat, I put on Defend, I put on diazonon, I put on any kind of,

you talk about herbicides, I won't even get into them.

I did everything there was, pruning, I could prune any, I did everything.

And I can tell you that my admiration for farmers is on match because I did it.

And how these people,

it's the only profession in the world where you do not know what you're going to make, you have no control of your cost, you only know that you're at the bottom of the rung, so that every person, person, your broker can raise the cost,

the supermarket can turn down a load of your fruit, but

you have no options.

Every day you have to pay a premium for insurance or you have to pay this regulation.

And you can have everything wiped out in one moment by the weather.

You have to deal with the weather.

You have to deal with labor.

You have to deal with the bureaucracy, regulation.

And you're the ultimate person that everybody tries to to regulate.

Or you're the one that takes the hit for the farmer.

You know, that when you put 3,000 boxes of packed fruit and you ship them to New York from the Central Valley, and some guy is in a cool truck and he's in Indiana and he tries to go into a motel to relax after driving 10 hours and he forgets to turn on the cooler on

the trailer and all and you it all goes bad, you know whose fault that is?

Yours.

Or do you know that if the broker tells you to pick persimmons, or he tells you to pick pomegranates, and he wants 7,000 flats, and all of a sudden you don't get any notice, and six weeks later he says, you know what?

I decided that wasn't such a good thing at all.

You come and get them.

And I said, what do you mean, come and get them?

Well,

they're gone.

They're rotten.

So that happens to farmers, and that's just, I don't know how they do it.

And my point to all this, Rand, is they should be treated as the most valuable element in our society because they're the ultimate producers of life and food.

And they don't get a lot of credit, and they're self-employed.

They remind me of self-employed truck drivers or 7-Eleven

or guys that are independent landscape.

All of these people are very important to consensual society because they're independent, they're autonomous, they're outspoken.

And they accept risk.

Yeah, they take risk.

risk, and they don't make a lot of money.

I mean, maybe the big corporate ag do, but I really admire them.

And I'm just saying that because this morning I took my morning walk, and there was a neighbor, and he,

I won't get into the description, so in case he's listening, but he was a little overweight.

And he was trying to save money by using old furrow irrigation rather than the drip system because

it was ditch water.

And he looked so sweaty, and he was out there shoveling at 6.15 in the morning.

And my gosh, I thought, I looked at the crop, and I thought, you know, given the price of raisins and given what I see on this vine per vine, you're not going to make any money.

And here you are out here killing yourself so that we can have a sun-made raisin in the supermarket at an affordable price.

I can't stand that.

I can't stand the regulators when they do that.

And Europe especially, they should get down on their knees and beg those farmers to keep doing what they're doing.

Learn more about European farming than American by watching that Clarkson's farm.

And it's a very good thing.

You did too, Jack.

You just got back from the Napa area.

But anybody that drives through those little roads in Napa on either side of 101 or Sebastopol area or Heidelsburg or

any of those areas, and they see that those beautiful vineyards and how advanced and sophisticated they are, and the people that run it, and the winery.

I know a lot of them are outside capital, but are the same thing as on Highway 46 near the Central Coast.

It's amazing what farmers do.

They are so far advanced in their technique and how they produce food, and they don't get a lot of credit.

And the idea of a guy sitting in an office just telling these poor farmers in Holland or Belgium or France, this is what you're going to do, and this is what you can't do, and this, this,

and they're going to take it.

It's just

boggling.

You have given us a great eye-opener here, Victor.

So, hey, we've come to the end.

We're going a little over.

I want to thank folks who

leave comments on all the platforms.

The Victor Davis Hanson Show now appears.

Victor and the great Sammy Wink did a show the other day where they talked about Vietnam, and I just want to read one comment that somebody left on YouTube.

It was from Zephyr0911, who wrote, My parents,

this is in response to your podcast, my parents were Vietnamese refugees after the war and escaped by boat.

My pregnant mom survived at sea for months.

I was born in a refugee camp in Hong Kong.

We entered America legally in Sacramento in 1981, eventually moved to Chicago, where I've lived for 45 years.

My family left Hong Kong with two suitcases and $200.

Only in America could they raise two kids who could contribute to the country and make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

A true rags to riches immigration story.

America is the greatest country that has ever existed.

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

What a great country.

Very nice later.

We were very lucky to get such wonderful refugees that the communists tried to kill off.

Yeah.

Hey, Victor, I want to...

But that's another story we talked about the whole 75 denewant to that war.

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Thanks.

Victor, you've been terrific.

My headphone went out a little bit there.

I apologize for

whatever I was doing.

You've been great, though.

Everything I did here was terrific.

Thanks so much.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

Thanks, folks, for watching.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you for listening, everybody.