Putin’s Dilemma, Rubio’s Cuts, and France at Ebb Tide

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is our Saturday edition, and we do something a little bit different in the middle segment.

Victor talks about history or a historical topic, and we're looking at 20th century great moments in history.

And today, it will be the French colonial era when they lose Algeria and Vietnam.

So, stay with us for that.

But first, we'll start with some stories, news stories, and the most recent ones.

Victor wanted to talk a little bit more about the 50 days given to Putin by President Trump and then also Jeffrey a little bit about Jeffrey Epstein so stay with us and we'll be back with those stories

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So, Victor, I know that you wanted to talk a little bit more about President Putin and his 50 days, so I'll just go ahead and let you take it from here.

Well, Donald Trump issued a warning to Putin that if he did not cease and desist and enter serious negotiations aimed at a ceasefire and a settlement, he was going to up the sanctions to a secondary boycott, which is illegal in the United States.

I grew up in the age of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers.

I lived on a small farm.

We didn't grow table grapes, but he issued a secondary boycott against anybody who bought grapes.

Now, what does that mean?

It wasn't that you were supposed to boycott grapes in Safeway, to take an example.

You were supposed to boycott Safeway for everything.

It was a violation of antitrust or labor relations board.

Anyway, that's what we're doing internationally in the next 50 days, that anybody who buys Russian oil, and by the way, that's European states too.

I don't know if he has a plan to supply Europe with sufficient natural gas and there's going to be enough petroleum in the Middle East, or we're going to do it, but they have been stealthily buying Russian oil and natural gas.

The same people who are supposedly berating us for not doing enough for Ukraine.

When he announced that, the Russian foreign minister and Putin just shrugged and said it's Trump.

Basically, they said it's Trump again, meaning Donald says this, Donald says that, Donald doesn't care.

But in the last 24 or 48 hours, hours, there have been rumors emanating from Moscow that the oligarchic elite and top members of the Russian military are very disturbed because this economy is about 60 to 65 percent munitions related.

It's a wartime economy.

Inflation is about 15 to 20 percent in Russia.

and there are shortages of key drugs, pharmaceuticals, essentials, staples.

And the economy, according to these reports coming out in the news wires, cannot sustain this.

So there will be increased pressure.

So the question is, well,

why didn't Putin make a deal when he had somebody who was willing to negotiate?

Trump didn't say, I'm going to give Ukraine as long as it, whatever it takes, to get back to Donbass or Crimea.

And we all know now that the Europeans, the American Democratic Democratic Party, the Republican Party, everybody has the formula for a ceasefire to stop this slaughter, slaughter, a million and a half casualties.

And it's simply Crimea,

Donbass, they've been Russian for a long, long time.

They're disputed.

They stay Russian.

Putin tells everybody that we would have lost them.

There would have been a war.

We institutionalized that.

That's why I had the special military operation.

And then he says, they would have been in NATO.

I stopped them in NATO.

And then that's it.

And then the only negotiating remaining disagreement is where is the 38th parallel type ceasefire line, the demilitarized zone as we saw in Korea.

Is it where Putin is right now?

Or do you push him back?

And the sticking point is that Putin, in reference to what I just said about dissension among the high ranks, is afraid that if he cuts a deal with Trump, he did not get enough from this special military operation.

Because after all, when he invaded Ukraine, Ukraine was not in NATO, and there were people in NATO themselves saying they didn't want Ukraine, most prominently the United States, to be in NATO.

When he started this, they had occupied Crimea and Donbass, and there was no way militarily that the U.S.

backed forces, NATO forces, the Ukrainian force, would ever get it back.

So basically, he's saying to the Russian oligarchic cadre, I'm 30, 60, here, 90 miles in, that was worth it.

And I don't think they're going to buy that.

But they want it ended.

And so Putin thinks he's on the back of a tiger, like all dictators, and the tiger is starting to scratch him and turn his head and bite him.

And yet he can't get off because if he gets off, he's dead.

Anybody who rides a tiger knows if you jump off, you're dead.

You stay on, you're going to be maimed.

And that's his dilemma.

And we'll see what happens as the pressure mounts.

But I have a feeling that before the 50 days are up, he'll cut a deal.

So you think these secondary sanctions are going to be very effective then, which is, I'm happy about it.

It's dangerous because the people who are selling Putin things

and buying things are not all enemies, at least de ure enemies.

For example, India is buying oil.

If we cut off all trade with India, that's going to be serious.

Turkey is selling them military parts.

If we cut off all trade with NATO, it's going to be serious.

So

it's a very dangerous thing to do a secondary boycott.

But then on the other hand, it's very dangerous for two nuclear powers to be in a proxy war, and that's what's happening.

We should say that we're in a proxy war against Russia, and Russia's in a direct war, to be more specific.

We've never seen anything like this since 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis when Nikita Khrushchev broke the rules of the Cold War and directly aided and armed a proxy to attack the United States.

That is, Castro was going to have nuclear-tipped missiles pointed at us

and

we had nuclear

tipped Atlas missiles from Turkey pointed at Russia.

And so we all said, we don't do this anymore.

You do not use a proxy to existentially threaten your superpower nuclear rival.

So we've got to be very careful about this.

Yeah, it seems like you've got a pit bull in a corner with Putin as well.

But the other good news this week, just to both together, secondary sanctions and the fact that NATO is starting to be drawn in and the Europeans are committing more to this NATO project.

Because when he asks for a ceasefire and he says I've got additional territory in the special military operations people are going to say to them it's not enough milit additional territory to justify and remember these casualties are 70 65 to 70 percent russian so when you say a million and a half casualties you're talking about a million dead maimed russians and they're going to tell him it would have been worth it had you taken kiev and we had all of eastern ukraine from kiev eastward, but you didn't do that.

You humiliated us, number one.

Number two, this additional territory is not enough.

And Vladimir, we had NATO in disarray.

We had them mad at the United States.

We had the United States mad at them.

They were all in dissension.

Now, 23 nations already have met the 2%.

That's a $400 billion increase in munitions.

And it looks like at the end of 2024,

25, all all but Canada and Spain will probably meet the 2%.

Now they promised within five years to get to or five to ten years to get to 5%.

And worse of all, we're on the front lines looking at Finland, which we attacked in 1939 with a million soldiers and could not defeat for six months, four months.

It's got the best artillery, the best army per person in all of NATO.

We've got Poland and extremists mobilizing for war at 3%

GDP, and they've got a huge army.

Germany has promised to have a 500,000 man army.

That'll be interesting, won't it, to see.

Remember the NATO keep America in, Russia out, Germany down.

Well, Germany's going to be really up.

And then, of course, we have Sweden kind of prejudice as a Swedish American, but they have a very sophisticated arms industry.

They make wonderful armored vehicles, and they make the Gripen Euro fighter.

It's pretty good.

It's not as good as the F-35, but it's getting close.

So the other topic that you were looking to talk about was that currently or recently in the Wall Street Journal, Alan Dershowitz wrote an article on Jeffrey Epstein and basically said there's nothing here to see.

And I was wondering your take on that.

Well, Alan Dershowitz, for a little background, was on the jet with Jeffrey Epstein.

One of the underage girls a couple of years ago came forward and made allegations against him that he had been involved with her.

He denied that and then sued her for defamation.

And as I remember, she withdrew that false accusation.

So he is writing as somebody who was Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer and had a perfect legal right to be on that airplane.

And he says,

and this is tricky because he's the attorney of a deceased client, but he says, even though my client is deceased, I honor the attorney-client relationship.

So I can't tell you everything, but I can tell you some things that are in the public domain that I can elaborate on.

One of them is there was never a list of clients of Jeffrey Epstein.

There were never published videos in the bedrooms in the Caribbean or the New York penthouse of prominent people engaging in sex that he knew of.

I don't know how he knows that, but he says that the cameras were surveilling the premises outside or

common-use rooms.

He did say

that there were a number of people who visited these

houses where these things were going on, and they are mentioned by Jeffrey Epstein.

So when Pam Bondi said she had a list, she was surveilling messages, emails, texts, maybe some camera that saw somebody going in a door, and there were mentions of all these people.

But he said there was no list on Jeffrey Epstein's end.

The list is just in

court trials, prosecution, federal government had bits and pieces that they've cobbled together against a case.

Then he said, I think they should release those names and let those people on an individual basis make the case that if you are going to accuse me, as Alan Dershowitz was accused falsely, I'm going to sue you for defamation, but I didn't do anything.

And that would dispel all the conspiracy theories.

As far as his suicide, he says he clearly

committed suicide.

However, he did say there is reasonable doubt about the role of the guards and the video monitors.

And he suggests that it's not impossible and perhaps even likely that Jeffrey Epstein, given where he was going to go as a pedophile into a prison, and we know what that's like, a wealthy white pedophile into the federal or state prison system, that's a death sentence.

He committed suicide and he either paid off or he made arrangements that the guards would not monitor him as he prepared for his suicide.

That was pretty much his disclosures.

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So, Victor, there's a lot of Democrat angst about Rubio

diminishing the State Department or relieving employees of their jobs to the tune of 1,300 of them.

And the Democrat or the liberal wing is saying that he's endangering U.S.

security on doing this.

And I saw a really interesting article by Byron York where he made the point that in the last 14 years or so, 16 years, the State Department has added 23,000 jobs, and all that Marco Rubio is trying to reduce it by is 1,300.

So, I don't, I think his point was I don't think the U.S.

security is being threatened.

Everybody should remember that this has been the left playbook for 50 years, 60 years since the Great Society at least.

There was an aberration during the Clinton years when Bill Clinton, for four years, collaborated with Newt Ginreach, and they were able through moderate tax increases and moderate cuts to balance the budget and hold, that was an aberration.

So, what I'm getting at is what the left does is when they come into power, they turn on the spigots and start hiring en masse for bigger government.

And then, when they go out of power,

these additions in the Pentagon, in the bureaucracy in the Pentagon, in DOJ, in the IRS, and all of these,

especially though in HHS, are so large and they're so accustomed and you have so many people in Washington working, many of them poor people, people of color, for example, in Washington, D.C.

So then the Republicans come in and say we've got to cut, but they're afraid to to undo the entire cuts.

So they start making 10 or 15 or 20 percent cuts, not in the actual agency as it was before the Democrats started adding, but they're starting to cut the level or rate of additional hiring.

And so and that sets off alarm bells.

It's a larger problem.

It's, I don't know how to put it, but it's like Trump's chemotherapy versus Biden's cancer.

And that messaging or that formula works across the board.

Here's what I mean.

It's very easy to let in 12 million people across the border.

All you have to do is say, come in, just go in.

I don't care.

And then you can pose as being very humane.

Look at these poor people from Guatemala.

They've never seen a Western doc.

Come on in.

And then that's the immediate photo op.

The guy in Bisalia, California, that's taking his mother for chemotherapy on Medi-Cal, and she goes into the

oncologist and there's a big line of people from you know out of out of the United States that have never seen seen a doctor, and she doesn't get her care.

Nobody sees that.

The idea of how do you get rid of the

10 million people who came in illegally?

Well, we all love that optics on the left.

The left loved it, all the people coming in.

But the second half of that equation is the chemotherapy to treat that cancer.

It is a cancer to let 12 million people unaudited in the age of COVID to come in with no background check.

But it's very, very hard, just like chemotherapy, to start rounding them all up.

10 here, 100 here.

This country went crazy over 360 people being deported from a pot farm that included child laborers and felons, but that's nothing.

There was 12 million of them.

Not all like that.

So

it's very easy just to tell people there's white privilege, there's white supremacy.

There's white rage in the ranks.

If you don't want to get a COVID shot, even though you've had natural immunity, you've had COVID twice, get out, get out.

It's very hard to go back in and say, we're very sorry.

The white middle class, rural class, largely are the people who were kicked out or forced out by DEI or vaccine.

Would you please come back?

Because you die at twice your numbers in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We need you.

That is a hard sell.

The corrective is much harder than the crime.

So Biden, he just let everybody be happy and just opened the gates.

He borrowed $7 trillion.

It's kind of funny that all these people are yelling at Trump right now.

Big, beautiful bills are going to add $3 trillion over 10 years.

We don't know if that's true or not, but we do know that they borrowed $7 trillion in four years and nobody said a word.

I don't remember the Wall Street Journal writing as many articles about Joe Biden's reckless spending over four years as they have over Trump's in the last six weeks.

I don't remember saying that Joe Biden's going to destroy the country with 9% hyperinflation.

I don't remember the Wall Street Journal saying in their news articles he's going to destroy the country by letting in 10,000 illegal aliens per day.

I do not remember the

Wall Street Journal said it is unsustainable to have a $1.1 trillion deficit every year.

It's unsustainable when you have a North American free trade formula, whether reified or de URI or de facto, to have one partner in the North running up a $63 billion

trade deficit and your partner to the South, who's getting $63 billion in remittances, running up $171 billion.

I didn't hear anybody talk about that.

And now

they're all screaming and yelling because Trump is the chemotherapy and his rhetoric matches the medicine.

He's saying, I don't care.

You know, Adam Schipp is

all of that.

It's very easy to go into the White House under Obama with Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and say, hey, you know, Donald Trump is an existential threat.

I got this guy named Steele that Hillary Clinton's paying through three firewalls.

We got a little thing in there that he pissed, excuse me, everybody, urinated.

That was one of the words they were using using the dossier.

He urinated on bed sheets in a hotel in Moscow with prostitutes.

Can you imagine if we leaked that, what it would do to Donald Trump?

And that's what they did.

It's very, very hard to go back and prove that Clapper and Comey and Brennan conspired to rig an election by producing false information, disseminating it, while Barack Obama knew everything that was going on.

If you look at the chemotherapy, the corrective, then people say, you're vindictive, tit for tat, you're just weaponizing the government.

And that's what they're doing.

And to add to your list,

there's been recent stuff out on the ICE raids in California.

And a lot of the commentators on the right are saying, well, they had very similar ICE raids, even in the Obama and Biden years.

And the left wasn't doing anything then, right?

So there you have it.

There's a whole pot-parie trafficking on the internet of quotes, and they are from Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Bill Clinton,

Barack Obama, and they run the gamut of illegal immigration.

They are, we are a nation of laws, not illegal immigration.

If you come in illegally, it's as simple as that.

You've got to go back.

We are going to deport people.

We are going to beef up ICE.

This was constant

from about 1980 all the way to about 2014.

What changed?

The number of illegal aliens increased, and the radicalization of the universities trained a quarter, a half of the population, and all these settler theory, neo-colonial theory, imperialistic.

So you had a nexus where there was now representatives

of the illegal immigrant community that said, we've got 10 or 12 or 15 million people here and we're a political constituency.

You add into the equation that the radical change to mail and early in balloting in 2020, and we know that there were a lot of ballots that could not be verified.

Put all that together, Schumer, the Clintons, Pelosi, they said, you know what?

This is stupid for a Democrat.

The Democratic Party is going far left.

They're being taught that

this is neocolonialism, that we don't really own America, that Latinos really own it, all that stuff.

And incrementally, insidiously, they flipped.

And they said to themselves, they put their finger up in the air and they said, our old constituency of the white working class with lunch buckets that go to the factory,

there are no factories anymore.

We outsourced it.

We offshored it.

Look at Ohio or look at rural Michigan.

They've all been wiped out.

They're all in fentanyl.

We'll just have a new name for them.

Deplorables, irredeemables, clingers, dregs, chumps, garbage.

That's who they are.

The new constituency are people of color coming across the border.

And let's get as many as we can.

And that was a radical shift.

And the irony of it, because

I believe there is something called divine providence, the more they brought in, the more short-term was their solution.

So, when these people brought in, they were coming from socialist, failed states.

And it looked really great at the beginning.

If you come from Oaxaca or Chiapas or Michokan and you're starving, or you have parasites in your gut, or whatever, and you come to this beautiful new country and you get everything free, and your kids, and maybe you too, if you're young, are going to get affirmative action, DEI,

on the idea that you were, the moment you put your finger or your foot in the United States, you were a victim of white oppression.

However, after that all settles down and you get a job and you start to look and you look at the crime and you look at the

radical abortion policies and you look at DEI for other groups other than yourselves and then the Latino community says half these people aren't even from Spanish-speaking countries or from Asia or Africa.

We have no allegiance allegiance to you put all that in a mix, they're overrunning our social services, people start to get conservative.

So the Democratic Party has been the best description of the border is the Democratic Party has deliberately been importing voters with assurity that they were going to vote left-wing

forever.

And the fact is, they only vote left-wing for about 20 years, and then they flip and go conservative.

And that's why the majority of Hispanic men voted for Donald Trump and almost 50-50 Hispanic.

And they had huge losses among Asians and among blacks.

And I don't think they're going to get them back.

That's what this is all about.

The ICE raids, the screaming and yelling,

Hikem Jeffries with a bat, Karen Bass giving two.

The whole subtext is we've got to get the Hispanic vote back for the midterm so we can impeach Trump.

And we can't can't do it unless we convince the Latino people they are victims of a gulag or Nazis.

That is a grim tale you weave, Victor, but it's probably, yes, very true.

So let's go ahead and take a break and then come back to talk about the French colonial, dismantling of the French colonial empire.

At least it's two big jewels: Algeria and the Indo-Sheen or the Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia region.

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

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

If you want to find Victor on social media, you can find him at X.

His handle is at VD Hanson.

And he's on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

So come join him there if you are interested.

And that's your medium of getting news.

So Victor, I'm excited to hear your take on the fall of Algeria for France and Vietnam, as that's part of the post-World War II experience, this dismantling of empires, especially the French and the British.

But Lord, look at it.

The French were

in rivalry with the British Empire.

And the Germans almost went to war over North Africa.

They had no colonial presence.

But generally, with the exception of the French and British, the colonial empires were proximate to poor European states.

What do I mean by that?

So Libya was right across the Mediterranean from Italy, and it was an Italian colony.

And Spanish Morocco or Mauritania,

right across from Spain, was an imperial protectorate or colony.

In the case of France, though, they made the argument, they were trying to make the argument that they were going to bring a holistic culture,

the cuisine, the life of France, the Napoleonic glory, and that way

and the British were more, we're going to get railroads and administration and create British efficiency and make this colonial system work in India, in Egypt, in Africa.

This whole system blew up in World War II

because

the Germans and the Japanese

and the Italians were very clever, even though they were racist, all racist nations.

They said to these third world colonial subjects, we're going to try to liberate you.

So the Grand Mufti, for example, who hated Jews and was

one of the Holocaust was a German, basically a German agent in what is now in the West Bank in Jerusalem.

And you could make the argument that the Germans tried to take over Iraq and its oil from Britain.

Same thing with Iran.

And so the war, the second part of the war was, once the Allies were victorious,

They had made a trap for themselves, a contradiction.

They had put themselves in a bind because the four freedom, freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom to vote, etc.

The Atlantic Charter was so idealistic.

Remember that they made allowances for the Soviet Union, which was a criminal state.

But my point is that

during the war,

as the Allies got successful,

the colonial people said,

well, you guys were liberating everybody in Europe from the yoke, liberate us.

And so almost immediately,

the French were weaker as far as their ability to maintain colonies.

So, for example,

most of Indonesia was taken over by the Japanese during World War II.

And why was that?

Because the Vichy government, let's be frank, France ceased to exist about June 22nd of 1940, and the colonies had no mother ship, just like the Dutch ceased to exist and the Dutch East Indies had no and the Japanese absorbed that.

When the Japanese were defended, then there was a defeated, there was a vacuum.

So most of Indochina was freed or was run by the Japanese.

And then France tried to reassert control that the Vichy French had lost.

That was a losing argument because you were saying,

well,

we were on the side of the Nazis, the Vichy's, and then Japan kicked us out, and now now we're kicking the Japanese out, and we want to bring back French glory and all this, and it didn't work very well.

So there was a war in Vietnam, essentially, from 1946 or 2007

all the way to 1954.

And it started out at first

that

the

Japanese in 1946, there were still Japanese there, and there was a lot of goodwill toward the new French government, not the Vichy's.

And

they had alliances.

Remember,

there was no such thing as South or North Vietnam.

It was all Vietnam.

And the problem was

that under

the Yalta Conference, they had invited the Soviet Union into Asia, which had not wanted to do it.

Said, no, no, no, no, that's your sphere.

We want to concentrate on Europe, and that's where the money is, that's where the war is, that's where the Nazis are.

We're not going to help you.

As soon as the Nazis were defeated, May 9th and 10th, the Soviet Union said, ah,

all these places are closer to our border, Korea, Vietnam.

And then they overthrew Shang Kai-shek.

By 1949, Mao was in control.

So you started to get Chinese advisors, Russian arms pouring into Vietnam, pouring into Korea to try to create a Soviet puppet state or a Chinese puppet state.

And the French then tried to stop that.

So from 46

to 1954, they thought they could do it.

And they did it pretty well from 46 to about 50.

And then certain things started to happen.

One is that that generation that Patton and the Third Army had armed,

Tassignet and Leclerc,

all of those great generals, some of them were aging, some got killed, but the World War II veterans

were

spread pretty thin all over Vietnam.

It wasn't us fighting to save Vietnam, huge juggernaut.

It was a thinly deployed French force trying to cover all of Vietnam, north and south.

And

a couple of things happened at the same time.

In 1950, the Korean War broke out, and France gave troops as part of the UN mission.

And so the world's attention turned to Korea, not to the French effort.

The French, de Gaulle, came to Ike and said, if you don't give us help, we're going to lose this war.

And we need troops, we need air support.

The Russians are doing it, the Chinese, your credibility.

And Ike said, we will give you some money and a little bit of logic.

We're not going to get involved in Vietnam.

It's just you're a colonial power.

We've never been a colonial power.

We're not going to be on the side of colonials.

That's what we said.

And after that, after the Korean Korean War broke out, if you look at 51, 52, 53, the French were gradually losing control as Ho Chi Minh and General Jiap got all of this aid and sophisticated arms, World War II arms, from China and Russia.

So in 1954, way up north, way up in North Vietnam, near the Chinese border, at

Denh Binh Phu, the French thought that they were going to make a caisson.

They were going to to go into a kind of an

upward plane, put all their troops there, and then all of the North Vietnamese and Chinese advisors would

coalesce, and then they would have World War II planes and artillery.

And they didn't realize that the North Vietnamese had Soviet artillery, which was better than their own.

They were outnumbered 10 to 1.

They fought heroically.

They killed 10 North Vietnamese for every Frenchman.

They were wiped out and surrendered.

I think think 11,000 were captured.

It was a disaster.

And after that, de Gaulle would cede,

get out of Vietnam, and then there was a UN agreement that divided the country between a communist country.

Most people in North Vietnamese had any sense fled southward.

And then the war started to take the south.

And at that point, by 1957, 58, 59, we were sending advisors in to arm the Diem government.

Catholic, pro-American, pro-Western, dictatorial, perhaps.

The problem with all this is the real thing that mattered was Algeria.

It was very different.

It was right next to France.

Morocco had not been a problem.

They had a kingdom.

It was stable.

The French gradually allowed the king of Morocco to take place.

He had been involved in World War II.

It was stable.

But Algeria was very different because there was over a million Frenchmen.

And

they had Napa Valley-like vineyards.

They controlled Algiers, the major cities.

In some of the cities, there was as much as 30 or 40% French, the Pied Noise,

and the Dark Feet, I guess it is, or Night Feet, or whatever it's called.

And

they were some of the toughest French people in the world.

A lot of them were military veterans from the Free French forces.

Some of them had been in the Mackis,

the resistance, and they did not want to give up 150 years of French development.

So there was an effort they thought they were outnumbered about nine to one, 10 million or nine

million to a million point three or something French, but they were right next to France.

And so that war, the battle for Algiers, went from 1956 to 1962.

And the French actually,

if you look at some of the documentaries, the Battle of

Algiers,

they did pretty well.

And some of the most famous French Camus was an Algerian.

There was a lot, some of the intellectuals and the most prominent people in France were Algerians.

But they didn't say they were Algerians.

They were the same.

And they were subject to discrimination, too, because they,

and

the other thing was, there was wealth in Algeria that was comparable to France because of the development of vineyards and industry.

And so there was a big discussion whether they should carve out a Mediterranean state.

That is, take the million and a half people, combine them, maybe 50 to 80 miles, and then make a purely French state.

But at this time, the Fourth and what would be the Fifth Republics were pretty much socialist.

And there was so much opposition.

of being a colonial power after World War II.

They'd seen what was going on in Vietnam.

They saw that that they had colonial wars in some places in Africa, and the British were giving up India.

So there was an idea to get out.

And then they made a fatal mistake, and they said, when we get out,

people who

have been Algerian can apply for French citizenship,

loyal Algerians, etc.

So basically,

a lot of French thought they could stay under this revolutionary, and it became almost almost an outright Stalinist state.

So they fled.

All of that wealth was confiscated.

It was destroyed under socialism.

They went into France.

They were very embittered.

They formed a lot of the right-wing parties.

There were attempts to kill de Gaulle for that.

They hated de Gaulle for selling them out.

Camus was very sophisticated.

You have people like Sartre,

who was pro-revolution and all that stuff, but Camus tried to point out, he was trying to find find a midway position.

He was actually advising the de Gaulle government.

Is there a way that we could allow them to be a semi-protectorate?

Could it be something like Greenland versus Denmark?

Something like that.

And there was no solution.

And what we see today in France with a large number, 16% of the population are North African Muslims, and increasingly from the Middle East, but mostly from the Maghrib,

comes from that colonial legacy.

It's sort of like the British legacy in the Caribbean with Jamaicans coming.

And it's very funny.

There's two ways to look at that to finish the colonial wars.

One is

that this is their just desserts,

that

they tried to colonize

indigenous people in their territories.

And for all the railroads they build and industry and communications and ports and airports, they basically thought they were doing it not to create civilization as they claimed, but to make money.

I think now recent scholarship shows that it was not a money-making deal, that the colonies cost more than they did.

So there's a revisionist study of colonialism that said actually it was naive and misguided, do the right thing, Kipling stuff.

And it didn't make economic sense.

It didn't help the mother country.

And that's one thing, that the people from these colonies who migrated back to Europe, into the Netherlands, into France, into Italy, but especially into England and France, they got what they deserve, kind of Schadenfreude.

The other is this is hypocritical.

Once you make the argument that it's wrong for people from a different country to go into your country and try to dominate it and keep their own culture and impress it on the Algerians, on the Vietnamese, then it's very ironic that those same people want to come back to the mother country, not assimilate, not and impress their culture.

And instead of using guns and cannon, they want to use demography and fertility to take over your country.

That's the other view.

And so it's a mess.

And the only thing you can say about the United States, except for the Philippines, it really was never a colonial power.

All right, Victor, so let's go ahead and take a break, and then we'll come back to talk a little bit about Rasmussen polls.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor is on YouTube and on X, sorry, and on Rumble.

And so, you can find him there for these video podcasts.

So, Victor, we had a Rasmussen poll on the Russian collusion hoax and to what extent people believed it or not.

And some of it was no surprise.

So, for example, 69% of liberal voters still believe the Russian hoax is true, only 27% of conservatives, and 45% of moderates.

And that did not surprise me, but then there were other questions.

53%

of voters broadly said the hoax was greater than Watergate.

53%.

And then 57% of voters said the Russian hoax instigators should be prosecuted.

And my thought was this.

That seems very low.

It's only 53 and 57%.

And so this Russian hoax for the Democrats, it still worked.

It worked in the sense that it had turned the minds of 47 and 43% of the people still believe things about it.

I believe in this sense: that

after Robert Mueller, for 22 months and $40 million, found that Donald Trump did not collude with the Russians, his left-wing legal team inserted into that report, well, the Russians were trying to interfere with it.

Yes, they were.

The Chinese were too, on behalf of Hillary Clinton and behalf of Joe Biden.

They did.

They tried to get into everything.

The Russians did that as a chaotic stuff.

I think you could make the argument the last person that the Russian wanted was Donald Trump, because you can say he was Putin's puppet, but if you look at what he did to the Russians, get out of a missile deal, sanction oligarchs, send offensive arms to Ukraine, wipe out a whole battalion of the Wagner group in Syria.

etc., etc., etc.

Tell the Germans to stop Nordstream.

He was a lot tougher than any Biden or Obama presidency.

But the point I'm making is

the Russians and the Chinese always try to get interference.

So they just took that fact and said, well, they tried to collude.

And maybe or maybe not Donald Trump was involved.

They found no evidence that he was.

But that wasn't the point of the Mueller investigation.

The point of the Mueller investigation was to eat up 22 months of Donald Trump's first term, and it worked perfectly.

And note the moment that it ended,

it was about 30 days later that Alexander Vinman, a leftist, was listening to a classified phone call with a president of the United States to Mr.

Zelensky, and he leaked that call against the law to Eric Saramella, who never heard a word.

And then he hid his own involvement.

And Saramella then said, I am a whistleblower.

You can't identify me.

And they both went to Adam's ship and organized an impeachment writ

that Donald Trump was interfering in the internal affairs of Ukraine.

No one ever said, well, I guess Devin Nunes surely did.

He asked point blank, Mr.

Vinman, would you tell me who you called?

He said, I can't do it.

I can't do it.

He's a whistleblower.

So in other words,

you're not the whistleblower.

So the person who's the whistleblower had no knowledge of the call.

How do you find out anything about it?

Except you violated violated the law by leaking it.

And he became a hero.

Then Adam Schiff lied under oath, and he said that he had no knowledge of either one of these people, and he was the one who cooked it up.

And then he kept saying Trump was involved.

That's why Trump is so angry at Adam Schiff, because he lied, lied, lied, and he was the engineer of the second impeachment.

And so, what was Russian collusion?

It was Hillary Clinton taking an old dossier, an old washed-up British spy from some Republican anti-Trumpers and paying him to reboot it and get Dashinko and all these people and write this stupid dossier.

It was full of lies.

There's a consul, a Russian consul in Miami, and there's this and that.

And

that crazy

Cohen that was Trump's somewhat lawyer was supposed to be in, you know, abroad negotiating.

He wasn't.

Even that liar had to admit that he wasn't.

And then to hide it, so Hillary said to the DNC, you can use my campaign money allotment.

The DNC said to Perkins Coe, you guys handle it.

Perkins-Coey said to Fusion GPS, you deal with and you transfer the money.

And there was no way to find out that Hillary Clinton was behind the whole thing, especially when she said, collusion, collusion, I'm in the resistance.

Trump

and so it wasn't just that they tried tried to throw an election.

It was they tried to destroy administration, and it worked.

Yes, it worked.

And today, these misguided people like Joe Scarborough or Rachel Maddow

or

any of these people that are on television, on MSNBC, CNN, or the network, did any of them apologize?

No.

Not one person said, we said that Donald Trump was a Russian phone.

Did Clapper apologize?

No.

Did Brennan apologize?

No.

Did Comey apologize?

No.

Comey looked up to Donald Trump and said, you are not the object of an investigation about collusion.

I can guarantee you that.

And then he went back and said, let's press ahead with Operation Crossfire Hurricane.

So he was completely lying to Donald Trump.

And then he went outside.

As soon as he talked with him, he, what did he say, memorialized it on an FBI device, and then he used it as insurance policy, and then he leaked it to the New York Times via a third party.

He's a total scoundrel.

Yes, and just the way the question is asked, was it worse than Watergate?

I think that Americans will all agree, and you'll get a huge percentage of people that Watergate was bad and was corrupt.

And

your vote would be 80, 90%.

But here with Russian collusion,

it's only 53%

worse than Watergate.

And it was a lot worse than Watergate.

It's times worse than Watergate.

Yeah, but the people don't know that.

That's a lot of reasons.

Watergate was about a president not telling the truth about a minor break-in that he didn't know about or authorize.

Once he knew about it, he felt he couldn't come clean and he was therefore culpable.

The cover-up.

This was about

falsely trying to swing an entire election and getting the FBI, not on the cover-up, but on the actual crime.

The FBI looked at that dossier and said to Steele, whoever's paying you, we will pay you a million dollars if you can verify that.

He couldn't.

They were involved.

The CIA, under Brennan, was taking that dossier material and presenting it as valid intelligence to Barack Obama so that he would spread it with Bruce Orr and James A.

Baker, the FBI, and James Comey, Baker, and Clapper were doing this to throw an election.

The second thing, why it was much more dangerous, it involved a nuclear rival of the United States.

Russia is culpable 100%, but one thing it did not do was try to throw the election by deliberately working with Donald Trump.

Maybe it tried to screw up the election like the Chinese, like it does everything, but it did not pay Donald Trump or Manafort or any of these people to beat Hillary Clinton because he was their.

And so when you start to tamper with a nuclear rival and you make these charges against it, even if it's a rogue, horrific regime, you are rising tensions.

It's going to rise.

And that was one of the reasons that eventually we had no credibility.

For the one time in his life, Putin was probably right when he said, I don't know what's going on.

I mean, basically, he said, we all have espionage, but we did not create this dossier.

And then we had this,

we went from Russian reset, Russian reset, we're Democrats, we're Hillary Clinton, our ambassador in Russia and Moscow.

We're going to make it a democracy.

We're going to make Yelsinism permanent.

We're going to get rid of Putin.

We're going to have a democracy.

And then all of a sudden, it's, oh, we hate the Russians.

They're horrible people because they support Donald Trump.

And that was horrible what they did.

Adam Schiff.

So everybody, I know that Donald Trump is wildly using capital letters, exclamation marks, shifty shift.

Adam Schiff is this.

He's a mortgage fraud.

Yes, yes.

Maybe that's loose talk, but he has a legitimate grievance.

And that is these people did it.

two times at least.

They did it in 2016 and the same cast of characters, most of them came back in 2020, and this time it was Russia, Russia, Russia laptop disinformation.

They said to themselves, we ate up 22 months of his first term.

It worked.

So, you know what?

He's got this laptop with all this pornography on it, all these admissions of Mr.

Big Guy, Mr.

10%,

that Joe Biden and the whole family's a crook.

Hunter says, I paid the bills for Joe.

He doesn't appreciate me.

This family doesn't basically appreciate that I'm shaking down foreign governments and making them rich.

And they thought, oh my God,

what are we going to do?

We have the last debate coming up.

I know what we do.

Hey, Anthony Blinken.

He wasn't Secretary of State then.

He was a campaign hack.

Could you call up,

remember Mike Morrell?

He was CIA director for a while.

Call him up.

And say that we need to round up every fraudulent, paid-off person we can that's a retired intelligence authority.

Half of them probably weren't.

They were still secretly contracting with the CIA.

But they all signed that letter.

Clapper, Brennan, Moral, Leon Panetta.

Who?

And then what did Biden do in the debate?

You're a liar, Donald Trump.

51.

He didn't even get the 51.

50 authorities said this, and they said that.

And

that was the end of it.

And then they, you know, a conservative group, just because it's conservative, doesn't mean it's inaccurate.

I think it was called Technometrica, ran a poll and 79% said, hey, if we had known that

the Biden campaign made up all this and planted all these lies and rounded up these 51 people to lie,

so everybody said, why is Trump now taking their security clearances?

First of all, they should have never had them.

If they're really out of government, that many people, but they deserve what they got.

I don't know why they're not legitimately investigated for deliberate.

I mean, if you have, you can sue the media and they will settle.

Why would those 51 people on the eve of debate, on an eve of an election, promulgate a fake letter that was demonstrably untrue and think they could get away with it by saying has all the earmarks of Russian information?

They should all go after them.

Yeah, and those things seem to still be working, I guess.

Perhaps in the broader span of history, as we get further along, they'll be understood as

similar, though, as we understand Watergate.

I mean, I pretty much

people are agreed.

I know it is much worse than Watergate, but the fact is that the people are still 47%, 48%, 49%

thinking that the Democrats have been honest with them, and that's not true.

That's because

75% of the Democrats believe this, and that makes the country about 48%, and about 15%, there's got to remember there's about 15% are never Trumpers.

And this dossier did not, originally the form

was hired by a Republican donor to destroy Trump.

You've got to remember that

you could make the argument that people like Bill Crystal or Charles Sykes or the whole Bulwark crowd or David Frum

or John Bolt, they hate Trump more than the left because in their way of thinking, Trump was the one that disconnected them or severed their conservative money streams.

And they found out when they woke up and they bet on the wrong horse, they had no speaking fees, they had no book big contracts, they had no private phone numbers to the White House, they had no job for their kid, nothing, nothing.

And they blame Donald Trump for that.

Well, Sammy's not going to be happy until it is treated like Watergate is treated these days.

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So, Victor, let's go ahead then and turn to the Education Department.

There are blue states that are suing the federal government for $6 billion in education grants.

and there's two things about education and man

is doing cuts just like Rubio only she's cutting half the education department and the Supreme Court upheld her right to do that my observation is this that the left is trying to prevent all of these things the government from being changed and cut back as though all of these things are entitlements even grants and that's what really is disturbing I think for all of us.

Because how are you going to cut back and reduce the deficit and debt if the left sees everything as an entitlement?

Your thoughts?

Well,

this was, as I remember, Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter added the Department of Education and I think the Department of Energy.

So you have to ask yourselves, once we made this huge federal bureaucracy and we redefined public education and said it's no longer the sole domain or even the primary domain of the states.

But we're going to have federal directives.

This is where we got all of this interference and Title IX, all of this stuff.

The federal government could issue edicts, and if the schools or even college did not obey them, then they could go in and cut off funds.

But the real question is, let's say from 1980 when it was created to 2025, we've had 45 years of it.

So let's just say this.

Oh, we got, we finally went into these backward places like the San Joaquin Valley where Victor went to school at Selma High School.

And he didn't have the same opportunities as kids in Carmel or La Jolla.

So we were going to regular, we were going to make federal mandates so that all these teachers had to be trained in a certain way and they had to have a certain curriculum and we would oversee it.

So guys like Victor at Selma High School would have a competitive advantage.

No, Selma High School, I can guarantee you, has lower SAT scores for those who take it.

And the general level of knowledge is much lower after 45 years.

I can tell you that if you look at the rankings of Americans abroad in math, science, analytics,

our global ranking has gone down.

Now, you can say there was, oh, well, we have 50 million people who came into the United States.

16%, they don't all speak English.

27%, okay, okay, but the fact is it didn't remedy it.

It made things worse.

Now, so the question is, why?

What was it doing?

Was it interested in ensuring that kids in the inner city were going to have a competitive parody with kids in preps?

No.

It was, let's promote the teachers' union.

Let's promote affirmative action.

Let's promote a culturalist, a cultural Marxism socialism.

Let's get therapeutic things.

Let's get gay stuff.

Let's get all of these mandates.

And we're going to determine

what textbooks are going to be.

It was an intrusion to

local education.

Do you really think some person with an EDD in Washington knows better what's going in southwest Fresno County than a principal of a school?

He knows what's wrong.

She knows what's wrong.

So it has a a record of failure.

And so what Donald Trump is doing, Ronald Reagan said he wanted to get rid of the Department of Energy and the Department of Education.

And

we can remember in almost every Democratic, Republican primary debate, almost everyone since 1988, it was all a contest.

Republicans got up there and they said, I'm going to cut energy.

No, I'm going to cut HHS.

No, I'm going to cut education.

They were all arguing.

It was like, who can brag about and then we get a guy that finally does it.

Let's just go back to the nominees.

Would in 19, let's say,

excuse me, 2016, would any of the primary people have cut had they won, tried to?

Trump tried to in 2017.

I don't think so.

Ron DeSantis is the only other Republican, I think, that would have done it.

But if you go back to when Obama was elected in the election, would Mitt Romney have cut?

No.

He wouldn't have done it.

He wouldn't have even dared do it.

In 2000,

that was 2012.

In 2008, would McCain have done it?

No.

George Bush had a perfect chance after 2004.

Would he have done it?

No.

Would he have done it after 2000?

No.

Would George H.W.

have done it in

1988, 9 when he took over when he won the election?

No.

Would Ronald Reagan, he tried, he couldn't do it.

So my point is no Republican would ever do it, and they all said they would, or that it would be a good thing.

Now, he's actually doing it, and everybody's going hysterical.

But it has no record of success.

It has a lot of damage.

And

most of the stuff that the federal government does from the Department of Education is simply

We can't address the fundamental problem of inequality in education because it depends on not racism, but culture and single-parent families and illegitimacy.

And if we were to address that, we would be considered racist or intrusive, and we don't want to suggest your culture needs to do this or that culture needs to do this or everybody should have English only.

And that was therapeutic, and it didn't help the people at all.

It made it worse.

And then this is just the K through 12.

You're talking about higher education.

Does anybody believe right now that if I took a Stanford graduate and I graduated with a PhD from Stanford in 1980

and I took a classics major, to take one example, because I taught classics as a graduate student, I can guarantee you that the students that I had at Stanford in 1980 in my class in Greek, I taught intensive Greek, they were 10 times better than the students right now that are graduating from Stanford in classics, many of whom don't know a word of Greek.

And that was true across the curriculum.

And so did the Department of Education have anything?

No, they basically greenlighted anything these people wanted to do.

Did they stop anti-sinema?

No.

Did they ensure that speakers were not harassed and hit and roughed up?

No.

Did the Department of Education come in and said,

Why are you charging 60%?

You don't need all this equipment, or you don't really have it all.

Why not just do 15 like private foundations?

No.

Did they say, well, wait a minute, we oversee campuses and you say it's a theme house, but 99% of your La Raza theme house is Hispanic.

You don't have any so-called other races here.

You say that graduations are auxiliary, but

I've gone to the Chicano graduation.

I didn't see any white faces at the graduation.

If I did see white faces, they were basically white people that were with a Hispanic.

last name from Argentina or somewhere or people of mixed heritage.

But the point was the whole intention of all this was racist.

It was to champion a particular tribe or race.

And that was contrary to the Supreme Court and civil rights.

Did the Department of Education?

No.

It has no records of sex anywhere.

So to get rid of it is not just to save multi-billions of dollars, but to free up and liberate these individual states.

to do things.

And does anybody think that the backward South and its racist heritage will be injurious to people in Florida, in Texas, versus Minneapolis?

You really think that kids are going to get a worse education in Orlando than they are in Minneapolis?

I don't think so.

It's going to be a lot more racist in Minneapolis.

Well, Victor, I know that you're up against a hard stop here, so this will be the end of our show.

And we'd like to thank everybody for joining us on this Saturday edition.

And we hope you enjoyed it.

And we're glad to have the entire audience.

And thank you, Victor, for all your wisdom.

And thank you.

I'll be out of the hotel and back home next time I see you all.

Thank you for listening.

Awesome.

And watching.

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