Call Me Daddy: Trump Takes on the World
Join Victor Davis Hanson and host Sami Winc in this Friday news roundup as they look at the tragic storm in Texas, the Democratic Party losing on immigration and ICE, Trump's approach to foreign affairs, the political messaging of the new Superman movie, and more.
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Speaker 3 Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. This is our Friday news roundup, and there is lots of news this week.
Speaker 3 Trump has been making news every week, all the time, anytime, as everybody knows.
Speaker 3 He did have a cabinet meeting, but we do want to look at Zoron Mondami first, and then also the storm in Texas that took more than 100 lives.
Speaker 3 So stay with us, and we'll be right back after these messages.
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Speaker 3 Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.
Speaker 3 Victor is the Martin and Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.
Speaker 3
You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com. Please come join us there.
The name of the website is The Blade of Perseus, and it does have all of Victor's works there.
Speaker 3
It is his official website, and there are links to his books as well. So please come join us.
So, Victor, I know know that there's been a lot of news out on Zoran Mandami.
Speaker 3 The things I picked up on this week that I thought were new was that he visited a mosque after the Iman in the mosque said that Israel should be annihilated.
Speaker 3 And then he has also threatened that he would arrest Netanyahu if Netanyahu came to New York City.
Speaker 7 The thing to keep in mind about him is He is a leftist communist. And I use that term very carefully because he did say in Marxist terminology that he wants to seize the means of production.
Speaker 7
I don't know what that means: Tesla dealerships, Trump towers. So that's not hyperbole.
But the problem with him is he is a child of privilege.
Speaker 7 As we pointed out before, when he said he wanted to go after richer, wider neighborhoods, he's also not that bright. He's glib, but not that bright.
Speaker 7 Because everybody knows when you look at statistical analyses of
Speaker 7 per family capital income, Indian Americans, i.e., him, the mom Danis, are the richest of all.
Speaker 7 But now that he's in the spotlight, everything he's posted, so he talked about an ISIS member who was unfairly treated by the United States. He said
Speaker 7 he apparently filled out applications where he said he was African American. He was trying to game the system just because he's an Indian American who happened to be born in Uganda.
Speaker 7
He thought that would work. It didn't work.
He didn't have great sat scores.
Speaker 7 We're told he was a genius.
Speaker 7 In addition to that,
Speaker 7
he didn't make it, but he trafficked in a video making fun of Hanukkah. He had all of these Indian actors, and it was like a minstrel show.
Can you imagine if anybody did that about Ramadan?
Speaker 7 They would be, he would be outraged. And now we learned that he's got a, he had a,
Speaker 7 he also trafficked in photos where people were flipping the bird at the Columbus statue.
Speaker 7 So if you think about it, in the last two weeks, he has managed to offend three ethnic groups that are prominent in New York.
Speaker 7 Blacks by trying to piggyback onto affirmative action when he wasn't qualified. Jews by making fun of their most solemn religious festivity.
Speaker 7
And Italian Americans make about 8 to 10 percent by basically saying F Columbus. And he's not done yet because he has a whole record.
And he supported people who were anti-American terrorists.
Speaker 7 So the question again is Curtis Silwa and
Speaker 7 washed up Cuomo, are they going to stay in the race and divide the conservative vote? If you look at the primary totals of Cuomo, Silwa, and Eric Adams,
Speaker 7
there's enough to beat him by 10 points. I don't like Eric Adams.
I think he was a racist. He said when he was a policeman that only he could go after the crackers.
He was hard left.
Speaker 7 And then when he found out his city was being bankrupt by the Biden immigration policies and the transference of illegal immigration people to New York, then he flipped.
Speaker 7 And when he flipped against the left, then suddenly they brought out of the wilderness indictments. He probably
Speaker 7 was culpable of getting Turkish government money, but it wouldn't have ever happened had he not crossed them. But he's the only chance that they have to stop this Marxist.
Speaker 7 A lot of you on the conservative side, you feel like this is good because they get what they deserve.
Speaker 7 It's only going to discredit the democratic label. That's partly true, but New York is an iconic city, and it's an all-American city, and you don't want it going down the tubes from this faker.
Speaker 7
So we'll see what happens. But each day we learn more about Mr.
Imam Dhani, and it's not good.
Speaker 7
He's one of these people like Barack Obama. His father got everything from the government.
He came over here and he was a leftist from Kenya.
Speaker 7
And the same thing with Obama, you know, apology to her, all that. And then we get Kamala Harris.
Her father came from Jamaica. He was a Marxist professor.
He got everything, affirmative action.
Speaker 7
And then Kamala is leftist and very critical. And then we have the, I don't even need to get into the Ilan Omar family.
All the scholarships and special deference that she got.
Speaker 7 And I could expand that list, but what you're seeing with Mom Dami is a pattern where people from, let's be candid, third world hellholes, they want to get out. And the U.S.
Speaker 7 government in its DEI or its magnanimity offers them ways out. They come over here.
Speaker 7 They enjoy all of the benefits of being a non-white minority in America, whether it's a Jamaican economics professor, Mr.
Speaker 7 Harris, or whether it is Mom Dami's parents, filmmakers, and his father is a left-wing Middle East studies professor at Columbia, or Obama's father from Africa.
Speaker 7 And then their children, the second generation, tend to be very critical and hard left of America. But America is the antithesis of where they came from.
Speaker 7 So you would think that they would appreciate, said, oh my gosh,
Speaker 7
I got special preference. I didn't even grow up in America.
My kids, and they don't. And
Speaker 7 it's a very important thing. It's
Speaker 7 about human nature that so many people look at
Speaker 7 magnanimity as weakness to be exploited and not to be respected and returned in kind.
Speaker 3 Yeah, that would take a little bit too much elevated thought, Victor, for those people that you just mentioned.
Speaker 3
So let's move on to the big tragedy this week: the storm in Texas that flooded the Guadalupe River. More than 100 people died.
The river rose 26 feet in three-quarters of an hour in the dead of night.
Speaker 3 And so a lot of kids in a camp lost their lives and other people as well. And I was wondering your thoughts on the news on this real tragedy here.
Speaker 7 Well, there's the truth.
Speaker 3 Yeah.
Speaker 7
And then there's the media constructs. Not just, I could say the left-wing or Democrat.
It's not. It's the media, too.
So the truth is that the National Weather Service and NOAA
Speaker 7 gave alerts twenty-four, thirty-six hours, if you look at their maps and you read their alerts, flash flood warning, dangerous conditions.
Speaker 7 I don't know why people who had these camps on the river did not evacuate, because I think they thought that when they had flash floods in the past, the river went up 10 or 12 feet.
Speaker 7 Nobody had ever seen this in 100 years. And when you see those time elapsed photographs where you see a bridge that's several, I mean,
Speaker 7 way, way above the river, and then within four or five hours, there's water coming over it.
Speaker 7 And so there was no, if you weren't going to evacuate, then you weren't going to save a lot of people. And I think people just thought, you know, I'm here out in Central California.
Speaker 7 We get NOAA alerts all the time about spring storms, lightning, dangerous.
Speaker 7
They'll say possible tornado conditions. It's very rare here, so they don't take it seriously.
But
Speaker 7 that's the reality.
Speaker 7 If it was preventable, it was only the people who run the camps might have taken more seriously the clear weather alerts. But for the left, it was a Rahm, Emmanuel,
Speaker 7 never let a great crisis go to waste. So immediately they jumped in,
Speaker 7
and they had three themes. on social media.
One theme was, you deny global warming. This is what you get, you Texans.
Speaker 7 Well, that's kind of weird because Texas has one of the largest solar and wind grids in the country, and they've really paid for it.
Speaker 7
And Austin's probably one of the most liberal cities in the United States. But the point I'm making is there's no evidence that this was global warming.
It was, if you look at
Speaker 7
1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, you had an incident in 1987, but nothing like this. So it's a once-in-a-century phenomenon.
And that happens.
Speaker 7
The second thing the left did immediately was: this was nemesis. You got what you deserve.
You're cutting everything, and we're kind of happy this happened. I'm not exaggerating.
Speaker 7 You had a pediatrician that went on social media and said, basically, they get what they deserve.
Speaker 7 The third one was because a lot of these people were very conservative that were killed tragically and they were Christian, you knew that somebody in the left had to do, they have two cards they play: the global warming card and the race card.
Speaker 7 So we had this minor appointed Democrat, Sade
Speaker 7
Perkins, excuse me, in Texas, and she gets on there and says, basically, that's good. You never let blacks go to your camps, and you were segregated.
That was demonstrably untrue.
Speaker 7 And you kind of got died, and you want us to feel sorry for you white people, and we don't. And so this is important because
Speaker 7 it's a reflection where the Democratic Party and the left are going. Because you have to superimpose what we just saw and what I just said onto a series of events.
Speaker 7 So you had the Obrego-Garcia romantic treatment of this spousal
Speaker 7
thug, gang member, trafficker, and the attempts to redefine him as a victim. Then you had these constant attacks on ICE.
And just this last
Speaker 7
10 days, there were two violent attacks. One would-be assassin had armor, and he was in his car, car and they stopped him.
Then we had ten, ten,
Speaker 7 ten Antifa-like would-be assassins that shot one of the officers in the neck.
Speaker 7 And
Speaker 7
what's interesting about them is they had their pictures. They fit the perfect profile of white kind of Antifa extremist spoiled brats.
They were all in black. They had arms.
Speaker 7 They were communicating with radio to coordinate this.
Speaker 7 And they had body armor. And
Speaker 7 if you want to, this happened when I was in high school and in college with the weathermen and the symboles liberal. If you want to stop it, then you have to do what Voltaire said.
Speaker 7 Every once in a while, the British hang an admiral to encourage the others.
Speaker 7 And I don't mean they're going to be hanged, but what I do think is they should charge all of them with conspiracy to commit murder, even the people who were not actually shooting.
Speaker 7 And then the next question is,
Speaker 7 who is funding these people? Where do they get the money to buy expensive arms, AR-15s, body armor? Who coordinates them? Where do they train?
Speaker 7 And
Speaker 7 if you take middle-class, upper-middle-class kids, and we had this with the Simberlees Liberation Army, and you put them in jail, that kind of stops it.
Speaker 7 Because these kids, for all their revolutionary talk, they are
Speaker 7
part of the establishment. And they're the kids that grew up and their mom said, you've got to go to Stanford, you've got to go to Harvard.
And so that's another.
Speaker 7 Then you had the mainstream Democrats feeding this seditious,
Speaker 7 that's the word the Democrats use, but it's more out to themselves. You had Hikeum Jeffrey posing with a bat.
Speaker 7 Hikeum, you're opposing the big, beautiful bill, and you spoke eight hours, but why would you take a symbol of violence like you're going to club these people?
Speaker 7 And this happened at the same time that members of your Democratic Congressional Caucus met with town hall people and grassroots.
Speaker 7 And we don't know if it's true or not because it was off the record anonymous. But your own Democratic people said,
Speaker 7
These people are kind of crazy. They're asking us to be shot and take a bullet.
We don't know if that's true or not because
Speaker 7 the Democratic Party is very, I mean, it's not like Jasmine Crockett and AOC or moderates, but they're trying to claim now, well, we're only like this because we have this lunatic hardcore base.
Speaker 7 So what is, just to finish, what sums all this up? The obvious exegesis is they have no power.
Speaker 7 We had a district judge, and we have been told for the first five months that Donald Trump has executive orders, and that's why district judges are going after them to stop them.
Speaker 7 But if there was congressionally approved legislation constitutionally
Speaker 7
correct, then they couldn't do anything. Well, we had the big, beautiful bill pass.
And what had happened?
Speaker 7 The Planned Parenthood people went to an Obama-appointed DEI judge and tried to get an injunction to stop it. Well,
Speaker 7 this isn't an executive order.
Speaker 7 So it shows you that these people are renegades, and there's people talking about impeaching that judge for trying, I mean, that's unheard of, that you go in there and you wait to a congressionally approved major bill and then you immediately
Speaker 7 You nullify it nationwide when you have this limited jurisdiction, right after the Supreme Court has said you can't do that.
Speaker 7
And then, so they don't have power. They don't have the House.
They don't have the Senate. They don't have the White House.
But there's another thing that's going on that's showing how crazy they are.
Speaker 7 Well, actually, two.
Speaker 7 One is Donald Trump had, I think,
Speaker 7
acknowledged by many people the best 20 days of any president in modern history. So he did that incursion.
25-minute incursion to Iran. He neutered the Iranian nuclear facilities.
Speaker 7
There There was no wider war. Now he's negotiating.
He's not pro-Putin. He's hard on Putin.
He's trying to leverage Putin by arming, giving arms to the Ukrainians against the wishes of his base.
Speaker 7 He's looking at Gaza, and there's about 500 to 700,000 Gazans who want to follow a group of sheiks and cut a deal and make their own enclave independent in Gaza, analogous to something
Speaker 7
and the West Bank, what we see of the the 2 million Arabs who are living inside Israel. So he's doing that.
He passed the big, beautiful budget bill. The economic news came out.
Speaker 7
Unexpected tariff, high income, good job growth, unexpected. We have to use the word unexpectedly because the media always says this isn't true.
Wall Street hit record highs,
Speaker 7 was not supposed to happen to happen. Inflation low.
Speaker 7 And
Speaker 7 in addition to all of that,
Speaker 7 basically zero illegal entries. Nobody would have believed that, that he could go from 10,000 to 12,000 a day to none, maybe 50,000, and they're not making it through.
Speaker 7 And this is coupled with something we also don't talk about. When we came in, we were told by our military grandees, oh, we're short 45,000 troops.
Speaker 7
It's not those commercials with pregnant flight suits. It's not the trans commercials.
It's not the DEI hiring.
Speaker 7
It's not Mark Milley and Lloyd Dawson talking about white rage, white privilege, none of that. It's because suddenly people got fat.
Suddenly they got tattoos. Suddenly they went into gang members.
Speaker 7
Suddenly there's very low unemployment. So we just can't compete.
And with the ones we get, we can't No, no, no. As soon as Donald Trump came in, they canceled all of those politically correct things.
Speaker 7 They started renaming ships to people who really served the military and were heroic, not Harvey Melk. I won't get into that.
Speaker 7 And
Speaker 7 they started to appeal to that.
Speaker 7 they basically said to the white working class rural class and Mexican and black rural class but mostly the people who were responsible are the the targeted demographic that the Biden administration went out after when they said they were going to investigate them the multi-generational combat people, the people that die at double their numbers in the demographic, and they want to go and camp.
Speaker 7
They said, you're not culpable. You're not a racist.
And you're going to be judged on your expertise expertise and military efficacy, not your gender, your sex, your sexual orientation, your race.
Speaker 7 And lo and behold,
Speaker 7
it's just like illegal immigration. We need comprehensive immigration.
No, you need a new president. Well, we can't recruit people.
We just have to get used to the new demographic.
Speaker 7
No, no, no, you need a new military leadership. And so you put all that together.
I could go on. And that is driving the left crazy.
That he is very, very successful. Finally,
Speaker 7 out of breath,
Speaker 7 he's not doing what he did the first term.
Speaker 7 He addressed symptoms. He said, we're going to try to build a wall because of illegal immigration.
Speaker 7 This time we're going to try to find a university that doesn't disclose like Stanford Chinese companies. This time they got in the wilderness years between 2021 and 2025.
Speaker 7 Trump and his advisors sat down and they said, why are these people so crazy? What caused the transgender transgender nuttiness? Why did we.
Speaker 7 We've got to address the symptoms.
Speaker 7
Excuse me, not the symptoms, the causes of the symptoms. It's the universities.
They are training an elite and they're getting away with murder. They're not honoring the Bill of Rights.
Speaker 7
They're not honoring First Amendment rights, free speech. They are violating the 2023 Supreme Court ruling on racial prejudice and bias.
They are gouging us on grants. They're charging 55% overhead.
Speaker 7
On and on. They're having all of these foreign students from illiberal regimes are not even giving back.
Let's hold them to account. Let's look at the foundations.
Speaker 7 Let's look at endowment income at the universities.
Speaker 7
And then let's look at PBS and NPR, these megaphones that are propagandistic. And then if we have illegal immigration, let's just not build a wall.
Let's just look at Mexico.
Speaker 7 Let's just look at Mexico and say, Ms. Sheinbaum, do you want to have $63 billion in remittances or do you want me to tax it?
Speaker 7 Do you want a $171 billion in surplus or do you want to go have me tariff you?
Speaker 7 Do you want to have the cartels killing us and getting 20 billion or you want me to declare them a terrorist organization and anybody that has anything to do with them in the banking system?
Speaker 7 And so he's looking at the causes, and that is terrified the left.
Speaker 7 Because that's how they hold power, not through popular acclaim, but because they control the media and education and foundations,
Speaker 7 Wall Street, etc.
Speaker 3 Yes, and Donald Trump is doing it all with his velvet glove as
Speaker 3 has become his way, and I admire it. So, let's welcome back a sponsor of this show, Open Phone.
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Speaker 3 And thank you, Open Phone, for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.
Speaker 3 So, Victor, the one last thing I wanted to just note about all of this democratic
Speaker 3 warring with ICE is
Speaker 3 they always fill us with the rhetoric of Hitler and tyranny, and they're really the ones that look like the brown shirts of the Nazi Party when these things are taking place, that they have their Antifa and the Nazis had the brown shirts.
Speaker 3 So they are the real.
Speaker 7
They have two problems. And number one is when you ask people, do you support illegal immigration? It polls no.
And would you support deportation?
Speaker 7
Even with the legacy media propaganda, they do support it. That's number one.
Number two, they have a problem with the law.
Speaker 7 They're basically telling Americans that it is moral to break the law and let in 12 million people, but it is amoral to enforce the law and tell the people who came in illegally to go back and try it again if they would self-deport.
Speaker 7 If they don't want us, if they want to continue to reside illegally, they're not going to get a second chance and they will be deported.
Speaker 7 So they understand that reality, but they also know that, as I said earlier, they don't have any institutional power, and Donald Trump is addressing why they had any influence at all.
Speaker 7 They have no political power, and now he's addressing their institutional power and they are paranoid.
Speaker 7 And so one of the things they're doing is they're trying to concoct an idea that we're going to forget about the 100,000 criminals he's already deported and the drastic drop in crime that ensued.
Speaker 7 We're just going to fabricate an idea that ICE is going after young children that were here illegally.
Speaker 7 But the problem they have is they can't tell you, well, what do you do about somebody who came in illegally and defiantly broke the the law, cut in ahead of people who were here waiting to come in here legally, and they're now residing illegally, often with fraudulent ID.
Speaker 7
They're breaking the law. So you either believe in the law or you don't.
Well, they don't believe in the law. So their idea of the law is whatever is convenient to us at any given moment.
Speaker 7 So if it's to wage law affair against Donald Trump, that's lawful. If it's to raid Mar-a-Lago, that's lawful.
Speaker 7 If it's to say that Donald Trump took classified documents and we're going to go into Malania's underwear drawer, but you don't do that to Joe Biden's house. You don't raid his house.
Speaker 7
So it's asymmetrical. They don't believe in the Constitution.
They do not believe in the rule of law. They believe in critical legal, critical race theory.
That the law is a malleable construct.
Speaker 7 That it's against the law to steal sneakers only because white, Christian, heterosexual, wealthy white people don't do it. So then they make laws to hurt poor people.
Speaker 7
So poor people then can redefine those laws and just do it. And then a critical legal, critical race theory prosecutor should understand that.
He should let them go.
Speaker 7
And that's called distribution and equity. That's what they believe in.
And they do it, of course, from their enclaves.
Speaker 7 They believe in the law when it comes to illegal aliens swarming into Martha's Vineyard.
Speaker 7 Or they believe in the law when Brad Pitt or somebody's house like that is broken into in Malibu or the most tony areas of Beverly Hill.
Speaker 7 You mentioned Karen Bass.
Speaker 7 So she went and confronted ICE and said, get out of here.
Speaker 7
Karen, two things. You are utterly disgraced.
You were in Uganda and you let your city burn. You were on a junket.
You had no business going over there at the height of fire season.
Speaker 7
Your administration in cahoots with Gavin Newsome did not allow people to clean the hillsides. You allowed the fodder.
You appointed a crazy water and power person who
Speaker 7 let drain or let stay empty a critical reservoir.
Speaker 7 You appointed a DEI fire chief that was more interested in people's appearance, sex, or race than she was making sure the hidements were there for her fire crews.
Speaker 7
Your deputy mayor is now in jail because he phoned in a bomb threat in an anti-Semitic fashion. That's your record.
It's a mess. So you know that.
So what are you doing now?
Speaker 7 You think if I confront ICE and tell him to get out of my city, the one million undocumented or illegal aliens in my city will be happy and I'll be popular. No, it's not going to work.
Speaker 7 It's too late for you. You're a seditionist and that's very funny.
Speaker 7 You and others gave us lectures about January 6th.
Speaker 7
This is true sedition. This is George Wallace Tarx launch.
You're going as a state's writer right up to a federal official, and you're saying that you have no jurisdiction in my city.
Speaker 7 Karen, you should read the Constitution. He does have jurisdiction in your city because the laws of federal laws trump state laws.
Speaker 7 George Wallace cannot tell black people to keep out of the University of Alabama just because it's the Alabama National Guard. JFK nationalized it.
Speaker 7 Abraham Lincoln went to war because Confederate governors, mayors were claiming that post offices, armories, federal bases belong to the jurisdiction of the state or the city.
Speaker 7
And the federal government said that's insurrection. That's what you're doing.
That's what she's doing. And it's not going to work.
It's all a roost because she and Newsome cannot govern California.
Speaker 7
They can't. It's a mess.
And so they think they're going to gent up all this hate of ICE.
Speaker 7 She's going to there's going to be I hate to say this, but there are going to be ICE people killed unless people speak out and start to tell Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass
Speaker 7 and others that we hold you directly responsible for your rhetoric.
Speaker 7 And we're not going to allow people to shoot at an ICE patrol person or enforcement. If they try to do it, we're going to file
Speaker 7 felony, conspiracy to commit murder charges. And they're going to be in jail if we can convict them for 50 or 60 years.
Speaker 7
And we don't really care if they live in the suburbs, are their parents or professionals. We're going to make an example out of them to save lives.
And I think that's what's going to happen.
Speaker 3
Well, I hope so. Victor, let's go to a break and then come back and talk a little bit about Trump and his cabinet meeting.
Stay with us, and we'll be right back.
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Speaker 3
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. You can find Victor on X.
His handle is at VD Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.
Speaker 3 So please come join us there if those are your choice social media.
Speaker 3 Well, Trump had a meeting, a cabinet meeting, and in fact, he went over a lot of the victories of his administration that you have just recounted for us.
Speaker 3 But there was one other thing that he said in it that surprised his defense minister, or sorry, Secretary of Defense Pete Hagseth, and that was that the Ukraine needs defensive weapons, and Donald Trump's willing to give them to them.
Speaker 3 I was wondering your thoughts on that.
Speaker 7
I wrote an article in the New Criterion about six months ago at the beginning of the Trump, and I said, these are MAGA agonistis. These are contradictions.
These are
Speaker 7 problems within the MAGA movement. One of the points I made is
Speaker 7
in terms of foreign policy, MAGA is Jacksonian. No better friend, no worse enemy.
Don't tread on me. And from time to time, to maintain deterrence, you're going to have to use force.
Speaker 7
Kill Baghdadi, kill Soleimani, get rid of the Wagner group attack on an insulation. Americans in Syria.
Deal with the Houthis. But the MAGA people say, no,
Speaker 7 we don't even have, our border is wide open, and you're spending too much money overseas, the defense budget's too big, why don't we spend and be Fortress America? Well,
Speaker 7 an Iranian missile will soon be able to hit Fortress America.
Speaker 7 So
Speaker 7 what happened was Donald Trump came in with a MAGA movement and he said, I'm kind of tired of Ukraine. Zelensky is a fraud.
Speaker 7
The Democrats pressured Israel. They said no collateral damage.
Got to have a coalition government. You've got to get a ceasefire.
Speaker 7 They suspended weapons deliveries. And
Speaker 7
they said to Ukraine, you can suspend habeas corpus. You can suspend political parties.
You can suspend elections. No ceasefire.
Don't have a ceasefire. Win.
Speaker 7
Don't be proportionate like Netanyahu said. We want you to be disproportionate.
And I guess they hated Putin, or they thought he was more existential threat than they did the people on October 7th.
Speaker 7 So Trump came in with that anger at that, and he had the mega-base. But the problem was,
Speaker 7 when he yelled at Zelensky, there is an existential truth. The immediate causation of the war was Vladimir Putin for the third time in four presidencies left his borders.
Speaker 7
He went into Ossatia under Bush. He went under Honor Obama, Donbass, and Crime.
He tried to take Kiev under Biden.
Speaker 7 And Trump said, well, he didn't try to do it on me because he knew what I would do. Yes, that's true, but you didn't inherit a quiet Putin.
Speaker 7
You had inherited a country with no deterrence left. So you had to restore deterrence.
And by pressuring Zelensky to make peace, you forgot for a second that it was Putin. Maybe he had reason.
Speaker 7 The MAGA people said, well, we promised that we wouldn't extend NATO to the Russian border. Or, you know, we did all, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 7 The immediate proximate cause was he crossed the border again, tried to take Kiev. Okay.
Speaker 7 So Trump is learning now as he talks to Putin. Basically, he said, Vladimir, stop it, stop it, stop it.
Speaker 7
We'll have a thing. We won't put him in NATO.
And we promise that
Speaker 7 we'll make an economic corridor between you and Ukraine. Everybody can profit with rare earth
Speaker 7 mining and everything.
Speaker 7
And you can probably, we'll give you the Donbass in Crimea that you stole in 2014. We'll instit what do you want? And Putin said, basically, I want it all because you don't understand, Mr.
Trump.
Speaker 7 I'm riding a tiger and when you're a dictator, you can't get off the tiger. You got to keep riding him.
Speaker 7 And I got to explain to the Russian people, I killed a million and a half or wounded a million and a half Russians for what?
Speaker 7 To go thirty miles more than I already have? That's not enough for me.
Speaker 7
If I have peace right now, all the Russian bloggers and all these people are going to start attacking. They're going to get rid of me.
So I'm not going to do it.
Speaker 7 So then Trump went to his advisors and said, uh-oh,
Speaker 7 we've got to violate a MAGA canon again right after the Iranian war, that we have to do something that we didn't want to do. We have to side with Zelensky for a while and give him arms.
Speaker 7 Because if we don't give him arms, we have no leverage against Putin. Because Putin is counting on me not to give them arms and to yell at Zelensky again in the Oval Office.
Speaker 7
So I don't have any credibility. So to get credibility, I've got to threaten Putin by giving arms to Ukraine.
That's where we are.
Speaker 7 It's a lose-lose situation.
Speaker 7 It's not Trump's war.
Speaker 7 He inherited it from a weak, demented president. And
Speaker 7 he's going to have to
Speaker 7
create a credible deterrence with Ukraine. And I think he's going to try to give them Patriot missiles.
But he's got a good point.
Speaker 7 We're so depleted because we have not rearmed ourselves, and we had to give a lot to Israel, and our means of production is sluggish of Patriot missile production. So
Speaker 3 I don't anticipate that he will be, Trump will be very successful with his peace efforts in the Ukraine and Russia, while he will be successful in the Middle East and his work with the states.
Speaker 7 There's only one way to stop Putin,
Speaker 7
and that is to triangulate. And that's what Henry Kissinger did in the Cold War.
When Russia was threatening
Speaker 7 to gain military superiority under Nixon, he said to Nixon, go to China and then split the two apart and make a cardinal rule. Russia is no friendlier to China than it is to us.
Speaker 7 China is no friendlier to Russia than it is to us.
Speaker 7
There's a lot of disputed territory in Russia that has been annexed over the years from China. Russia has 144 million people and a much bigger territory than China.
China's got 1.4 billion,
Speaker 7 ten times more.
Speaker 7
And yes, it's got less territory. And it has claims on some of them.
So when you talk to Qi,
Speaker 7 you're trying to divorce him from Putin. You tell Putin,
Speaker 7 Qi's got designs on your territory, and he's got a bigger army than you, and you're tied down.
Speaker 7 You should be friendly with us and make a deal with us, because whatever you say about the United States, we don't want your territory. We're not interested in trying to hurt you.
Speaker 7 And then he should tell Chi,
Speaker 7 you know, be careful, but Putin's tied down. He has no means to.
Speaker 7 And
Speaker 7
we don't support your idea of aggression against Russia, but we understand it. And then we tell Putin, you better be careful about China.
And that's what Kissinger did.
Speaker 7 It was kind of double-dealing, triangulate. But the point was he nullified the Russian overwhelming threat in the Cold War that way.
Speaker 3
Well, Victor, let's welcome back another sponsor of our show, Free Prints. I would like to take a moment for Free Prints.
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Speaker 3
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Speaker 3 So Victor, it seemed like there was one more thing on that Trump meeting. Oh, no, not one more thing on the meeting, but one.
Speaker 3 Netanyahu, the second thing that Trump did this week was to meet with Netanyahu, and they seemed to be good friends.
Speaker 3 I think everybody and myself as well are very happy about the relationship between Israel and the United States right now. And that
Speaker 3 meeting seemed to exude that. But he also said that he has nominated Trump for the Nobel Prize promise.
Speaker 7 Netanyahu did. That was a payback because Trump supported him, never cut off his supplies, gave him the
Speaker 7 I think, I don't know if he gave him the green light during the actual negotiations,
Speaker 7 but that's what the Iranian president, when he had that interview with Tucker, I saw part of it.
Speaker 7 It was something else. I mean, that guy just acted as if he was.
Speaker 7
I don't know why anybody doesn't like Iran. We love the United States.
We've never done it. We haven't ever committed one act of terrorism against.
I thought, you know, how about the Marine barracks?
Speaker 7 How about the Iraq war? How about
Speaker 7 trying to kill diplomats in Washington? How about blowing up the embassy? Those were all your surrogates that did that. But anyway,
Speaker 7 it was the idea that Trump was allowing Netanyahu to do what he had to do, and then he helped out in the 11th hour to get rid of the nuclear facility when I wasn't sure the Israelis had the wherewithal to do it.
Speaker 7 And then Trump also attacked the left in Israel and said, Why are you trying to destroy Netanyahu through these bogus? I've gone through this myself, lawfare. Stop it.
Speaker 7 And then Netanyahu appreciated that and said, We should nominate you for the.
Speaker 7 But the problem is, do you really think the left, left, left, left-wing Norwegians would ever listen to the head of Israel?
Speaker 7 If he nominated something, they would say, that person's never going to get it.
Speaker 7 We live in a very sick world, an upside-down, Alice-through-the-looking-glass world where Barack Obama does nothing and he gets a Nobel Prize.
Speaker 7 And Donald Trump, whether it's the Abraham's Accord or trying to stop the Iranian war after the end of the nuclear threat or the Pakistan, India, or the Rwanda war or Ukraine, he's trying to create peace and he'll never get the Nobel Prize.
Speaker 7 The more that he creates peace, the more they hate him. And again, it's that tragic hero.
Speaker 7 The more Shane comes down out of the mountains and he starts to give deterrence to the Sodbusters, and the more he kills
Speaker 7 the three people, the cattle barons, he has to say to Joey, tell your mother there's no more guns in the valley. I'm gone.
Speaker 7
Or that one guy during that dance scene in Shane, I mentioned that with Jack the other day. I don't know how you know, Wilson.
And I felt like getting out of my chair and slapping the TV screen.
Speaker 7
You idiot. He's saving all you people that can't save yourself.
And you're criticizing the methodology only because you're safe now because he's here.
Speaker 3 And isn't it strange that they give a Nobel Prize to somebody for not doing anything,
Speaker 3 American President Obama for not doing anything, as though the Europeans are saying, if you Americans would just stay out of everything, it would be better. But we all know it wouldn't be better.
Speaker 7 No, we know what's going on right now in European capitals. They're all saying, oh my God, crazy Donald Trump.
Speaker 7 He eliminated, at least for five to ten years the threat of ballistic nuclear tip missiles. And the Iranians would always gang up on us and bully us and not listening because we're unarmed.
Speaker 7
And we were always kind of hoping the United States would help us. And Obama and Biden, everybody was too scared to do it.
And this guy comes in that we despise.
Speaker 7
And he, in one shot, puts him back 10 years. And then he makes us.
go up to 5% and he's going to rearm the United States and we're better. But we can't say that because we're supposed to hate him.
Speaker 7
He's orange. He's got comb over hair.
He's got a Queen's accent. He's crude.
He's bombastic. He's right-wing.
Speaker 7
Gosh, what are we going to do? That's their attitude. That's moral cowardice at all.
I really like the NATO head. He didn't care.
Speaker 7
He just, he was a former, I think, what, 14 years he was the head of state of the Netherlands. Was it Netherlands? I think so.
And he basically said,
Speaker 7 they had a New York
Speaker 7 left-wing journalist that interviewed him and said, are you kind of embarrassed that you called him daddy and that you're obsequious?
Speaker 7
He said, no, we're in better shape than we've ever been. We're going to be rearmed.
NATO is going to be, we have strike plans the moment Putin goes into Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Korda.
Speaker 7 They would pay a terrible price. Then the reporter
Speaker 7
said something like, Well, you don't think Trump would come to Europe. We've already discussed it.
Yes, he is. And we're going to have the wherewithal and between Trump and us.
Speaker 7
And we could swat, you know, very confident. I couldn't believe it.
So what they're saying, I mean,
Speaker 7 how low do you get when the American journalists want to attack their own country and their own president because the Europeans are starting to respect the idea that at last the United States is rearming and forcing them to rearm against their will, which they knew they had to do.
Speaker 7 And yet...
Speaker 7 It's like that news conference you mentioned about the, it's not a news conference, the televised cabinet meeting, and they asked a question about Epstein.
Speaker 3 Yes, and Donald Trump just tore the reporter apart as that's an inappropriate question when there's so much more going on and so much tragedy in Texas.
Speaker 7
I was watching that. I think that's the sixth cabinet.
There's once a month. Biden in four years only had nine.
So he's going to pass him in September. But
Speaker 7 there's a famous, he wasn't a very good writer, but there was a classical Greek writer of the Roman period, Athenaeus, and he had something called the Dipnosophisticae, and it was called table talk, witticisms around the table.
Speaker 7
And he just recorded what everybody said. And if you read it, it's fascinating.
You know, how many varieties of figs are there? Or why do Romans have togas? Or what, you know, they just talk about.
Speaker 7 And when you listen to that cabinet meeting, each cabinet member kind of praises Trump, but Trump goes, how about energy? And then all of a sudden he he goes, it's just horrible.
Speaker 7 Wind and solar and you can't recycle and they're toxic. And then somebody else comes out with a whole different topic and it's just a pottery.
Speaker 7
It's and it confuses the media because they're like, wow, Biden never even had this. And we've never had a televised, let it all hang out.
Kind of, it's...
Speaker 7
We feel like we're being used because it's scripted, but it's crazy. It's spontaneous.
Trump can say anything to anybody, anytime, anywhere. And
Speaker 7 there's no blinders, there's no filters, and we're right in the middle of it. Then you have some conservative, for the first time, you have conservative
Speaker 7 journalists, and they kind of have a t-ball attitude. Hey, President Trump, what are you going to do about this? And they put a ball up there so Trump can whack it.
Speaker 7
And then you look at the faces of the Democratic or left-wing journalists. What? You're not supposed to be a journalist.
You're conservative.
Speaker 7 You know, the British played that famous song when they lost at Yorktown, the world upside down.
Speaker 7 That's what happened. The world is upside down.
Speaker 7 It's the Battle of Yorktown.
Speaker 3 Trump seems to have done it in a very good way for most of us voters. So I'm not complaining about the upside-down world of the left.
Speaker 7 And just think if he's right about the tariffs.
Speaker 7 That was another news this week that all of the experts who said the tariffs were going to spike inflation, according to Jerome Powell, apparently the Japanese and the Germans and the Chinese and the Indonesians and the Vietnamese and the Canadians and the American, all of them were making a lot of money and they all want to be in the largest consumer market in the world.
Speaker 7 And if you just say to them, so we know what you're doing and you're making a big profit, so we're going to take 10, 15, 20% of it. And they go,
Speaker 7 we're going to get out of here. We're not going to do that.
Speaker 7 And then you say, okay, don't do it. But then Scott Bessant, who's really a good guy, he calls them up and says, hey, remember now, when you have a big surplus, you're vulnerable.
Speaker 7
And when we have nothing left to lose, because we have a deficit. So, just if you don't want it, play with us.
Bye. Wouldn't want to be you, see you.
Speaker 7 So, the point I'm making is that now they're all saying,
Speaker 7 Well, Trump got revenue with these 10, 15, 20 percent tariffs, and the prices didn't go up. Well, yeah,
Speaker 7 because they were making a huge price margin profit. So, they got together and said, which is more important? Making 5% to 10%
Speaker 7 on our sales to the United States instead of making 20%,
Speaker 7 or not having sales at all in the United States? And they chose to have a reduced margin and pay the tariff. And then
Speaker 7 Chairman Powell,
Speaker 7
the head of the Fed, keeps talking about tariffs are going to raise inflation. He keeps doing it and doing it and doing it.
So Donald Trump said he's too late, Powell, Jerome Powell.
Speaker 7 Everybody said Trump is picking on him. He was picking on him.
Speaker 7 He didn't fire him, which would have been kind of
Speaker 7 untoward.
Speaker 7 I think he has to step down and march.
Speaker 7 But basically, if you think of all the economic indicators and you compare his lowering of interest rates under
Speaker 7 Joe Biden, you get the impression that we're paying $3 billion a day in interest.
Speaker 7 And all Donald Trump is saying, if you were to lower it by a third,
Speaker 7
we would save $1 billion. That's a third of a trillion dollars in my budget.
And that would really help us to
Speaker 7 balance the books. Why don't you do that? Because all the economic indicators, and you get the impression Powell is thinking,
Speaker 7 yeah, but you've made fun of me, and I'm a left-wing person, I may be a rhino-Republican, but I don't like you, and I'm going to have all this high-flutin language and economic jargon, and I'm going to keep the interest high, and you're going to hate that.
Speaker 7 And I'm going to enjoy the fact you hate me and hate that because I got another nine months here I'm going to torment you and he's really tormenting millions of Americans that want to buy a house or a car with paying artificially high interest rates
Speaker 3 and you are not going to catch Jerome Powell making Donald Trump's administration a success that's one of the downsides of Trump screaming and yelling at people.
Speaker 7 There's a lot of good side because chaos disrupts and gives avenues of new change.
Speaker 7 But a lot of people nurse their wounds and they get so angry that they become self-destructive and nihilistic like Powell. He's not going to go down as a great Fed.
Speaker 7 20 years from now, when somebody writes the periodic book of the Federal Reserve, they're going to look at this period and they're going to say, this guy did not lower interest rates when every economic indicator shows the economy was robust and
Speaker 7 there was no danger of inflation.
Speaker 3 Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take our last break and then come back and talk a little bit about the word that's been floating around DC recently.
Speaker 3 And stay with us to find out, and we'll be right back.
Speaker 3
Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. Victor's podcasts are now on video on YouTube, Rumble, and Spotify.
So join us on any of those platforms if that's where you get your video content.
Speaker 3 So Victor, the word floating around DC has been amnesty, that Donald Trump is planning on some sort of amnesty for the workers of agriculture, hospitality, etc.
Speaker 3 And I think he's
Speaker 3 a little bit opposed to that right now, but they seem to, there's a lot of pressure on him to give amnesty to those people who have been here for some time and have been working and participating in the economy.
Speaker 3 I think that's the key to the point.
Speaker 7
Amnesty is a weird word. It's a Greek word.
In Greek, you put an alpha, we call it alpha, privative, and it cancels out whatever the root is.
Speaker 7 The root comes from the Greek verb mennevsko, to memory, to memory, to remember. Pneuma, anything you see with mn is usually something to do with memory.
Speaker 7 So amnesty means you just don't, you just forget it.
Speaker 7 I forget what happened. So So the problem is that
Speaker 7 I don't want to give him amnesty, but he's not talking about citizenship. He's talking about allowing people under certain conditions to apply for a green card.
Speaker 7 The key is the certain conditions and the numbers. Those are the two things that will rile everybody.
Speaker 7 Everybody's got to remember that the 12 million who came under Biden was in addition, not to three or four or five like the left told us, but 20 million illegal aliens.
Speaker 7 There are about 30 to 35 million illegal aliens, and they make up part of 55 million who were not born in the United States.
Speaker 7 The other 20 million apparently are either citizens now or green card holders. So what are we talking about?
Speaker 7 We're talking about people in key industries that
Speaker 7 Trump has been told by AgriBusiness that you can't find Americans to do the work. And that's not just
Speaker 7 driving a tractor or picking blueberries. It's also meat packing, it's also making beds, it's also cooking, etc.
Speaker 7 Okay, so how is he going to square that circle of telling his MAGA supporters that he's giving amnesty? Well, he's going to have to be very, very careful.
Speaker 7 If he's going to do this, he's going to have to say the following.
Speaker 7 Of the thirty-five million, I'm only talking about four or five million people that can get a green card that are not going to be subject to deportation.
Speaker 7 And who are those?
Speaker 7
They have to have been here four or five years. They have to be crime-free, no DUIs even.
They have to be off public assistance. They have to be gainfully, as I said, employed.
Speaker 7
And they have to pay a fine. And then they get a green card.
And then they can do what they want. They can reapply every year for it, or they can try to go to the citizenship route.
Speaker 7 Under the 1986 Simpson-Missoula Act, only a third chose to get citizenship.
Speaker 7 I think I said in the dying citizens, that means citizenship and residency are almost the same now.
Speaker 7 But my point is, out of the 35 million illegals, I don't think you'd have more than four or five million.
Speaker 7 And I'm always surprised when I go into my local town and I meet somebody that I thought I knew or I was acquainted with or comes up to talk to me, and they are on the following.
Speaker 7 They're working, they speak perfect English, they're very conservative,
Speaker 7 and they've been here a long time, and they're illegal.
Speaker 7 I'm serious. I've met a lot of people like that, and they made a bad mistake, and they're perpetuating that mistake.
Speaker 7 And if they had an avenue to get a green card, I think it would be worth it because it's not going to be a lot of people. But it would, there's another thing why it would be valuable.
Speaker 7 It would really make the left look stupid because they're saying they want to deport everybody. But if you said to the left,
Speaker 7 well, if you're a good U.S.
Speaker 7 resident and you don't commit crimes, you don't take money from the government when you're able-bodied and you're working and you're willing to pay a fine, then you have an avenue to a legal green card.
Speaker 7 So, in other words, you're going to you're demanding that you not deport all the other people who don't qualify.
Speaker 7 You mean you're on the side of people who are able-bodied and not working, on the side of people with criminal records, on the side of people don't want to pay a fine, on the sides of people who just crossed the border.
Speaker 7 Is that what you're doing? So that's what I think his team is doing.
Speaker 7 But the MAGA base will say, no,
Speaker 7
no green cards. It's not amnesty.
That's the wrong word. It's the chance to get a green card if you fulfill certain conditions.
Speaker 3 And speaking of immigration, if we could turn to a little bit lighter subject, and that is movies.
Speaker 3 There is a new Superman movie out, apparently, and the director has claimed his movie has a political message about immigration because Superman was an illegal immigrant, apparently.
Speaker 7 What's the actor's name, Glenn? Is that his last name? Can't remember.
Speaker 3 Scott Glenn?
Speaker 7
Yeah, not Scott Glenn. It's another guy, young guy.
But
Speaker 7 he's saying that Superman was an alien. I guess he's saying he was an interplanetary illegal alien because he came here without getting a passport or asking permission to come from Krypton, right?
Speaker 7 So there's two things.
Speaker 7 I can't figure out this because we know from the Snow White debacle and every other Disney movie, to take one example, anytime you have the lead actors show who they really are, and they're all the same, that they hate the United States and they hate Trump even more than they hate the United States.
Speaker 7
And this would be ridiculous because Superman stands for truth, justice, and the American Way. I remember I used to watch George Reeves.
I'd come home from Selma Eric White's school.
Speaker 7 My twin brother and I would get off the bus before we did our farm chores with my grandparents. We ran in at 4 o'clock to see Superman, and George Reeves would stand there.
Speaker 7
He killed himself later the actor. And there was wind blowing, and his cape would blow.
And it was really good.
Speaker 7 But the point is, they're taking an all-American traditional hero and they're making the actor attack America or at least attack the current administration. So you think, now what's going on?
Speaker 7 And it has to be one of two things.
Speaker 7 They lost control of their merchandise and it's going to be a big dud because who wants to go see an anti-American Superman? It's like Snow White,
Speaker 7
a PC Snow White. So that thing was a dud.
And they know that. So they lost control of the narrative.
Or
Speaker 7 they knew from the very beginning, given the people that were working, it wasn't somebody in the front office let their ideology once again freelance, and then the guys in the back room with
Speaker 7
the green shades and do all the numbers, they said, what the who are these people? They're going to bankrupt us. They always go PC and it destroys us.
So what do we do?
Speaker 7 Well, at this point, we can't do much, but maybe we can get the left-wing crowd to go to a movie.
Speaker 7 So tell those guys, since they're left-wing anyway, and the right's onto it, Middle America doesn't like it, and we're going to lose money. Just tell them that now they're for illegal aliens.
Speaker 7 And maybe we'll get a bunch of Antifa people and suburban Karens to come out. That's really pathetic, but it doesn't make sense otherwise.
Speaker 7 We want the hysteria. We're getting free publicity.
Speaker 7 Keep mouthing off. You hate America and Superman.
Speaker 7 It's like Captain America. Any, as a general rule,
Speaker 7 and maybe I can call it Victor's rule any movie that is a superhero movie and any movie that the lead character is supposed to represent the American way or have the name America in him or Captain America super
Speaker 7
he's going to be left-wing. And the director or producers are going to try to insert into the movie subtle repartee lines, dialogue that he's anti-American.
Because you have to look at the people,
Speaker 7
the people who live down there in Los Angeles and write the scripts. It's like Google.
There's an article recently when you search all these Google trips. We've talked about all the opposite comes up.
Speaker 7
I mentioned insurrection, riot, 2020 and January 6th came up. I had to have a surgical procedure follow-up this week.
So I was in Menlo Park where it was...
Speaker 7
I had to go to a doctor, and I sat in a cafe and watched people walk by. And I was walking around from one doctor's office to the other.
And I looked at those people. And I said,
Speaker 7 These are the people who write the Google
Speaker 7
algorithms. And they are.
They're all spaghetti arms, they're pink hair, they're the young people,
Speaker 7
and they're all left-wing. And that's who runs America's Google searches and Yahoo searches.
And it's the same thing with Screenwriter. They're completely disconnected from the body politics.
Speaker 3 And it's no wonder that Google runs the the way it does or movies are put out as they are. So,
Speaker 3 last topic for the week for our news roundup is that Gavin Newsom has backed down from placing caps on oil corporation profits. And I was wondering if you had.
Speaker 3 You know what I'm wondering? Is this a political move?
Speaker 3 I'm trying to get elected president, or is this him coming to terms with the reality that fossil fuels are an important source of energy for his state.
Speaker 7 He went along with the legislature the last six years.
Speaker 7 Remember, as I said earlier, no one
Speaker 7 person is more responsible for California's decline than Gavin Newsom because
Speaker 7 maybe Jerry Brown, who was mayor of Oakland and had been governor
Speaker 7 and was governor twice and mayor of Oakland. But Gavin Newsom was eight years a city council person,
Speaker 7 eight years a lieutenant governor, eight years a mayor, and he will be eight years a governor.
Speaker 7 So he'll have 32 years in the Bay Area where is the Bay Area, not L.A., is now with Silicon Valley money and left-wing, that's what runs California.
Speaker 7 So he's more responsible, and he has been overseeing all the regulations that we're going to get get rid of refineries and he bullied them and bullied them and bullied them.
Speaker 7 You've got to have the California Air Resources Board does this and you have to have this blend and you have to do that. And finally they said, you know what?
Speaker 7 We're going to go somewhere else. You keep importing oil from the Saudis and you complete, you're going to have to
Speaker 7 import gas from Nevada or I don't know, Arizona, go ahead and Texas, I don't know. But we're not going to do it anymore.
Speaker 7 And that whole Richmond corridor for Northern California, they're going to leave. And gas will go up to about $8 a gallon, and all the left-wing millionaires along the coastal corridor will be happy.
Speaker 7
But he's going to panic because they're going to look at that when he wants to run for president. And his Democratic primary rivals will bring it up.
What's the price of cal?
Speaker 7 That's what Ron DeSantis did when he beat him in that debate. What's the price of gas? How many people have left California versus Florida? What's your tax rate versus ours?
Speaker 7 Here's how many people you have, and here's your budget, and here's how many people we have in our budget.
Speaker 7 And he's done all of that and so remember that line in animal house where what was that guy's name i know everybody knows dean wormer or what worm
Speaker 7 wormer yeah he says to the fat
Speaker 7 going through life fat lazy and ugly is that what he says fat ugly and lazy is no way to go through life i feel like i somebody should say
Speaker 7 being incoherent incompetent and i don't know what else corrupt is no way to go through being a governor governor, Gavin, because everything you've done from high-speed rail to the tax rate at 13.3
Speaker 7 to gasoline tax that you're now increasing, it's going to be the highest, it is the highest in the nation, to 48 cents a kilowatt, to Stonehenge high-speed rail.
Speaker 7
We drove home today from Minlo Park on the 152 from Gilroy to Casa de Frude. It hasn't changed in 60 years, 70 years.
I remember going three or four years old, four years old. And that's your legacy.
Speaker 7 And the LA fire, the Aspen fire, the Paradise fire, all of that.
Speaker 7
You took Paradise and you made it into Purgatory. That's what you did.
And
Speaker 7 then you, every once in a while, went to Napa wine tasting while people were trying to get a permit in LA and you went to the
Speaker 7
French laundry while you shut down everybody else. And you can't help but living, you're living in a $9 million house.
Your wife has government contracts.
Speaker 7 You were a Nepo baby that got everything from the Getty family.
Speaker 7
And now you're kind of a character. He does that little neck thing.
What is that? He goes back and forth with his neck. It doesn't work anymore, Gavin.
Speaker 7 The hair slicker and the vat, all that doesn't work. Every once in a while, you put on your Abercrombie and fish work clothes and you go out by that
Speaker 7 nightmare train yard by the port of L.A., remember, where they loot everything, and then he picks up his little gloves, or he goes to the Paradise Fire, and he digs a little ash and puts it in a bucket or something.
Speaker 7 It doesn't work anymore. You're just a total failure.
Speaker 7 You destroyed the most successful, most beautiful state in the world. And
Speaker 7 the only reason it's even viable is because people, unlike you,
Speaker 7 Pat Brown, whom was a Democrat, but he was a good governor, Ronald Reagan, George Dick Mason,
Speaker 7 Pete Wilson, they built the state. And you're living on their work and you're trying to destroy it, but they were so,
Speaker 7
I don't know, so industrious and so imaginative that it's very hard to destroy in just your 32 years and as a public official to destroy it. But you're managing.
He's got a little bit more to go.
Speaker 7 What will come up next?
Speaker 3
Such a sad tale you weave, Victor, about that pathetic young man. man.
We want tales of heroes
Speaker 3 on this podcast. And I guess Donald Trump right now is our tale of a hero.
Speaker 3 So, Victor, we're at the end of our show, and I have some comments from listeners of you and Jack on your latest podcast. That would be the Tuesday podcast on July 8th.
Speaker 3
And Lisa Ortiz 4364 says, thank you both. VDH, praise God.
You seem to be on a positive recovery. Thank you, Jack.
I enjoy your input during the podcast.
Speaker 3
We all don't like the same tea, and that's okay. Don't change.
So
Speaker 3 you're here for tea, meaning Jack said that he has detractors, and I think she's saying she really likes what he does. And so don't worry about his detractors.
Speaker 7
I was like, I was like, I was like, I told a post-op the other day. It was kind of medieval, but he went in and took a camera.
It was kind of, I've never seen anything like it. You're watching it.
Speaker 7 They give you a local anesthetic, and then I've had an infection from the operator. And they go in, and
Speaker 7 they have one little thing that shoots water, one little thing sucks it out, one little thing takes a picture.
Speaker 7
And it feels like you have a caterpillar under your eye and a caterpillar crawling around above your wisdom teeth. But the doctor is very good.
And
Speaker 7 there was a lot more extensive cutting than he had anticipated when he got in there, and a lot of it had some problems. So I hope that now I'm back on the road to recovery.
Speaker 3 Yes, so some tales from Victor's Precious about Victor's Precious Bodily Fluid.
Speaker 3 Yeah, not so good.
Speaker 7 Operation Number 10. I don't want to do 11, believe me.
Speaker 3 Yeah.
Speaker 3 Another one is
Speaker 3
Boo Lion LBS. So pounds, Boo Lion Pounds.
Hey, Jack, in a future podcast, can you finish the story of going for a drink on 35th and 3rd?
Speaker 7 Yeah, I bet he can.
Speaker 3 I bet he can. And C.S.,
Speaker 3
or sorry, C. Shelley 5658.
And this was a longer one where he was saying he really liked your guys's podcast, but I like this part of it. He said, I'm a self-taught, I'm a self-taught kid.
Speaker 3 I saved up to buy Oxford history books in my late 20s, and I'm in my late 20s now, only to be forced to temporarily fail my high school history exams in my socialist country, as I quoted Victor Davis Hansen as one of my sources.
Speaker 3
Got a true PhD eventually and planning to teach on a temporary visa. I adore America.
I adore order. I've never known it and will leave when my gift of teaching expires.
Speaker 7 Thank you for that.
Speaker 7 I had a person write me about eight years ago, a scholar, I won't mention his name or affiliation, but he said, you know what's happening to you, Victor?
Speaker 7 He was kind of friendly. And he said, when you wrote a book like The Other Greeks, it has, I think I had like 5,000 citations
Speaker 7
on the bottom of the page, footnotes at the back. It was kind of crazy.
And the references, a lot of them were very obscure, and some of them, you know, from untranslated
Speaker 7 scolia, from
Speaker 7 manuscripts. But anyway, he said, people
Speaker 7 use your citations and your research, but then they don't want to be associated with you given your
Speaker 7 Trump feeds.
Speaker 7 So they put a footnote and they'll say
Speaker 7
they'll use in the body of the text, they'll use an argument that you did. And they don't want to be called plagiarists, so they'll footnote it.
And they'll say, see Victor Hansen,
Speaker 7 and then they'll have a comma.
Speaker 7 Who otherwise is completely wrong on the whole, or who otherwise is not. And they always do that.
Speaker 7 They take your research and your ideas and then they footnote it.
Speaker 7 But when you look at the footnote, after they acknowledge they took it from you, they trash you as an idiot
Speaker 7 or public enemy.
Speaker 3 As only academics can do.
Speaker 3
And this last one is from Socratic Sandpiper. I'm sympathetic to Elon.
I like this Socratic Sandpiper because I kind of sympathized with your sympathy here.
Speaker 3 I'm sympathetic to Elon's disappointment and anger.
Speaker 3 He tried to move mountains in the administration, and then Trump turned around and pushed through the big, beautiful bill, which adds to the debt in significant ways.
Speaker 3 Instead of starting a new party, Elon should take interviews and explain his position. And that's a very rational thing.
Speaker 7 I think I'm on record that the richest man in the world and the most powerful should
Speaker 7 let bygones be bygones. And one of the things that Elon is a Renaissance genius, but
Speaker 7 when he says something at X or Starlink, our SpaceX,
Speaker 7
our Tesla, that's gospel. I want you to get a better booster.
I want you to expand Starlink into Africa. They do it.
I want you, Doge, to cut. No, you can't do that in government.
And that's...
Speaker 7
Trump's position is this. We'll see who's right.
He's saying to Elon,
Speaker 7 you didn't get your trillion dollars. You got maybe 200 billion.
Speaker 7 But I'm going to, you're not giving me credit because I got 10 trillion in foreign investment coming in, and I'm going to lower the interest rate one way or the other and save a billion dollars a day.
Speaker 7
I'm going to get tariff revenue. I'm going to start selling citizenship to rich foreigners.
I'm going to do everything in the I'm going to have the tax that's going to stimulate GDP.
Speaker 7 So before you say that I blew up the let me wait until next March
Speaker 7 and we'll see. And the only problem with that is that the supply side does work,
Speaker 7 but only if you have fiscal restraint.
Speaker 7 Reagan
Speaker 7 really grew the economy, grew by 7%
Speaker 7 in 1984.
Speaker 7 But the problem was he couldn't stop the spending, so he had big deficits. Yeah.
Speaker 3 Yes.
Speaker 3 And you know, I was thinking just anecdotally, as I drive the 99, since I commute sometimes, I can really see a difference in the industrial area because you end up on the 99 right in a very industrial area of Fresno, and it really is changing.
Speaker 3 I can see businesses starting to pick up and abandoned.
Speaker 7 I drive through some very impoverished towns between Central California and where I work on the coast, near the coast, and on the west side.
Speaker 7
I'm starting to see little towns where the old abandoned factories packing out. You can start to see trucking companies come back, food companies come back.
And then
Speaker 7 I start to see the quality of some of the farming.
Speaker 7 The places look better.
Speaker 7 So I think there's I don't know if it's psychological or it's foreign investment. I don't know what it is.
Speaker 3 It's looking good, Donald Trump. That's all we have to say.
Speaker 7 I just saw a statistic today. Two million more Americans are working and one million less foreign nationals are working.
Speaker 7 That's something I could not believe that.
Speaker 3
All right. Well, thank you, everyone, for joining us for the Victor Davis-Hansen show.
This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off. Thank you, everyone.