Iran and China as Paper Tigers

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He's a man with a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Victorhanson.com is the address.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, and we are talking on Sunday, the 29th of June.

And this particular episode will be up on Thursday, July 3rd.

And by the way, that's not an important day, Victor.

I just wrote a piece about for Philanthropy Daily.

It is the 250th anniversary of George Washington actually taking command of the Continental Army in Cambridge.

So that's the beginning of POTIS I,

even though he was a president.

Victor, you've written about why everyone hates Iran.

There's some stuff out there.

I said the Iranian theocracy.

That's true.

The Iranian people.

We love the Iranian people.

But we, you know, I understand that.

Barack Obama didn't love him.

We love him.

Barack Obama loved the theocracy.

I don't think he liked the Iranian people, or he wouldn't have loved the theocracy.

Yeah, he was was the best friend of the Theocrats.

President Xi of China looks like he is being diminished.

A very interesting piece in the New York Post today.

AOC, the bogus Bronx lady,

another

black congresswoman attacking people who have the nerve to mention Martin Luther King in some testimony before Congress.

And I thought, well,

let's get Victor's take on that because he's actually met Martin Luther King.

So that and more.

Victor, we'll get to all that when we come back from these important messages.

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This is unconstitutional.

Have you heard some biased journalist, maybe on a podcast or a YouTube show, say this?

Probably.

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

So, Victor, you forgive forgive my shorthand there of the hatred.

Victor doesn't hate anybody.

Nobody hates.

But here's the piece.

It's titled, In the End, Everyone Hated the Iranian Theocracy.

If people want to see this, read it.

They can go on Victor's website.

Here's a little slice from it.

Did China come to the Mullah's aid?

No.

They were not shy about ordering their Iranian lackey to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, through which 50% of Chinese purchased oil passes.

For President Xi, the Iranians are treated as little more than Uyghurs with oil.

The world decided.

Without oil.

Oh, with oil, yeah.

Yeah, with oil.

The world decided that it was tired of a half-century of crybully terrorism, empty nuke threats, mindless mobs screaming scripted banalities, cowardly murdering, and medieval theocrats threatening the general peace.

Victor, great peace, you know.

Yeah, what I meant was that we were told that all it was going to be World War III, 30,000 people killed, there was going to be all these riots.

And I thought, why would that be?

And I I just went, I tried to be systematic.

Well, the Russians like tensions in the Gulf because it raises oil prices, they think.

It didn't in this case.

Why would they sell another anti-missile defense system and just see it blown up again?

And they got run out of Syria and they kind of went out with their tail between their legs when the Assad dynasty fell.

And why would you want to back a loser like the Iranian theocrats?

And why does Russia have a strong, I don't know, affinity with Muslims after it, what, in the Third Chetnikian War, it leveled Grozny to the ground?

China, 50% of their oil comes from the Straits of Hormuz.

We're going to shut down the Straits of...

No, you're not.

That's what China told them.

And then the Arab world, Muslim pan-Solidaire?

No.

They don't like the Persians or the Shia.

And then Europe, Europe, well, Europe is...

This is very dangerous.

We caution.

And then privately to Trump, thank you, thank you.

We were in missile range if they had ever gotten a bomb.

So there was, you just go down the list, there was nobody, and everybody said, well, Hezbollah and Hamas,

aside the fact that Hezbollah's leadership is maimed, crippled, dead, and hiding, or each person, anytime a person from Hamas says, I'm the new Hamas leader, I'm ahead of the military wing, they get killed.

The Houthis, they're like, as I said earlier, they're like the black knight in Monty Python.

Every time they lose an arm, they say, I'm your flesh wound.

That's who they are.

And all of them say, well, we were going to attack Israel simultaneously.

We just needed the mothership to coordinate.

And they didn't do anything.

Iran watched them be wiped out.

So when Iran's term came, nobody liked them.

I got

a really nasty letter from an Iranian, I guess American, and

he was going through all the defense of the regime, but he was acting as if I had attacked the Iranian people.

I hadn't.

He's attacking the Iranian people by

defending that horrendous regime.

And he even went back to Alexander the Great.

Whatever you want to say about Alexander the Great and the Persian Empire, he conquered the Persian Empire with an army that never numbered more than 40,000 people at the battles of Isis,

Granicus, and Issus, or Isis, and Guagamela.

And so.

Hey, what is the guy saying?

Despite being conquered, we really weren't conquered, essentially?

Yeah, that we're heroic.

And no,

that was the theme of Herodotus' seventh and eighth books.

I mean, 300 Spartans out of a contingent of maybe 6,000 held off a quarter million people at Thermopylae.

They were three to one at Salamis, and they lost, picked out at Plataea.

So I don't know what his point was, but he was trying to tell me all the grandeur of Persian.

society and I had made fun of Persians.

I hadn't.

I had made fun of the theocracy, which he was, and then he went into the whole anti-Semitic, anti-Jew stuff.

It was repulsive.

I'm going to print it and reply to it, because it gives me

an opportunity to make the argument why what

why our attitude to the theocracy is warranted.

The other thing that's worrisome, if there's a lot of people like that, and I think there is in the West, then don't expect a green revolution.

I don't think you're going to see a lot of people rise up.

Not that they support the theocracy, but they don't want to get killed.

And I remember when they did rise up and Obama for 11 days didn't say a word because he wanted them to fail.

Still I guess earlier that if you came to America or Europe after 1981-82, then you stayed during the Khomeini Revolution.

You were anti-Shah.

You thought that these crazy fanatic mullahs could be manipulated by you, the sophisticated Europhilic socialists that was going to make Mossadegh another Mossadegh government or something.

And then you didn't understand how formidable and ruthless they are.

They killed you off.

They drove you, all the students that were involved in the takeover of the hostages.

And then you fled.

And you fled to the United States in the second diaspora or Europe.

And you were not pro-American.

That's why you see them in the media.

You see them in academics.

I met so many Iranian refugees that became citizens or green card holders.

And I just asked them, what year did you come?

If they came from 78, 79, when the Shah was there, they knew what was coming.

They understood that.

And they got out with their property and they were in business, commerce, etc., farming, mining.

And they are very successful here.

They're very anti-theocratic.

They're very pro-American.

But the second diaspora, they went into academia, they went into liberal fields.

and they sort of blamed the United States for supporting the Shah, which brought in Khomeini, which they couldn't control, and therefore their socialist revolution failed.

So then they went to where the people they blamed, the United States.

That's where they went.

So it doesn't make any sense.

Has your military group ever looked at the Iraq-Iran war?

Yeah, we have.

What is the assessment of the Iranian military?

It sued for peace.

At that point, it had about 75 million people to 80 million people, and Iraq had about 30.

It had double the population, and Iraq had attacked.

They held off the attack.

They used suicide, and they did everything.

They sent young 12-year-old kids through minefields.

They mobilized a huge army, and they actually invaded, counter-invaded, and got into Iraq.

Saddam Hussein used 220-volt shocks in the marshes to electrocute them.

He used poison gas.

It was horrific.

much worse even than the Iranians.

And then that didn't work, and they had the War of the Cities, where they exchanged Scud missiles.

Then they had the War of the Tankers.

Remember that, where Reagan tried to intervene?

That was the latter part.

And then finally, they came to Khomeini and they said, we can't get arms.

Nobody wants us, even our enemies don't want to sell us arms.

We had to do, you know, hostages.

Remember the Oran-Contra?

They were doing anything they could do to get any arms.

By 1986 or 1997, they had exhausted exhausted the Shahs.

The reason that they did, excuse me, the reason they did very well in 1980 and they rebounded once they were surprise-attacked in 81, 82, because they had the largest stockpile they inherited from the Shah.

They had F-14s, they had American patent tanks, they had a lot of good material.

But they had exhausted that by 84.

And then it was a war of attrition, and the Russians were selling arms.

And Saddam Hussein, which was one of the reasons he invaded Kuwait in 91, he was borrowing massive amounts, multi-billion, floating, multi-billion dollar loans from Saudi, Oman, all of these countries who were terrified of the Khomeini Shias.

And then when he wouldn't pay them back, they said, you gotta pay us back.

He said,

I wasn't fighting for me, I was fighting for the Arabs.

And he invaded Kuwait.

But my point is, they didn't do very well.

And then that famous thing where Khomeini said, this is the worst thing I'm forced to do the worst, most painful thing I can imagine, That is submit to a ceasefire and basically a de facto loss.

So they didn't.

And that's important because the myth of the indomitable Iranian military is not backed up by any evidence.

They can blow up Marines that are asleep in their barracks via Hezbollah and III.

They can blow up our embassy.

They can torture Buckley and kill him.

They can blow up Jews in Argentina.

They can send missiles.

And by the way, this letter writer was bragging to me and this angry reader, well, we blew up the Wiseman Institute and we blew up a university.

That's really good.

See, we're effective.

Without the idea that, you know,

they were only targeting civilian targets and Israel was going after military and scientific, i.e.

nuclear targets.

But no, it didn't reflect well on the ability of the Iranian military.

Well, I want to apologize for the kafluiness of what happened technically here.

But

Victor's here.

That's all that matters, giving his wisdom hey victor thanks uh for your for the uh education there on the uh iraq iranian war and the the might or the alleged might of of iran and i can't wait to read your response to this arano file i guess maybe kind term for him okay

i also you mentioned hamas before and i i the headline that i saw this morning again we're recording on sunday the 29th israel killed hamas co-founder Hakam Mohammed Isa al-Isa on Friday.

And he is one of the architects of October 7th.

And you just can't hide.

It would be like you're working for,

I'm still writing for National Review, and somebody's knocking off all the editors, and my turn is next as senior.

And I think, on the one hand, it would be nice to be editor, but the other hand, I'll just stay home, but maybe they know where I am.

Yeah.

So what I want to break.

It's scary.

It's like, remember Hang Em High?

Was it Hang Em High where he begged literally?

He finds every one of them.

He has their names.

And the same thing is they have the names of every single person.

They know exactly their role on October 7th.

And they're just waiting for that person to announce that he's the head of the military wing of Hamas or

the Revolutionary Guard Brigade or whatever.

And they're dead.

They're dead.

And that means it's very difficult for them to recombobulate because you're going to be dead.

Hezbollah is going to be dead.

And I wouldn't, if I was in Hezbollah, I would never use a pager again.

I would never use a cell phone again.

I would never be anywhere near an apartment building that I knew had a missile in the basement.

I'd become a Bedouin.

I would never be anywhere in my next 20 years next to a Lebanese that A was missing a hand, fingers, an eye, or genital.

I just wouldn't be near them because that would be self-condemnatory.

I think, well, maybe they're going to finish the job.

I mean, we don't appreciate all of that.

And it's the same thing with the car bomb explosions of the physicist.

And they had the names.

If you were an Iranian physicist and you get a call from Khamenei, well, we would like to start the, we have a new place.

It's underground.

They can't reach it.

And we'd like you to get $6,000.

And

we're going to give you the title of the head of the Iranian Nuclear Proliferation Program.

Congratulations.

The soon-to-be ex-head.

Yeah, well, who would do that?

And that's what they don't understand.

All of our experts and pundits don't understand that psychological element.

You're dead if you do that.

And that has a deterrent effect on people.

I think even we go back 50 years or 60 years,

Eichmann,

sorry.

They found him and they hung his sorry ass as it deserves.

Exactly.

And I mean, everybody thinks these people are zealots when the.

How did

Goering?

he took cyanide with a secret capsule at Nuremberg but most of them I mean Goebbels and his wife shot their kids he shot himself what happened to Himmler he was an ex-chicken farmer he was the head of the SS and then he disguised himself as a sergeant and tried to sneak around and they caught him and he took cyanide They had the name, the Americans and the British had names of all of those top Nazis.

Very few of them were defiant, you know.

They got out in a jeep and charged the lines.

They just either either killed themselves took cyanide blew their brains out or tried to hide and and sneak off yeah and that's what they're gonna do well good uh nice to have some earthly justice hey victor before we move on to i mentioned a quoted from your article uh about president xi of china and there's some really interesting piece about

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Victor about Xi.

This is really interesting.

New York Post piece today,

again, Sunday the 29th by Gregory Slayton.

Maybe I've read him before.

I'm not sure who he is, but it's titled, Is Chinese President Xi Jinping on His Way Out?

Here's what he writes: Over the past six months, unprecedented developments point to the potential and potentially imminent fall of China's chairman of everything, Xi Jinping.

Chinese Communist Party elders, including Hu Jintao, Zhi's immediate predecessor, whom Zhi humiliated at the 20th Party Congress in 2022, they are now running things behind the scenes.

Xi is in poor health and likely to retire at the CCP plenary session this August or take a purely ceremonial position.

Xi's downfall has been rumored before, but never have we seen the recent purges and mysterious deaths of dozens of People's Liberation Army generals loyal to Xi, all replaced by non-G loyalists.

Victor, it's very interesting.

The young lad is, you know, we heard Castro for decades was on his way out or dying, etc.

Yeah, we said that Putin was sick, remember?

He had lymphoma, he was supposedly on steroids, but he's still around.

They can keep

leaders get very exceptional health care.

There's always this rumor that Chi was, I think he's the same age as I am.

I'm going to be 72.

He's born the same year, 53.

But he's kind of overweight.

He's quiet.

You get the impression maybe

it never looked like he was happy.

But in that type, it's hard for the military and the political class in that country like it is in Iran or anywhere else because when you see a leader that starts to decline supposedly, whether physically, mentally or career-wise, you have to make a calculated guess about the rate of his descent because if you jump ship too early, he's going to kill you.

If you jump ship too late, you miss his successor, you miss the boat.

So, you know, what do you do if you think he's

like Biden?

If we were in a dictatorship and Biden was a dictator, at what point would you think the Biden people would get you?

Or he was so far gone they had lost credibility, and it's hard to know.

But Biden didn't lose credibility with the Democrats until that debate.

Otherwise, they were sticking with him.

And the other thing is, what does Qi have to show?

What was his, in terms of the PLA, what has he done?

That is, I mean, everybody was talking about BRICS, this new

Brazil,

India, China, North Korea, Iran.

Everybody talks as if it's very formidable.

But if you look at the members of the alliance, Iran is inert now.

Bing!

And you look at Russia, it's tied down, it's lost a million dead, wounded, and missing in Ukraine.

And it can't crush Ukraine like it thought it could.

And China is in the midst of this disastrous trade war with the United States, potentially at least.

And he's got a lot of internal problems.

I think a lot of people are thinking, why did you get so confrontational with the United States before we had reached military, political, and economic parity?

And why did you align us so closely with loser countries like Russia and Iran and lose a lot of our insidious leverage we had over the Europeans and the Americans?

It would have been much smarter for you to be nice to the Americans and the Europeans, don't gouge them too much while we built up our military.

We don't have parity yet with the United States.

We don't have economic parity.

They have one-third larger GDP than we do.

So we weren't there yet.

You rush things.

I think that's what they're thinking.

Well, they have,

I think they also have tremendous debt, or they have these Potemkin cities, not just villages.

Nobody's in them.

They build, it's not that they have, you know, they have 1.4 billion people, and they build these huge pre-planned cities on real estate principles that are not based on supply and demand in terms of money.

And they just, by fiat, order them, and then they think, well, we have 400 million people that don't have adequate housing, but how are we going to pay back the people who we contracted to build this stuff?

If these people have nothing, we'll just have to put them in there.

If we put them in there, then everybody will want a free house.

So what do we do?

And they just sit there as empty cities.

Well, plus the aging population, I don't know how they get out of that.

I don't think so.

Aging populations, it's not just that you have too many people that can't do a full day's work, but they require a lot of young people to take care of them.

The society itself is less risk-taking as you get older geriatric people.

You really, when you go to war, when you have a one-person, one-child family, you're very protective, as you should be.

But an aging population is directly tied to affluence.

and gaining affluence, ascending, and more importantly, declining fertility.

And they're connected.

So it's not the old days of China or the West or

of these societies that you have an extended family and you've got a house with grandma and Aunt Millie and you've got them watching the little babies and you've got three or four kids in the same house.

That's how I grew up.

You know, extended family.

We all had these little houses on this farm and we would go down and take care of my grandparents.

Basically, from the age of 10 until my grandmother died when I was,

oh gosh, 40 years old.

No.

I was born in 1953 and she died in

83.

I was 30.

All we did was, I fixed the house, I mowed the lawn, I took my crippled aunt from polio to places, whether I was at Stanford or Santa Cruz, I drove home on weekends, took them to Eastern Star, the Shriners, Masonic Temple, a Walnut Improvement Club, Farm Bureau, Grain.

I did all of that.

And it wasn't just me, it was my siblings.

And so that was our job.

And then

when we were small, three, four, five, six, my parents, if they had to go somewhere, we stayed with my grandparents.

It was in the house.

It was only a

in China.

Most of these.

That's how it works.

Yeah,

they don't even have first cousins.

The one-child family policy.

They don't.

And for a nation that was

fine with the

forced abortion and infanticide,

I don't know why that won't be fine.

It's fine with 55% male.

You know, when you have one child, everybody wants the male to have the family name, and, you know, and there's a shortage of women.

Actually, it'd be smarter if you were going to be a calculating SOB to have a daughter because they're in great demand.

There's not enough women.

Yeah.

And so it's a

I don't envy any leader

in China.

Victor, we have a couple of mouthy Democrat congresswomen to get your take on.

One of them, of course, is a 400

Yeah, well,

we'll do that when we come back from these important messages.

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Let's go on the mouthy Congresswoman.

One is ALC, but let's hold off for this.

I never heard of her before, but this is Democrat Latifah Simon of California.

Here's what happened, Victor, the other day.

The headline here is, Democrat rep explodes over GOP quoting Martin Luther King Jr.

in hearing.

Keep Dr.

King's name out of your mouth.

Democrat Rep Latifa Simon erupted during a House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday objecting to Republican witnesses invoking the legacy of Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

during testimony related to DEI programs.

Simon directed her outburst at Dan Lennington of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, that's a great organization, by the way, Judge Glock of the Manhattan Institute, also great, and Eric Smith of the Cato Institute.

All three were testifying during a session focused on the future of DEI policies in federal and private institutions.

Very few of you have read and studied and sat in Ebenezer Baptist Church, so I would ask you, you keep Dr.

King's name out of your mouth.

That's a losing argument.

Nobody has

exclusivity to anybody.

And what they were doing was quoting content of our character, not the color of our skin.

That's what he said.

I heard him at the Grace Cathedral.

I think I was 11 years old.

Nobody has a right.

That's like saying, well, you're not

white, so don't dare quote Lincoln.

He's my Lincoln.

He's not anybody's Lincoln.

And that gets me really angry.

You know what is happening now with the black elite community, especially in journalism and media and politics and the administrative state?

Two things are happening.

One is they are hemorrhaging voters to the right, and they know that.

So you've got 15% of the black vote, but 26% of black male.

So, it really weakens the argument to say that anybody who votes for Trump is racist, because if you do that and you're a black leader, like Obama learned when he started yelling and screaming at those aides to Harris, you talk down to people.

But more importantly, chances are that every 25% you're going to be talking to somebody who voted for Trump in the case of black male.

More if you're a Hispanic leader.

So, that's one thing that

racialist, tribalist group has.

And the other thing is, it's very hard to invoke

the per capita income between black Americans and white Americans is not nearly as wide as white Americans and Asian Americans.

It's not.

It's about $10,000, I think $15,000, but as I said, it's about $60,000 to $100,000 with the top groups of Asian Americans.

What I'm getting at is class is not an indicator, a reliable indicator of a person's race anymore.

So you have a whole thriving black

middle and upper class.

The Wall Street Journal today has an article, for example, about all these black families that are making in states like New York or Pennsylvania and California a quarter of a million dollars are 300,000, and they're complaining that they're not rich.

But if you look at the pictures of their garage, there's a Cadillac, there's Tesla's.

One woman's complaining, well, we make $350,000, but

we can't afford the $70,000 tuition room for our kid in private school.

Another one says we paid $9,000 for my son's athletic program.

The point I'm making is that for that new demographic, which is about 50% or higher, the old race, race, race, race that we're victims doesn't mean anything.

What they're wanting to know is: why am I in California paying $550 for gas?

Why is kilowatt usage costing me 30 cents a kilowatt?

Why are you banning natural gas stoves?

Why would you ban fracking?

They have, like anybody else, but this fossilized elite and amber is still into tribal politics.

That's how they got elected from these black districts and Hispanic districts, but they don't represent necessarily the rank and file anymore.

Not in the case of Hispanics, 50%

voted for Trump and 54% support him now, according to the recent polls, and maybe more for deportation.

And then, so what happens is they understand that people who are self-identified and self-appointed as custodians of racial features.

So, then when they start to see this hemorrhaging, they double down, they get ultrasensitive, and they say things that are either silly or racist.

And so, I'm talking about not just politicians, everybody.

So, just the last two weeks, you've got Jasmine Crockett saying, you know,

and then she goes into the fake accent because she's a preppy that went to private school, upper middle class, and she knows she's hemorrhaging supporters.

So, like AOC, she's got to re-establish that she has a ghetto accent.

And she turns it on.

It's fake.

But more importantly, she's got to say something about white people.

So she said, And finally, you know, Cabella Harris,

we just voted for an old white man.

Just voted for an old white man.

And then Whoopi Goldwork, you know, about all of her blacks have it worse than people in Iran.

And we had Ilya and Omar not too long ago saying, you know, the biggest threat is white men as terrorists.

So they say white, white, white, white, white, white, they're obsessed with it because they're trying to find something to fan up a re-enthusiasm or some anger or racism.

They're desperately looking for a Charlottesville or they're looking for a Michael Ford or they're looking for something because they are out of touch with this new movement that is actually a proof of the success of the Hispanic and black classes to become upper upper class,

you know, upper mobile people.

And they don't want that to happen because they were selected as the anchor woman.

They were selected as the caucus chairman.

They were selected because a large part of their race.

And they don't need to do that anymore.

But they don't have confidence that they could do it.

They're not Tom Sowell.

They're not Shelby Steele.

They're not people who have confidence in their own exemplary talents and powers.

Well, Victor, I want to remind our listeners, they should maybe want to check previous episodes.

And Victor had some very long takes, you know, to do it now, on

your meeting of Martin Luther King as a young kid and hearing him.

And actually,

I think he patted your head or something like that way back.

So, kind of very interesting.

He walked around the entire congregation at Grace Cathedral and he shook everybody's hand right by the door.

My mom pushed me in when they closed the door.

And we'd gotten up six hours to drive to San Francisco, and there were some African-American women who contacted a woman that we knew and didn't have a ride.

So we went all the way out to Hunters Point and picked up two African-American women that were elderly.

And so we couldn't find a parking place.

We came late.

So we were in this huge line.

And finally, they said, the doors are closing.

I don't know why my mom would do it.

I think it was 11.

And she just pushed me.

And I almost tumbled into the door.

And then they locked it.

And I was by myself.

And I listened to it.

I can remember what he said.

I mean, it was content of a character.

He said that.

I think he said that at a pretty much.

But he also said, if you're going to be, if you're a landscaper, if you're a janitor, whatever it is, you're going to be the best at what you do.

And that's important.

You don't complain.

You just be the best.

And then things good will happen to you.

He said that a lot.

I don't know if it was on the record.

He was just answering, but he was,

I was, I remember told my mom, I said, whatever you're doing, if you're doing the best, that doesn't matter what you're doing.

It's how you do it and the level of expertise.

And so for her to say that because she happened to go to King's historic church and a white person didn't, that makes her an authority on Martin Luther King.

And that's not the way it works.

I'm sorry, we don't make rules for you.

We don't say that this person is white and therefore you can't quote them.

You can have just as much.

Shakespeare and Socrates represented are just as much yours as they are mine.

Just because they look like me has nothing to do with it.

So you can be one of the biggest fans of Aristophanes, even though he's white, and I'm not going to say, oh, how dare you?

I went to Athens where he lived.

Don't ever mention his name again.

Unless I'm a racist.

If I'm a racist, I'll say that.

But you're a racist, and that's why you say it.

And that's what's sad.

I think what's happening here with the whole

recalibration of the social, cultural, and political landscape is the tolerance for that now because of upward mobility and affluence and class not being, Trump's success with appealing to people on their class shared interest rather than the racial segregated interest,

is that you're going to see more and more of that strident racial demagoguery and you're going to see less and less tolerance for it.

I just turn it out, tune it out now.

I've had a couple people who do that, and I won't mention their names that when they start in I just can't talk to you about it.

I don't want to talk about it.

I don't want to hear it anymore.

I just don't want to hear it.

I don't do it.

I don't want you to do it.

California, the largest minority is Hispanic, 45% of the population, 46%.

I have a lot of Hispanic friends, but if somebody starts to saying, as a Latina, as a Latino, Latino, Latino, I just tune it out.

Fine, you can be a Latino.

I don't want to hear it.

And I expect you wouldn't want to hear me saying, as a white person, as a white person, as a white person.

I wouldn't do it.

But if they said as a Bronx native?

So, Victor, I am a Bronx native.

Yeah, well, that's a different thing because you're not identifying by race.

No, but there's something about I'm from the Bronx that implies this toughness, this kind of thing.

Is the Bronx considered more,

is it considered tougher to grow up in than the Queens, or vice versa?

Yes.

Yeah.

Queens

compared to the Bronx.

The Queens had many more, had nicer neighborhoods than

the Bronx.

It's below Staten Island, too, as far as smaller scale goes.

Staten Island is above the Bronx.

Bronx is of the five boroughs, Bronx ranked last.

Yeah.

And so she uses that to cement her egalitarian proletariat.

Well, but very interesting, it came up last week, and this had been raised before, but it's getting a lot of attention.

She grew up in Yorktown Heights, which is a suburban community in Westchester, north of New York City.

Very in Connecticut, right?

Hot.

No,

in New York City.

Yeah, it's in Westchester County.

But

there's a state, Republican state

assemblyman named Matt Slater, who's a graduate of her high school.

And he was a senior when she was a freshman.

I think she was on the track team, and so was he.

And he's like, what is this?

BS that she's from the Bronx.

She's from Yorktown Heights.

You know, just be who you are.

So anyway, her authenticity as a tough because the Bronx

Obama.

Remember Obama?

Yeah.

He was Barry Sortello or something for a while, and then he was Barack Sortello.

Then he was Barack Obama.

I don't think he used that name until he got to Occidental.

And he found out that it was, he said that in his memoirs.

I read Dreams from My Father.

He basically said he didn't want to date white people.

He gravitated toward black people because he saw that there was more career opportunities for emphasizing one half of his racial pedigree than the other half.

That's what he basically said.

Even though the half that he emphasized in his particular case, his father was nowhere to be found, and his mother was, and especially his grandmother, was ubiquitous.

I don't think his grandmother and grandfather that brought him up and scrimped and saved, she had been a bank teller who worked herself up to a bank president, gave, I think when she died, each one had got a $450,000 inheritance.

I don't think that she ever referred to her grandson as anything other than Barry.

I think that Barack came after they were gone out of the house, and he did that in college.

It would be kind of sort of like if Sweden was a big powerhouse right now, or it was really the nice thing.

I think I would rename myself as Leif, or maybe Thor.

Thor, Leif, Hansen.

I put two S's on there, too, Hansen.

I have a brother named Nels, so maybe that's, and one named Alfred, which is kind of an English Scandinavian.

But

anyway.

Once upon a time, Sweden was the bronze in the toughness or everything.

Yes,

Charles XII invaded Russia, and he almost

got quite there.

They were the most warlike of all the Scandinavian people.

Yeah.

I just was speaking to a Swedish member at this international delegation.

I gave a lecture and question and answer.

I don't want to give much information who she was or anything, but you could tell that she was on the left of center, which meant she was Swedish.

And I started to talk about the wonderful Swedish grip and air fighter that Saab makes, and

that the latest additions to NATO, both Finland and Sweden.

Sweden brings very sophisticated armored cars, fighters, missiles,

some of the best munitions in the world, and Finland has the best artillery in the world.

So So when we got those two editions, that was a plus plus.

And I was just saying that and I thought, I caught myself halfway through.

I thought, oh, she's a pacifist, and I'm offending her.

And of course, she's Swedish more than she's a pacifist.

So she had a big smile and was correcting me on weapons and things

and adding to the munitions that Sweden is underappreciated for.

Victor, I want to ask you a question about a former commie, Fuzzy,

how former his communism was.

And then we're going to take a break and get into the final chapter of the show where I want to get

your thoughts on some

things going on in Africa.

But John Brennan, I'm just curious, how does he have any cachet?

He's still on the boob tube, and he was on saying that Iran needed enriched uranium.

By the way, John Brennan was a member of the Communist Party.

He voted for Gus Hall.

Yeah.

Has he formally announced that he's converted to Islam?

No, I'm serious.

Are you serious?

Yeah, no, no.

No, I don't know that.

No, he at one point said that he was.

Wow.

All I know about him is he was a under Bush, he was for enhanced interrogations at Guantanamo.

So he was a mirror image of whomever he worked for.

And then when that became a liability, he attacked Bush, and then he wanted to be

CIA director.

I think Obama thought, and then he came out and said that that was torture.

And then he weaseled his way back in by attacking Bush that he worked for and flipped and became left-wing and worked for Obama.

And he finally made CIA director, and then he lied under oath on two occasions.

Once he was asked directly if

the CIA was monitoring the computers of Senate staffers, they were, and he said no,

should have been fired there and should have been charged with perjury.

And then he made an astounding statement of the predator-grown assassination missions that Obama was very proud of on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

He said there wasn't any, any, any collateral damage.

That was a complete lie.

So when people, even in his own party, were thinking about charging him with something, they brought him in and he was contrite, of course.

Kind of like James Clapper when he said that the NSA doesn't spy on people and then they said you're a pathological liar.

Here's the data.

And he said, I only gave the least untruthful answer.

I don't know why they weren't fired.

I don't know why they weren't charged with perjury.

I don't know why they didn't yank their security clearances.

I'm glad that Trump finally did, and no one listens to them.

Each of them then went to lucrative billets respectively at MSNBC and CNN.

But you're right.

When you hear anything from James Clapper, and they both, Clapper was the one that said that Trump was a Putin asset, a Russian asset.

So did Brennan, essentially.

So they bought into the steel dossier.

They were two of the organizers or the prominent people with the 51 intelligence authorities.

They have a horrible record.

And so why would anybody listen to anything they say?

Well, Victor, it's one of the perpetual head scratchers.

Hey, we're going to take a final break here, and then I'm going to pose a question or two to you, Victor, about what's going on in Nigeria and some peace settlement in between Rwanda and Congo.

And we'll do that when we come back from these final important messages.

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We're back with the Victor David Hansen.

David, I did introduce you as that once.

I would say that Hansen.

And to the few people who know who I am, a very small number, I would say 80% call me David, not David.

Yeah.

It was so embarrassing.

I know I've mentioned this on the show before.

When we were visiting with Sarah Palin in 2007 at her

the governor's home, and she was hosting us on a national review cruise, and

I was introducing people, and I'm looking right at you, and I said, Victor David.

And as soon as the duh came out of my mouth, I was like, oh, what an idiot.

Amongst the many idiotic things I've said.

You know what?

Maybe I was feeling tired, foggy, or running low on energy lately.

There was a very famous political analyst at the time, probably the most famous at that time in history, and I won't mention his name.

And he turned to me as we were in the bus from the

cruise ship to the president, the gubernatorial mansion, and he said, Now, do you know anything about this woman?

And I said, a little bit.

And he had a printout, I think it was Wikipedia or something.

And then we got there, and he kind of hijacked, you were talking or somebody, and he said, now let me just say something.

And she's an upcoming, she's going to be a star.

Remember that?

Just.

We can say the name.

It was Dick Morris.

And that's how

I've been invited to so many venues, and that's totally Dick.

But I give him.

He was impromptu.

But you would have thought that he had been an intimate observer of her political career.

Well, he did think.

Remember,

he wrote a book called Hilly versus Condi, didn't he?

Oh, yes.

He had a lot of bestsellers, but Dick,

when we went to visit, when we went to Alaska in 2007, her popularity

in state polling was over 90%.

And many people thought, you know, if she had been the governor of Colorado or something like that, everyone would be talking about her.

You know what's funny is that I had

a friend that was very angry in that year when John McCain

selected her.

And he said to me, I can't believe he picked her.

He picked her after meeting with her without even, you know, background or consult, supposedly.

But if you remember, she was in the kitchen, you remember?

When we were,

she was in the kitchen, she slipped off her shoes and she was walking around and bare feet or stalking.

And she must have been, how old do you think, there, 40, 30?

Um, that was almost 20 years.

She was, yeah, she was, well, she had a kid a year later, so yeah, she was early 40s.

I thought when I saw her, she was absolutely stunning.

Okay, yeah.

And she was smiling and winking, and she was captivating.

She really was.

She had kind of a middle-class accent.

And I can see, and then when that thing happened, I remember that they put Nicole Wallace as her personal handler, as communication director.

And then we found out later that

Nicole Wallace and her staff were snickering about how Sarah Palin didn't have

a knowledge of wardrobes and makeup, and she didn't have any clothes.

Remember that last?

They were sabotaging by leaking to the press that she was some kind of bumpkin.

Yeah.

And she'd never really been on the national stage.

I thought she won or at least least kept even with Joe Biden in the debate.

She was terrific in it.

Yeah.

In fact, the same thing at that meeting.

She said, so tell me about your family.

How many kids you have?

Like, she was genuinely interested in other people.

She was very nice.

She was decidedly normal.

She was absolutely stunning that day.

I can remember that.

I know.

I remember what she was wearing.

That beautiful woman.

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Victor, let me, as we get to the last topic here, let's conclude, just because they're on the same continent, I guess, but two things African.

One is the,

I think kudos to the Trump administration and for helping to conclude this endless madness between Rwanda, which has had its own madness internally, and the Congo.

Thanks to Marco Rubio and others, there's a peace agreement there.

But then separately, I wanted to raise my old colleague, friend Madeline Kearns, who was at National Review, she now writes for the Free Press, she's a terrific writer.

And she wrote a piece, very powerful piece the other day about the endless slaughter of Christians and Catholics in Nigeria.

I mean, the numbers are shocking, and it just happens.

I have a feeling like right now, Victor, as we're talking, there's probably some church in Nigeria that's being attacked by these Islamic terrorists who are macheteing these

worshipers to death.

I'm sorry.

Religion of peace.

No, I'm sorry, I forgot.

But I got to ask that.

I don't want to keep going back in a separate manner, but when I was talking to these international State Department-type, I think there were 40 countries or 35, there was somebody from the Congo, and he was asking me what the Trump administration added to what was driving their views of Africa.

And I said, well, we get most of the attention on Europe because of trade and Asia, but Latin America and Africa kind of get left out.

But there were two concerns, it seems to me, in the Trump administration about Africa.

One is economic and the other is cultural.

And the economic is they're very worried about Chinese influence and the Belt and Road Initiative, both in an idealistic sense that these countries are getting in terrible debt.

allowing China to build highways, bridges, ports, airports, and then paying for it by natural resources.

I never understood that either.

You said that why aren't people getting outraged about Christians?

And I can't figure it out.

Because the other cultural worry is what you're talking about.

There's a lot of people that are surrounding Trump that are angry and that there's no attention to this slaughter of Christians in Africa.

But there's also no...

There's no condemnation for China.

If that was a Western country that went into the third world and built segregated enclaves so their people were not interacting with the local population, and then building these substandard, a lot of them are substandard infrastructure projects, and then charging them for it and making them pay with copper or lithium or whatever they pay for, there would be international outrage.

That's another thing about the international left.

They don't mention China at all.

I can't figure out they're just scared of China or they're bought off by China or they still have this nostalgic idea of a little star in their college cap they wore, you know, a Mao suit they put on.

I don't know what it is, but

those are the two things that really, I think, concern the administration.

And same thing with Islam.

It's like China in the religious fear.

It has a complete exemption from the same type of scrutiny that other religions or the West has put under.

And, you know, it's,

you can see it on October 7.

You can see it in the Iran War.

All of a sudden, Israel is taking out physicists that have a military component to their occupation and people in the military and military targets.

And this crazy person from Iran or from an Iranian somebody, an expatriate, writes me that he's

boasting that I underestimated the efficacy of the Iranian military because they attacked the university and a research cancer institute.

And he's bragging about that.

And he's so inured to the idea that Westerners would never challenge him or his left-wing politics or his Islamic politics that he can say things that are self-contradictory and condemnatory.

Because you say, well, if you're such a superior civilization or religion, why are you bragging that you attack a non-combatant doctor or surgeon or researcher when the other side is not doing that?

And you're bragging about that, that the only people you can kill are defenseless?

I haven't kept up to date, but I don't think that Iran killed one soldier in this 12-day war.

Maybe they did, that was on leave or something.

But it was a war against civilians.

And I don't think that Israel deliberately targeted very many civilians unless they were working on a nuclear project.

But anyway.

Okay.

Well, Victor, we're at the conclusion of our show, which is a day out from

the 4th of July, so we hope our listeners and viewers enjoy themselves on this

federal holiday.

Great day.

249th birthday of America.

Next year will be the semi-sesquicentennial.

So that's I have that right.

We conclude our shows with some comments from our listeners and readers.

And here are two.

One is this headline, So Much Great Information and Knowledge, and this is from MDHBPB,

who writes, I'm 74 years old, retired RN, and I only wish I had known about VDH many, many years ago.

Thank you so much for helping me.

And I'm sure millions of others understand our history as well as present.

I listen every day if possible.

Keep up the great work.

And then the other comment is from Tony L.

Upchurch.

I think this is off of YouTube.

I've always thought of VDH as a very rare animal, kind of like a wolverine.

The highest level of intelligence, very stealthy and fearless.

And everyone wants to know what he thinks.

He's giving me a free education in his columns for over 35 years.

Thank you, VDH.

I'm so glad you're feeling.

I appreciate that.

Yes, I am.

I had my two week, just had my two-week

checkup, and I was whining to a great surgeon that I didn't feel 100%.

And he made the

connection, if you had an open sore the size of a dime or a quarter inside your notice, and that's where you cut the tissues out.

If you had a canker sore that was ten times bigger, would you feel bad?

Or you had a big sore the size of a coin on your leg, two meters, two millimeters.

Would you and I said, ah, if you put it that way, it would hurt.

He goes, Well, that's right next to your brain.

So his basic attitude was to correct Victor's

type A extreme personality and say, calm down.

The surgeon knows best.

He does.

And at two weeks to be wiped out and to have, you know, pain in your sinus doesn't mean that the problem wasn't solved.

It's just the solution still hurts.

I like him a lot.

I don't know that you have a type A or a type B.

I think you just have a type V.

Your personality is quite unique, my friends.

Well, I think I inherited, my parents were,

I don't say neurotic, but workaholics.

Workaholics.

I don't relax like I should, is what I'm saying.

Yeah, you don't sit down.

And that's not in the book.

I have siblings that were very calm, quiet.

I mean,

that were able to calm down.

But I can't, if I'm watching TV, I'm typing at the same time.

Well, you write like a fiend.

You're finished your book, by the way.

Yeah, I started on January

5th, the Trump book, and I'm working on it today, 120,000 words, and I have to

have somebody look over over it and edit it, which I do have.

They're correcting typos and stuff, and I had another, and I'm going to go through the final copy and submit it.

All right.

I hope and be prepared, listeners, viewers, readers.

So, hey, Victor, you've been great.

Thank you for all the wisdom you shared.

I want to thank the folks who have written me, many have, about Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society.

You can subscribe.

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Well, every Friday, you will receive from me an email that has 14 recommended readings, worthwhile, important, groovy, cool articles I've come across the previous week.

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Thank you again, Victor.

You've been terrific.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, and God bless them earth.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Much appreciated and viewing.