Iran Abandoned, and Blue Cities, Too

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

This is our Friday news roundup in which we look at the news of the week and of course the war in Iraq is Iraq.

Of course the war in Iran is still going on so we are going to look at that first and all sorts of things about that war.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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

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So, Victor, we have lots going on with the Iraq war.

Trump has got his ceasefire, and I think I would like to start there.

How do you think the ceasefire is going?

I know that Bibi, Netanyahu, and the Iranians didn't actually start it at the hour, I think it was 6 o'clock in the morning their time, that they were supposed to start this ceasefire.

And it got Trump a little bit angry and he F-bombed the presses with his anger.

Yeah, I think Trump is trying to be magnanimous to Iran and be even-handed.

So it was supposed to be concluded at midnight.

And the Iranians violated it.

They sent missiles that landed in Israel after the deadline.

Israel had planes in the air that were doing two things: one, in the 12-hour period before it was announced, after it was announced and before the deadline was enacted, their attitude was, we know what Iran's going to do.

And they just sent volley after volley after volley of missiles into Israel.

So they wanted to take care of the last bit of business they could.

So they did.

And Donald Trump got angry at them and said, Why are they bombing?

Well, they're debombing because that's what the Iranians are doing.

And then

the Iranians had, I think, two or three projectiles that landed three or four hours after, so Israel had planes in the air for that contingency and Trump called them back and said and then he said they don't

I don't know what that art of the deal is, that both sides got to quit blank and around, you know, or uh but it's an asymmetrical situation.

By that I mean Israel would not have been in the skies of Iran had it not been for their surrogates on October 7th, butchering 1,200 of their citizens.

Two,

Israel is taking out military targets, generals,

military physicists,

launchers, bases, enrichment.

Iran is just sending terror weapons, just like the V-2 attacks in London or Manchester or Liverpool in 1944 and early 1945.

They're just terror attacks.

They're aimed at civilians.

They hit hospitals.

I thought the American left would be so angry.

They hit the Weissman Center, a research institute.

They hit a hospital.

They didn't care.

That's what he's trying to do.

And now there's a peace, and there's a lot of criticism from the left.

And the left is now saying, this is so strange.

They said, you can't go in there.

You can't do this.

You can't hurt them.

And then when Trump announced, I wiped them all out.

He said, you think they would get happy that now it's over?

And they said, no, you didn't.

We got a guy on our side who leaked from the Pentagon.

And he says, you didn't do it.

And the Iranians said you didn't do it.

So they're kind of rooting.

So you want to say to AOC and Jasmine Crockett, okay,

maybe you're right.

We'll go back in again.

Is that what you want?

So

they have an incoherent message, and they don't understand that as long as you have B.B.

Netanyahu in Israel, and that won't be for much longer probably, and

the next three three years of Donald Trump, it doesn't matter to what degree it can be reconstituted because it's still a multi-multi-billion dollar task.

And a discredited regime and a humiliated military are going to have to then tell the Iranian people, all those cranes you see in the side over all those mountains, we're rebuilding the nuclear facilities, and they're not going to like that because it went up in smoke.

And then if Trump is still in office, he's going to wait and wait and wait, and then he's going to tell them, don't do that, don't do that, and then he's going to take it out again.

And then the question is, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, there's a little asymmetry there.

Is it cheaper for the United States to send seven B-2s from Missouri to take them out?

And I don't know, probably

$50 or $60 billion in munitions and everything, million dollars.

Or is it cheaper for them to build that?

And the answer is a poor country is going to use more expense, so a rich country can use less to take it out.

So, the only caveat or qualification is, since we had Jimmy Carter

and Ronald Reagan, and George H.W.

Bush, and Bill Clinton, and George W.

Bush, and Barack Obama, that was six presidencies, and none of them would take it out.

So, if Donald Trump were not in office when this Reconstruction begins, and B.B.

Netanyahu is not in office, and you get one of these crazy left-wing Israelis, then

that's a concern because they won't do anything.

But as long as you have somebody who understands that this is not the end, it's just the end of the beginning, you've destroyed the mystique of Iranian invincibility.

Nobody's afraid of Iran anymore.

50 years of a poptimkin, fake, veneer military.

It's over with.

Every time you've looked at them militarily, when they fought the Iranians from 1980 1980 to 88 they were very unimpressive.

They had about three times the population and they could not win the war.

Finally they were sending little kids, you know, as suicide soldiers to plot out pathways through minefields.

And finally Khomeini said this is the worst thing I've ever we have to sue for peace.

And

so and then think of this.

Iran in eight years lost a war to Iraq.

You can can argue who won, but they basically lost it.

The United States military, just three years later, went 6,000 miles across the globe and destroyed in 100 hours that same military.

And yet we think that the Iranians are invincible.

They're only invincible because our last six presidencies thought that it was taboo to strike back.

So in 1983, when they blew up the embassy and killed 63 of our people, and then followed it a few months later and blew up the Marine Barracks and killed 241 of our people.

All Ronald Reagan did was send the USS New Jersey, that World War II battleship of the Iowa class, and he shelled the Druze areas and some terrorist compounds and did nothing.

And then

George H.W.

Bush did nothing.

And then during the 2005-67 crest of the war, they sent shaped charges.

Those are IEDs that are of such a caliber that they have enormous penetrating force.

And they destroyed ABOM's tanks, deadly vehicles.

Official count was 600 Americans died through that Iranian device, but more likely.

I think Jack Keene and other people have said there was more likely 2,000 people.

And we did not reply to that at all.

We didn't, we could have replied to that very easily.

We didn't.

And of course when Obama came in, they shot down a drone, very sophisticated drone, and he didn't even, it was on Iranian territory, territory, and they knew we knew it was going to be reverse engineered, and that was the basis probably of their whole drone factory.

And all they asked, they just begged him to bomb it.

He wouldn't even bomb an inert.

He did bomb other countries.

He bombed Libya, he bombed Somalia, he bombed Yemen, he bombed Afghanistan, he bombed Pakistan, but he wouldn't touch Iran.

That was a sacred cow to Obama.

And the result was that down predator was taken apart and re-engineered.

Just like B-29s, the Russians got a B-29 intact, and then they called it a tupelo bomber and they made it exactly the same.

And so that's the other problem that we've had through this entire problem with Iran is that for eight years, one presidency

not only was lax, like Reagan and the two Bushes and Clinton vis-a-vis Iran, but they were favoring Iran.

Maybe it was Valerie Jarrett, maybe it was Ben Rhodes, maybe it was Samantha Powell, maybe it was Susan Rice, maybe it was Hillary Clinton, I don't know, but they had a crackpot idea that there was a Shia crescent starting in Tehran, descending into Damascus, down into Beirut, into Gaza, and over to Yemen.

And these were going to be Alawites and Arab Shiites that were aligned and were getting billions of dollars from Iran to sabotage the oil fields, to stir up minorities in Oman and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia that were Shia.

And in this paradigm of Obama, it was called creative tension.

Then we would go in and say, well, Israel, you may be democratic, or Saudis and Kuwaitis and the Emirates, you may be moderates, but you are kind of like the oppressors that have all the money and all the people in the United States.

And I'm a community organizer.

And I always side with the underdogs.

So my little Shia, my Persian people, it's time for them to get a comeuppance on you.

So you guys go get a bomb or do this or do that.

We're not going to do anything.

And that's what happened.

So it was always a Potempkin country and it took 12 days.

Well, I shouldn't say that.

The Israelis, as you remember, in 2024, destroyed their defenses.

And then very magnanimously, but also under pressure by Biden, they only sent in three missiles to show what they could do.

And they destroyed the defenses on some of the nuclear sites.

But they stopped.

I don't think they should have stopped.

But they were told, you have to stop.

And they probably would have cut off munitions.

But it took 12 days to reverse a 50-year myth.

And it took the United States 35 minutes in their airspace to show that seven presidencies had not done what 35 minutes could do.

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So, Victor, let's go ahead and continue with this theme because I have some questions questions that things that have been argued out in the public sphere.

Do you feel that Iran has been denuclearized and how much if we are saying there's a lot of debate about that?

Well, the debate is that there was an anti-Trump lower echelon Pentagon anonymous quote-unquote intelligence officer who claims that there wasn't a lot of damage in the sense that they esconced with 900 pounds of uranium.

That's 60% enriched.

The difference between 60 and 90 is not the difference between 30 and 60.

It's a geometric ratio.

So once you get to 60, the effort to go to 90 is smaller than the effort to go from 1 to 60.

It can be done very quickly.

It's cumulative.

So the question is, not do they have 900 pounds of enriched uranium, but the peripherally or collateral issues, do they have

the ability to enrich that cyclotron?

Do they have centrifuges, excuse me, do they have enough centrifuges to spin the uranium to get it up?

And where are they?

Do they keep some, I don't know, in they have a secret underground place?

Do they have a warehouse somewhere that looks like a

machine shop?

Nobody knows, but I think it's unlikely.

And then do they have the ability after these attacks on the ballistic missile system and some of the weaponization processes, assembly plants, do they have the ability to take the enriched uranium and compress it into a warhead that will fit on a missile?

It's not easy to do.

And so we don't know that, but if they said we have five nuclear weapons, I don't know what would happen, but

even when they sent 500 missiles, Israel shot down 90% of them.

So you're talking 50 missiles got in, is that right?

And if one of them had been nuclear, it would have been very dangerous.

But if they send three of them in or two of them, they'll shoot them down like we shot all seven down.

So the only danger is that they still have 500 or 1,000 missiles, and they would implant a nuclear missile within those and send them over.

If they did that, they would be obliterated.

Israel's got over 200 nuclear missiles.

And so they know that.

And

they were experimenting with space vehicles, satellites, that they were experimenting with that they felt in five to ten years they could put a nuclear device on and then have it go orbit and then descend subspace vehicle into the United States.

It was very funny when these left-wing CBS, NBC hosts started challenging Markov Wubi.

Do you have proof that they went to the next step of weaponization?

That is so funny.

It's like saying that a person goes out and he writes out a plan that he's going to assassinate somebody.

He goes out and gets a gun and then he loads it and then he goes and hides out

and then he loads it and points it at somebody, but he doesn't pull the trigger so that you preempt and stop him and you say, how do you know that he was going to shoot that person?

We don't.

But why do you put

centrifuges under 300 feet of solid rock and cement?

What's the purpose?

Why do you enrich to 60%?

Nobody does that.

There's no need to.

It doesn't help your nuclear electrical generation plant.

You only need 3%.

So why are you doing that?

We know why.

The subtext of all of this is the liberal media and the people that are, that now the lunatics that control the Democratic Party, whatever Donald Trump says, they go insane.

And there's a big discussion about this, because when Donald Trump replies to AOC,

very low Q person,

I suggest she goes and takes the Montreal assessment test, which I aced.

Another low IQ person, another,

We don't have presidents in the past that talk like that.

And that gets them really, really angry.

So then the question is, then they show their real selves.

And in a cost-to-benefit analysis, who benefits more, the Trump side or their side?

Because Trump turns off independents by doing that, but he also,

I don't know, takes a goad and hits them, and then they go crazy and reveal how crazy they really are.

And that's where we are in the political back and forth.

Well, before we go on to

before we go to messages, I just have perhaps a short question.

The Democrats were saying it's unconstitutional, so I was wondering if you could explain for the audience, what is their argument that the attack on Iran's nuclear facilities was unconstitutional?

Well, it's not unconstitutional.

It says that the executive branch can take

action to ensure the United States is safe.

And that doesn't mean

go to war.

And it says if you want to declare war, then you have to ask the Congress.

But we've had hundreds of actions.

Korea was an action, but it's not a war.

And that's why if you go back through our history, we've had the Revolutionary War, we've had the Mexican War, we've had the War of 1812,

we've had the Civil War, we've had the Spanish-American War, we've had World War I, and we've had World War II.

Now, you can argue that Korea and Vietnam were much more deadly and bloody than 1812 or the Mexican War, but

they were considered police actions.

And so we were in a modern area, and the courts have said to try to split the difference, they have passed the War Powers Act.

And that suggests that if you're using troops for 60 days, you have to inform Congress and get authorization to go beyond that, as I understand.

And so Trump did try to call, I think they did call Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the opposition,

in the Senate, and they tried to call Hykim Jeffries, but he says they didn't.

But Donald Trump held up the phone, you remember, and said, here's what I did, and there was a record that he tried to.

So

it's not unconstitutional in the modern age, unless you, and then AOC said, well, he said the word war.

So that makes it, it doesn't matter what he said, AOC.

It was 35 minutes over a target in which not one American nor probably one Iranian got killed, and that's it.

Do you understand that?

He did not do what Obama did.

2016, Obama dropped 26,000 bombs.

He dropped them in Pakistan.

He dropped them in Yemen.

He dropped them in

Somalia.

He dropped them in Iraq.

He dropped them in Syria.

He dropped them in Pakistan.

You understand that?

He did not get congressional authority.

From 2011 to the last day he was in office, he bomb-bombed, bomb-bombed Libya.

He left it a complete desert.

it was completely nihilistic.

If they had just kept out of there, the Qaddafi government would have been moderated by now and the children's would have taken over and who knows what.

But he did that.

He caused that chaos.

Last day of his office, he, he, he, he, Obama ordered B2, same one as Trump, and they flew across the country, the world, and they bombed.

And he didn't ask anybody, your predecessor AC, for permission.

And the reason he didn't is because the Republicans controlled the House and the Senate, and they didn't trust him as a commander-in-chief, and they might have said no.

And that's why Donald Trump didn't either, because you guys don't control anything, but

we only have a six or seven-seat edge, and he didn't know whether there's going to be people in the House that would vote, like Thomas Massey, for example.

So he didn't do it.

It was a political decision.

Was it illegal?

No.

And if it was illegal, then I think there's been 300, what they call kinetic incidents

since the War Powers Act was passed.

So George H.W.

Bush went into Panama, First Gulf War.

He took a vote on the First Gulf War.

Ronald Reagan went into Granada.

Ronald Reagan shelled Beirut.

Ronald Reagan bombed Libya.

We go into Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton bombed the whole Serbia and the whole Balkans with NATO.

He

bombed

Central Africa when they attacked our embassy.

And then we go into Barack Obama.

He was making jokes at the White House correspondence dinner that, somebody dating my daughter?

I got only one word for you.

If you want to date my daughter, it's called P-R-E-D-A-T-O-R.

Predator.

You never know.

You're never going to see it.

You're never going to hear it.

Until it hits you.

How's that?

That's what he did.

You know, it's just ridiculous.

And by the way, as far as hypocrisy goes, goes, Obama, when he was his first term and only term senator, gave a big lecture about the racist filibuster, racist,

when he was running.

And then when they had lost the majority, when he had gained the majority, he said that you got to get rid of it.

He said that at a

funeral for a noted John Lewis, a noted civil rights leader.

He said, oh, we've got to get two more states in the Union.

People want to say, John Lewis died.

You're supposed to talk about him.

Well, I'm talking about two.

We need four more senators, and we've got to get rid of that Jim Crow filibuster.

And everybody said, but when you were in the minority, you used it yourself to try to stop Judge Alito from being confirmed.

I don't think anybody pays any attention.

To the Democrats or their clownish representatives.

Or, you know what?

Can I just ask you one thing, though?

Because they're, because Because to prove it unconstitutional, they want to say that Iran was not an existential threat.

So they're bringing in these people that say, whoa, I was in Iran at a rally where they were yelling death to Americans, and then a couple of them turned around to me and they were so nice and welcoming to their country.

And I think, wow, that is not going to prove that Iran is not an existential threat because you've got the death to Americans being yelled.

Who cares that a couple of people turn around to meet some nice things?

You can't say anything publicly nice about the United States.

Second of all, it is not a constitutional democracy republic where the people have a legitimate vote.

It's rigged.

So

the rig is in you hate America.

So to the degree you can shout that, it doesn't matter whether you agree with it or not.

That's the official policy of the Iranian government.

And you're probably going to get social cultural points from the government, or you're going to get paid.

If he had said, as these news people keep saying, I really like America, and somebody would say, well, why don't you go out and say that?

Okay, I'm going to tell all of you, let's stop saying death to America.

We like Starbucks.

We want to go.

They'd shoot them.

Everybody knows that.

It doesn't matter.

That's like saying, well, I went into Nazi Germany in 1939, and I saw a German, and he whispered in my ear, he hates the Nazi, and he likes America.

Who cares?

They think he's going to do anything about it with Hitler?

That was so ridiculous.

The left is so, it's...

I don't know what happened to it.

I mean, it was always flawed in its thinking, but these new...

There's something kind of, I mentioned that one podcast, it's kind of controversial, but the Democrats have kind of ceded authority to new DEI people.

They're the ones on TV.

It's AOC, it's Rashida Talib,

it's Jasmine Crockett, it's Al Green, and they are afraid of them.

But

and

The majority, the vast majority of the black caucus votes to impeach Donald Trump.

But at the same time this is happening, you have a different phenomenon.

You have somebody like Byron Donalds, conservative black congressman,

or is it Wesley something, Wesley Hunt in Texas, academy war veteran, conservative,

and they win not in black districts, they win in white districts.

And you have 26% of the black male vote voting for Trump, and you have a poll in June by Rasmussen that 53% of black people, that's almost all black males, support Trump.

So you have this disconnect.

The face of the radical, crazy Democratic Party

is Hispanic, Padilla, black, but at the same time they are getting more and more extreme and spouting racist, and I mean that sincerely, racist stuff.

When she says, well, you know,

you all voted for an old white man instead of Kamala Harris.

And then you have Whoopi Goldberg, you know, and well, black people are so much worse off here in America than the people are in Iran.

And

that just keeps going and going and going.

But at the same time, they're doing that, you start to see that the majority of blacks and Hispanics don't like that.

They're saying to them, AOC, how many homeless people do we have in our district?

What's the price of gas?

What's the price of electricity?

Can I buy a home?

And they're not interested in that because they have no answers to that.

So

it's kind of like being a white person here in the San Joaquin Valley and trying to think that,

oh, I'm supposed to show solidarity to the white elite that run my state.

Oh, I like you, Gavin.

Oh, I like you, Nancy.

I like who else is there?

Because you're white?

No, no, I have nothing in common with them.

I have much more in common with Byron Donald.

And see, that's what they don't understand, that this this black caucus, Hispanic caucus, they are elites, pampered, wealthy, entitled people, and they do not represent anymore the rank and file.

And they're trying to to gin it up.

That's why we had that mayor, that crazy mayor in Los Angeles of a suburb.

And she said, Hey, you, hey, cholos, you guys always, you always go out and you fight gangs, and you have your turf, and you don't let anybody go there.

And now

it's embarrassing what you're doing.

You're not doing anything.

You've got to go out there and fight ICE.

Get the gangs out.

Remember that?

That she said that.

Yes, I did.

Yeah, but most of the people in her district are probably saying, not.

I want the police here.

I don't want M13 M13 bullying my kid at school.

I don't want some illegal alien from Michel Khan and cramming up the emergency room so my sister can't get in.

I don't want to go to the supermarket and have 10 people ahead of me pull out 50 EBT cards while I'm waiting.

So they don't get it at all.

No, they sure don't.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about Hezbollah Law.

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

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So

one more question on this Iran war.

What's happened with Hezbollah?

The last time we saw Hezbollah, they still had thousands of missiles.

160,000, we were told.

Yes.

They have the same thing.

It was the myth of Hezbollah.

And then about every month, they showed a parade in Beirut, and they had camouflage.

They got guys who were six feet.

They goose stepped like Nazis.

And then everybody, then you got some wimpy left-wing spaghetti arm correspondent from CBS or something.

Oh my gosh, here they are.

These are the most formidable terrorists in the world.

What an impressive thing.

And I've talked to my sources in the Pentagon and they said

we can't deal with these people.

And they remember Biden, there was a dispute over natural gas off the coast of

Beirut, and he sided with Lebanese, scared of Hezbollah.

And then then we were so they have 100, no, they have 110.

Oh, they have 140 rockets pointed at Israel.

So as soon as Israel retaliates, at Gaza, you're gonna get a trifecta.

You're gonna get Hamas coming out with their missiles that Iran, then you're gonna get the Houthis, and then you're going to get Hezbollah.

And they're gonna blanket them with 20, 30, 40.

They did have, they sent 20,000.

But what they didn't get was

Israel knew that.

They knew that, so they had implanted pagers and phones ago, and they just were waiting for the opportune moment to let them off.

And nobody understood what that meant.

It meant that two things, they blew, out of the 10,000 people who are the rank and file in command and control, they blew the hands, genitals, or eyes off about

because, I mean, they had in their pocket, front pocket, or they were carrying it, or they were looking at it and, oh, what's a strange message?

And it killed or maimed four or five thousand of them but that wasn't the end of it number two it sent a message to everybody i can't use this anymore because how do i know that my brand new apple that i just bought at the apple store was not already contrived so i can't use my

anything not my pager not my phone so that really hampered them And then number three,

it meant that four or five thousand of the key terrorists in Lebanon had to go around with bandages on their eye, bandages on their groin, bandages on their arm, and say, I was in a motorcycle accident.

Look, I lost my hand.

Somebody was in a hunting accident.

But it just identified them immediately.

And once that happened, and they were

exposed, then the people hated them.

They always hated them.

And then they're saying, hey, Israel, you know that farmhouse?

It's on my property.

There's six missiles in it.

Hey, Israel, you know what?

That old bus station, there's a missile underneath.

And they all started to, and then Israel went in and they blew up all these missiles.

They hit them, they knew where everything was, and then Nasrallah went through, he got everybody together and Israel, they're so stupid.

If Israel does all this, do they think that the Israelis, they're smartest people in the world?

So they said, what would they do after we blow their hands and eyes and genitals off?

They'll start to meet with messengers and couriers.

So we have to get some couriers and messengers.

And they did.

So this will be even better because they'll all meet in one place, and that's what they did.

And they blew Nasrallah and the whole thing up.

And then, when they did that, Assad said, I've got all these crazy ISIS and Sunni Arabs that hate me because I've been killing them, and I've got the Alawites are only 20%,

and I need Hezbollah.

And they said, No, no, no, we're not going to go and die for you.

So, he just collapsed.

He said, Can I go to Moscow?

And he flew off.

And then Iran said, Well, we lost our base.

That's how we supplied everybody.

Now, what happens?

And then Iran called up Hezbollah and said, you're supposed to kill Jews.

And they said, you didn't do anything.

You just gave us a bunch of money and sent us out there and we're all maimed.

So they said, hmm, okay, we'll call Hamas.

We can't get a hold of them.

They're underground.

So we have to wait till they come back up like gophers.

Well, why don't you attack when Hezbollah does?

After all, why didn't you?

And they said, you didn't do anything.

You planned the whole thing and you didn't do anything.

And then they called the Houthis up and said, well, why don't you send a bunch of missiles?

They said, well, we lost our port, we lost our air port, we lost

our grid, you didn't do anything.

And then Iran said, well, you were all supposed to coordinate together,

but you didn't.

So each one of those people attacked separately.

Sometimes they coordinated, but each one said, them,

get them, not me.

So Israel just picked them off systematically and serially.

And then when they had them all gone, Assad was gone, the Russians were gone, Houthis were gone, basically, Hamas was gone, Hezbollah was gone.

Then they turned their attention and they said, now you.

And then Iran said, okay, Hezbollah, rise up to help us.

And they said, no, we're not going to do that.

And they said, we gave you billions of dollars.

No, we're not going to do that.

You're Persians.

We're Arabs.

We're not going to do that.

Sorry, you let us get destroyed by the Jews.

We're not going to do that to help you.

And they didn't.

That's what's so weird.

All these left-wing democratic politicians got on TV during the 12-day war.

And Israel's in really bad shape because all they have to do is snap their fingers, and there's going to be a Hezbollah simultaneous.

They had been saying that for years, and it didn't happen.

Can I, since we're here, can I finish off the Middle East by asking, what is Egypt doing with this and/or Turkey?

Because the one thing about Egypt was, was they were allowing Hamas to import arms, et cetera, through their border.

So I know at least that much.

Egypt's idea was this.

We have two things we must do, and they're mutually contradictory.

So we have to square the circle.

We have to show the Arab street, because we are the largest Arab country by population, that we're on the side of hating Israel and Jews.

So we got to open...

We have to find a way to open the border a little bit so it hurts Israel.

So if Iran wants to send a little boat off our shore and then a bunch of Hamas people come through Gaza, we'll give them that right to do it.

But we don't want any of these people.

They're troublemakers.

They're just crybullies.

We don't like them.

They're not Egyptian.

So we're not going to let all the people.

As Israel starts to push, push, push block by block southward, we're not going to let them in Egypt.

Everybody said, well, you have the whole Sinai.

You could have beautiful little camps.

You could mix cities.

You could.

No, no, we don't want them.

They're troublemakers.

They're Muslim Brotherhood people.

Sisi said, these are the type of people that tried to kill me.

They're the type of people that overthrew the country.

We don't want them.

And so basically, it was.

And then Greta, I remember Thunberg, she said, I'm going to take my little boat and go down to Gaza.

And the Israelis said, no, no, no, no, no, you're not.

And they said, well, maybe we'll go into Egypt.

And they said, no, no, no, you're not.

And then a bunch of left-wing Europeans said, well, we're going to go into Cairo and then Alexandria.

Then we'll get buses and we'll go into Gaza and have a peace march.

And they said, no, no, no, no, no.

And everybody's saying, we're for the Palestinians more than you are.

So they don't want anything to do with it.

Turkey has a problem.

They hate Iran and they hate Israel.

And they hate the United States, to tell you the truth.

And

their borders are right in the middle of it.

So if you look at the map, all Israel had to do was make sure that when they flew all the way into Iran, they were flying through chaotic, unenforced Syrian and Iraqi airspace.

And they didn't get too close to Turkey.

And then Turkey closed the border with Iran.

So they said, no, if you guys want to have refugees, you're not coming in here.

And otherwise, 30%, the Aberbijanis and 30% of the population of Iran is not Iranian.

And Turkey controls a lot of the degree of they're going to help those people or not.

It depends on how they feel about Iran.

Under Erdogan, they had a no problems policy.

We just don't want a problem with Iran.

But they don't like them at all.

They're Sunnis and they're Shia, so they don't like them.

And they have a sense of imperialism.

So Turkey's attitude is: we were the Ottoman-Arab

universal caliphate under the Ottomans.

And Persia's idea was we were much bigger than you.

We go back to the Sassanid dynasty.

We were part of the Parthians.

So they have rivals that they each think that they are superior to the Arab nation.

Got it.

So,

yeah.

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

So, Victor, we were talking about the left not resonating with the working class anymore.

So, I wanted to look at the candidacy and the winning of the Democratic primary by, I think his name is Zoran Mamdani.

Madani.

And he is now the Democratic candidate to be mayor in New York.

And his agenda, just so our audience knows, a few things.

He wants $65 million for gender-affirming care.

He wants to emasculate the NYPD.

He wants to drive the rich from New York and globalize the intifada.

And he wants the government to run grocery stores.

He makes Eric Adams look like Lincoln, you know what I mean?

So he's a complete idiot.

He makes Bill de Blasio look normal.

And he's going to win because there is no other candidate.

I don't think that Eric Adams has a chance to win at all in the general election.

These are

ranked elections.

So you think he's going to win the general election?

Oh, that is a sad.

He's resonating with the working class, do you think?

Yeah, but there are no Republican viable candidates.

There's no conservative viable candidates.

And he's already beat Cuomo, who's the only Democratic candidate in Adams.

So maybe

Cuomo will run as a third party.

I don't know what.

It's not going to work.

And it's like Mayor Johnson in Chicago.

It's like Mayor Bass in Los Angeles.

So what's happened, to be graphic, is in these large cities,

the so-called white middle class and conservative minority, they have left.

And so you have a large minority population, and you have a tiny little liberal elite who think they can control things by their zip codes.

People in Malibu, Brentwood, and L.A., people in Upper West Side, you know, or Park Avenue.

Or Pacific City.

And they feel they don't really care who's in control, but the white middle class and conservative Hispanics, they're gone.

I mean,

they're gone.

And a lot of the wealthy, so-called white class, Jewish, have gone.

So, believe me, I spoke twice in Naples, and then I went back to Palm Beach, and then I went again this spring, and housing prices have quadrupled.

And almost, I went to two dinners I had to speak at.

Every single person had one thing in common.

They had left New York.

They might have their condo there, but they had bought, and they were all saying the same thing, that prices of housing had doubled.

Just astronomical.

It's going to triple now because all that capital, he's not only going to give free markets and defund the police, but he's going to tax capital, not income, capital.

And people are going to say, you know, I'm already paying in New York State and New York City taxes somewhere around 16%

plus 38% federal.

And I'm not going to stay here when I can go to Florida and pay zero.

And if you're, you know, if you've got a $5 million income,

you could save you $500,000, $600,000 a year.

And that's what's happening.

They're all going to leave.

And that's what's happening to Los Angeles.

That's what's happening to Minneapolis.

That's what's happening to Chicago.

It's going the same way.

So all these cities are going to be 70 or 80% minority, and they're going to be run by left-wing minorities.

And I don't know what's going to happen to them because

there's other cities that are arising in the American Southwest and South that are mixed racially, and they don't necessarily always have minority mayors, but they're conservative minorities and majority white populations, and they are going to be functioning, but you're not going to have a Los Angeles or a Portland or a Seattle or a Minneapolis or a Chicago or a Washington, D.C.

or a New York as a functional city anymore.

It's not going to happen if you continue to elect those people.

And they do.

And so everybody says, well,

why would the black community elect Mayor Johnson when he defunded the police and he didn't protect them and he let all these illegal aliens take over their social services?

I guess the answer is because he's black.

Why is Karen Bass even walking around as a legitimate official after what she did to the fires?

Well, I guess the bl there's hardly only 3% of Los Angeles is black.

I suppose the Hispanic population thought that she was very very left-wing and she was good for something, but she hurt them terribly by letting in all of these illegal aliens and spending billions of dollars on people who were not U.S.

citizens.

This is getting you can start to see what the Democratic Party did.

It wasn't just under Ted Kennedy when they changed the immigration laws to familial relationships being a criteria to get across the border.

And it wasn't just when they destroyed the border with a wink and nod of conservative corporate Republicans that wanted cheap labor, but

they wanted people to come in and they had two or three criteria.

You had to be poor, you had to be non-white, you couldn't have a high school diploma, you could have no capital, and we're not going to give you civic education.

And we do not want you to rapidly integrate, assimilate, associate.

We want you to go into a tribal enclave and stay there.

And then then you get your spokesman for the Chicano, the black, this caucus, that caucus, and you were a constituent.

And you will be the new demography that will get us elected because our message is too far left and crazy that the traditional demography would win with it.

And that's what they've done.

And

they've been very successful.

Their only challenge is that when you bring in people from

all of these places, especially Hispanics Catholic, there is an ingredient there of conservatism.

And when they start to work hard and plug into the middle-class trajectories, and they start to see, they reach a magic point where all of a sudden they go home and I've talked to them.

Uh-oh, the money that grandma gets in food stamps, the kit my son gets in free college, the money that we get in free health care,

all my granddaughters and grandsons that were born free, that's not as much as I pay in taxes now.

I pay 12, 13 percent, I pay 12 percent

sales tax, I'm paying almost over a dollar in gasoline tax.

This is not worth it.

I can't buy a house.

I can't buy insurance.

And so that cost-to-benefit analysis is starting to favor the middle-class conservative viewpoint.

And when that happens, they'll close the border because the left has no morality, no principles.

It's all transactional power acquisition.

But right now, their attitude attitude was to bring in an entire different demography, teach them to hate the United States, teach them to hate so-called white majority.

And I say that literally when you have a lot of people like that mayor saying, attack ICE people, or you see Jasmine Crockin disparaging old white men, or you see Ilyan Omar saying that the government should go after white terrorists, or you see Mark Milley echoing late Lori Daliston that there's white racism, white supremacy, white rage in the military, and you see what the view people say about white people, and then you hear Joy Re.

It's just everywhere.

It's everywhere.

And that was the idea of the Democratic Party because they had no message.

They lost the class.

They were not ecumenical.

They were not.

They seem to be losing the racism, too.

I mean, people are keyed onto it.

I don't want to be part of that.

No, I think what you're going to see is it's going to be an enclave party.

It's going to be four or five million people around chicago four or five million people in washington six or seven million in new york seven or eight in los angeles uh a million or two in san francisco they're going to be enclaves of left-wing lunacy and it's not going to work

and the federal government if it's in conservative hands is not going to keep you know they've already told galvan newsom we're not going to give you billions of dollars for your high-speed rail it's crazy we're not going to give you money when you're spending ten billion on homelessness.

We're not going to give you money when you give $500 million for illegal alien Medi-Cal.

We're not going to give you money for Medi-Cal when you have 50% of Medi-Cal are people having

50% of your resident population is

on Medi-Cal and a large number are illegal.

They're just not going to do it.

And

these cities are going to be...

I don't know what's going to happen to them.

But I know that if you talk to middle-class, white, black, Hispanics, and you say, do you go down to downtown L?

Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

Do you go to downtown San Francisco?

No, I don't want to go there.

Do you go into downtown?

You want to go to downtown New York?

Nope.

Do you want to go to downtown Washington?

Nope.

They don't.

They do not.

You like to run Greg on the bar?

You want to go to the subway?

Nope, nope, nope.

It doesn't matter if that's real fear or perceived or exaggerated, just the impression that you get.

Nobody wants to get anywhere near these places that are run by these types of politicians.

Absolutely not.

So Victor, let's go ahead and take our last break and then come back to talk a little bit about illegal immigration.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

You can catch Victor on YouTube and on Rumble and also on Spotify.

And on Spotify, it's called the Victor Davis-Hanson Show on Spotify to catch the latest episodes.

So, Victor, we have some good news on illegal immigration, but I want to just sort of set it in the case of a Brego Garcia, who is a judge, has said he can be released until his court appearance,

and at the same time has said that the federal government has the ability to detain him anyway.

So he's got it both ways.

I don't have to let this human trafficker wife beater out on the streets.

And then

the thing that is very interesting about illegal immigration, the new statistic, is that there has been 957,000 between January and May of this year

have left.

Almost a million people have left that

immigrants.

And that's an ambiguous statement because, on the one hand, it shows you that people are leaving at the rate of 2 million a year.

And if that were to be true, in four years, you could get because they came at the rate of 3 million.

So you could get 66% of the people deported under Biden.

But I don't know if they can sustain that given the courts, etc.

But a lot of people have pointed out that the murder rate, Cash Patel, said, had dived because a large number, several hundred thousand of that, of the people who have been deported, and sometimes it's up to 2,000 or 3,000 people a day, and the self-deportees are leaving because they have criminal records.

But we'll see how many leave.

Again, we have to do kind of a Marshall Plan to get back to where we were when we thought we had a crisis.

Before Biden, people, even at Yale, had said that they thought there were 20 million illegal aliens.

Then I think people agree there were 10 to 12 million led in by Biden.

So if you were to get the 10 to 12, you still have this 20 million, and you don't know what to do.

And as I said earlier, if Donald Trump wanted to take the air out of this pro-illegal alien balloon, you know what he should do?

He should announce right now,

and he should make it pretty tough.

He can say, if if you were here illegally and you A, have been here six years, B, you have no criminal record, and I mean DUI too.

Three, you are gainfully employed and you can show that you're working.

Four, you're not on public assistance, right?

And five, you were willing to pay a fine, $1,000, something token.

And six, you're not going to get citizenship.

That's up to you.

You're going to get a green card to work.

And he would announce that.

I think he'd probably get eight or nine million people, and that would be good.

And then, given the 1986 Simpson-Missoula, only 30% chose when they were offered that deal by Reagan under the amnesty to actually take it.

They just got green cards.

And they did because, as I wrote in The Dying Citizen, we've so diminished the

exclusivity of citizenship, it's not that much different than residence.

You can do everything you want, maybe even vote in some places.

I hope not, but that's

school board elections in Cambridge, Mass, or San Francisco.

But my point is this.

Then you take out

all of the

legitimacy to all of these riots.

So then you just say to Mayor Bass or Mayor Johnson or the guys waving the Mexican flag, well, you didn't take the amnesty.

And that tells me either A, you're a sponge and you're not working, or B, you've committed a criminal act, or C, you want to be a free rider and you don't want to go through a legal process, so you would have a lot more legitimacy and public support to mass deport 20 million people if you had.

I think it would work.

Well, speaking of deporting,

the

Khalid, Mahmoud Khalid, was the guy, the pro-Palestinian protester at Colombia who organized everything and the administration.

He doesn't, he's not an American.

His wife is an American, but he is not.

And he is being let out after three months in jail in Louisiana.

And I was wondering your thoughts on that.

We went right back on the street and it was Globalize the Intifada.

He's a guy that helped organize riots that were violent at Columbia, even though he wasn't a student anymore.

And he came over here, he said, to study.

And as soon as he got over here, he was

a pro-Hamas organizer and some of the protests that he organized were violent.

He was in some of them, and then he was a spokesman for those divest Colombia people.

And he said, No, I'm just here to study.

And so he's back now.

And the question is not, what did he do?

Because that's not, it's not a law.

He can say whatever he wants.

It's a free country.

Residents are protected under the Constitution.

But if you look at the immigration law, it doesn't say that a person has a right.

It says that he can come in subject to the United States decision about A, how many people do we want?

We want 1,000.

If you're 1,002, that doesn't mean you can sue and get in.

You can't sue the federal government and say, you said you wanted 1,000 this month, legal, and I looked at there and I have a higher SAT score than number 72.

And number 84,

he doesn't like the United States.

You can't.

You don't have any way to sue.

And so what they're saying is, it's our pleasure.

Reminds me of that line in Lawrence

Arabia when Peter O'Toole says to Anthony Quinn, the Raider, and he says, I think you'll do everybody, you'll go to Aquaba.

Why would I go to Aquaba?

It's not for my pleasure.

And he said, You'll go to Aquaba because it's your pleasure.

And it's the same thing with ICE.

It's their pleasure.

They can do whatever they want.

They can say, you know what, we only have a limited number of people that we can let into the United States.

So we look at particular dynamics.

And we want people who

are industrious and they follow the law and they like the United States and they come over here to study and this guy doesn't he supports Hamas he doesn't say that he can't he's got perfect right he can support Hezbollah too we don't care but we don't want him because that's our pleasure and that's all they have to do and the judges know that the district judges the whole district judges whole idea is If I rule and warp the law and don't follow it, I'm going to be on TV and every liberal law school is going to want me to speak in the next couple of years.

I'm going to be a hero on campus.

I'm on the Upper West Side or in Malibu or Brentwood or in Pacific Palisades or in Presidio, Ohio.

I'm going to be courted.

I am going to be reversed.

I don't care.

But then I can tell everybody, I,

Judge Brockman, I, Judge Smith, I, I held up Donald Trump for 30 days, 80 days.

That's what they're doing.

But they're destroying the respect for the law and the process.

All right, Victor, let's go ahead as we do at the end of the show and look at some of the comments.

This time I went to your video channels, YouTube and Rumble,

and your Saturday podcast

with me, Sammy Wink.

And this is some of the things that, and this is the historical one and gives you some idea of why Gunwise here is talking historically.

Gunwise says, Mr.

Hansen, Hansen, I served in the U.S.

Navy from 78 to 1904.

My first deployment was when the hostages were released from Iran.

During the rest of my career, I made seven more deployments.

And regardless if I deployed from the east or west coast, those maniacs in Iran were responsible for changes to the deployment plans every single deployment.

The best thing that could happen for the world would be for us or Israel to remove the theocracy in Iran, and that's from gun noise.

It could happen because, as I said, if you're a lieutenant general and did you see that it was on one of the news sites that the Israelis had been calling up the second-tier generals and one of them released the tape

and it says, hello, you need to get out now.

And he said, what do you mean I need to get out now?

Do you want to live?

Yes, I want to live.

You need to get down now.

You're going to be targeted to kill.

And then the generals, what do I do?

Get out now.

Who are you?

Get out now.

We have your number.

We are getting rid of your people.

What do I do?

And so they've killed about 20 of these top generals.

So the second tier of generals knows that Israel could do it again.

And number two,

they know the people are angry because they blew all that money on Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis and Assad and the nuclear program for nothing.

It's all up in smoke and the people are saying, I could have had health care.

We could have had a new airport.

We could have had a new university.

We could have had a new highway system.

But you people blew it up and you didn't even get, you didn't even destroy Israel like you said you were going to do.

What did you do that for?

You did for nothing.

And your military, you guys are impotent.

You're incompetent.

And then some general is going to say, wait a minute.

Khamenei is in hiding and we don't want his sons.

Maybe we should just get rid of him.

So I think if there's going to be a change, it's going to come from the military.

I do.

And then I have one from YouTube, and it's by Alan F1.

And it says, Victor, as someone who thought he knew the disgusting truth of history, you have given me truth.

In an hour, you have granted me a pathway to really see what had and is happening.

I'm 56 years old and feel foolish for having such thoughts.

I thought I saw under the first layer, but that was so not true.

We only need about 10 of you in power to really speed things up.

You by yourself are doing the Lord's work.

Thanks.

So that was an interesting way of saying thank you to you.

What period of history was he referring to?

He must be referring to the World War II, and in this case it was 1945.

It was from our episode that we did.

We're going to talk on our next podcast as we go through major events of the 20th century.

We've been doing this for four months.

We started with the Russo-Japanese War, Panama Canal, and we're going to do the Berlin airlift of 1948-49.

All right.

Well, thank you very much, Victor, for all, and thanks to our audience for joining us.

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