Iran, the Pariah Nation

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Well, hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

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.

And he is a farmer, a philologist, a classicist, a military historian.

I think he's America's.

You did a lot of things and all not.

That's absolutely not true.

It was not a good farmer.

Farming was the hardest of all.

Yes.

And I was not a successful, financially successful farmer.

Well, could you have been a financially successful farmer with this amount of acreage and growing raisins?

What is it really like?

I was too wedded to

I'd been brought up to save the ranch, keep your great-grandparents' grandparents' traditions, don't change them.

So the place wasn't viable.

But I have 45 acres.

Do you remember in the in the was it this

the 88 election where um s where what did Michael Dukakis suggest to people to was it grow Belgian endive?

Do you remember that?

Yeah, I do.

I do.

I used to get a lot of uh I know that he was a man of the left, but uh he used to write me really long handwritten letters.

Wendellberry, you know, the

agrarian.

I really liked him.

I did.

He was a very sweet guy.

And he wrote me, oh, I don't know, after Fields Without Dreams and The Land Was Everything, two books I wrote on farming.

He wrote me some of the nicest letters.

And I really agree.

Well, I'm at your farm right now, folks.

I know people see the background.

They think, where's the lovely Sammy Wink?

And why we got this fat, ugly guy here?

But that's you, just, I'm here.

I'm on the farm.

I'm out in California.

And it's a great honor to be doing this and doing this with Victor.

And we just recorded another show.

and this shows we're recording on the 22nd, Sunday the 22nd.

This episode will be up on Thursday, the 24th.

And while we were recording the previous show, some news broke about, of course, about Iran and Trump.

And we're going to get Victor's take on this breaking news.

Plus, some trans, a father of a trans, a kid wrote us.

I think it's worth getting Victor's take on that and some other subjects.

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

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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So go do that.

Victor, here's the headline from the Daily Mail while we were recording our previous episode.

Iran threatened Trump with sleeper cell revenge terrorist attacks inside U.S.

days before the nuclear strikes.

And here's the first paragraph or two.

Iran warned Donald Trump it would unleash sleeper cell terrorists to

wreck havoc on U.S.

soil if he attacked, according to reports.

Trump received a communique from the regime just days before he ordered U.S.

military strikes on its nuclear facilities, sources told NBC News.

The official message was delivered to Trump through an intermediary at the G7 summit in Canada last week.

The president left early on June 16th to consider his options amid the conflict between Israel and Iran, according to sources.

You know, it's very funny that news.

I had not heard that, but.

I was kind of struck.

I think it was Saturday afternoon.

I was writing an article watching TV, and Trump was on the tarmac, and some reporters were kind of being slightly obnoxious, but pressing him.

And he finally just turned to him and said, you're a target right now.

You're in danger because you're near me.

I'm a target.

And I thought that was kind of, that was a strange thing to say, but obviously he'd been briefed.

If I were Iran, I would not do that because

People have lost all patience with you guys after 47 years.

And one of the weird things about Iran is not just its total loss of all of its influence.

So if Jack and I had this conversation on October 8th of 2023, right after this pre-civilizational medieval mini-Holocaust of innocent Jews, and I had said to Jack, I make a prediction.

Within two years, they're going to destroy Hezbollah, and the leadership is going to be identifiably maimed for the rest of their life.

There's going to be no air defenses in Iran.

Israeli planes and American planes are going to be flying at will anywhere they want to go.

The Assad

60-year dynasty is going to blow up.

The Russians are going to be out of the Middle East.

Hamas is going to be stuck in tunnels, but not really much less of it.

All of its kingpins, like Mr.

Nasrallah of the Hezbollah, are going to be dead.

The Houthis are going to try to cut a deal with us.

You would have said, God, Victor, you're nuts.

That can't happen.

But that's exactly what happened.

And yes, it was due to Israeli courage and brilliance and Donald Trump's leadership, but there was also one other element.

And I don't think, I'm not talking, I want to be very careful and specific.

I'm not talking about the Iranian people.

But that government

is

the most widely despised government in the world.

And I don't mean just by the United States.

I'm talking about liberal Europe hates it.

Its patrons, China, remember the Uyghurs and Russia, remember what they did to Grozny when they leveled that Islamic city?

They don't like radical Islam or Islam in general, but they despise Iran.

They do not want the Iranians to get a bomb.

Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, all they had to do, since they were killers, is coordinate after October 7th.

I was expecting an apocalyptic October 8th.

I thought, wow, you're going to get all of these rockets from Hezbollah.

You're going to get Hamas to come out of the tunnels.

You're going to get the Houthis to blanket Israel with the missiles and drones.

Then you're going to get Assad doing something.

And then you're going to get all of these Iranians.

But you know what happened?

Iran didn't do anything.

They kind of winked and nodded.

Well, we were kind of not, kind of maybe, sort of maybe involved.

But they just let each of these terrorist tentacles be out on their own.

They just let them, you know, they just said, you know what?

You go do it.

And we put you up to it, you go do it.

And they don't, right now they're not really reacting to Iran's plight.

I don't see a lot of people volunteering, do you?

From Hezbo, from Lebanon or Syria or,

I don't know, the West Bank or Gaza or Yemen to go and fight for Iran?

I don't.

I think people...

So what I'm getting at is even the people who deal with that government don't like them.

So when this war started and there was even the Arab countries don't like them.

And so, when they're looking around and they're thinking, wow, the Israelis were really successful, and the Americans, but part of that Western success was the world, even the dark side of the world, the evil side of the world, the autocratic dictatorial medieval, don't like them.

There's something about them.

They are cry bullies.

You know what I mean by that?

They're crybarries.

All they do is kill and maim and pick on innocent and people that are helpless.

And then, when somebody just once in a rare time retaliates like we did, then they start crying.

This is so unfair.

I was watching the UN thing.

I was just flabbergasted.

The Iranian ambassador.

This is so unfair.

This was against international law.

I thought, what did you expect after 50 years?

This is late.

This is not nearly what you deserve.

So that's a missing Tesser on this larger mosaic that they have no goodwill across the globe.

Everybody doesn't like that.

I think Putin,

he reportedly talked to Trump.

I would give you 50-50 odds that Putin said something like, well, we don't like you, Donald, getting in and getting on your hind legs and doing all this stuff.

And we could, in theory, arm Iran like you are arming Ukraine.

But you know what?

Privately, We don't mind the oil going up, but more importantly, we don't like them any more than you do.

We have to deal with them.

They're lying lying SOBs.

We don't like them.

And they stir up Islamic terrorism everywhere they go.

And I'm sure that Chinese.

I'm sure that Chinese said the same thing.

They said, all we want is calm so the price of oil goes down, not up.

But we don't like these people any more than you do.

They're like our North Koreans.

Nobody likes them either.

You know, I got to string another headline on you.

Yeah, oh mo.

I didn't know about that.

I know.

Well, here's another one that just happened.

I should just keep the phone.

Fast breaking news here here on a Sunday, right after the Saturday attacks.

Again, from the Daily Mail, Trump sensationally calls for Iranian regime change.

As he holds crisis talks with UK Prime Minister Kent Kier Starmer on Sunday, the U.S.

President took to his truth social page to share.

Well, we mentioned this on the last podcast, make Iran great again.

But Victor,

in the initial, I watched way too much follow-up analysis of the bombings,

Midnight Hammer.

And what repeated constantly was that this is not about regime change.

This is not about regime change.

And now here, Donald Trump is holding.

It's really good what he's doing because he's squaring an impossible circle.

Because the MAGA doctrine, rightfully so, said

anytime we go into these countries and we try to change the government and impose our values, we end up with pride flags on the embassy in Kabul or gender studies, and then we're weak and we're imperialistically obnoxious and they don't want to change.

And you know what?

Not one drop of American blood is worth any of the Taliban.

So Sia wouldn't want to be.

That was the mega credo after Iraq and Afghanistan and the misadventure in Libya.

So regime change hasn't worked and nation building hasn't worked.

So Donald Trump knows that that is a third rail, that you don't, you didn't go into Iran to take out the government and plant one of our own.

You didn't even want to go in there and take out the government because we know what Hillary did in Libya.

They took out Gaddafi and they got something worse.

But, but, but, once you've done it, in the aftermath of the fact and the fact that you didn't go in there to do it, and then you start hearing again and again that they want to kill you and they want to continue, then you realize something that you don't really care about what happens afterwards.

You just don't want them around because they are the worst of the worst.

And you're not going to try to hide that anymore.

And you have more confidence in the Iranian people that might come up with something, even if it's a general in the military who is semi-secular, than this bunch.

This is the worst of the worst.

This is worse than Saddam.

This is worse.

Partly because Iran has so many more natural assets than did Iraq or Libya.

But,

you know,

if they were to unleash sleeper cells, they have no idea about the American people.

There would be a mass uprising.

And I think that would be a stupid thing to do if you were the Iranians, because every Iranian national who was pro, and there's a lot of them in the United States that are pro-regime.

They're here in the academic field and everywhere in the media.

Robert Malley's type of people, not that he's Iranian, but they would be going home immediately.

So I don't think that would be a wise thing to do.

I want to ask you about Spur here, but before that,

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Victor, we have, as you know, so many new listeners and viewers, and I know once or twice before you've talked about these kind of two tranches of Iranians who came to America,

many of them out here in California.

Would you tell us again about these?

Well, I've had, I was in academia, as you know, for half a century, still am at the Hoover Institution.

So

I probably, and then

I have a lot of friends in agribusiness, and there's a large Iranian community in agriculture in California.

I go to Los Angeles a lot.

There's a lot of Iranians, expatriates.

And

I have had, let me put it this way.

I would say I've had 10 or 12 of the greatest conversations of my life with Iranian expatriates that were so talented and so pro-American.

And I've had 10 of the worst conversations of my life.

And I try to be empirical, not emotional about it.

So I always ask the question, what year did you come to the United States?

That's the breakoff for me.

And in my

on-scientific, I'm being non-scientific, but it's based on my own empirical observations.

Those who saw the writing on the wall, 78, 79, before the Shah fell, and they were predominantly Jewish, but not all.

They got out of Iran before the apocalypse and they were pro-Shah or pro-Western.

It was several hundred thousand.

Several hundred thousand in the first diaspora.

And they came and now they're very, very prosperous.

They're very successful.

They're pillars of the community and they're hyper-patriotic.

They are pro-American.

They despise that regime.

Now, that said, remember that when they took over the embassy, that wasn't all Islamicist at all.

Majinajad might have been one of the students, but they were also socialist, Marxist, Euro-student types.

And they really did, all they talked about was Mossadegh, Mossadegh, Mossadegh.

And I won't get into the intricacies and complexities of the British Petroleum-CIA effort to dispose them.

But Mossadegh was not Abraham Lincoln, as we're told, but that's another story.

But my point is this: the second group really did feel that they were in the media, they were in government, they were in the universities and education, and they were socialist leftists.

And they felt that the Islamicists were so barbaric and so mid.

And these were mostly atheists, agnostics, and secularists, not Islamicists.

But they thought that no one in their right mind would turn over this sophisticated society that the Shah built to those people, those backward Khomeiniites.

But they would, after the revolution was over, these useful idiots, the mullahs, would fade.

And then they, the intellectuals and the

socialists and the communists and the secularists, would take over.

And they didn't understand what the Khomeini people were like.

And so they were liquidated.

Remember Bonnie Sauter?

He was sent to France.

Goats Body was executed.

All of these anti-American dandies that thought they could ride the

wave of the Islamist Revolution.

So then Khomeini came in, and by 81 and 82, they were just going down the list and getting rid of all what they called infidels.

And these were, you know, sincere people who were opposed to the Shah, the autocracy, naive but sincere.

And so they started coming to the United States and Europe.

So my breakoff was usually 81, 82.

And I would meet these people not in business.

They didn't own coffee shop chains.

They didn't own cotton farms.

They didn't, you know, they weren't entrepreneurial.

They were, I saw them again and again in academia.

I saw them again and again in the media.

I saw them again and again in the bureaucracy here.

And they all were similar.

I had a lot of really vociferous arguments.

Their narrative was, you Americans created Khomeini via the Shah, and you did this to us.

And da-da-da-da-da.

And we would have run a nice socialist Iran, but the Khomeini people were created because of your oppression and imperialism.

And now we suffered for what you did.

And now we're stuck here in the United States.

And they were pro-Iranian in a weird way.

They didn't criticize that regime.

They criticized the regime among themselves and in the abstract, but they felt that the United States was demonizing Iran.

And in some ways, they were as bad as the Khomeiniites.

And they're all over now in the United States government.

And they are the second wave diaspora.

And they are not fond of the United States, in my view.

They blame it.

And

it's going to be,

every time you talk to them, they cannot criticize Iran.

They will not criticize, I mean the Iranian government.

They won't.

Even though that Iranian government killed them off and drove them out, it'll be like, we were drove out because of you, because of Mossadegh, because of your imperialism, the CIA.

If you had to be fair to us, then the Khomeiniites wouldn't have come in.

It's your fault, your fault.

And then you think, well, if it's our fault, why in the blank did you come here?

Why didn't you go to a socialist utopia in Poland or something?

So I've had a lot of problems with the second wave.

Who was Obama?

I can't remember her name.

I can't remember anyone's name.

The woman who was Obama's right hand.

Who was her hand?

Valerie Jarrett.

Yeah.

Yes.

She was representative of, well, she wasn't really an Iranian

father was.

But she was definitely pro-Iranian.

And although she was very liberal, she was very tolerant and appeased this

fundamentalist lunatic government, as Obama did.

And they did because they felt that that government had legitimate grievances against us and

was a result of our culpability, and we had lost an opportunity to have a good left-wing Iranian secular government because of what we did.

So, in other words, they were more pro-Ahmedijad than they were American.

On our last episode, we were talking, and we're going to go to a break in a second, but we were talking much more about what happened, Operation Midnight Hammer.

I meant to ask you,

the general

Raisin Kane,

has he ever been involved in anything you've done at Hoover, the military?

military?

I think he's visited.

I haven't.

We had General Abazade, had General

Mattis as a fellow.

General McMaster is a senior fellow.

Admiral Ellis, who's in charge of the Mediterranean Fleet, is a fellow.

We have a program where lieutenant colonels come.

We've had some wonderful people participate.

Did you know of his reputation before?

Yes, I did.

He and

the two former CENTCOM Vogli or whatever, Vogli, but the main one that when i the one who was legendary was carrilla yeah uh i don't know if you remember somewhere when the first three years of the war 2003 there was a journalist named michael yon and he yeah and he wrote dispatches he wrote dispatches directly from

uh and he has a series of them when he was embedded with eric carrilla's um

i guess it was battalion or brigade i guess and he was in combat with him.

And I watched him.

He was wounded three times.

Yes, he almost got killed.

He l he was a lieutenant colonel.

He was out in firefights.

He was the most experienced combat veteran of any general of his generation.

And

when I was in bedded in 2007, I also went for a brief period.

I think it was four days in 2006, mostly in helicopters.

It was not as long.

But everybody talked about him.

Everybody talked about him.

And my point is that he became a legendary figure and now he's, I don't know how he did it, but he was rewarded on merit.

Usually the Pentagon doesn't reward merit as it should.

And now he's CENTCOM commander and he's very pro-Israel and he's very skeptical of Iran.

And he's been the liaison between us and

Israel and missile defense and operational strategies.

And he is one reason why Israel and the United States are on the same page right now.

And he took a lot of heat during the Biden administration.

A lot of us were afraid they'd relieve him because he was so competent and he was so fair to Israel.

And he's a wonderful person.

And I hope when the present, I think

all of our better informed listeners will know, I don't know the tenure of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

I think it's three or four years.

But

if there is an opening

of the present guy is wonderful too.

But Carrillo would be a wonderful chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

I think he's headed for retirement this year.

He's earned it.

He's been everywhere.

Anywhere there's been combat and danger, that's where he's been.

I should also be fair to my colleague, H.R.

McMaster.

He was in the lead tank battle.

Oh, my gosh.

He was in the largest tank battle since

I guess it was larger than the Omkipper war tank battles, at least single battle.

He was a captain of a Nabrom's tank group that destroyed all of the T-72s, and then he was,

you know, all through the Iraq war he was on the front lines.

He had shrapnel.

I think he injured his hip.

When I went with him for four or five days, he made me sit in the left rear of the Humvee

because

that was the one place when it hit something, you had a survival ability.

I remember going into these rooms where he was, it was during the Arab Spring and the defection of the Saddamites to the cause of the surge.

he would always, everybody had to be unarmed.

And so you were with all these former Saddam Baathists.

Some of them had these weird Saddam tattoos, you know, on their face, and you never knew.

They had blown up people before.

And so he always said, you sit by the door.

If we get blown up, you're going to go out the door, not up, and smoke.

So

I was,

I always, he's a colleague of mine.

His office is right next door.

So I've always, we've disagreed a little bit on Trump, but he was, unlike some others, I won't mention, I think his problem with Trump wasn't that he was trying to undermine Trump.

Maybe he said things that were anti-Trump, but he was trying to translate Trump ease into actual policy.

So, if Trump said, I want to get out of the RAND deal, he probably, I'm just surmising, he probably said, I don't think we should right now.

But if you want to do it, here's how we're going to do it.

And then he did it.

That was different than some people like Rex Tillerson and Bolton, who tried to obstruct.

So, anyway, Eric Carrilla is a legendary figure, and I'm so glad that he's there right now.

Well, we're going to get your take on

objectivism in

reporting and journalism.

And I have a very touching, powerful letter from a parent of a transgender kid, and I think would like to read part of this and get your take on that.

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

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Again, we are recording on Sunday, the 22nd.

This episode is out on Thursday, the 26th.

And only the Lord knows what will transpire between these two dates.

We live in the fastest-breaking news cycle that I can imagine ever lived through.

Victor Terry Moran of Infamy, no longer with ABC News, finally got the heave-ho,

was with them for quite a while, and he gave a talk.

Former ABC News reporter Terry Moran says, journalists shouldn't be objective.

We know they're not objective, but this is a.

Terry, I got to ask you a question.

Why is there a prefix called opinion journalism?

That's what an op-ed writer does.

The op-ed writer surveys the news and then he gives his opinion.

And typically, they are divided mostly, they may deny it, into conservative columnists like myself and liberal columnists on the other side.

But the news division, the news division is support I mean, we all have personal prejudice, but they have a code of conduct they learned in journalism school, supposedly.

But what you're doing, Terry, is you're just channeling.

You're not even original because when Trump was elected, we had a triad of marquee journalism.

This is coming to me now, so please, if I don't get this right, we had a guy in the New York Times named Jim Rutenberg.

Remember him?

And he wrote an op-ed and said, I am not going to be disinterested.

That's out the window.

From now on, we're going to be biased because you have to be to stop Donald Trump.

He's an existential threat.

Then we had Christiane Anampour, and she wrote and said, I cannot be neutral.

You can't be neutral, not on climate change, not on all these existential efforts.

And then we had my favorite Jorge Ramos, the guy who lives in the gated community community in Florida, the elite who trashes the United States all the time on immigration.

And he said immigration was so critical and we were so unfair to Latin America, I don't know why he wanted to live here, but he does, that he couldn't be disinterested.

So they set the standard that the new journalism was going to be biased with such arrogance and hubis, they never thought themselves, hmm, if I do this and destroy the protocols and the ethos of journalism, do you think that there might be other people who disagreed with me and had similar intellects and abilities as I do and evidence that they would then think as journalists, they could be biased and try to slant the news to Trump.

And then I wouldn't object because I said because I'm biased, they could be biased.

They never did that because they thought their genius suppressed everybody else, that everybody would agree with them.

And it's really sad to see, I don't want to keep picking on the Wall Street Journal, but I think a lot of you out there read the op-ed writers, the opinion journalists in the Wall Street Journal, especially Kimberly Strassel.

I like, did you know James Freeman at all?

I know James, yeah, I think he writes very good columns.

And Holman Jenkins, I disagree with him sometimes, but I like him.

Bill McGurn, one of them.

Bill McGurn, and I think

Gerald Baker is wonderful.

I disagree with him, but I like what he wrote.

All of them.

Jason Riley.

But when I look at the news,

it's not disinterested anymore.

It's always

every article that has the word Trump in it has some kind of knife that you twist into him.

Everyone.

And I don't even read the news anymore.

I just read the opinion journalists.

I still have my subscription, but I can't read it anymore.

And then I look at, as I said before in a podcast, I look at the names and they all come from Atlantic Political,

Washington Post, New York Times.

So somebody at the Wall Street Journal has decided that, unlike the New York Post, this Murdoch outlet will be left-wing.

You know, this Moran thing is no news to us.

We've known.

Remember

the journal list from?

I think I was mentioned on it.

Oh, you were?

Yeah.

That was, was that Ezra Klein?

Yeah, with a ton of people.

They all sang off the same song sheet.

Here's the story today.

You remember when they cracked John Podesta's emails and they had all his New York Times reporters said, one of them said, I know that I'm a complete fraud because here's what I think

I'm going to write.

And they were sending their news articles to be proofread.

Yeah.

By the way, Christine Hamilton, you mentioned her.

Last week, I swore she said something like she's afraid to come to the United States.

Promises.

Promises.

Please don't come.

She married, wasn't his name, Jamie Rosen?

He was on TV the other day.

What is it about the left that they all have to be wounded fawns?

They all have to be, I'm on the barricade.

You know, they're all safe.

They're all affluent.

They're all protected.

They're all entitled, but they all want to get like, you know, they want to get arrested, or they want to crash an ice thing, or they want to say that they're on a hit list, or George Clooney will be out of business, or Bruce Springsteen, or Rosie O'Donnell.

They're all,

it's all psychodrama.

You know what they do that we don't do?

We do very little.

Last time I saw you

a month ago, it was in Washington.

There were the Bradley Prizes.

Okay, so there are prizes.

There are things.

There are awards that happen on the right, but nowhere

on the scale that it happens on the left.

I mean, it's just staggering.

And these folks live to

get honors and awards.

Tell me about every time I'm in a hiring committee and I look at all these letters after people's names and I hear some people, I won't mention colleagues.

My gosh, Harvard BA, Yale PhD.

He was a Guggenheim winner.

He had a national endowment for the American Grant.

My God, he was at the Rome Center.

I think, well, I just want to look at the title of the thesis and the publications.

I want to read them to see if they're convincing or empirical.

But you're right.

The left is so weird because ostensibly they're left-wing people.

We're with the people.

We're hoi poi.

And yet they're the most intensely obsessed and fixated on honors, titles,

grants.

And it tells you, again, the key to the left-wing mind.

It's a psychological attempt to square the impossible, to be

Joe Everyman, and just be for equality of result, and yet want to be better,

better rewarded, elite, exclusive, snobbish, and that it all works out to this stupid guilt.

I'm going to live in the nicest area of Palo Alto, and

I'm going to have a $5 million home and be very liberal.

But I do have a Ukraine flag on my lawn, and I did have a BLM, and

we had that sign.

Remember, it said

there is no racism in this home.

I think the poster child for all this may be the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz.

Remember at the end, he got a doctor of thinkology and then recited the Pythagorean theorem.

There was something in that when they started to give all those little elements as if that was equatable with knowledge.

That was kind of a fatigue.

The university's in a full

downside.

I don't think it's going to recover because I think everybody looks at these protests.

You're in New York.

Did you see that swarming of Penn Central station?

Yeah, a bunch of protesters went in and just swarmed the whole station while people were trying to get on the train, screaming about Palestine, the whole thing.

And you get the impression now that it's not worth

subsidizing to $1.7 trillion to send these kids to go to these places that are 95% leftist and get indoctrinated and ruined and childless, not married, no home until their mid-30s, angry that their education didn't give them the material rewards they think they deserve, but nothing but debt with worthless degrees in sociology and

gender studies.

Spaghetti arms.

Spaghetti arms.

Yeah,

spaghetti arms and screaming and yelling.

They should just become electrician.

Nothing's more noble than to be an electrician.

Maybe some of them will stick their finger

in the wrong outlet and get a little bit of a character.

met a lot of electricians and I supposedly have a PhD in classical languages and they'll say Victor now this let me explain it to you for the fourth time

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Victor,

to torture our listeners, because I'm going to keep reading, and we'll change this up a little bit.

I got a very powerful I sent it on to you, as you know, and I'm not going to give the name of this person or where, but he writes, this is about trans parent a parent of a trans

a man, a young man.

I'm unfortunately the parent of a transgender child.

My son was a brilliant, multifaceted person.

He was hired by a certain company without going to college.

I'm not going to name the company.

I was an extremely engaged parent as my self-employment allowed me the flexibility to always be available.

At some stage, my son convinced himself with the help of social media and local psychiatrists that he was in the wrong body.

Unfortunately, once young people start cross-sex hormones, the new hormones reinforce the newfound identity.

And as I imagine is the case with most transgender people, the hormones get layered with a variety of other medications such as antidepressants, anti-anxiety, ATH drugs.

As the endocrine system and the brain get flooded with pharmaceuticals, the person becomes a shadow of their former self.

If someone were to ask me to describe it in a word, the word I would choose is heartbreaking.

My lovely son is gone.

The person he has become is not someone I know.

I cannot bring myself to endorse or affirm his lifestyle.

And our friend here wrote this because there is a lot of sad, many sad parents who have endorsement.

I think what he's he's trying to get at, and he does get at it, I'm not suggesting he doesn't, but

he's dealing with an elemental truth, and it's one that we've discussed before.

Let's say we go back to 2010.

It was widely accepted that genuine gender dysphoria, biological malady,

as I said, it's in the literature among Hallmark sexologists, is that there are people with

cognitive cerebral sex orientation that doesn't match their physical bodies.

So they are men trapped in women or women trapped in male bodies.

But, but if you look at the numbers per 100,000, it's just minuscule.

And this is

not just Victor saying, this is decades of sophisticated research.

It's about 0.01%.

It's very small.

And suddenly, this became the next civil rights issue of the time.

And all of a sudden, the university started to use, they abolished the word sex, they started gender.

Then they said that, unlike race, apparently, that it was malleable, that people could construct their own gender.

And all of a sudden, it became a civil rights left-wing cause celeb.

And then you started to see these astonishing mass hysterias were in some campuses.

It was at Brown, where 20% of the 20 to 30% of the undergraduates said they had considered transitioning and then we used to be very skeptical of the medical profession performing dangerous operations on minors.

I know in my family my my mother's sister Lila who lived in this house when I was a young had polio and they did 17 experimental operations at the Shriners Hospital in the 1920s.

She went in there walking and she came back with her legs broken about 50 different places to try to straighten and she was a lifelong invalid.

But that was always I always brought up that why would they do that to an eight-year-old, nine-year-old?

Well, they were trying their best at the time, but the point was the general ethos was, let's be careful with operations on children, and more importantly, let's be careful on the prescription of very powerful drugs, hormones, antidepressants on children, and preteens and young teens.

All of a sudden, the woke ideology put all of that ancient wisdom out the door, threw it away.

And just now, it was a civil rights issue if you were opposed to a doctor basically mutilating somebody's physiogamy and face or body or sexual organ, anything.

And we were getting these dangerous operations.

And then we went to the next level where the parents weren't even to be told about it.

And yet, as I said before, throughout the ages, if you look at medieval literature or you look at Roman literature or you look at Greek literature, I can remember in the historian Diodorus, in an odd passage, he says there was a person in this part of Greece, and although he had male characteristics, he was a female.

And then we have the Hermophodite in Greek mythology, Hermes and Aphrodite.

In other words, he had both sex organs.

And then we had the myth of Tiresias, who wanted to know whether women or men enjoyed sex more, so he changed himself into a woman.

And we had Petronius's satiricon, transvestism, cross-dressing, transgender.

All of that was documented as gender dysphoria.

But there was also a theme to it, and that theme to it was it was enhanced and popularized, calibrated on the affluence of a society.

And the more leisured and affluent a society, and more urban, the more it was expressed.

And so we didn't learn from antiquity or the history of Western civilization.

It's tragic that I'm not saying that the writer's son wasn't really suffering from gender dysphoria, dysphoria, but given the amount of people who have said they were transgendered, given when it's collated with the previous scientific evidence of the actual demographic of that group, they're at odds.

So I just hope that his son was not a person who was unduly influenced by the popular culture or the institute, college, or high school.

And I can tell you that there's a lot of advocacy there, and

it's very dangerous the type of drugs they're prescribing and the operations they're normalizing.

Well, we are conscious of the tremendous amount of parental heartbreak there is out there, Victor.

So thanks for your comments.

We're going to

lose a child.

And

whether a child wants you actually lose a child or a child won't speak to you or any of that.

It's terrible.

And I feel for the rider.

Well, we're going to head into the home stretch, and we have two things to talk about.

And I forgot.

Oh, yeah, here they are.

We've talked in the past about blowing up dams, and

Donald Trump's doing something about that.

And then there's our old friend, Tim Walls, and we'll get your thoughts on his latest whatever

when we come back from these final important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'd like to get to the dam stuff first.

Victor, you've talked a lot about what's happening in California.

You did on a recent podcast, too.

There's a great website I've come across, UN1, U-N-W-O-N.

It follows rural land use issues.

And a piece here from last week, Trump Stops Snake Snake River Dam removal.

It says Biden plan elevated fish

over citizens.

And Victor, there was a plan to blow up four dams on the Snake River.

They generated 3,000 megawatts of reliable power.

Clean power.

Clean, right?

And enough to power 2.5 million homes.

And they were going to be blown up because, why?

I don't know.

Because the headline is right.

Fish are preferred.

They don't understand that, take California.

There's 40 million people here, 41 million people.

There used to be two or three million.

And that was when rivers ran wild.

Our grandparents and great-grandparents saw these dams on the major rivers of California, to take this instance, as supplying four benefits for a sophisticated and growing society.

They're recreational.

They allow people sports,

water sports, sailing, boating, fishing.

Second, they can control floods.

They can modulate the intensity of the river downfall.

Number three, they create, as you said, hydroelectric power.

And four, and in my interest, they provide irrigation for agriculture by storing the water.

And yet, who in the world, to take our example, would blow up four dams on the Kalamath River, not nearly as big as these dams, but on the Snake.

But Gladin, it wasn't just that he blew them up, but he took money from a California bond measure passed by the majority of the Senate to build dams.

And he took that and expropriated and used half a billion dollars to blow them up.

And for the first year and a half, and it's still the after effects, it was an ungodly disaster.

It created mud flows, it killed wildlife, it polluted, it destroyed the homes of people that were at lakeside homes, it robbed people of electricity.

And he did that.

And one of the things that they do is they try to use fish under the guise of Native American people should have their ancestral rights to harvest salmon or something.

That's what they did with a klamath and to a lesser extent with a snake.

But it's anti-modern, anti-civilizational.

It's nihilist.

And Donald Trump, once again, you know, if you just think about it, and I do think about it, if Kamala Harris was president right now, I think that Iran would have a nuclear weapon, and I think Israel would be unarmed.

They would have cut off all armed supplies by now.

And I'm pretty sure that they would blow up all the dams in the Snake River.

It's everything.

And I think there would be another 10,000 people coming in every day.

And Mr.

Mayorkis or his facsimile would be telling us as people in the background flood across that the border is secure.

We dodged a bullet.

We really did.

And that's why I cannot forgive people who were conservative.

That's why I really admire Mike Pence.

I liked him, but when I saw him tonight, I felt like he was a tragic figure.

He was praising Trump, and Martha McCallan asked him, was this at odds with what you voted for?

And he tried to explain, but even I looked at his face, and I thought his face just said, please don't go there.

I was probably wrong, because how can you not vote for someone who represents 90% of what your whole life's credible was?

And given the alternative, the alternative wasn't Bill Clinton.

It wasn't even Barack Obama.

It was hard-left socialism.

No one that signs a letter or a petition ever apologizes.

The Duke faculty that signed, there were like 88 of them, not a single one of them.

The 51st.

On the Duke La Crosse?

Yeah.

The 51 signed them.

No, the 51, not one of them has.

But they did lose their security clearances.

Trump stripped them.

And the hundred economists?

No, well, the hundred Republican.

Well, there were 17 Nobel economists that said we were going to have a recession.

But there were hundred

republican conservatives who who endorsed yes kamala harris it's one thing that they actually endorsed wasn't the law school dean at pepperdine i'm from getting it he was the vatican ambassador wasn't he well there was a law oh doug kameck yes he had he had actually endorsed

he had endorsed black obama

but they never say um yeah no we're wrong we're sorry no they don't they just they

they don't.

And not only would we have had Kamal Harris as president, Victor, we would have had Tim Walls as vice president.

So you know what this most shameless essay that I've ever seen.

Bill Crystal wrote something after what Israel did and Donald Trump's

out.

This week or so.

Yeah.

Oh, it was the last 48 hours, basically saying that the horrible Donald Trump was somehow stumbling or bumbling into the right position on Israel and Iran.

And the horrible, stupid Donald Trump, I'm just paraphrasing, would maybe even hit Iran.

And then I think after he did, he mentioned it.

In other words, he didn't have the intellectual courage to say, had I got my way, Israel might not even be here because the people in my new party hate Israel.

And they count on useful idiots like me to cover up their anti-Semitism and hatred because they do hate Israel.

And it was, it was, it just, it's just staggering to think that all those people

for all those years made so much money and so many scams and

grants and PACs and project for the new American century and all this stuff.

And then all of a sudden we found out it was all, oh, Trump hurt my feelings.

He didn't appreciate my genius.

Now just forget everything I told you.

Cruises.

the cruises are evidence of this.

I'll tell you why.

As you know, many of our listeners know, I mean, I ran the cruises and you came on many of them.

And there was never a thought of

having, well, we, I remember one cruise, we had you

and

Bernard Lewis, Milton Friedman.

You know,

if we could get great thinkers and speakers, that's what we wanted.

That was a national review cruise.

On a weekly standard cruise, no one of of that, you would never have been invited on.

I never was.

Why?

Because you would have been, you may have come off as more intelligent, etc., than Bill Crystal.

And Bill Crystal always had to be the premier mind on those.

I never understood because his father was brilliant and widely published and prolific.

But for someone who got a PhD and was a professor and was posing as Dan Quayle's brain, and he was was the intellectual architect of neoconservatism.

I mean, I give, I don't agree with Robert Kagan, but he wrote a lot.

You know, you wrote a Robert Kagan wrote a lot, but Bill Crystal never wrote much of anything.

I don't think he has a book to his name.

I can't imagine that.

How can you be the intellectual architect of a particular ideology and not take the time to write?

He had a column in the New York Times for a while, and that was kind of make a trombone sound, whomp, womp.

well anyway i mentioned tim walls tim walls' love for china it happened a little while ago here victim maybe within 10 days i don't know i've forgotten that events are going so fast headline former dem vp pick tim walls claims china may have the world's moral authority after israel attacks iran i was surprised the guy that went to china how many times is thinks that the ccp is well you never know because a lot of the things he said about China, remember the Tennen Square lie, the army about why he didn't go with his unit to

Iraq.

No sooner had he been nominated as vice president, I think he was picked because he offered, it was very hard to find someone

more intellectually unimpressive than Kamala Harris, but she found somebody, and that was Tim Waltz.

But everything he said was basically a lie.

And then you juxtapose that with his, what do you call it, herky, jerky, frenetic.

The The nation was introduced to him as he was this kind of middle-aged balding guy like me, but he was pudgy and he wore these kind of

30s-something

tight pants with, you know, we used to call them high waters, you know, the cuffs were way up to his thigh

and the sleeves were halfway up his arm.

And then he went out and he started gesturing.

He would point to a guy in the audience.

He'd do this.

He'd just, he was, Gavin knew some on steroids more than Gavin does.

And then he didn't say, and then he turned, he was kind of like the folks he, I'm going to work with the middle class.

And the more he talked, you thought, this guy is a total fraud.

Then his daughter started coming out.

She had warned the rioters in the 2020 that her dad was going to call out the National Guard.

And the wife had said she raised the windows to smell the aroma of burning tires from the riot.

They were just a dysfunctional, crazy family.

Then the other day, when they were talking about adjudicators for the crisis, he mentioned the only one that was legitimate was China.

Tim, everybody has said that you were either a naive or pro-PLA, and a lot of people defended you.

So why would you confirm

the right-wing suspicion that you're a stooge or an idiot as far as China goes and say that a mass murdering government with a history of butchering 70 million of its own people is the only legitimate neutral adjudicator of the Middle East?

You're a complete idiot.

idiot.

And

this weird thing where he's supposed to be, remember, he, I know how to change the oil on a truck, and I love my beer and I drink Mountain Dew.

And it's just a complete sad, I feel sorry for him.

He's a buffoon.

I think the best person

that I know put who summed him up, who's a very underappreciated genius, is Tyrus.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, he's smart.

He is.

And he said, Tim Waltz is a clown in search of a circus.

And that summed him up.

Yeah.

I love Tyrus.

And I'm very happy my old colleague Kat Timf is back on.

I saw her.

I am too.

You taught her.

Didn't you teach her?

I didn't teach her, but I saw her on campus in 2004 or 2005.

She was an English major.

I was teaching at that time classics, Greek history, stuff like that, military history.

But

I was on the Gutfeld show, and I talked to her about her Hillsdale days.

And she's beat cancer.

She has a child, happily married.

Everything worked out very well for her.

She's got a keen wit.

Yeah.

I like her

as well.

Well, Victor,

we've worn you out today, and we're going to conclude here with what we normally do at the end of the show.

I'm going to read the comment, and so many people, typical YouTube show now, episode will have 300, 400.

One episode, I think we had 800 comments.

It's tough to read them all.

We plow through.

But here's one.

Actually, this one is from Apple.

And this is from, it's titled Renaissance Man.

Victor is the true Renaissance man.

Farmer, historian, linguist.

He covers all the bases.

I really enjoy his podcasts.

Really down to earth.

I take this opportunity to wish Victor a speedy recovery from his surgery.

I look forward to the wisdom he brings us on daily events.

Godspeed, Victor, and this is signed Alaska West.

And there are many, many.

That's nice.

I'm only nine days out.

I think I'm 70%

better.

Yeah.

Well,

and that's only because he had to remove bone rather than just tissue in one of the sinuses.

So that was a little complication, but the slugs have stopped.

I've said it too many times.

You're indestructible.

I want to thank.

The folks who write me.

I get a few emails every week from folks who subscribe to Civil Thoughts.

That's the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society, which is trying to strengthen civil society.

Civil Thoughts comes out every Friday, and I provide 14 recommended readings.

How do you get it?

You go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.

Easy peasy, not charging you, not selling the names.

None of that monkey business.

Thanks.

Oh, subscribe again, right?

Subscribe.

Did I say that already?

I did.

Picturehansen.com, the blade of Perseus to subscribe.

Picture, you've been terrific.

Thank you

for hosting me here.

You're sitting

40 years ago, there would have been a Ford 4000 sitting right where you are.

Yes.

This was a garage for my tractors, and then I remodeled it myself into a garage for the cars.

And then I had taken a, it was a shop during my grandfather's period, but it also had been a place with a manger, that slope over there.

Yeah.

That low part.

That's where the horses came in and ate.

And this was hay.

And I remodeled it.

Then, when I had a professional, a wonderful guy, Steve Sargent, who was a contractor, he came in and completely redid this two years ago.

And he asked,

Who did this?

And I said, I don't know.

Somebody came out of Mars, and he thought he was an electrician and a carpenter

plumber.

Yes.

But he did a wonderful job.

So it's a beautiful room now.

And

when I grew up, we did, but we didn't, my grandfather had gotten rid of the working horses in the 20s when he used to worship on the altar of the 9-in tractor.

And then especially the 8-in tractor had overhead valves and a PTO.

And then the Ford Jubilee of the 19 late 40s was just, that's what I drove when I was a kid, gas tractor.

But we only had horses to ride.

My Swedish grandfather had been wounded in World War.

one and was kind of disabled.

So he had 40 acres and he kind of made a menagerie there.

He was completely self-sufficient.

He didn't have any money, but he had geese and ducks and chickens and hogs, and we would go down and butcher these 800-pound hogs.

And I remember, God, it was so gross with the intestines.

I hated doing it.

And then we...

Did you know it was a bronze?

I did.

Tango Johnson was a cowboy, and then

he was my grandfather, my grandmother's brother.

He was 13 years old.

He rode all the way from New Mexico with four horses for his father to California when they moved because they couldn't afford putting 13.

And then my Swedish grandfather broke horses.

And I was down in Kingsburg once,

and there was a big Swede who left, and he was a rodeo clown.

And my father said, that guy

is famous.

My grandfather, he goes, yeah, he's famous.

You know who it was?

He was Slim Picken.

Yes, he lived in Kingsburg, California.

And he was a rodeo clown at the Woodlock Rodeo a couple of times before he became like Doctor Strangelove.

I think that's what made him famous in 62.

But I'm talking when I was five or six years old.

And he came out to look at a horse that my grandfather broke.

But he was a big Swede.

He had gone to, I think he had left Kingsburg or he'd gone to Texas where he got that accent.

But he was a Kingsburgh Swede.

Yeah, he had a very technically.

Yeah, but he was a Kingsburgh Swede, and he was a big guy.

My favorite movie was underrated and much criticized, but I thought it was brilliant.

Sam Peck and Paul, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid when they're on the river and Katie Girardo, he said, James Colburn says, We gotta go get the kids gang and he said, Nah, I don't go anywhere.

I'm in retirement.

I'm building myself a boat.

Remember that?

I don't want to go out there and he said, No, what if I throw you a twenty dollar?

He said, Okay.

Katie well, not Katie, but his wife was Katie Girardo.

And she was pretty old at this time.

Well, he was too in their 60s.

So they go out and they shoot him up, but he gets shot.

And then he goes to the edge of the river, and then she kind of goes, doesn't get near him, lets him die.

He holds and he looks at the sunset, and he sings Bob Dylan sings knocking on heaven's door.

I know it sounds corny, but you watch the movie, it's really moving.

And that was one of my favorite Bob Dylan.

You should

write a Peck and Paw article someday.

I wrote

right up from Corsica.

And his brother, Denver Peck and Paul, was a judge with my mother on the Superior Court, Denver Peck and Paul.

And he was a very funny guy because

every once in a while my mom was pretty young.

She was 50.

And

she would get people that she sentenced that would say things to her that were,

you know.

And then I was.

So

Denver said to my mom once, now, you've got to take a lesson from me, Pauline.

And he pulled up his rubs and he had a gun underneath.

It was legal, permitted concealed weapon.

And my mom said, I can't do that.

And my father, he said, listen to Denver.

But they were the Peckinpaws had a little cattle ranch up in Corscold, and that was kind of the backdrop of Ride the High Country.

The geography doesn't quite make sense, but they get to the high Sierra, or not the high, but the high Mother Low.

And that's supposed to start in Corscold.

That's where the Peckinpaws were from.

Sam Peckinpaw was a tragic figure because

he made that brilliant ride the high country, and then they gave him a lot of money.

And

he didn't really make another great movie until The Wild Bunch.

And

he did cowboy shows.

And then he also did that weird Eastern Front war movie, Men of Iron.

Cross of Iron or

James Colburn was in that.

Actually, there's a whole cult.

I didn't realize that.

I've got letters from people that said that was his greatest movie.

That was his greatest?

Yeah,

I said something that I thought I was kind of disappointed, and somebody wrote me and gave me all these links to in Germany, all over the world, it's a big cult movie.

So it's kind of a good movie.

I'd watch it again, but it's wasn't there one where there was some

I was in a room with a bunch of Russian women.

He also did a movie that was really violent, but it was actually well done, Straw Dogs with Dustin Hossman.

But

I just, I've never seen Bill Holden, and he was a brilliant actor, but that was one of the best roles I've ever seen him in

as Pike Bishop.

He was Ronald Reagan's best man.

He was.

He really.

That was so weird because you'd think that he would be a liberal critic, and he was so loyal to Reagan.

And he was, I love Bill Holden.

He was just wonderful.

He's like Dana Andrews and Joel McRae, those three.

I always liked those guys.

Ben Johnson.

Ben Johnson.

He was a certified cowboy.

I'm doing this by memory, but it was

the John Ford triad, you know.

And he was on that one sin where he's got one foot on each horse and he's doing the Roman ride, you know.

And that was actually Ben Johnson did that.

Well, he did, and so did the kids.

So did the

what's his name, Junior, the blonde-haired guy.

He He was in Airlines.

Yes, he's very good.

Yeah, that's like a good one.

I'll remember his name in a minute.

There were no stand-ins.

He lived to be about 80, 90.

He was in the searchers, wasn't he, with a guy that rushes out and gets killed?

No.

That was Harry Carey Jr.

Harry Carey Jr.

was in that movie, though.

Yeah.

But I think he was as skilled a writer almost as Ben Johnson.

Ben Johnson,

as I remember, made a fortune in LA real estate.

Oh, he may have.

Yeah, he was a very astute investor.

All those,

but Sam Peckinpaw's life, you know, at the end, he was cocaine and drugs.

But he was a brilliant director for a while.

It's going to be at the end for us, Taylor.

Metamucil.

I don't know.

I feel like after my ninth operation and

some immune problems, I feel like knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door.

My friend, the glue factory does not beckon yet.

I hope so.

You've got to go.

I've got to go.

I have a farmer friend that says, Victor, when I get old, just get me a concrete room and hose me down

occasionally.

You've been terrific.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Yeah, same.

And we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.