Trump Bombs Iran, While Obama Just Bombs

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This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show. I am not Sammy Wink, although I'm sitting in the Sammy Wink chair.
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Today we are recording on Sunday, June 22nd, which is a few days, actually maybe even less than 24 hours after America's historic bombing of Iran. We're going to get Victor's take on that.
On Gavin Newsom, on Obama, on... Gavin Newsom, oh my God.
I'm sorry, Victor. That'sor that's torture you gotta deal with it victor is the martin and neely anderson senior fellow at the hoover institution the wayne marshall busky distinguished fellow in history at hillsdale college he is not the president of the gavin newsom fan club he has a website the blade of perseus you'll find it at victorhanson.com and later on in this episode I'll tell you why you should subscribe.
Victor, when we come back from these important messages... Oh, hi.
Thank you. We will get your take on what happened in Iran.
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Victor, I guess we want to just throw it out there. Iran, what's your take on every aspect of it? If you think about it, Gerald Baker, I really like him.
I disagree with him in place, but he's a very astute observer. He pointed this out, and others have too, and I had written about it, that the Middle East has been the graveyard of administrations, if you think about it, for the last almost 50 years.
Jimmy Carter ruined his administration with a failed April 1980 rescue mission. Ronald Reagan was almost impeached, but with a ran contra.
George H.W. Bush was doing well.
he was 90% approval after the 91 first Gulf War, and then the survival of Saddam and the Kurds, and then that imploded him. He lost.
A hundred hours, right? A hundred hours. And then we had Bill Clinton.
He kind of did the best of avoiding things, but he could have killed bin Laden.

There were some mistakes. And then we had, of course, George W.
Bush with the tragedy of the Iraq War. Obama was almost done in by Benghazi and the bombing of Libya from 2011.
And by the way, that went all the way up to the last day. It was an office full day.
And then, you know, we have Trump was the first one really to dodge the bullet with Soleimani and ISIS and Baghdadi, Wagner Group. He did well.
So the point I'm trying to make or belabor is that a lot of presidents don't want to get near that quagmire. And yet I can't think of any other Republican who would have done what Trump did.
They either didn't have the guts to do it, or they didn't have the competence to do it. But it was not easy.
If this had failed, like these other failures, he would have been done for. He knew that.
Because the idea that seven of these things, these B-2, worth a couple of billion dollars each, were going to fly, what, 7,000 miles, coordinate with fighter escort, the moment they went into Iranian Territory B, refueled several times, 15 hours of wearing terror on the pilot, and then to hit these targets the size of a kitchen table from 50,000 feet, and get out without any losses whatsoever, and get back home, and have it completely confidential, leak-free, secret, no one knew about it, even the media was faked out. It's pretty amazing.
And he took a huge gamble because he knew that the negotiations were going nowhere. So that is one thing.
And then if we just for a second, Jack, could look at all of his critics. So the left says he didn't get constitutional authority, but he doesn't really need it.
I guess it's 60 days, but you're allowed. But now they're hammering that.
I can't believe it. Tim Kaine? He was head of the DNC when Hillary, who was that? It was Hillary, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Ben Rhodes wanted to bomb Qaddafi out of power.
I had been in Libya in 2007, and it was a, well, I had a ruptured appendix. Yeah, your life-saving surgery.
I was in my room, and I talked to a lot of people in the Libyan government, and they were all excited that the kids were taking over. It was going to be kind of like a Jordanian dictatorship, but the point was the Italians were coming in with a big free trade zone.
The people in Malta had the Corinthian Hotel there. Archaeological excavations were going to resume.
And we bombed. And we just caused...
The clinic that I had been saved at was bombed. And Hillary said, we came, we saw winny-witty w wiki kind of, I came, I saw, I conquered.
But she said, we came, we saw, he died. She was making fun of the fact, and it was chaos.
By the way, left-wingers, so the point I'm making is they didn't get any congressional authority. The last day that Donald, that before Donald Trump was inaugurated on January 19th of 2017, if I recall, Barack Obama bombed Libya.
And you know what he bombed him with? B2s. And he didn't get any congressional.
So the gumption of these people is say, you don't have congressional. Another thing is the whole taco thing disappeared, didn't it? Trump always chickens out.
Remember that? They don't talk about it today, do they? I think it's gone. Actually, the day before there was this talk, oh, he always uses two weeks.
I said two weeks means infinity. Two weeks was brilliant because what it did was he needed a deadline so that he could reestablish the fact that his threats are always reified.
The 60 days, people had already said, well, you didn't keep the deadline, the Israelis did it for you. So he wanted to make sure that he had a deadline that he would enforce.
He wanted to give the Israelis a couple of days to see if they could come up with something, maybe a commando raid, and they probably said, you know what, it's not going to work. We can't take this out without you.
He wanted to get the assets all assembled in the right place, it all planned out. And he knew that if he waited five or six or eight days, that each day the chances of surprise would diminish as you got near the deadline.
So it was a really good thing to do. And it also showed that he was willing to negotiate.
And that was important. So everything about it was inspiring, inspired.
And the left hadn't, I mean, what position do they have? I saw one of my colleagues at the Hoover Institution, Mike McFall, said, well, this was the end of negotiations. I mean, my gosh, he tried to negotiate with them, but what were they going to negotiate about? They weren't going to give it up, because that's who they are.
Negotio ergo sum, right? They just, they live for that. They're a proverbial scorpion.

That's what scorpions do.

They sting and kill people.

And so that's what they do.

They can't.

Without their terrorist appendages,

without their nuclear threat,

without their oil,

they're nothing, nada, nothing.

And they know that.

So they weren't going to negotiate.

And by the way,

Trump comes in in January,

and they say, hey, by the way, Mr. President, they're a few weeks from Obama.
And he must have said, well, wait a minute. When I left, they weren't.
We had sanctions. We had embargoes.
I robbed them. Well, you know, they wanted to negotiate.
And they gave them $100 billion in oil revenues. And they begged to get the free pall Pallets, that was Obama, and then Biden gave them the free reign, begged them to get back in the Iran deal, and then of course they destroyed deterrence with Kabul, Chinese balloon, the Anchorage disaster, all that stuff.
So Trump comes in and they say, well, why didn't he negotiate? Well, why did you deliver to him an Iranian bomb, basically, on a plate? So there was nothing to negotiate with. Now there's, Trump is really, it's really ironic because he says, well, now that you don't have a nuclear threat to speak of for the immediate future, let's negotiate.
And they're thinking, we don't have anything to negotiate because the only card we had was our nuclear threat, and you took it away. So are we going to negotiate about our survival? Well, we should talk about what's it now called, MIGA.
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And by the way, walking into the studio, I tripped over so much gold here because Victor loves gold.

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We haven't finished all of the people who are going to be affected by it.

Thank you. A disease called crucifilia.
I know. It's an addiction to gold.
Gold love. Hey, Victor.

We haven't finished all of the people who are going to be affected by it. Of course not.
Yeah, I'm not moving on. Yeah.
So I was thinking, then the MAGA people, remember we were told there was a big fracture in the base? Right. But the polls, if you look at Republicans on one hand and MAGA, people who identify and they overlap, the vast majority supported the idea they couldn't have a bomb.
And even by a less, by a magnitude, I should say less of a majority, but still a majority, wanted the preemptive attack. So I know Rand Paul was against it, Candace Owens was, Marjorie Taylor Greene was a prominent critic, Sean Davis, and Tucker Carlson.
But there's no other alternative. They agree with Donald Trump on 85% of his agenda, the border, crime, you name it.
The New Green Deal, opposition to that, court appointments. So really, it's a particular issue.
I know it's an important issue, but it's a funny kind of war. I can guarantee you there won't be one American footprint on the soil of Iran.
It's a kind of funny war when you go all the way across the world and you don't lose any soldiers at all, and you probably didn't kill any soldiers or a few or maybe none, and then the enemy is losing and no sooner do you destroy, I don't know, five or six hundred billion dollars of infrastructure. Then you say you want to negotiate when they're losing.
That's not a typical war. Tucker was, did you see that debate he had with Ted Cruz? Yeah.
It was kind of a, I mean, they were both on the same side, but it was very acrimonious. But at one point, Ted Cruz said, well, you know, they wanted to kill Trump.
And Tucker said he didn't know. Yet the Biden, not the Trump DOJ, indicted that suspect in November of 2024.
And he's in Iran now. And they're proceeding now.
Pam Bondi's proceeding. They have apparently a lot of evidence.
So when Cruz apprised Tucker of that, he said, well, if I had known that,

I would like to nuke them. I think he was just exaggerating with a nuke, but what he meant was that would be reasons to go to war.
So I'm not sure that even he will sustain his criticism because he kind of modified that. Can I ask you about a conservative criticism along these lines is that Donald Trump is being played by Bibi Netanyahu.

That's a theme out there from some folks. I think it's just the opposite.
Because if you think about it, the reason Donald Trump could go in there, and there were no Iranian missiles, there were no Iranian aircraft, so to speak, and as we're speaking right now, there is no Hezbollah attack on the American embassy, there may be, there is no Hamas uprising in Gaza, there are no terrorists coming from the Houthis, and there were no air defenses, because Israel denuded Iran months ago of its air defenses it neutered Hezbollah, destroyed Hamas and the Houthis are pretty much inert and there's no Assad dynasty as a receptacle of Iranian supplies in Syria and guess what, there's no Russians in the Middle East anymore right next to us. If Putin's Russians planes were right there as they have been, it might have been iffy.
So Donald Trump waited and let this play out. He, unlike Biden, he basically said, you're a sovereign nation.
What they did on October 7th was reprehensible, horrific, medieval. Go do what you got to do.
And they did, and that helped Donald Trump. So I don't see how he was played unless you think that Iran posed no existential threat to us.
The Europeans sure apparently do because they are kind of coy. I feel kind of bad for them.
They don't have any military wherewithal to be credible to Iran. But unlike what you might think that they would just play to the left, maybe it's because of the rise of the conservative parties they're worried about, I don't know.
But the German Chancellor Mertz said they're doing our dirty work for us in reference to Israel. Absolutely.
They have, Macron said they can't have a weapon. So they've been actually pretty supportive according to their fashion.
The Arab world is just on spec. It was the same with Israel.
And that is they contact the Iranians and say, oh, you know, we had nothing to do with this. It's not us.
You guys right across the Gulf were looking at us every evening. We had nothing to do with it.
And then they kind of believed, this is terrible. We don't believe in preemption.
And then they call us up or the Israelis say, have you guys going to do this? We're all for it, but you've got to finish the job. Don't let this animal be wounded, and then they'll turn on us.
So we support you, but only if you annihilate them. And that's pretty much the Arab world.
China and everybody's, oh, China and Russia. I think, who said World War III? Is it Tucker, I think? Maybe.
Oh, yeah. Steve Bannon.
Steve Bannon, sorry. Yeah.
Tucker was just being rhetorical if he did. But Steve Bannon, and so here's Russia.
Now Russia's looking and thinking, well, we got kicked out of the Middle East. We no longer have a patron, I mean a client in Syria.
And there was a reason why we didn't go into Osatia, Georgia, Kiev, Crimea, Donbass. In other words, there was a reason why we went in during the weekend George W.
Bush, the Obama administration, the Biden, but not Trump and this confirms why we didn't go in he's too volatile, he's too unpredictable we don't know what the blank he's going to do and we're tied down in Ukraine we've lost a million dead, wounded, and missing. And finally, this is not good that he was so preemptive and we don't know what he's going to do.
And finally, I think they say, oh, the Middle East is in turmoil? Oh, my gosh, that's so terrible. Oil could go up to $150 a barrel.
In other words, it wouldn't be a bad thing for Russia to get a windfall profit. China's just the opposite.
Their attitude is, please, we used to buy 90% of oil from Iran, and we'd get 50% of all the Middle East oil that comes out of the street. Please, please, the United States, just calm down.
We don't want any disruption, and we don't like what you did with Iran, but we also are afraid that you did it. Because we don't know what you would react to if we did that in Taiwan.
I don't think either one of them are going to do anything. So you look at the left, there's nothing there.
It's very hard to attack a successful. All these presidential actions abroad are like football.
The 49ers out here in California are 10-0. You can't find a seat.
And when they're 0-10, nobody can give away a ticket. So what Kennedy said after the Bay of Pigs, he said, success has 1,000 parents and defeat is an orphan.
And that's what it is. It was successful so far.
It changed. George W.
Bush was polling 90% when the statue in 2003 fell in April and 25% at the end of his term.

He hadn't changed.

The mission, it wasn't working without cost as it had been. But would the world have been quaking in its boots over George H.W.
Bush?

You wrote something the other day, Victor.

Well, you've written these things frequently. thinks out loud he's unpredictable and he will drop a bomb on your head and that's that dynamic of of how he acts in public and uh he's hard to be like a farm yeah yeah and they know that and there's always an element to it.
And he understands something that all of the people from the Kennedy School of Government with few exceptions don't. And that is the more unpredictable you are and the more volatile you seem the more deterrence is likely to accrue to you.
And he knows that. And so all of these groups that are supposedly going to weaken his presidency whether it's the mega base that's not going to happen the left is what is it it's like we're going to impose we're going to oppose and really smear trump because for the first time in 47 years, the Americans have struck back for the Beirut bombing, the

hospital. We're going to oppose and really smear Trump because for the first time in 47 years, the Americans have struck back for the Beirut bombing, the hostage-taking, the Marine barracks, the killing 2,000 in Iraq, trying to kill a president.
And they finally said no mas. And that's terrible.
And it was successful. And that's terrible.
And there's no more nuclear threat in the pursuit. And that's terrible.
That's not going to work. Russia and China is not going to work.
The Arab world is not going to rise up. And then the question is, what will Iran do? And it's sort of like Straits of Hormuz.
And the U.S. Navy can handle the Straits of Hormuz.
Terrorist enclave. If they kill, if there's, I hope that doesn't happen, because if you have some Iranian terrorists that start killing Americans in the United States, you know what Trump will do.
He'll just say, everybody that's got a green card or a tourist visa from Iran, I don't care, you're going home. And he will expel the whole diplomatic corps.
He'll get rid of all of them. He'll shut down all the Iranian nationals that are in.
So that's not going to happen. I don't think that's going to happen.
Is it good things can happen? The Iranian street, anytime you bomb somebody, it's very hard for the people who are on the receiving end to side with the people who are on the bombing end. Yeah.
I mean, Japan did, but what was its option, right? Well, I mean, we took out, and then when you get rid of a dictator, you bomb them out or threaten, Milosevic left and we got something better. Gaddafi, they'd be bombed out of existence.
We got something worse. We bombed Saddam out of existence.
We got something slightly better maybe, but it took years and years. So it's an iffy thing.
I don't see the Iranian street. It's like that keep quoting the Aesop's fable.
Everybody wants to bell a cat and put a bell so you can hear him coming, but no mouse wants to be the one that has to be devoured in the first attempt. So anybody that goes out in the street is going to be butchered.
The more likely sense of resistance will come from the army because they've killed, what, 20 to 25 of the top generals. And the people are going to get very angry when they start to hear and see, and they already are, that probably a trillion dollars over 50 years was invested in Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis and the Assad's.
And all these people were greedy and demanding and they were impotent. And they're all gone.
And all that money was for nothing. And then you had all the nuclear burrowing and rock mountain fortresses, all for nothing.
And the embargoes and the sanctions that cost you billions of dollars for nothing. And the military, through all of that, finally turns out a country of 11 million people versus 91 million.
That little country destroyed your air defenses and now is flying, waving at you all over the country. And you can't do anything.
So your military was impotent, impotent, incompetent. And now they're thinking, the generals, well, they killed the first 25, so my name's on some list.
So where do I sleep? You know, four doors all blown up. I can't go underground like a mole forever.
So you would think that there are some army people who would say these theocrats got the people angry at them, and they're killing all of our generals, and we're not the same thing as the theocrats, and maybe one of them will do something, but I doubt it. But that's the only source that I can see of a popular uprising coming from the army and the military.
Well, there's a few more Iran related topics to get your take on, Victor.

One of them is Barack Obama. Another is the aforementioned make Iran great again.
And

Pete Hegseth, I'd like to get your thoughts on him. And we'll do that when we come back from

these important messages. Folks, we're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show recording on Sunday, June 22nd.
This episode will be up on Tuesday, the 24th. I apologize.
I'm haggard. I've hardly slept.
Flew across the country. I know you did.
I don't know how you're doing. Well, it's...
We're both in bad shape. The walking wounded, but exhilarated by the news of yesterday, on Saturday, late Saturday evening on the East Coast.
But on the plane here, Victor, roughly three hours ago, I think from when we're talking right now, I saw on Fox, I was watching it on the plane, and Donald Trump put on Truth Social. I'm going to call it a tweet, but it's not, but a truth.
And he talked about, well, first of all, the background talk, we just, we were not into regime change. And then he said something like, you know, regime change is just a phrase something like that and yeah let's make iran great again so i wonder where and is is he just he's just talking thinking out loud maybe as you've written one side of the peninsula is going to be gaza riviera and the other side is going to be i don't know monaco or something but again what do you make, if you're an Iranian and this guy has just destroyed a trillion dollar 50-year investment and neutered you, and the next thing you know, he wants to make you great again and negotiate with you.
It's not quite the way that most American presidents act. And at the same time, it's not a sign of weakness because he did something that no other president would have done.
So he's very confusing to these people. And that's what he just keeps everybody off.
That's why the left, by the way, can't figure him out because they want him to be a right wing bogeyman. But on the one hand, they see him around with Joe Rogan and Dana White and RFK and Tulsi, and on the other hand, Wall Street hates him more than unions.
Unions like him. Wall Street hates him.
And so he's, he gives, he doesn't want to tax Social Security. Usually Republicans want to privatize it.
He doesn't want to be taxed. So he's hard to pigeonhole.
Yeah. Well, they were trying to pigeonhole Pete Hegseth earlier this week, Victor, and what a difference a day makes that he and Tulsi Gabbard were on the outs.
They were not in the inner circle. And I think in the last 24 hours, again, you know,

we're 24 hours out from the activities of yesterday, I think he's come off looking really well.

Well, I mean, we have two defense secretaries. One of them oversaw the greatest humiliation in

50 years since the embassy fly-off in Saigon in 1975, Lloyd Austin, who went AWOL for a week. And he was beloved by the left.
And here have another guy who participated as a partner with Rubio and Trump in probably the most spectacular American operation in the Middle East in its history. And he got, when people were leaking, and he fired two or three of his closest soldiers.
Yeah, he leaks all the time. There was no leaks.
The media bought hook, line, and sinker the, they had a problem because when you're going to use these V2s, you don't want to put them out in a place where they could, they're $2 billion each. So you want them home, and you don't want them to be targeted by a drone or something.
But when they flew out, there were reporters at the base looking to see when they would take off. So they came up, the Pentagon came up with the idea that they were going to Guam.
Everybody believed it. So the Iranians thought, well, they're in Guam.
We'll just start surveilling Guam. And they weren't.
They were headed right toward Fodor. So everything he did was pretty much contrary to what the left said.
His stock has risen. So has Rubio's.
So has Trump. My wife was watching MS.
I think she was trying to torture me because I said, I've suffered enough. Please don't do this.
You want to see them in these hours. You want to see them in their misery.
She did turn to, she started smiling, watch this. We watched CNN and then MSNBC.
It was incredible. Each guest they had on was, well, I'm not a big Trump fan, but this was inspired.
This was brilliant. I mean, Martha McAllen on Fox had on Mike Pence.
Did you see him? I did. I saw today, yeah.
I felt bad for him. Yeah.
Because they were, I mean, she was a good journalist and she was trying to point out the contradictions but it was a little different. He had differences in one sphere, not foreign policy.
But he was magnanimous. He said only Trump would have done this.
I saw him do it. It was great.
And the thing about all this is when you get tied emotionally like he did, I understand that he felt he was in danger January 6th and all that. But the fact of the matter is on 80% of the issues, he was on Trump's side in the 2024.
And saying you're not going to vote for that and you're going to sit out is like voting against it in a tight race. So when you're not voting, you're going to endanger the republic by letting a nincompoop like Kamala Harris come into office.
Well, you just shut your mouth about it. All he had to do was do what Bill Barr did.
Remember Bill Barr said early on, I'm going to vote for Trump? Yeah. And then he kind of shut up.
And he didn't see that. But if you look at all the people who have crossed Trump, none of them end up well.
Not John Bolton, not our former colleagues at the National Review, not anybody. And Tucker was very wise.
He got a little overboard. And then Trump said today, reportedly, that Tucker called him, nice guy, and apologized.
And then Elon, he was going nowhere with Trump, and nowhere beyond Trump. And then he kind of made his peace.
He's working his way back. It's just not a good idea to get emotional and not look at dispassionately if you're a conservative.
Because on the conservative spectrum, you're not going to get anybody who is as competent in getting things done for the conservative cause than him. He may not be a purist, but my gosh, why would you just sit out because you don't like his tweets or you feel that he's using capital letters or something? The Buckley rule of the rightward most electable candidate, I think, should apply.
It should. I mean, if you have a moral issue like abortion, something like that, you think your soul will be at risk.
That's one thing. Hey, Victor, before we get on to one last aspect of Iran, I think we should get your take on Barack Obama's recent utterances.
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And we thank Open Phone for continuing to sponsor the Victor Davis Hanson show. Victor Obama, before there was any sense, before the bomb started to fall, two or so days beforehand, Obama, who seemed to have been under a rock recently, He's hurting.
Be sympathetic. Michelle said that she didn't want a boy because the son would have turned out like Barack.
Yeah. Well, she's getting even with all of his, I don't know what his transgressions are, but whatever they are, she's getting even.
She's got a lot to get even for. So does he, I think.
I don't want to go there. Yeah.
Well, here's an article that Obama calls for Trump resistance. And the headline is, I forgot where I got this, may have been Fox News, Obama's awkward call for a broad scale Trump resistance.
Speaking to the Connecticut Forum in Hartford, the former president called for institutions, law firms, universities, members of both parties, and even just the department officials to make, quote-unquote, uncomfortable sacrifices to defend a democracy, he argued, is increasingly under fire in President Donald Trump's second term. He suggested without ever using Trump's name that the U.S.
was, quote, dangerously close, end quote, to a more autocratic government. Would this guy just go away? Barack, I'm addressing you personally.
Who is the one that said, if Congress is not going to pass my legislation when you lost the majorities, I have a phone and pen, and I'm going to use it. In other words, you set the precedent for executive orders.
Who was the one who sat in the Oval Office as James Comey and John Brennan discussed Operation Crossfire, and you knew what they were doing, and you did nothing. Who was the one whose IRS under Lois Lerner's maverick or maybe institutional chicanery tried to go after Republican, what, non-profit PACs? Well, applicants.
Applicants. Applicants right before the 2012 election.
Your Secretary of State, we don't even get on to Uranium One and all of those scandals, but the Benghazi thing was completely avoidable, and those people died and were wounded because you would not allow forces that could have saved them and come to their aid from sicily and other places you wouldn't do and then you created this susan rice lie that it was a um pre-planned oh it was uh it wasn't pre-planned it was a spontaneous riot over a coptic filmmaker remember that yeah yeah that was all a lie and you knew it. And now when you say that we all have to get all of your liberal friends have to be mobilized, do you say that, as I said earlier, when you lectured black men about their false consciousness, you do that from Colorama, the $9 million estate, the Chicago three or $4 million estate, the $20 million estate on the beach at Hawaii that should be flooded because you said global warming would rise the oceans by now, or the big Nantucket-Sweetheart $14 million deal for 20 acres.
So you are the elite of the elite, and I can't find any evidence that your $200 or $300 million that you've cashed into, I don't find anything that you did that if you were a normal Barry Sotelo that you would have earned. It's all based on leveraging your office.
And you did it the last year in office because you knew the more that people saw and heard you, the lower your polls were. And then you said, you know what, I'm going to let Hillary and Trump fight it out in 2000.
And I'm just going to golf and cut deals with Netflix and everything else and use my office to cash. And that's what you did.
And your polls went up because we didn't see you. We didn't hear you.
So nobody listens to him anymore. Everybody's making fun of him.
I mean, you've got two successive presidents. One is senile and was at the center of the largest cover-up in presidential history, and they know that, and they can't avoid it.
They're even fighting among themselves. You did it.
No, you did it. No, the White House did it.
No, the media did it. And then you had Barack Obama, who everybody, everybody, even your closest supporters, realized that your whole purpose was always to make money and to have a life of leisure, and then to assuage your guilt by calling people less than genuine revolutionaries or community organizers like yourself.
So you're a complete fraud. You've got a diminished capital.
And the only good thing about all this is your presidential library reflects your own competence. It's a monstrous eyesore.
It's unfinished. Your DEI little agendas turned into be a disaster.
and it reflects your presidency perfectly. On a similar line, not because she's black, and he's black, but Whoopi Goldberg, did you see her the other day? Like, oh, people in Iran.
But black Americans have it worse. You know, I've said this as a very sensitive subject, but two things are happening with the black elite.
On the one hand, there was a Rasmussen poll, a tracking poll, a weekly poll, and it was just ignored, because when I turned on MSNBC and CNN on this torture chamber my wife put me through, they were all saying, the polls are terrible for Trump, but they're not. The Trafalgar and Insider Advantage and some other ones that were accurate, Rasmussen among them, especially Rasmussen, 53% of Hispanics favor what Trump's doing, 54% of blacks higher than the white vote.
And then you have these brilliant black Byron Donalds, and you've got the new Texas legislator, representative from Texas. He's a U.S.
Military Academy graduate. He just destroyed Bill Maher.
Oh, Bill Maher. Yeah, I forget his name.
Sorry. Yeah, he was just brilliant.
So what I'm getting at is that most of the talent in the black community is the really brilliant people, a Roland Fryer, in the legacy of Shelby Steele and Tom Sowell. It's all conservative.
And Jason, all these people. But at the same time this is happening, the left, the DEI left, looks at all this, and they see that their power is waning, that black males are defecting to the Republican Party, and they have to play the race card because they have to say, no, no, no.
I, Whoopi Goldberg, may be a multi, multi, multi-millionaire. I may have every advantage that I could have that someone in East Palestine, Ohio, does not.
But I have to play the race card. Otherwise, who am I right now? So she does and says that life is harder on blacks than it is on people around.
Nobody believes that, Whoopi. And then this is synonymous when we had Jasmine Crockett say that half the country, the people who voted for Trump, were mentally ill.
You're mentally ill. Every time I see you, you don't know whether to sound like a prep-spoiled brat with no ghetto accent to a ghetto accent to play.
What are you doing? And then she ends up with this racist diatribe in which she says, Oh, and then brilliant Kamala Harris. Brilliant Kamala Harris.
Do you think that she could build one building? I don't think she could supervise the construction of a house. That's what Donald Trump did.
And so then she says, and so they had to vote for an old white man. That's what Joe Biden is.
But my point is, it's always white, white, white, white, white for Whoopi Goldberg and for her. Then we had this clown, I don't know who his name is, Alex Padilla.
He's our senator. All I remember.
Then he says, well, I was just going up there. I don't object to deporting, incarcerating criminal.
Yes, you do. You were at California.
You helped draft the sanctuary cities to protect illegal alien criminals. And anyway, what are you supposed to do, Mr.
Padilla, when somebody came here illegally, cut in front of a line, probably had fraudulent ID, and you happened to be in the vicinity of an ISA. Are you supposed to say, well, the law says I'm supposed to detain you and deport you or give you a hearing, but I can't because you haven't committed a crime other than the crime of interhineering.
No, they don't do that. I'm sorry.
Then he was mad because J.D. Vance, who didn't know who he was, and he had been a fellow senator said he was jose padilla the the would-be bomber and he thought that was racist so he did that psychodrama i was arrested and then you had this grown man mr macho and he starts crying did you ever in your life other than this have you ever seen a man try to fake up the tears i mean it, it is one of the most embarrassing things.
I thought it humiliated himself. I know that, I mean, as I've said, members of my family are intermarried with Latinos.
I grew up with Mexican-American people. And I can tell you that a grown man crying like that is publicly humiliating, and it's something that community doesn't really appreciate.
And so I don't understand. And then, so you had that, and then you had this view where they were going on, and they suggested, excuse me, we had Whoopi Goldberg, and then we had Ilhan Omar.
And she starts mouthing off and says that the dictatorship in Somalia that she grew up under and fled was not as bad as one of the worst countries in the United States. Go back.
Go back. I remember when I was a student, remember the left had a sign that said, F it or change it, change it or F it, and the right had love it or leave it, and you'd see worrying.
But really, if you came as an immigrant and you were the beneficiary of state largesse to go to college, we, the taxpayers, federal and state, paid for your education. You violated campaign finance laws.
You kind of cheated on the use of discretionary funding as a congresswoman. You married one of your political operatives.
It's kind of conflict of interest. I won't get into your immigration status.
Marrying your brother. Whether that's true or not, but there were some credible sources, at least.
And you would think you'd have a little bit of gratitude, just a little bit. Why does she have no gratitude? I think it's because of DEI.
I think people come here and they survey the landscape and they say, I have a choice now. I can either really like this country and compete and be on my own, or I can play victim.
And even though I just sat one inch inside the United States, I can claim that because of the color of my skin, I have been a victim of two and a half centuries of oppression, and I need repertory treatment. And that's what they do.
And it will not stop until somebody says, if you're an illegal alien and you come in here and you're going to pose as a victim, or you're Mr. Khalil and you're going to pose as a victim, it's not going to work.
I don't care what it is. You have not suffered anything.
If you want to see real racism, go down to Oaxaca or Michoacan and see how the Spanish elite treat indigenous people. But it's not Americans doing that.
When you come up here, you have been a victim of racism in Mexico, but you are a beneficiary on the spurious idea that because you're now in the United States, you can draw on supposed centuries of racism for compensatory treatment, and we're not going to do it anymore. And I think that's part of this anger now.
They're getting more and more desperate. The DEI left.
White, white, white, white. Old white man, old white man, old white man.
Terrible country. Somalia's better.
And it's really racist. And I think, and this is going on, Jack, at the same time we're hearing James Carville in one of his lunatic videos saying, I don't know what's going to happen, but they've got to get the white working class back.

They've just got to get it back.

They don't know what's good for them.

Well, they're not going to go back.

Why would they go back?

You think they want to vote for Pete Buttigieg when he comes,

doesn't even want to go to East Palestine?

He's scared.

We know you hate us.

They know you hate them.

You hate them.

You call them deplorables, irredeemables, chumps, garbage, clingers. They understand that.
They know who Peter Strzok's texts were. I went to Walmart and I smelled all these Trump supporters.
So you're never going to get them back. They don't like you because of your issues and your attitude and your sense of privilege.
And the ultimate culpability here is with the white elite bicoastal class because they are the beneficiaries of a lot of old boy networking. I agree with that.
And they're very successful. They're very wealthy.
They're very influential. And they are very materialistic.
And they don't want to give that up, but they feel terrible about it. So one thing they do is they patronize wealthy people just like them that happen to be non-white.
And there's a lot of them, just as many almost. You can be Indian, you can be Asian, you can be Hispanic, you can be anything.
And if you're non-white, a white liberal will try to feel so terrible at what white people, not him, people in East Palestine have done. And it works two ways.
They patronize the DEI elite, which only makes them more emboldened and think they can get anything they want. And then the poor white people who don't get anything, then they're the ones that are the cause of all the racism, according to the white elite.
And I think everybody's sick of it. We're all sick of it.
Well, Victor, I think we're sick of Gavin Newsom. And as we're talking right now, for all I know, he's at his winery sipping wine.
He's at the French Laundry having a $600 meal while everybody's locked down under COVID.

Well, we have to talk about him as we round the turn here and head into the home stretch.

And we're going to get your take on what Gavin's done lately when we come back from these important final messages. We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson show.
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I've got to make a plug before we continue. Plug away! It's your show! I know.
Given this volatile situation in the Middle East, and given that Turkey has been very aggressive lately against my beloved Greece and Cyprus, I think it's time for Donald Trump, I know he's not listening, but I think it's time for Donald Trump to make a spectacular ambassadorial appointment. I've mentioned it a couple of times.
Max Nikias, the ex-USC president, Cypriot native. No one has been more pro-Trump, more competent, an engineer, brilliant PhD, and he knows Cyprus backwards and forwards.
And Cyprus, like Greece, will play an integral role in the next three years. He would be the most loyal, competent, and impressive appointment for a Cypriot ambassadorship, as well as Tom Connor on the American Battle Monuments Commission.
Why? Because he wrote the book on it. Hillsdale Professor of Military History, superbly qualified.
Wait, wait, had he been on it? And was he bounced? I was on it. You were, I know, but he was not on it.
No, he wasn't. But he should be on it.
I know that a lot of times the donor class, but he's been to all the cemeteries. He knows it backwards and forth.
Those two appointments of Tom Conner and Max Nikias would be wonderful. Okay.
Well, you hear that, Donald Trump? I'm sure. Well, he may be watching it at 3 in the morning.
Gavin sips while L.A. riots.
Have we forgotten L.A. was rioting? It's amazing how, Victor, how something was going on a week ago.
It seems to be ancient history almost. But as the riots engulfed Los Angeles and mobs vandalized public buildings, incinerated vehicles, assaulted law enforcement officers, California Governor Gavin Newsom was enjoying a swanky wine-tasting party.
Yeah, he left his $9 million home, and he went to Napa in the same fashion he went to the French Laundry while we were all locked down. He can't help it.
He's another scorpion. The frog takes the scorpion across the wall, and then the scorpion kills him for treating him so well.
And you ask him why. He is a spoiled, entitled Bay Area brat.
He always was. He always will be.
He's incompetent. He's mediocre.
He can't do the job. And he's always been a beneficiary of getting money.
His father was a judge. He had all the right contacts.
They introduced him to the world of easy commerce. And he's been a complete, if you look at his role on the San Francisco City Council as San Francisco mayor, as lieutenant governor, and as governor, and you total that whole 30 years, there is not one American more responsible for the destruction of California in general and the Bay Area in particular than Gavin Newsom.
Whether it's the homeless problem or they're defunding the police or the budget deficits or letting water out to the ocean while our farmers are short and our reservoirs are half empty as I speak or the 30 to 40 cents a kilowatt power or blowing up dams on the Klamath River or not building dams or the high-speed rail boondoggle, the 15 to 30 billion, it's just a disaster. Everything he, he has the on Midas touch.
Everything he touches turns to dross. Now you have Pacific Palisades.
He should be down there every day, just hammering away on the zoning, the coastal, get these houses built, help these people. They're wonderful people.
If we can get a renaissance and get them back up, it'll help L.A. Let's get rid of the homeless downtown.
He's not doing anything. All he's doing is, well, how? He's doing this with his shoulders, this little jig he does, and he's trying to think, the party is really alienating.
I'm going to have to move to the center. So he gets Charlie Kirk on, and he gets all this, Steve Bannon, and then somebody says, hey, you idiot, you're never going to be nominated because it's full of a bunch of Marxists and socialists.
You do that after you get the nomination. But right now, you have to compete with the lunatic fringe.
So you've got to act lunatic.

So then he goes down and he wants to pick a fight with Donald Trump.

He said J.D. Vance the other day was a liar.

We didn't need any, you know, the city is burning.

You see AutoZone or all these stores robbed.

You see graffiti on federal buildings.

You see bricks thrown at police from overpassing.

You see the 101 shutdown.

You see all of this, Mexican flags, American flags burning, and there's no problem. He and Karen Bass, the woman who caused basically the fire by her in absentia and non-governance.
So anyway, you'd think he'd be down there, but instead he's trying to get up from 4%. 4% of the Democratic Party want him to be the nominee in 2028 and his polls in california were about 26 so he's thinking i had it all wrong going to the middle i've got to get nominated so i'm going to act as crazy as the other people so i'm going to pick a fight with trump i'm going to call vance a liar i say, we're, you know, come out here and meet me.
I dare you to jail me. This whole little sticky has macho stick.
And then he thinks, and he's gone from four to 6%. Then he thinks he's going to get the nomination and then he will revert back like Bill Clinton and Dick Morris.
It's not going to work. You know why, Gavin? Because it's you.

And you reigned over 30 years.

Your fingerprints are everywhere.

Whether the California disaster is infrastructure, it's power,

it's no gasoline that's affordable, it's driving oil refineries out,

it's fires that were poorly handled.

Look at Oakland.

Look at Oakland as pre-civilization.

You, you, you did it. And everybody knows it now.
So he's going to... And then he thinks that, you know, I think he thinks like this.
Well, you know, everybody that takes on Donald Trump and starts slurring him and attacking him going back to the Rosie O'Donnell days or going to the John Bolton or Mark Milley, or the ex-generals, or all of them, the Rex Tillerson, they all lose, but I'm Gavin Newsom, and I won't. Yes, you will.
You get in a big fight with Donald Trump, he doesn't care. He's just going to say to you, if you want sanctuary cities and you want to defy federal immigration laws, then don't take the money.
And then he says, well, we're going to we're going to cut cut off remittances or mean our taxes to to the federal government. We'd give them $80 billion more than we deserve.
Yeah, it's 1.5% of $5.5 trillion on annual revenue the government gets, Gavin. It's nothing.
And anyway, it's a felony to tell people not to pay their federal taxes if that's what you meant. So he just, I don't know, he's a very exasperating person because he kind of questions your whole view of our system.
When you look at him and you think, how did that guy get ahead? He is so mediocre. And then, you know, he was in rehab with alcoholism, and then he seduced his best friend's wife.
And all of these things about him are reprehensible, but you just ask yourself, they could be forgiven if he was competent. Right.
But he's not. Kamala Harris has the same disease.
How did she get to be a breath away from the president? Well, I can see that because it's funny you mention that because it's a really good point. Which is more powerful in our our system the old white boy network where the wealthy and the people with degrees behind their names and the right zip codes take care of their own the martha's vineyard crowd and the bay area crowd or the dei angle but they're both they both have something in common they're not based on merit so he rose through the ranks not on merit in the way that she did, but they did it in the same manner, but they did it through different agencies.
But it's similar. Well, we're going to have to end it on that because to let our listeners in and viewers behind the curtain, we do have to record another show and you are still recovering i am i am i'm getting better every day it's just i'm anger angry at myself i'm frustrated it's been nine days and i'm not feeling normal okay well you're you look okay for the walking wounded but we're we'll close it out by thanking our listeners and and letting know, viewers, whatever platform this show is now on Rumble, YouTube for viewing, Apple, Spotify, etc.
But we try to read the comments. We appreciate people that take the time and effort to rate the show and to leave comments.
And I'm going to read two comments. One is from LeftyAlone1.
I think these may both be from YouTube. This and the next one.
The worst thing about being in Israel in our bomb shelter is missing two days of Victor and team. I was too nervous to take an hour away from the news.
Missing an hour of Victor's common sense, brilliant scholarship is much worse than missing an ice cold lemonade on a hot day. Please take all the time you need for a full recovery from your surgery.
And that's from Lefty11. That's a nice letter.
I wrote a column, what was Iran thinking? And I had a paragraph that was too long. I should have included it.
One of the things, what were they thinking by taking on Israel? I know they thought there were only 10 and a5, 11 million people, but they are the most capable people in the world. And I know they're fractious and they get in arguments, but when they get united, they're unstoppable.
And what they have done to Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas and everybody, and indirectly to Bashar Assad, it's all based on ingenuity and brilliance. It really is, and courage.
So what they've done to people, to bad nations, and what they're doing for us, they're fighting a civilization war. Israel is fighting it on our behalf.
I said that today. I had an interview, interview since my operation with Ben Shapiro.
And he wanted me to comment on the slur that Netanyahu is leeching off us. But actually in a weird way, Trump handled that relationship beautifully because he allowed the parameters of what Israel could do to just be limitless.
And he'd never threatened like Biden did to cut off munitions and all that. And the result was that when our bombers went in to finish off this nuclear program, there was no Israeli defenses.
There was, I mean, there was no Iranian defenses. There were no missiles.
There was no Hezbollah that is going to kill. They may try, but they won't be as effective.
There is no Hamas. The Houthis are kind of neutered.
There's no Assad. The Russians are not.
They did all that. And we were the beneficiaries.
I'm surprised that Chancellor Merz in Germany was the one that understood that. And he did.
Ron Dermer, the ambassador, had said once at a Gate Stone meeting, I think it was important. He said, Israel is our indispensable ally.
And I think he was damn straight. They're so vital to America.
It is. I mean, every time I've gone there and I look at Haifa, I thought, wow, this reminds me of San Francisco the way it used to be.

You know what I mean?

It reminds me of San Francisco, but everything worked. Hey, one more comment here.
It's from at2fishes-q5h. Not sure what that stands for, but whoever this is writes, a must listen for the working class.
We're so lucky that Victor Davis Hanson represents the traditional independent working class and the cultural history that still struggles to exist in California, the very backbone of the state's economy for 250 years. Thanks to both of you and everyone who's taking the time for comments.
And I want to thank the folks that I've gotten a few emails this week from folks that read Civil Thoughts, which is a free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society. We are trying to strengthen Civil Society.
It comes out every Friday. 14 recommended readings.
I know you're going to like it. Totally free.
Go to civillthoughts.com. Sign up.
I was just talking, just a final note. We were talking about a visitor who will remain on name.
Oh, yes. Ungrateful visitor.
And I was talking about my son when he was, how proud I was that he grew up, you know, on the farm doing everything. And he was a great forklift driver.
He still is. And he's a high school teacher, but my gosh, he had so many working class skills.
And I always valued those as much as academic skill. He wasn't interested in the same academic things I was, but he was much more adroit and practical.
The other day we had the boat, and I mean, he just took off the blade and everything in service. He's very mechanical.
He works works very hard i'm very proud that he is a solid member of the working middle class well the apple didn't fall far from the tree our listeners should know the second episode of this show we ever did back at national review you had 103 fever and were under your house under this house, fixing some leak from the kitchen plumbing, and sick and covered. You were in a crawl space.
You came and did the show. Yes.
We don't say this. The plumber had done.
The bathtub two-inch drain had too many turns in it to get to the cesspool,

so I was trying to make a three-inch line parallel with a straight shot.

With a fever.

With a fever.

Yeah.

And I kind of...

Mission accomplished.

Yeah.

You've been terrific, Victor.

Thanks very much.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

Thanks for viewing.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Thank you, everybody.

Bye-bye.

For listening and viewing.