Will Trump Hit Iran?

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Nelson Show.

This is our Friday news roundup, and there's lots on the agenda today.

The first things are the war in Iran, and also the No Kings protests this weekend.

I know that Victor hasn't been here for a while and has had an operation.

So, Victor, I hope you're doing well.

I am.

Say, seven days ago, this left sinus was no problem.

They opened it up, and the other one they hit a bone.

So, it was a little bit trickier to remove the bone.

But they drained the two four-months sinus infection.

I'm just wiped out, but I think

there was a very good doctor and surgeon, and

had a little, you know, extra because it was bony disease bone.

And it's out.

So I feel like in the next two weeks, I'm going to get back to normal.

Wonderful.

So let's go to some messages and then come back and we'll start the show.

Stay with us.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

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So, Victor, we've got lots going on with Iran.

I think the recent questions are if the United States is going to help Israel with bunker buster bombs.

And so, maybe we can start there on the latest question.

I wrote a tweet about that today because

Trump is having dissensions in the MAGA-American first ranks.

The Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Candace Owens,

Representative Massey, Rand Paul are angry that he is considering an

optional

preemptive strike in the Middle East, which according to the MAGA doctrine, we don't do that.

He's arguing that I think he said, because he replied directly to Tucker, called him

Kookie,

he's saying that he is a Jacksonian, a Gadsenfla flag, don't tread on me, or Cornelius Sullis's, Lucius Sullis'

no better friend, no worse enemy, kind of a deterrence.

We don't want to look for trouble.

We don't like to intervene.

But from time to time, Baghdadi in the first term, Solomony in the first term, Wagner Group in the first term, Little Rocket Band.

When people take advantage of our magnanimity, we have to show them who's boss.

So I think Trump feels that he has given leeway to the Iranian theocracy.

And again and again, they don't take the offer.

And what is the offer?

The offer is to become something like

Saudi Arabia, Ghad, the Emirates, Kuwait.

In other words, a very wealthy sheikhdom in the Middle East that doesn't support terrorist appendages.

I know people are going to say, well, wait a minute, bin Laden, Saudi Arabia.

I know that.

But we're talking about right now, I think we kind of set them straight on that.

And Iran doesn't want that agenda.

They believe in a

Shia crescent.

Tehran, Beirut,

Gaza, Damascus, Yemen.

And it's a rival bloc to the Sunni

Arab bloc.

This is the Persian Shia bloc.

And they want to spread turmoil, and they feel they're going to inherit the Middle East.

And so they're not going to negotiate.

Because to negotiate would put them out of business.

But the problem they have right now is they are a terrorist nation without any terrorists.

They are bragging that they were going to be a nuclear weap uh power without any apparent nukes.

They think they're the preeminent decisive conventional threat in the Middle East, but they're not threatening anymore to anybody.

And when you look at around all their assets,

Russia is no longer a patron, a power, a protector.

The Assad dynasty has gone from Syria.

It's flipped from pro-Shia Persian, that Arab dynasty, to,

at best,

Sunni at worst, maybe with ties of al-Qaeda, but whatever it is, it doesn't like Iran.

And then Gaza, Hamas is inert, Hezbollah is inert, the

Yemenis are Houthis, I don't know what to say about them, they're emasculated.

So the whole facade of Iran is this dynamic, revolutionary,

fervent, boiling state of anger with all these, it's been destroyed.

Israel's destroyed it.

And Donald Trump has maximum pressure.

It can't sell oil.

And Israel is systematically

disarming and denuclearizing it.

Now we get to one critical point, and I'll finish.

So at Fior

and

other places, there are nuclear piles.

That's a word

inexact.

No one knows how much fissionable uranium that's been enriched to 60 up to 90% there is.

People suggest that there's enough for 9 to 12 bombs.

And some of these places are under a hundred yards of solid rock.

So the question is:

now that Israel has destroyed their defenses, destroyed their command and control hierarchy,

destroyed their physicist and nuclear scientist, going after the armed forces hierarchy,

destroyed their air defenses and their

what was their air force,

now it has to decide: can it destroy these heavily reinforced nuclear sites.

And there's a lot of talk about it.

Some people say, well, they killed Nasrallah.

They have small 2,000 to 4,000 pound bunker busters.

So, and they have complete air control, and there's no hurry.

So all they have to do is send one like a pencil, you know, through

a pie, and then another one, and then another one, and another one, seven, eight, ten, twelve, just keep hammering the hole.

Other people say, well, no,

they need a B2 stealth bomber.

Maybe a B1 could handle it, but it's not, it could carry the weight, 30,000 pounds.

And then do we give them that?

They know how to operate it.

They could do it.

But why would we, then we're a participant directly,

or do we do it ourselves and the mega base gets bad?

We get into this question.

Some people have suggested that just like the mother of all bombs, those are the daisy cutters you drop and they send shrapnel and they're just horrific weapons, they are dropped by a C-130 that can carry up to 40,000 pounds.

So people say, well, if they have air superiority and there's no danger of a slow-moving transport

being refueled and shot down, why not

give it to the Israelis have them.

Why not give them a couple of these huge 30,000-pound 30,000-pound bunker busters and they can put them on a C-130 transport with some radical modifications?

So there's all these ideas floating, but they get down to the point that Donald Trump is not a Lindbergh isolationist.

He is a Jacksonian, as I said.

And right now he's trying to calculate

I do things in the interest of the United States, and I do that through a cost-to-benefit analysis.

On the plus side, if you can get rid of Iran that has killed Americans for 50 years and is the troublemaker in the entire Middle East and will threaten Europe and us one day with a nuclear weapon, then that would be very good.

So we support that, and we support Israel that Iran has targeted.

However,

in a cost-to-benefit analysis, what are the costs of that?

Because that's what he is, a Jacksonian.

He's not a neoconservative neoconservative nation builder or interventionist.

He's not an isolationist.

And the costs are, he is examining right now,

will they attack Americans at other bases?

How many?

He's kind of, I think, waiting until the Israelis say to him, we've got most of the missile launchers.

But we don't know to what degree all these installations in Syria and Iraq are well protected by patriots.

We don't know that.

And then, second,

he's asking himself, what will it do to my domestic agenda if we have oil prices spike and we have a big war, and I'm trying to get inflation down to lower interest rates, etc.

And then he's saying,

what do I do with my MAGA base?

Will they say this is an optional forever war?

Will Tulsi Gabbard resign?

Will Tucker go on and blast me?

He's kind of said he didn't care about that.

And then finally,

to what degree

are Israel's interests parallel to ours?

I think 90% of them get the bomb out.

They should.

Trump, when he does this analysis, he should take it out.

But here's the final comment, and that is,

we are at a point in the war, five days in, that they have done so much damage to Iran

that if they don't put the proverbial bell around the cat's neck,

then all of that's for naught.

Because what will happen is the Iranians will emerge from the wreckage and they will say

the most powerful country in the world, the United States, with all of its

weapons they gave the little Satan, they bombed us, they did everything.

We hit them back, and guess what?

They quit.

And we still have our nuclear option.

So once you cross the Rubicon,

you cross the Rubicon.

As Napoleon said, if you're going to take Vienna, take Vienna.

So if you're going to get into this mess,

then do it.

And I think right now Trump is warning the Iranians you can still get out of this by negotiations, but he doesn't believe that.

But he's also telling the Israelis, can't you come up with

some type of methodology to destroy these reinforced mountainsides that have fissionable material beneath them.

You have all the time in the world.

You have superior.

Just keep hitting them.

And maybe we'll give you a big bunker buster.

And you guys are brilliant.

Just adapt it to a C-130.

They can carry 40,000 pounds.

Or maybe they'll let him use a B a B two, but I don't think he wants American fingerprints directly on the attack.

Finally,

all the MAGA people have said, the base has said, well, this is a wider war.

But then you have to break that down.

Russia.

Russia's been talking some things that are kind of scary, but

what are they going to do?

They don't need the Iranian drones.

The Iranians have already made plants and fabrication assembly ability inside Russia.

So Russia's building Iranian drones.

Putin doesn't mind the price of oil going up.

He would love to see it go from 50, 60, 70 back up to over 100.

He doesn't care about that.

And if Europe doesn't get their oil, more power to it.

So

he would like to have more money.

And he's already bogged down in Ukraine.

He doesn't have the wherewithal to go in and intervene.

And Trump is pretty smart.

He mentioned, well, maybe Vladimir wants to negotiate.

Well, that's kind of throwing him a bone, and maybe that will ease Tenson's and his negotiations

over Ukraine.

And what is the Chinese idea?

China's idea is that

temper, temper, temper, we take 80% of the pre-embargoed Iran oil was ours, 50% of every drop of oil out of the Middle East that goes out of the Straits of Hormuz goes to us.

Don't do anything.

So they're not going to intervene.

So what everybody says a wider war, I'd like to, is that who, what are the Arab countries going to do?

The Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Saudis, they're going to say, how dare you hit a fellow?

Islamic nation.

No.

They're going to privately say, look,

Israelis, we've got to give every noon we're going to have a press conference and we're going to damn you as an Islamic phobic Zionist entity.

But please don't take that seriously and just finish the job.

So Victor, I would like to go back to your discussion of Iran and Iranian capabilities.

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So, Victor, I wanted to ask you a little bit about Iran's capability at this point.

Khomeini, the Ayatollah on his ex, has written that the U.S.

entering in this matter is 100% to its own detriment.

The damage it will suffer will be far greater than any harm that Iran may encounter.

So, that's a big bluster.

I know that he's lost a lot of men, etc., but

they seem to still be bombing Tel Aviv or sending missiles into Tel Aviv pretty regularly.

So I was wondering.

90% of them are knocked down.

To my knowledge, they haven't killed.

They're in a war where you haven't killed one soldier on the Israeli side.

So

they're just sending it.

It's like the V-2 attack on London.

They're inexact.

They're not military targets.

Sometimes they get close to the IDF or Netanyahu's residence, but mostly they're inexact and they're just trying to create terror, like V-2s.

And they work sometimes because during the First Gulf War, when Saddam did that, that drew a lot of American resources out to look for those mobile launchers where they could have been concentrating more on Saddam's soldiers.

And it's the same thing in World War II.

Churchill, it was when you get 20,000 people killed or casualties, you can't just ignore it.

So

the Americans and the British were using resources to go after V-2 sites that were not a strategic weapon.

They were not sinking battleships, knocking out airports, industries.

They were just terror.

So that's what they're doing.

And

I'm kind of shocked, to be frank.

I see all these military analysts on television, and they say the most astounding thing.

I don't want to mention anybody.

And they said, well, we know that the Fad and the Patriot and the Iron Dome and the Arrow and David Sling don't work.

They're not keeping them out.

Hello?

Yeah, that's crazy.

There's like 100, a wave of 100.

They take out

90, 93, 94%.

That's amazing.

Some of them are hypersonic.

So that is crazy.

And at the same time they're doing that, they're going after the launchers as the Americans did in the first Gulf War.

So the point I'm making is that

Iran, when they make those boasts,

it's on the fumes of prior passivity.

They think to themselves, well, Obama wanted to get into a

negotiation with it.

Ben Rhodes, his assistant national security, had thought it was a great deal.

They sent us $400 million at night on pallets in cash.

And Joe Biden begged us to get back in.

John Kerry was meeting stealthily with Jar.

So they're afraid of us.

So

they don't quite get who's in the White House.

He doesn't give a blank-blank about their leadership or their threats.

They said the other night, this will be a historic night tonight.

I think that was last night.

The Israelis said at the end of the week, something would happen.

And I am more likely to believe them than I am the Iranians.

Right now, it's one of the most bizarre wars I've ever studied or looked at because

you had this huge country with all these terrorist appendages that sowed terror

and fright throughout the Middle East, and the capitals of Europe and the democratic administrations were worried about it.

And

all these formidable assets, the Hezbollah shock troops, the Assad crazy Damascus Army and Air Force, the Russian patron, the Hamas terrorist,

where are they?

They're nowhere.

They've just gone down the list and they're killing them all.

And they don't have any mechanism to destroy the Israeli ability to wage war.

And they've killed, as I'm speaking, about 50 people in a full-fledged theater war.

Israel is not trying to hit civilian centers.

I'm not defending the idea that it's pristine.

I'm just saying that it's going after military, scientific, and political leaders.

And more importantly, it's going after their ability to resist and to attack.

And they said two weeks, so they planned this for years.

So I would imagine, we're getting into five or six days.

I would imagine pretty soon you're going to see very few missiles taking off

and you're going to see some type of stealthy operation, car bombings or something like the Hezbollah takeout where they're going to go after more people they planned.

And then I think they're going to concentrate on these nuclear areas.

And I'm not sure that they need the

bunker buster bomb.

Everybody said bunker bunker is a bunker buster.

As I said,

They got Nosrallo through three floors.

I understand that it's 100 yards, much deeper, but three concrete floors below the earth.

And if they just keep going after it, just like mowing the lawn, one 2,000, 1, 4, just the same, they'll drill down and they can do it.

And the role of the United States is twofold.

To offer logistical support, so you don't do a Joe Biden and say, if you don't stop it, we're going to suspend all shipments of 2,000-pound bombs.

You don't do that.

You just say, what you need, go ahead and do it.

It's what Mertz said, the German chancellor.

They're doing the ugly work for us.

And what he meant was they're eliminating an existential threat to Europe.

And diplomatic.

So Trump is saying to everybody in Europe, I don't want to hear that they have to stop.

I know you have Arab populations.

You're all pro-Hamas, but don't dare tell me to cut off the Israeli.

It's not going to happen.

They're doing this in your interest.

This isn't Hamas.

This is somebody that wants to destroy you too.

And to tell the Chinese Chinese and the Russians to butt out.

That's all.

And

that's a lot.

But I don't think at this point, even though we have all the assets accruing, we're necessarily going to intervene

if the logistical, scientific, military problem of how to destroy these centers of nuclear enrichment cannot be handled by the Israelis.

And the Israelis have recently said that they have more up their sleeve than what they've already done.

So we'll see that in the future.

And so I just want to note a few things since you've kind of answered the U.S.

position.

But given that you said Trump doesn't want the American fingerprints on this, the USS Nimitz is headed for the region.

And the second thing is in the news.

I'm not sure I see any importance to it.

But the doomsday airplane has moved from Louisiana, I believe, to DC.

So I don't know.

They move that plane around just to make sure it's okay.

That's where Trump goes in

existential wars.

But

from what we can gather, Iran does not have a ballistic missile that can reach the United States.

So he doesn't have to fly around.

I think what he's trying to do is he's sending B twos that are capable of dropping a bunker buster of a magnitude to destroy these facilities.

He's sending the old B1s in there that they have the lift capacity.

Maybe they could do it too if they're adapted to it.

We have about 40 or 50 of these huge bombs.

And he's sending two carrier groups.

That means he's got two of those Arley Brook,

what we used to call destroyers, or now frigates.

There's probably a nuclear...

two or three nuclear subs in those two groups when they get there.

And they've probably got 150 to 180 F-35s and super hornets then you've got basses and guitar.

I mean they

it's I don't think the Iranians

I feel sorry for the Iranian people to be run by these lunatics that keep all this braggadachio and they've spent all these hundred trillions of dollars over the last 50 years arming all these thugs, Hezbollah, Hamas, and they could have been doing so much for their own people.

And

it's everybody, everybody says everybody hates them, and they probably do hate them, but it's the old, as I keep quoting, the Aesop fable about the poor mice that need to put the bell around the cat's neck.

Who's the brave mouse that wants to get killed first and eaten?

So who are the brave people that want to rise up against the regime before it's completely weakened and they're going to get killed?

Well, that was my last question.

I don't know that there is an answer for this, but I was wondering your assessment of the transformation of the Middle East with this war.

And I wanted to make a note that Donald Trump has been on this mission since his first term when he went after the terrorists, specifically killed a couple of the

terrorists

selves.

And now it's on to taking out Hamas, Hezbollah, in this current administration.

And now we're into Iran.

So the whole picture is that the Middle East is being, I don't know, emptied is the word, but it's being emasculated, the Shia faction and the terrorist faction.

Well, the existential threat was always Sunni radical Islamic terrorism because Sunni Arab, because they were

the 9-11 perpetrators.

Bin Laden was the great terrorist.

But from all the misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, we did, people forget that, we did kill.

I went over to Iraq twice

during the surge, and naively I said to a high-ranking commander, so is the surge about winning hearts and minds?

And you're built.

I was at a park.

I think it was in Taji or somewhere, or maybe it was in

any way.

I can't remember exactly which city.

And I said, wow, he was showing me the park, and it was nice, and they were.

And he said, no, no, no, no.

We're killing terrorists.

We're killing a lot of them.

And we're telling everybody we're not.

So my point is that we kind of decapitated bin Laden and all, and Trump did bomb the proverbial SHIT, as he promised, out of ISIS.

He killed the loudmouth Baghdad.

Remember?

2016, 17, and 2018, he was beheading all those people on the shore.

It was horrible, burning people alive.

He was was kind of like that guy in Lonesome, one of those lonesome dubs, the man-burner, you know.

I mean, they were horrific people, and he got rid of them.

So

the problem with the Middle East is not necessarily radical Sunni terrorism.

You always have to watch that, but

it has been the Iranians.

And the Obama strategy was to build up Iran

and tell the Israelis and the Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan, sorry you guys, we're not your allies.

You have oppressed the Shia and you've oppressed the Persians, and they have a legitimate right in the Middle East.

So they have a crescent.

There's this huge Iran, and then there's Syria, and then there's Lebanon, and then there's Gaza, and then there's Yemen, and it goes way from the Turkish border all the way down in the Mediterranean here.

And we're going to let you balance them off.

From time to time, me being Obama, I'll come in and adjudicate.

That was the whole crazy idea.

And they said, are you insane?

Do you think that Jordan and Israel are morally equivalent to these crazy nuts in Iran or Hezbollah?

So that crashed.

And so now the existential threat to the Middle East essentially is the money, the money, the money that Iran, as the fifth largest oil reserves in the world, has.

And if you can stop that being channeled all around the Middle East to kill people,

you'll have you've gone a long way.

Will it solve the Middle East problem?

No, because

you've still got a strong, whether it's Shia or Sunni, there's radical Islamicists, and they have certain

prohibitions that prevent

modernity.

Whether it's

tolerance tolerance for dissent, constitutional government,

diversity of religion, treatment of women in an equal fashion, they don't want that.

And those are barricades or hindrances or bridles on progress, social, cultural, economic prosperity.

But that's not our business.

We're not in there to remake the Middle East.

All we want for the Middle East is, you guys,

do whatever you want.

You want to make oil, you want to build a city in the desert,

we don't care.

All we want to know is two things.

If you've got a product, oil, that the world needs, sell it, and we'll keep the sea lanes open.

And don't use that money to kill Westerners.

If you do, we're going to have problems.

That's all.

And under that rubric, we have defined Israel as a Western country.

And Western countries, though, are the, and Westernization are, I think, a big threat to that traditional Muslim culture that you're talking about.

That's on the right.

What destroyed the Shah?

What destroyed the Shah?

Was it because he was a when I was in college, he's a right-wing fascist.

No, no, no.

He was no different than any other autocrat in the Middle East, except he did believe in Westernization, and he did want to emancipate women, and he did want to repress the political role of the malocracy.

He was paying them off.

And he did want to bring in science and secularism.

And

that did him in.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and go to some messages, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about the no-kings protests.

Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

If you want to find Victor on social media, you can try try him on X at his handle is at V D Hansen and on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup.

So you can join him there.

So Victor we had lots of protests this weekend.

They seem to be stirring it up a bit.

The presses, what I noticed about it was the presses, the mayors of these sanctuary cities and the governors with their sanctuary cities in them have all been trying to argue that there's nothing to see here, that these are peaceful protests.

So I was wondering your thoughts on that.

It's really incoherent because

Gavin Newsom, who remember he had Charlie Kirk on his podcast, and he was going to be the voice of moderation.

I believe that biological men shouldn't be in women's sport.

All this little bones he threw to the moderates, he thought, that's the future of the party.

And then he thought,

yeah, but I'd never get nominated because my party's insane in the primaries.

So what I have to do is move to the left where I was and act really left, and then when I get nominated in 2028, I can go back and say, oh, I had Charlie Kirk on my podcast.

So right now, because he has no identity, he doesn't know who he is.

He's empty, he's a shadow of a person.

He's a shadow of a shadow.

And he

has really destroyed his political career because everybody has eyes and they see cops pelted with concrete from overpasses.

They see the 101 shut down.

They see stores looted.

They see people assaulted.

And they get furious when they see.

And I'm talking about mostly Hispanics who a recent poll this week: 53% of Hispanics support Donald Trump and his efforts.

CBS said it was, I think, 56%,

54 to 56%

supported deportation.

But when you see somebody flying a flag of the country they don't want to go back to and burning the flag of the country or spitting on it that they insist they have a right to stay, that is a losing optic.

And that's what he's in line with.

So the more that he and Karen Bass, Karen Bass, I flew over and it's pretty quiet.

Well then,

as you say, take up all the curfews off and let's see.

Sunset Drive in Los Angeles is empty.

All the stores are boarded up and they're leaving.

That whole city has been destroyed by liberal governments.

She's done a lot to destroy it, both concretely and

abstractly.

And so is he.

And then as far as the no kings, when I heard that term, I thought, oh, wow, this is a demonstration against the 400 liberal district judges because nobody elected them and they're the lowest tier of the tripartite federal judicial system, and they're regional.

There are district areas, first, second, third, fourth.

They're not national Supreme Court judges, and yet somebody is letting them get away with upsurping executive power.

They are the kings.

They're the most powerful people right now.

They can nullify anything.

So then I thought, well,

I was listening this weekend to the no kings demonstration.

The first thing I noticed, why is almost everybody was white and elderly?

That elderly woman that was crying, that she was so scared.

But I mean, there's,

no offense, but they seem overwhelmingly white, elderly, and female.

And it was almost...

It reminded me that I was looking in the crowd.

I thought, do I see any of you from UC Santa Cruz when you were doing this in your youth?

Because it's pathetic.

And

I don't know what they define as Donald Trump as a king.

So Donald Trump is following Barack Obama.

Barack Obama said after

the whole health care debacle, he said, I have a pen when he lost the house, and I have a phone, and I'm going to, that's what he did.

He had executive order after executive order, and

the right couldn't stop him because they didn't have the conservative judges in enough number

to cherry-pick them and do what the left is doing now.

But the point I'm making was,

what is Donald Trump doing like a king?

If he says, I want to call it the Gulf of America, I want to call it

Fort Bragg, all he's doing is, well, Biden said, I don't want to call it Fort Bragg.

So he said, well, I do.

But the difference is that people are suing Donald Trump to stop it.

So he doesn't have absolute power.

You're talking about a president that...

I would like to talk to the people.

This is to you, all of you elderly white women who predominate in these parades.

Could I ask you some questions?

You're talking about unrestrained power and the use of extra constitutional authority.

Which president in our history has been impeached twice?

Which president in our history was tried as a private citizen?

Which president in our history has been the object of five local, state, and federal civil and criminal suits?

Donald Trump?

Which president 25 states plus tried to take off the ballot?

Which president, as we speak, is vilified every single day as Hitler, Mussolini, fascist?

And we had just this, in this news cycle, we that North Carolina state representative, and she gave, she posted a picture of a woman at a podium with a bloody guillotine saying some cuts are necessary.

That's a joke, I think, on Doge, with Donald Trump's

severed head.

I thought, wow, they tried to kill him twice.

Why are you doing this?

Then we had James Comey, who was going to 86 him.

And then we had

Spartacus and the 25-hour filibuster.

Then we had this crazy Alex Padilla.

I don't even know who he is, except that they claim that he's our senator.

He's never done anything.

And he takes off all ID, and then he bursts into Christy Noam's press conference without any forewarning, no badge, nothing.

And then he wants to have a cycle drama.

He almost pulled it off, but unfortunately, the news cycle guillotined him because of the war.

So what I'm getting at is that Donald Trump doesn't have a lot of unlimited power, but his opponents seem to have exercised extra constitutional power in a way we've never seen.

So maybe the demonstration should be aimed at them.

Hey, you people, no lower cut court judges acting as if they're Oliver Wendell Holmes or something.

No, no, no, no.

And you don't take an opponent off the ballot.

And you don't impeach a president twice the moment you take back the House.

You just don't do it.

You don't do it.

And you don't try to take somebody off the ballot.

Come on.

And you don't try to pack the court.

And you don't try to get rid of the Electoral College.

So they're the dictatorial ones.

Yeah, they sure are.

And they're also a little bit crazy, too.

I mean, it might be just that I watch Fox News.

And so they bring these people out.

They ask them questions, and they'll be like crying hysterically while they're trying to answer questions.

And you think, man,

Donald Trump has more than the border to protect.

He might have to bring back insane asylums.

I'm joking a little bit, but there you have it.

Well, I grew up with them.

With insane asynchronous.

With the mental hospital in Stockton, the mental hospital in Napa.

And they, I tell you one thing when I was growing up, we all had relatives in those places.

Some of them perhaps were wrongly put in them, but we didn't have homeless people that were mentally ill, defecating, injecting,

urinating on the streets.

They got care there.

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So, Victor, I wanted to just continue on with the left that seems to, I don't know, that seemed to be crazy and getting crazier.

Are you going to go into Ilan Omar territory?

Well, yes, let's talk about her since she's one of those things.

She just recently claimed that we are turning into, meaning we Americans in America, are turning into one of the worst countries on Earth.

Thank you, Ilan Omar.

And yeah, I would like to talk about that.

She said we're worse than her Somalia, didn't we?

She said that she lived under a dictatorship.

She didn't actually.

And then she's lived under a dictatorship before, and she's never seen the National Guard out to protect the city as she's seen this.

And she thought that it was an oppressive force.

She was worried about Somalia and Somalians.

She should address one of the biggest financial scandals in the country, and that was a Somali group tried to hijack COVID meals during COVID and got a huge government contract and stole billions of dollars, and no one's even talking about that in the Somali community.

She should address that, if that's who she is.

She's comparing anything to Somalia.

I don't understand that because

When she came here, she remarked that she thought it was much dirtier than she had imagined.

She came out of a refugee camp.

And when you look at her biography, she's been the recipient of scholarships, financial aid, everything this country gives a person.

She hasn't been oppressed when she's been here.

She's really marketed her DEI.

I am a woman of color, Islamic, foreign national, naturalized citizen person.

And then the big elephant in the room is it's pretty clear from her ex-husband and her prior marriage and people in the Somali community, as reported.

Scott Johnson did it on Powerline and he was collating, correlating a lot of accounts,

that

for purposes of getting in here, she married her brother.

That was immigration fraud.

But she became a pop figure and she was always suggesting she was an object of hatred because she was a

empowered black woman, all that stuff.

But she never had to account for that.

And so why would you commit fraud to come into the United States, allegedly, and then you're here and then you get,

you're just lavished with grants and scholarships and college opportunities, and then you're a congresswoman with all this power, and

all you do is damn, damn, damn the host.

And I guess

I don't know.

Is she a racist?

Does she hate the United States because it's 68% white?

What is her anger at it?

I don't understand.

She can't hate white people because I just said that at all these no-kings rally, they're predominantly white.

She must hate black and Hispanics because the latest Rasmussen weekly tracking poll.

Do you support Donald Trump in his current efforts?

54% blacks, 53% Hispanic, 53% whites.

So, Elon, Elon, are you angry at Hispanics and blacks?

And you like whites because they're the biggest group that doesn't like Donald Trump?

I don't know.

Well, the last thing about the left is there was a very good column by Ned Ryan in Real Clear Politics, and he was addressing the phenomenon of left-wing talking heads trying to disown the Biden era a little bit.

And he said that

the thing about the left is they want to and have wanted to destroy the system as it is.

And he went all the way back to Obama when Obama said that he wanted to fundamentally transform the Republic.

And Ned Ryan.

Spread the wealth.

Yeah, Ned Ryan's argument is they want to destroy the Republic as well as Western culture, so they're just going to keep right on at it.

Yeah, I don't know what they want.

They don't know what they want.

If you sat any of them down and said, what do you want?

It's mostly free stuff.

And the free stuff that they want, somebody produces it, and the people who produce it, they don't like and would destroy, and then they don't know how to produce it.

So that's the history of socialism anywhere it's been.

Barack Obama weighed in the other day, yesterday?

He's really taken a hit because almost everybody he endorses loses.

And when he starts talking down to people, everybody thinks, did he fly from the new Hawaii mansion?

Did he come out of Colorama?

Does he still go to the Chicago property, or is he back at Martha's Vineyard?

But he said, You liberals, you can't, you've had it easy.

You just want to have your latte and go to Milan or go all over the world, and you haven't risked anything.

I'm thinking, what the blank of you risk?

Other than, what was he, a content

a

content former for Netflix or something?

And they gave him almost $100 million

for nothing.

He's the most spoiled, materialistic.

She is the most angry, unsatisfied, complaining, insecure person in the public sphere.

And he is just,

I'm going to take these stupid liberals for everything they can.

Barry Switzer Swaheto or Paletto.

Yeah, I'm going to change my name back to Barack Obama, and I'm going to to be esoteric, and I'm going to start, you know, hope and change and fundamental transformation.

And I'm going to just play these suckers for everything they have.

And when I end up with them, I'm going to be worth a couple of hundred million bucks.

And then I'm going to lecture everybody how they're not a radical like I am.

Community.

That's what he does.

He's absurd.

He's what David Mammet would call a tuna fish.

Do you fear the left destroying the Republic and Western civilization at all?

Since that's where Ned Ryan's.

The only one who's destroying the Western civilization is the universities

because they are teaching, they're doing it by commission and omission.

They're not teaching Plato, they're not teaching Aristotle, they're not teaching Machiavelli, they're not teaching David, they're not teaching any of that.

They're just teaching this grievance or this

postmodern, post-structuralism, DEI stuff, and it's worthless.

It's kind of like phrenology in the late 19th century, you know, bumps on your head, reveals certain aspects or

Soviet universities in the 1930s and 40s, all that research was worthless.

Anytime I'd look at a German book on classics and research, and it was between 1933 and 1945, and there were some published, it was worthless because it was just pseudo-white supremacy, Arianism, Arianism, Arianism.

And that's what these universities are.

It's a waste of time.

If you send your child to them, to any of these places, they're going to come out unrecognizable with debt.

And so they don't teach it, but they do teach a creed, and the creed is hate and destroy.

And I see these faculty members at Stanford.

Gosh, I go in the parking lot, and it's like a,

I don't know what it is.

It's sort of like a

up, up, up, up scale car show.

Because

I go, oh, Audi, 90,000.

Oh, BMW, 100.

Oh, Range Rover?

Range Rover?

Range Rover.

Oh, BMW hybrid SUV.

I cannot believe these cars.

And then I see these people and I walk around the Stanford campus.

I have my little apartment.

This week I had this surgery recovery so I had nothing to do but feel sorry for myself and walk around these neighborhoods and I see this, I would go online and just see what they're worth.

4 million, 5 million.

They're just little leave-it-to-beaver houses.

But they're all so nice and smug and I'd see people walking and I'm thinking, these are revolutionaries?

These are the people who we're supposed to feel are on the cutting edge.

Do they know what life is like in downtown Fresno or southwest Tulare County?

Do they care?

They're just a joke.

The universities have become a joke.

And

it's, they have everything that they used to, when I was in college, everything I was brought up that was evil, they have embraced.

McCarthy, Victor, did you know you had to have a loyalty oath at one time?

I mean, I had a professor at Stanford.

I never took one.

And I'm thinking they're doing it now with DEI laws.

And, you know,

there was a quota on Jews.

Well, there's a quota on Jews now, too.

Nine percent of the student body at an incoming class at Stanford the last four years was white.

And that may have been a way of restricting the number of Jews coming in.

It did.

So they do all the things that they criticize.

It's just a matter of power.

They have the power now, and they're going to.

I don't know.

That's been

one of the reasons I'm kind of crazy is I've spent 50 years, a stranger in a strange land, on those campuses, listening to them, talking to them.

They're irrational people.

And they're overrated, and they have a huge

and unrealistic appraisal of their powers, their intellect, their influence.

And

you talk to them after five minutes.

It's like, well, you know, Victor, I argued that in my second book, and that if you go to footnote 38, I made this point.

And I'm thinking, this point has nothing to do with the world you know what I mean but it's sad and how we have idolized and iconicized these universities

but they're the they're the culprit yeah that's where it all starts it all starts in the universities and but isn't it going to be hard to change them when you've had all the faculty hired that are these progressives and the administration is progressive and didn't the business school recently hire an ultra

progressive I can't believe I don't I can't believe this because Stanford Business School was the premier business school and the current Stanford

president Levin

was the Stanford business dean and he was a very reasonable centrist he had a high regard so he goes to be president and they just hired a woman I think the top three business schools are all run now by women fine But she doesn't have a degree in business.

It's all sociology.

And then in her website introduction, or the article, the little puff pieces about her, she's a stalwart DEI supporter at a time when everybody is running away from DEI and racial preferences and segregated dorms.

She did say she makes good soup.

That was something.

But I can't believe they did that in this climate.

I can,

because they're all there with her, all the people that hired her, and that means faculty and administrators.

Sam Biggie, I won't get on insurance, I guess.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, let's do two things that are positive things about the current administration and government or things that have been changing.

It looks like the U.S.

murder rate at this point has gone down and maybe the lowest in the last half century or so by the end of the year.

So that was a positive.

People have made that argument.

And Cash Patel has taken about 30%

of the Washington force and dispersed it were to zip codes where there's high crime areas.

So the FBI is now a partner.

They're not going after school boards, meetings.

They're not going after traditional Catholics.

They're not going after

campaigns, they're not partnering with Facebook or Twitter.

So that helps.

But But

there's been a lot of discussion by some criminologists on the right that when you deport,

and most of them were self-deportations, a million people, and you had a high number of them with criminal records, that every time you do that,

you're just collapsing.

It really helps statistically in these cities to get rid of illegal aliens, and there may be four to five hundred thousands of them.

But that's who they're concentrating on.

And so the first million who have self-deported or been deported are disproportionately people with criminal records, and that will affect

everything.

And when you see some of the people that the protesters are demonstrating for,

when you see that ICE had warrants out for people's arrests that were horrific people, and then you hear Karen Basque and Newsom,

it's la-la-land.

It really is.

And you know that her

mayoral mansion and Gavin's $9 million home, like the Pelosi estates,

they're not going to be subject to the consequences of their immigration ideology.

One of these criminals is not going to go to the Newsome home.

And

that's the sad thing about it.

They're going to be unleashed right here in Fresno County, and the people who are going to suffer the most are the Hispanic community that people think for some reason are responsible for hosting them.

Well the other statistic that I wanted to ask you about is there were

773,000 fewer immigrants in the workforce and so that was also something that was positive for, especially for the American worker, that there's jobs opening up for them.

This may be the first time in 50 years that the number of

American residents are smaller in December of 2025 than they were in January.

Because at the current rate of self-deportation, we're about

getting close to half the year and we may have had seven, eight, nine hundred thousand and probably another two hundred forced.

We could have two million people leaving, which would be the population might even start to decline a little bit.

But what's most important, when you looked at the Biden employment figures, most of those new jobs, not most, but a high percentage of them were not U.S.

citizens and they were low-wage jobs.

But when you

say to the American worker, these people are not, to the employers, I should say, that you're not just going to be able to hire a bunch of people and exploit them and pay them a minimum wage.

Wages will go up and people will be in competition for American citizens.

And

you're going to save a lot of money on social costs.

When I drive through this rural area that I live in and I look at certain federal and state offices, they're packed.

Health, education, housing, food.

I just got back an hour ago from a local market.

I think everybody there had an EBT card.

So, and many of them were probably not legal.

So, my point is that we don't even talk about that.

The left gets really angry and says, well, they pay taxes.

No, but we're going to get rid of a whole black market.

The black market in the United States is estimated between two and three trillion dollars.

And, you know,

when I'm looking at myself right now, I go that way.

There's a huge swap meet I've been to.

It's a lot of cash.

I go that way.

There's a lot of roadside stands.

And I go that way and I know Four Corners.

It's all cash.

And I know from

trying

to

find somebody to do anything from plumbing to electricity, you talk to these people and they won't work unless you get cash.

So just to get rid of that element of the economy or to prune it down, we're going to get a lot more federal revenue and we're going to have a lot less black market economy.

There's so many insidious aspects to illegal immigration.

That's why a heritage study suggested it costs us $170 billion

a year in not

noticeable or covert exactions and debits and all of the manner of the economy, from federal, local, state subsidies to the black market to law enforcement to drugs, you name it.

And so

everybody asked me, like,

I'm sitting in this house that never had a key.

I remember one time my grandparents went to New Mexico.

That was the only time they ever left this farm.

And they asked my parents to watch it.

My parents were going out.

And they said, Victor, there's a key somewhere.

So I walked down here.

I was like 14 years old.

I went through every drawer to find the key to lock that.

They had no key.

And that was true of everybody.

Today, this Mad Max, this area.

And I said, what changed?

Was it human nature changed?

No.

Was it the culture?

Partly, but a lot of it was illegal immigration.

It really was.

I didn't, I never knew, nobody knew what M13 was, or the Norteños, or the Serenios gang, or a SWAT team.

That didn't even exist out here.

And I'm not talking about so-called, oh, white people.

No, no, no, no, no.

Our neighbors were Greek American.

They were Portuguese.

They were Mexican American.

They were Armenian.

They were Japanese.

It was the most diverse, natural diversity in the world.

The only difference was when we went to high school with people in grammar school, nobody said,

I'm Chinese, I'm Japanese, I'm Armenian, I'm Mexican.

Nobody self-identified.

But it was diverse.

And

this open border just polarized everything.

Especially the idea that when you walk over the border and you put your first toe in the United States illegally, there's a whole mechanism and industry that says to you, you are a victim.

Now, you may have come from Mishokan and you never saw a white American, but they did something to you.

So when you come into their territory, we're here to help you.

Your children get affirmative action.

We will make sure you're not discriminated in the workplace because we're going to assume you're going to be an object of oppression and we'll help you fight your oppressor.

That is the message that the Democratic Party has been giving.

And it creates a terrible attitude.

And I tried to fight it for 20 years at Cal State Fresno to my students and say, you know, if you can speak and write English better than people who were born here and you know Latin or Greek or you can read French or German or you're acquainted, you are going to be independent and confident

in the university.

And you won't have to rely on a a crutch of your ethnic fijes.

And anybody who does that to get ahead career-wise because they're not confident in their power.

I get back to what Tom Sowell always said to me.

He said once to me, you ever been to a black doctor?

I said, I have once.

And he said, I only went to black doctors when I was growing up.

And I said, well,

was that because of segregation?

He said, not really.

He said,

it was because of discrimination.

I said, I know that to get through medical school and be discriminated, you had to be better than other people.

So I said, do you go, oh, no.

I try to find white male doctor because

in the academic world, they play the same role that blacks did in the 1950s and 60s.

He was being facetious in a way, but he wasn't.

The benefits of discrimination?

Well, he writes about that.

That when you are completely audited your entire life,

and he mentions that in in every realm of politics, culture, and economics, and many of his works.

If you have a press that hates Donald Trump and hates Republicans, then you're going to have less corruption than you do with Democrats.

Not because they're better people necessarily, but because

they're afraid of what the media is going to do to them and uncover.

But when you have Senator Menendez, who went to prison

the other day, yesterday, today,

he knows that they give him a pass.

If you're senile and you're Joe Biden, then it's a cheap fake.

But Donald Trump has to go take the Montreal cognitive assessment.

And that's what he was saying: that when you have a hostile system, he doesn't

equate that with approving that.

He doesn't approve of it.

He's just saying when you're confronted with a deterrent or a hostile system, it makes you combative and makes you rise to the occasion.

And when you're treated in the opposite way, where people make excuses for you, then you take advantage of that.

It's human nature.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about the Democrats in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

You can find Victor on YouTube and on Rumble.

These podcasts are.

So please join us there.

So, Victor, the Senate Judiciary Committee had a hearing on the Joe Biden cover-up, and every Democrat, was my understanding, or at least almost all of them,

did not show up.

The guy from Vermont showed up.

One.

Why did they do that?

Like,

what point does that serve, that there was a brilliant Joe Biden administration, that there was no illness on the part of Joe Biden's

mind?

Their thinking goes like this.

We had a coup in in 2020.

What we were supposed to do, we had a bunch of insane people running.

Were we going to get the Castro, Mr.

Julian Castro?

Were we going to get Spartacus?

Were we going to get Pocahontas?

Were we going to get Crazy Bernie?

Were we going to get Pete Buttigig?

We had nobody.

And they were all, one of them, Pete or Elizabeth or Bernie, were going to win.

So we had to get old Joel from Scranton.

So we had a coup.

We knew he was senile.

That's why we brought him.

He was an empty vessel.

So we used him.

So what?

That's what we did.

And we got him elected.

And then for four years, we got the most progressive agenda in history because nobody knew who was running the country.

We just said, oh, Joe, get out there like the guy on Star Trek, right?

His drum, you know, the original Star Trek.

I think his name was John Gill.

John Gill, yeah.

And, you know, and then you go, and that's what they did.

And then we got caught.

So he couldn't fulfill the mission finally, but we got four years out of him.

And if he had, you know, he had the stress test debate and he froze, but he could have happened a year earlier.

So we take the win.

We got four years.

Okay.

And we came close with Kamala.

So what do we, why are we going to go to a hearing and hear all this stuff that he was senile?

We know he's senile, but what's the purpose of this?

It's just to rub our noses in it.

And that's what they think.

They don't ever think,

oh my God,

we tried to put a senile, demented person into the presidency, and although we controlled him, there were periods where he was talking on the phone with foreign leaders.

He had the nuclear codes.

We gave him the power to destroy the world almost.

And he was completely non-composment.

Oh my God, I can't believe we did.

That's what they should be thinking.

Let's never do that again.

But

I think everybody knows now that whatever they're guilty of, they project.

So

they understood that, and that's one of the reasons they kept talking about Donald Trump.

They're doing it now, that he's 79 years old.

Remember when Donald Trump was our 25th Amendment, 25th Amendment, 25th.

Hey, Rod Rosenstein, McCabe, can you get a wire?

Hey, can we get Bandi Yee or whatever her name was, a Yale psychologist?

Let's get her in here to say that he needs an intervention, a straitjacket, because he's crazy.

That's all they did.

So then they made all that architecture of mental illness.

Then you get somebody who is really demented and they think, how dare you?

Remember the Robert Hurd transcript psychodrama?

Can we just see, you guys will release the transcript, can we just see the tapes so we can make sure that the transcript actually represents what he actually said?

And can we see

his notes so we know that his ghost rider was not having access to classified information.

That is terrible.

You're making fun of senile people.

That's ageism.

Remember all that outrage?

It's got a little, there's a, there must be a box in Washington called the Outrage Machine with knobs on it, and it has antenna and internet, and so there must be some little nerd, and he thinks, how do you get angry?

And he turns these knobs and it goes out to Rachel Maddow, it goes out to the squad, it goes out to the view, and then they say,

walls are closing in, walls are closing in, walls are closing in, bombshell, bombshell, bombshell.

And there is somebody behind the curtain doing that.

It's almost like they're automatons.

With the outrage odometer on.

Yeah, it is.

They don't think for themselves.

And you have this Rachel Maddow at, what, $25 million a month for four days?

Is it one day a week?

Four days.

So

she's making six million bucks an hour, and and she's out there preaching this socialist equity and fairness.

And you want to think, well, if they're laying everybody off at MSNBC and CNN, all you have to do is say, I want to raise my hand.

I only want to get $1 million an hour.

And let's spread the wealth.

They never do that.

No.

They create this facade of

ideological communism, socialism, but it's really

a facade to square the circle of their own greed and their insecurity, but their greediness, graspiness.

They're really materialist, and then they feel guilty, so they have to say they're socialist in the abstract.

But you look at all of them: Nancy Pelosi, Insider Trading,

Rachel Maddow, the Biden Consortium.

And that was all veneered over with Kering, and how dare you?

That's not who we are.

How dare Donald Trump?

How dare he mention my son?

Remember that?

No, you did.

When you're talking about the Biden Consortium,

I'm just a little bit worried about Jared Kushner and his consortium and the work they're doing in the Middle East.

It's going to look really very suspicious.

Yeah, he's been under the radar, but I'm a little worried.

They have a new phone now, a Trump phone, and the Trump shoes and this

downtown club in Washington where you pay $500,000 for and then

the crypto companies.

So my point is this is that I think their operative agenda is that

they've tried to destroy us every way they can.

So whatever we do is going to be audited ad infinitum.

There won't be one thing, even if we wanted to be crooked and sell influence, we couldn't because they're examining us in a way they never did Biden.

But but i would like just to see them not do any of it and i

you know i'm out in the middle of nowhere but every once in a while somebody will call me and say you should mention this on this show or you should do this or

i have a product you know and i never

i've never taken any any money and I've never called up anybody and said, I can do this.

It's just, I don't have the opportunity, so maybe I'm morally sound because I don't have

that type of temptation, but I just don't think that anybody in the vicinity of Donald Trump at this revolutionary moment, counter-revolution, excuse me, he has such a thin margin of error.

Any little problem, they're trying to destroy him every second, and he's got three and a half years to go, and you don't want any exposure like that.

And just look at the history of the presidential.

You've got Iran-Contra,

you have Watergate, you have

the Bill Clinton Monica thing.

There's always going to be exposures and scandal.

And so you don't want to give them a freebie.

No, not at all.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show, and so I'd like to read some of the comments.

This time I took them from our Rumble channel.

One of them, we were talking about Churchill and World War II.

I believe this was a Saturday show, and the commenter said Churchill didn't want to have unconditional surrender because he knew that would incentivize the Germans to fight to the bitter end.

Roosevelt was the one who announced the goal of unconditional surrender and blindsided Churchill.

And I thought that was interesting.

Churchill was true.

That did come from Roosevelt, but at the Casablanca conference, Churchill agreed to it.

The one who was blindsided was Stalin.

And

he was the one, of course, that had made an arrangement with Hitler under Molotov-Ribbentrop.

So he had no grounds to criticize it.

But Churchill was just, his attitude was, this is how World War I ended.

On the plus side, we didn't have to, we lost

17 million people in World War I, we, the combatants, but we didn't have to go in and physically take Germany or we would have lost another 10.

And then the counter-argument, yeah, and that's how we got the Versailles armistice without a clearer victory or defeat.

We got the Versailles Treaty, and then we got the Nazis.

So

that was where it came from.

It was all

from the very beginning, 1940, not the very beginning, but by 1943, when they had a little bit of confidence, they had stopped the Blitz.

They were winning the War of the Atlantic.

They had driven the Nazis out of, almost out completely of North Africa.

They were going to land in Sicily.

Then for the first time, and the Japanese, they had taken Guadalcanal.

They were starting to really hurt the Japanese tanker fleet with submarine.

At that point, they said, and they were starting to bomb deeply into Germany and Eastern Europe.

Not that it was successful yet.

But then Roosevelt and Churchill felt that they could issue a communique about unconditional surrender.

But a lot of people criticize it because it means, you know,

the Japanese were probably you could have probably negotiated a surrender, I don't know, somewhere after Iwo Jima, say in March of 1945, and if you had said to them, you can have your military government, you just have to get out of China and you've got to get back into Japan.

They probably would have taken it because they were about ready to be destroyed.

But that wouldn't have been a good thing.

Not at all.

But a lot of Americans.

The sad thing about this, when you look at wars, and it's

they're not like this.

They don't start off with few casualties, then in the middle of them, they reach a crescendo and then they decline toward the end.

It's more of a slope.

So they start out, and right before the end, they get really bloody.

So the worst year of casualties from 1939 to 1945

was late, say, June of 44 to

August of 45.

That's when everybody died.

All right.

And then also

on Scheinbaum, who is the president of Mexico.

Two comments, very short ones, but they're interesting.

Laura Schiller, President Scheinbaum seems to have found a reason to shut up.

You were talking about how she shouldn't be provoking.

She found a reason, I think it's called

billion-dollar tax on her remittances, a

high tariff to stop her $171 billion trade surplus,

and shutting the border down so the cartel's $20 billion

infusion of cash in the Mexican economy stops.

And then the last one was also on Scheinbaum too.

I think all of us

have this question a bit.

How is a Jewish person named Scheinbaum the president of freaking Mexico?

Is what I want to know.

Well, I mean how does that happen?

There are a lot of people who migrated to Mexico from Europe.

Vicente Fox, remember him?

Fox isn't a Latin name.

So there was

I had an in-law

my brother's wife was from Mexico and she's deceased now, but

her father was prominent in Mexico and her mother was Jewish.

And

I knew another family that operated a chain of theaters in Mexico.

They were Jewish.

So

Mexico is not a diverse.

If you're asking me, is it diverse like the United States?

No.

It has a lot of indigenous people that have been sorely oppressed by the conquistador elite.

But

every time I've lived my whole life with people from Mexico, and this is what is so strange about my politics that it's aberrant, because when I look over my entire life of all the people I knew, and I grew up with the Oklahoma diaspora, those are people who came from Oklahoma, the million people from

31 to 1945 that came to the United States from California.

And they were holy rollers,

fundamentalists.

I'm just being stereotypical now.

And they were from the south.

They had southern accents.

So I should have heard just endemic prejudice.

I heard some.

But when I

was confronted with just nonchalant racial bigotry, it always came from the Hispanic community.

And it was insidious.

It was

being working with people and saying we have to wear long-sleeve shirts so we don't look like an N-word.

Or I went over to a girlfriend's house and the grandmother said

about one of the women

girl that I was dating that you tell her not to sit out in the sun too much.

And

or I have two children, one of them is

blank-blank and the other is white.

So there was an endemic.

Nobody wants to talk about that.

But

that Latin American culture is the most racially aware culture that I've ever experienced, more so than the so-called North American white culture.

It really is.

Well, Victor, thank you for all of your wisdom today, and thanks to our audience for joining us.

Thank you for everybody for listening and viewing.

And

I'm finished my first week of new sinuses, and they hurt like hell, but they're

recovering.

It's a new age.

Yes.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.