Donald Trump Sets Europe Straight

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We are recording on Wednesday, the 20th of August, and this episode will be up the next day, Thursday, the 21st.

Victor Davis Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne Amarshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, and he's a man with the website, website The Blade of Perseus.

You can find it at victorhanson.com.

You should be subscribing later in today's episode.

I will tell you why.

Victor,

our last show, which came out Tuesday, was recorded Sunday, and it sort of straddled the big summit that happened on Monday.

And that's what we're going to get.

to today, your views on what happened Monday at the White House,

Donald Trump and every leader of Europe sitting in front of him like a bait, like

sitting in front of a teacher.

It was a remarkable sight.

But we'll get your take on the summit.

We'll get your take on the Cincinnati update.

Elon Musk wants to forego his plans for a third party.

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

Victor?

Yes.

What's your views?

How do you assess what happened on Monday at the White House?

Well, you know, everybody was angry.

I had colleagues at Hoover and other people that said Donald Trump was played by Putin, da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

And we've talked about how you have to talk to even the worst monsters.

And Putin,

monstrous though he be, is not in the same league as Uncle Joe, as FDR called Joseph Stalin, or Mao Zedong, whom Richard Nixon courted and flew all the way over to Beijing to meet.

So

anyway, they thought they had the narrative that Donald Trump was going to cut a deal with Putin and leave Lesielinskis and the Euros out.

And then he had an interview later that night with Sean Hannity in which he talked about land swaps, which everybody knows has to take place.

Then the unexpected happened.

They called the Europeans and they said, get over here.

We want to consult you.

This is a multi-front Western effort to negotiate with Putin and we need your input.

We can't have all of you at the summit, but maybe I can be a referee and get them in the same room, but we have to be on the same page.

So Zelensky flew over and he wore a suit, a sort of suit.

It was kind of like a postmodern suit.

And then all of these seven,

I like the picture of Maloney was on his left side.

And I think that was by invitation.

I assume that Macron kind of weaseled his way in to be on his right side.

But Trump orchestrated it.

I mean, it was Emmanuel.

You know, it was like he was at a NATO conference, daddy.

And

essentially,

they were there for one reason.

They said, this thing won't work unless the United States gives support.

What they meant by that is they were the ones, let's say, in the 90s who said, we have to get rid of Milosevic, we have to use armed force.

And

the Clinton administration was kind of reluctant.

They're a nuclear power.

Milosevic and Yugoslavia.

The Serbs have a nuclear power patron, Russia.

So we're only going to give air support.

And, of course, we don't want to get in the ground.

And then

U.S.

air support, I think, was responsible for 85% of the missions against Milosevic.

And it worked.

So ever since then, the Europeans have thought, we're not going to intervene.

They helped a little bit in Afghanistan.

Some of them did in Iraq.

But you have to have the United States, if not on the ground, at least air support.

And

the result of all of this Monday talking and diplomacy and haranguing and horse trading was that Trump said,

although there won't be ground troops in Ukraine, that he will be willing to back up the European ground support with air power.

And of course, the United States States has the largest and most effective air force in the world, and that will protect them.

So now it's just a question,

really, it's what you and I have talked about.

It's just a question of this invader, Putin, has to have something tangible to give to the military and the oligarchic class.

And we don't know what tangible is defined by them to justify a million dead, missing, captive, wounded, and killed Russians after three and almost three and a half years.

So we don't know where that magic DMZ is, but

I think the West is going to say we want to just freeze things where they are now

and you can institutionalize everything to the east of you.

We won't,

Zelensky can't cede territory, so he won't officially recognize Crimea and Donbass and the area to the west that you now occupy,

but nobody else is going to complain, so you can say they're part of Russia.

And then there'll be horse trading along that DMZ.

And I think the Europeans are delighted, because that means A,

the United States will support Ukraine.

So if Putin invades Ukraine for a what?

Fourth time?

He invaded under Bush, he invaded under Obama, he invaded under Biden.

I shouldn't say under Bush, he invaded Ukraine.

He invaded a foreign nation, Ossatia-Georgia, in 2008.

But if he should leave his borders for a fourth time, the U.S.

Air Force would meet him, and the Europeans would huddle behind air cover.

And that's what they wanted.

So now they can tell Zelensky, you're not going to be in NATO, but you've got the U.S.

Air Force to protect you if Russia tries to invade.

And

Europe gets to buy natural gas from Russia again, apparently.

And then what's the next phase?

I have a feeling that the President's plan is

to have a sort of détente

and try to wean Russia off of China and triangulate with China against Russia and go back to that Henry Kissinger formula.

Victor, the imagery of the

summit with the president at his Oval Office desk and all the leaders in front of him, it's kind kind of like the Pope in the College of Cardinals, that kind of dynamic.

We've talked about the Colossus imagery before, but he truly is the leader of the world,

the Western civilized world here.

Maybe not their hero.

And it seems very authentic that these gaggle of European leaders

genuflect before him.

I don't want to make him into a god or anything.

No,

I think

he's really helped by the last four years of the Biden administration.

They got what they wanted.

They got a waxen effigy, they being the left, and they got a chance in a lifetime to use this old Joe Biden-Scranton,

I don't know what we would call him, mirage, to push through this open borders, critical legal theory, critical race theory, DEI, get out of Afghanistan, you mil, all that stuff.

And it was a colossal failure.

And Donald Trump comes in and he reminds people, yes, we have a lot of debt.

Yes, we're running deficits.

Yes, we have tensions.

Yes, there's red, blue, black, white, all this stuff going on.

But compared to the alternative in Russia, in China, in India, in Europe, we are a powerful and the most powerful nation.

We have the biggest military.

We have the most, the largest economy.

We have the most effective technology.

We

have the greatest oil and gas production in the world.

We produce the most nuclear energy.

For some reason, everybody wants to come to our universities, including 300,000 Chinese who are being trained in the most sophisticated technology that bring it back to China and use it against us, but that's another story.

So, but nobody exercises that power.

And this guy comes in and says, you know what, everything is negotiable.

We don't have to have 300,000 Chinese.

You don't have to charge us 50%

surcharge as university.

We don't have to have DEI.

We don't have to have.

And we can do it.

We can just do what we want.

As long as it's legal, constitutional, and it has the backing of the American people.

So he's exercising domestic and foreign power that no one has really tried to do because they were all in a state of depression.

And they thought, oh my God, we went into Afghanistan, we left.

Just people hanging from the wheels of our planes.

It was just so terrible.

Oh, my gosh, George Floyd, we're such a racist country.

We have to call in the UN Commission on Human Rights to see if we're good or not.

Oh my gosh, we're not exceptional.

Barack Obama said we're only exceptional like Greece.

This mutual

self-hating despair,

kind of the Pete Buttigig view of America.

And he came in and said, that's not right.

Just look at the facts and get over it.

And I'm going to stage a counter-revolution.

And Europe looks over there and I thought, wow,

this is is amazing.

And, you know, there's a ripple effect, Jack.

It's not just that Eastern Europe is getting more conservative.

Even when they don't have a conservative government, they enact conservative policies in Romania, Poland,

the Czech Republic, etc.

But they're getting a conservative government in the Netherlands, in Italy,

and even in Latin America, Bolivia, Argentina.

So

he has ripples that go beyond the United States.

And

one of the sets, I'll just finish this, but what was very sad when I looked at those seven heads of state in Europe, I said to myself, wait a minute, you collectively represent 500 million people.

You have over 150 million people more than we do.

Your GDP, which used to be equivalent, has gone down to about two-thirds of ours, but it's still the third-largest GDP in the world.

You were the embryo of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment.

You've got these very capable people,

and yet here you are, all seven of you, begging this American president to stand in front between you and Putin.

And if he's there between you and Putin, then you're going to be brave.

And so much for all the ankle biting of, you know, America's this, and America's corrupt America's this no no it's not that at all we want you between us and Putin we can't defend ourselves we who created the Western military tradition and have this we could field if we wanted to

probably 400 divisions we could have eight or nine thousand late model jet we're not going to do any of it we're going to self-destruct.

We're going to get down to 1.4 fertility.

We're not going to have children.

We're going to open our borders to people who hate us from the Middle East.

We're going to destroy our nuclear, gas, oil, coal industries and bring in high-priced wind and solar that doesn't work.

And we're going to commit collective suicide.

But we need you to help us.

So we don't want to end up like that bunch in the White House.

That's what I was thinking.

Here was one man, and he was representing free enterprise, dynamism, optimism.

American strength.

And here were these seven others who were very nice people.

And I love Europeans, but basically, they were there with a tin cup, and they didn't need to be.

Well,

we'll give

selective love for Giorgia Maloney from Italy above all the others, Victor.

She's more like us than the rest.

There's one other guy there, though.

He was wonderful, Alexander Stube from Finland.

The Finnish.

And he just said something that was absolutely right.

Everybody was mouthing off, and he just said,

I would like to make a mistake.

He was a U.S.

foreign exchange student from Finland.

He said, I could just make a point.

Finland has an 800-mile border with Russia.

And they invaded us in 1939.

General Mannerheim fought him off, and we survived.

What the subtext was to Zelensky, and the message to the Europeans was, talk all you want, but when you're stuck with this huge Russian sugarnut on your border and they invade and they're going to try to absorb the whole country, You fight like Ukraine has done, like we did from November 39 to March 1940.

But at some key point,

when right before you're going to be overwhelmed and crushed, but before that happens, you have inflicted a half a million casualties or a million, maybe Finland did, then you cut a deal.

And we gave 10%

of our territory to Russia, and we promised we would not, we would not be in favor of either country.

Even when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union and the Finns hated the Soviets, Mannerheim said, we are not going to set one foot into Russian territory.

We will help you on the siege of Leningrad, but we'll do it from the Finland side.

So what he was telling everybody is,

you fought heroically, you've got a great military now, everybody can support you, but the subtext was, you've got to give up some territory to save your country given the monster on your border.

And two,

you can't just expect to be a pro-Western, chauvinistic,

hyper-anti-Russian country right on the border of Russia, not given your history.

like our history.

You've got to be very careful.

And they call that Finlandization.

But that's basically what Austria did.

That was what Finland did.

And to a lesser extent, that's what Switzerland did.

And they all survived.

It's cool survival, right?

Hey, Victor, I want to take a moment for our sponsor, Hillsdale College.

Hillsdale College is offering a brand new free online course called The Federalist.

Together, these courses explain how the United States Constitution established a government strong enough to secure the rights of citizens and safe enough to wield that power.

And today, it's our responsibility to pay attention, to be vigilant, they may say, in order to preserve and protect Republican self-government.

Hillsdale online course on the Federalist includes 10 lectures, each about 30 minutes long.

You can take the course at your own pace, and there's no cost to sign up.

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We thank the good people from Hillsdale for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor, we're going to get to James

Comey and his creepy fascination with pop singers.

But before we do, one last thing about the summit is

this is such a

major week in international affairs and

foreign policy.

And the focus of the Trump-hating media is

Washington, D.C.

and securing

and National Guard going in there.

And it's just crazy that the dynamic of importance and the real news is there, and they're clutching at this scandal, that this trying to create a scandal, trying to create the democracy is dying because the streets of Washington are getting safer.

I mean, the mainstream media is so blanked up.

It's remarkable.

No, it's a high.

They'll never stop.

Remember when they tried to storm the White House grounds in 2020?

They had torched the St.

John Episcopal Church, and Donald Trump was ready to bring out federal troops, and Mark Milley had a photo op and he said, oh my God, I was taken because he listened to the left, and then they said he was a fascist.

And that was when General Mattis in that period resigned or was fired.

Either one, I don't know quite what happened, but there was this idea, you can't bring federal troops.

And I think I wrote a column at the time that during the Rodney King riots, that 92 or 93, I think.

Excuse me, 91, I'm sorry.

Colin Powell wrote a note.

Colin Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs and he wrote a note to George

H.W.

Bush and said, we got to restore order and I got 5,000 Marines and we're ready to go.

You just say the word.

And Bush did.

And they sent the Marine Corps into Los Angeles to stop the killing and rioting.

So it happens all the time, but this isn't even

that severe.

He just said for 30 days we're going to bring enough troops in to just show a law enforcement presence so the police can get back to their regular job.

And of course, they said, well, crime is down.

And then, of course, the police union said it's only down because we're forced to call, you know,

breaking and entering shoplifting, or we're forced to call aggregated assault, petty, you know, fighting or something.

We don't charge people, and then that goes to lower the crime rate by intention from the politicians.

So everybody who lives on the street knows that.

So the Democratic Party, I don't understand it because it's 75%

Democrat Washington.

And they all, every time you go there, the only people you meet are left-wing, and they all tell you, you can go to this place, you can't go to that place, be careful, you can't walk this way.

And they are, they're aware of it, that it's a very dangerous place.

The other thing is, it's very weird because you have Al Sharpton weighing in about fascism, you've got all of the people in MSNBC, but we're essentially talking about a particular crime group, and that is African-American males between the ages of 15 and 40, and they make up about

4 or 5 percent of the population, and yet statistically they commit about half of the murders and maybe a larger percent of assaults, and in rare interracial crime, they're six to ten times more likely to attack a white person than a white person is to attack.

And you can talk about the reasons for that.

I'm open to discussion.

History of racism, slavery, Jim Quilt, whatever.

Or as Tom Soule, my colleague, has said, African Americans were one of the most law-abiding communities in America up until the Great Society program.

And then he's written several books about why white liberals did things that injured the black communities, confidence, entrepreneurialism, etc.

But whatever exegesis you use, that is the problem right there.

And yet you see all of the, you know, Joy, I just did a little thing on Joy Reed.

She just cut a podcast when she said that white people were stupid and all of American music, they can't invent anything.

They've never invented anything.

I'm thinking Beethoven,

Chopin, Mozart.

And she said, we invented music in America.

Then you had this woman from the New Yorker,

Doreen St.

Felize.

I think Chris Ruffo uncovered a whole corpus where she said basically white people, she hated them.

She's writing for the New Yorker magazine.

They're dirty, they cause plagues.

So what I'm getting at, you've got like this.

You've got this crime problem in America that affects mostly the black community as victims of these young black males who are inordinately represented in violent crime.

And then you've got an elite up here whose money,

both white and black, whose money, whose zip codes insulates them from the problem that they help create.

And then

when confronted with the problem, as Trump did, by bringing in, then they start calling people racists.

And then when that doesn't resonate, they get into Ku Klux Klan territory by starting talking.

They're starting to talk about genetically awful people.

I hate white people.

They can't think.

They don't, they cause plagues.

And these are not isolated people.

You know, they're

New Yorker writer.

Or you have Mondami says going after whiter neighborhoods.

And so

they don't, there's this problem and the country should try to approach it.

The black leadership, as people have said for 50 years from the black community itself, we need to stress the two parent households.

We need to redefine masculinity as staying with your wife and raising your children.

And we don't.

The message in rap music, that is not conducive to the black middle class.

And nobody will do that.

Nobody will do it.

And so Donald Trump just ignores it and he just says that these people are suffering in the inner city and other people who try to navigate as the capital of the world,

they're being attacked, and we're not going to put up with it anymore.

It's a federal city, and I can do this.

And then everybody's on the left is, ah, this is dictatorship.

And then privately, oh, does that mean that I can go out to eat tonight?

I can actually go to that restaurant.

I can stay up 10:30, and even though I only live six blocks away in Georgetown, I can actually walk back to my house.

I don't have to get an Uber, or I don't have to worry about who the Uber driver is after 11 or 10.

So it's a schizophrenic Dr.

Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde.

If Trump is for stopping a war, the current Democratic Party is for war.

If he's going to close a border and stop illegal immigration, they are for illegal immigration.

If he's going to go in and stop crime, they basically don't care and say there's if crime, there is no crime.

Whatever he says,

they're against.

And it's

the other thing is, very quickly, anybody who gets in an argument with Donald Trump on the left

loses.

Because what happens is he knows that they hate him so much that he just has to push one or two buttons.

Oh, where's that button?

Where's the Trump derangement button?

I'll push it.

And they'll say, oh, he had.

Trump will say, oh, Nicole Wallace will be canceled.

She's got terrible ratings.

And then

she's off to the races that Donald Trump.

Don't they understand if they look at Liz Cheney, her status right now, what happens when you go into a personal vendetta against Trump, or if you look at Adam Schiff, what he's looking at right now, for 10 years, all he could say is he hates Trump, and now he's facing serious charges that may lead to indictments, that he leaked classified information, that he kind of staged the impeachment, that he lied about his relationship with the whistleblower Sarah Mella and

Vinman, and he may or may not have listed one home as a principal residence or two homes.

So he maybe

have some exposure for tax fraud.

And yet he just melted down.

And even Barack Obama, you know, he really hated Trump, and now he hated him so much, and he gotten so many TIFs with him that now we've got plenty of evidence that he basically told the CIA, I don't like what I'm seeing.

These are two objective empirical assessments that Donald Trump did not collude with the Russians.

The hour is getting late.

He's already, we failed to stop him during the election with Russian collusion hoax.

Now I want to sabotage his transition and presidency by getting a new assessment from you guys.

So you reject what your field men have found and you concoct the idea that he is a Russian agent, provocateur asset, so then we can go after him.

And that's what Obama's reduced to.

He broke Obama, and he broke Obama that now, when Obama goes out on the campaign trail, as he did in 2024,

it's pathetic.

You know,

he just gets in his private jet and he flies from his beach home in Hawaii or Martha's Vineyard or Calorama, and then he tries to look around, see if he sees some black males.

Then he goes and tells them that they're suffering from false consciousness and they better listen to him.

And then he's, oh, I'm done.

I'm going to fly back to which Michelle, which mansion should we go to?

We got four of them.

Which one?

We've got to be authentic.

And then we'll have a podcast and we can talk about our marital problems, you can.

And that's what he's reduced to.

Yeah,

he's a performance artist.

Hey, Victor, we're going to get to

Comey

and

what else?

Elon Musk.

Yeah.

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

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We are back back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, I have to make note for people who watch this on YouTube and who had watched earlier.

And where I am, I've changed it around my office.

And I have over my shoulder here a picture of

you, a caricature by the great Roman Gen, our life.

I like Roman Glenn.

Oh, he is.

He's a terrific guy.

By the way, on the mortgage stuff,

you should remember 15 or so years ago, the mortgage issue, this is a long time

politicians have gotten favorable use of mortgages, and it killed Chris Dodd in Connecticut.

It killed

Kent Conrad in North Dakota.

They chose not to run again because of the ramifications of those scandals.

So I think

your favorite senator there may be in trouble just on that alone.

He's got a profound.

Yeah, he's trying to raise money.

He wouldn't do it

unless he knows what he did.

It's the same thing with Letita James.

They can say all they want is a vendetta.

This is revenge.

This is racism.

And then there's these documents.

In the case of Letita James, she's a New York statewide elected officer and it requires her to live in New York City and that she put her principal residence in Virginia for tax breaks, probably duplicate, one in New York, one in Virginia, or, and then she misled the state

about what the house was for a mortgage deduction.

And it's all in writing, and she signed it.

Yeah.

You know,

some Catholic saints, Padre Pio, were known to bilocate, but I don't think Letitia James had that sacred power of being in two places at once.

So, hey, Victor, let's get to James Comey and then Elon Musk.

First, Comey, you've seen the video.

I mean, it is so creepy and weird how he is relying on Taylor Swift for

his mojo, encouragement, how to get through these dark days.

I thought we just talked about people who were broken by Trump.

He was broken by Trump.

He thought he was going to be so cute and have a private conversation with the president and then go record it and leak it to the New York Times.

Probably a classified.

And then he thought he was so cute by hiring Christopher Steele as an FBI contractor.

And then he used that false information.

And he had an FBI attorney, Kevin Kleinsmith, who lied under oath or doctored a FISA court document.

I could go on, but when all that was exposed,

he's looking at a lot of criminal exposure, I think.

He's kind of an Oedipus figure.

He has a fatal flaw, and that is that he's arrogant and he's reckless.

and his emotions drive him.

He was involved way, way back with John Ashbrook.

Remember when he went into the hotel room during the George W.

Bush, and Ashbrook was getting an appendix, and they had this,

he and Patrick Fitzgerald had him signed.

I can't remember, but they went in there.

And Comey was a

He was a lawyer for Lockheed, made a lot of money, as I remember.

and then

he was in the DOJ, then he was the FBI director.

He was the one that

said that basically he wrote that letter that said Hillary

was guilty of using

a non-secure server for classified information, and he named the number of documents, and then under subpoena, she destroyed communication devices.

But he said, kind of like Robert Hurr with Joe Biden, I don't think we could convict her.

And he was acting as if he was the FBI director and the Attorney General because

at that time

the Attorney General for Obama had abdicated and she wanted no part of it because she knew that it would be too flagrant to let Hillary off.

So she was going to let this egocentric narcissist Comey play that prominent role while she met with Bill Clinton, Loretta Lynch, at the Phoenix tarmac.

And

their private jets sort of kissed each other, nosed up to each other, then they talked about their grandchildren, supposedly, as they formulated the plan to get Hillary off.

So he has a really checkered history, and it went to his head that he was infallible.

And he got more and more egocentric as he interfered.

And he's interfered in two elections, 2016.

And then again,

you could make the argument that through his tweets and all of the stuff he said, and his former FBI people had the laptop.

They didn't, that was under Christopher Wray.

They didn't let people know that it was authentic.

And the 51 people then could lie that it was a Russian information project.

Everything about him has been destructive.

Now, remember, now he's...

He goes to a beach and every once in a while he finds little secret messages, right?

That

86, 47, and he had an earlier one, too.

He finds rock formations, you know.

Right.

I go to the beach every year.

I've never, for 50 years, I've never seen one rock formation

message.

The only message I see at the beach is use copper tone.

You know, that's supposed to pull by an answer.

What he does is he goes to the beach and he makes little shell formations and then he films them and he puts them on.

And he doesn't understand what he's doing.

He has no common sense.

It's frightening that this man was in charge of the FBI.

After two assassinations, you would say 86-47, and you're the head of the FBI.

And now he's got somebody like Cash Patel that he went after,

and he is going to have to release.

They're going to release a lot of information about him.

I don't know to what degree he'll get off on the Statue of Liberty.

limitations, but he's got a lot of criminal exposure.

KT McFarlane was on, of all places, or she's been on it before, Gutfeld.

She was on there the other night.

Not necessarily a place to break news, but she said she was in the room, of course.

She was an aide to President Trump early on, the first term, and that

Comey came with documents to say, hey, you know,

we got some info here of some dicey sex-related stuff with you.

That may have been, you know, that he peed on and was peed on by hookers or something like that in Moscow, all that lunacy.

Anyway, her point was

he said that to Trump, and then he said, Oh, by the way, I'm going to fill out the full term here.

She used the word blackmail.

So it was very interesting to see her say that the other night.

He's a very nefarious character.

The worst, of all the terrible things he said,

the worst was he was in an interview and he was laughing at how he destroyed

Mike Flynn.

He said basically

that

he sent FBI agents to go to the White House, and normally they had to ask permission to go there.

And normally, they would apprise a high-ranking cabinet-level person that they were on their way to interview them.

And normally, that when that interview took place, that cabinet officer and a national security advisor, it's a pretty high office of Mike Flynn, they have a counsel present.

And then he was saying, these people were so inept

that we just sent Peter Strzok and I guess the other guy in there.

And they kind of ambushed Flynn and he didn't know they were coming and they didn't get permission.

He had no attorney.

And we asked all these conflating questions, confusing, and he got him to say that he'd never talked to the Russians.

And when we had evidence that he talked to somebody connected or Russian, then we got him.

And he was laughing about it.

And he destroyed Mike Flynn for no reason.

Just, Mike Flynn was one of the most talented intelligence officers in the U.S.

Army.

And that was that.

And Casey McFarland, you remember, was, I think she was an assistant to him, to Mike Flynn.

And she spent a fortune trying to defend herself from the innuendo that she might be investigated.

And that's what Comey did.

And as I said before, now we have Robert Mueller, tragically, is in a,

I guess, assisted living for people with onset cognitive problems.

But we remember when he testified before the House, I think it was the Intelligence Committee rather than the oversight, he just said that they asked him, would you please describe what you knew about fusing GPS and the Steel?

I don't know anything about that.

Well, Mr.

Mueller, that's why you were appointed the Steele dossier.

That was what they used to force your appointment from Jeff Session.

And then we had McCabe who lied four occasions to federal investigators.

Then we had Comey who said, I can't remember.

I don't know.

245 times under oath to the Oversight Committee.

And then we had Christopher Wray, who went after Catholics, went after parents at school board meetings,

said he couldn't, he had to leave a

Senate

appearance where he was testifying early because he had business.

He got in an FBI private jet to his vacation home.

The whole bunch of them, four of them in a row, really destroyed the reputation of the FBI.

And I don't say that as my opinion.

You look at polls and they went from about 80% approval way down to 30, 40%.

And among Republicans, it was even worse.

They were completely out of it.

I guess that you could call them a retrieval service for the Biden family.

Lose a laptop, call up the FBI, and can you find that laptop?

Go get it and hold it and see if it's Russian.

Oh, it's not Russian

fabricated.

It really is Hunter.

Can you keep it under wraps for a year?

Don't tell anybody you have it.

Don't tell anybody you know that it's Hunter's, but let 51 people lie to the country on the eve of debate to swing an election that it is a collusionary act.

These are your friends in the intelligence community.

Oh, what?

Hunter lost his gun?

He threw it into a.

Got to find out that.

He registered it and lied under oath in a federal application for...

Got to find...

Oh,

Ashley Biden,

she had a diary and she left it.

She just was so out of it.

She left it in her rental.

And somebody who then rented the apartment that she was in found this diary.

And it has a...

salacious passage where she showered with her father.

She thinks at an age that was inappropriate.

And now it might end up with somebody like, let's go get James O'Keefe.

We'll get him in the middle of the night and get him in his underwear and put him out.

That's what they did.

Oh, the National Archive says that Donald Trump has all these classified.

Well,

what do we do?

Well, let's have a performance art SWAT raid and we'll bring little labels classified and we'll scatter the documents all over the ground, take pictures of them, and then we'll leak it.

And

that's what they did.

Roger Stone will tip off CNN and have another performance.

They were completely a rogue operation, the FBI.

And they were dangerous.

And that is, I think, attributable to Mueller, but especially Comey.

And now what's even more shameful, they get on television.

McCabe does.

Comey does.

Christopher Wray, to his credit, hasn't popped up yet, but he probably will.

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Victor,

it seems like a million years

since Elon Musk was a mini colossus striding the public stage and then his breakup with Donald Trump and then the threat of a third party and today's news though is that Elon Musk is foregoing this third party effort and if he does weigh in politically in 2028 he wants to put his attention time money behind J.D.

Vance

and I don't know if there's any

there's been any mending of fences but anyway Elon Musk is backing down from this third third-party effort.

Any thoughts on that, Victoria?

Well, we said that would happen.

Remember when we discussed it, we said that, first of all,

the way that our political system is set up, it really is a two-party system.

And people who have tried that, even with a lot of money or prestige, like I think we mentioned the Bull Mosque Party of

1912 under Teddy Roosevelt, and he had left the presidency, had taken over for William McKinley, but he didn't really get a quasi-third term.

And he let his

successor, William Howard Taft, be president, and then he ran against Taft.

Taft came in third.

Wilson had all of the Democratic vote, and the Republicans split it.

That's the only role of a third party.

It's a spoiler.

Even Ralph Nader supposedly may have cost

Al Gore the election by taking key votes, a few thousand in Florida that swung Florida over to George W.

Bush.

And then, of course, Ross Perot in 92 got 19% of the vote.

I think that was the second highest of a third-party candidate

if you exclude the Civil War candidates.

And I think that did cost George H.W.

Bush the election of 92, because it did split the conservative vote.

Rush Limbaugh made a good argument about that at the time when there was kind of a Perot mania and he said, this guy is not a conservative.

Not that George H.W.

was necessarily a pure conservative, but he was preferable to Bill Clinton and Perot.

That was the argument Rush was using.

So it was not going to work.

And I think if people went to him and said,

you may not like the EV, the end of the EV mandates, and you might feel that you weren't appreciated after you spent, you know, three...

almost $300 million

and you concentrated it in places like Pennsylvania that helped Trump and you may be angry that the Doge took your neutral reputation and your endorsement of Trump after the first assassination, and it hurt your brand, and people have boycotted you, all that.

But if you take reflection, Donald Trump will not stop SpaceX flights.

Not like Gavin Newsom was said to

Musk, you can't, our California coastal mission will not let you fly out of Vanderburgh, launch out of Vanderburgh missile space base.

We don't do things like that.

And if you're smart, you'll see that while you've had disagreements with Trump and you rashly and unwisely accused him of being in the Epstein files in

an injurious fashion, he's the only thing you got, Elon.

And you can square this circle by you don't have to humiliate yourself and go back and beg for Trump's forgiveness.

All you have to do is say you're not going to have a third party to injure the Republicans in the midterms, and then you can look at J.D.

Vance,

and that will be helping Donald Trump because it will continue the MAGA tradition, it will help them in the midterms, and you can kind of save your conservative credentials by backing J.D.

Vance, who has, after all, he worked with Peter Till in the financial order.

He knows the people very well in Silicon Valley, and he agrees with almost everything you say.

So it's a logical move.

And I think Trump endorses it.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, Victor, let's take on one other topic.

Then we're going to go to a break, and then we're going to have a final topic as we round out the show.

Again, we're recording on Wednesday, the 20th of August, and this episode is up on

the 21st of August.

I knew you slipped in a special episode.

You were interviewing.

Senator Eric Schmidt.

That's coming out this Friday.

It was a wonderful interview.

I wanted it to come out

Tuesday the 19th, but we had an interview with Barry Strauss that was pre-arranged before the Schmidt interview, and he talked about his new book on Rome and the Jews.

So we did two interviews this week

with Senator Schmidt from Missouri.

Wonderful guy, very smart.

very well acquainted.

He has a new book out about how

lawfare and the degree to which Republicans can master the law and turn it back on the people who are warping it in a legal fashion.

And then Barry Strauss talked about

the very

mercur relationship between the Jewish population and the Roman Empire.

Oh, interesting.

All right.

Well, I cannot wait to listen.

Now, let's get back to an old topic, which is Cincinnati and the beatdown there from a few weeks ago, which got to national attention because of the outrage over no action at the time.

You know, the police department, the mayor, no one was doing anything while this

very disturbing video was out in the public.

So, what's happened three weeks later, four weeks later?

Well, Victor, the

racial justice warriors, race hustlers, whatever you want to call them, in Cincinnati had a press conference last week, and it's very much a blame the victim.

You had an Ohio State Representative Cecil Thomas who said that the

these folks want the victims charged.

They want them charged with instigating this riot.

This state rep says that the fact that the victim hasn't been charged, quote, raises serious questions on whether there is bias involved in the investigation.

Another participant at this press conference, Tracy Hunter, who is a former judge, says, we are here today because of the injustices that we have identified in the handling or rather mishandling of this incident, et cetera, et cetera.

Even the mayor said something stupid, idiotic, implying, like, yeah, all the investigation work hasn't been done yet.

But Victor,

this

hustling in the face of what our lying eyes don't saw is striking.

Every day there are millions of encounters between two people who exchange profanities, insults, some of them probably racial, and they have a one-on-one.

And that's what they're claiming this white gentleman and this black gentleman did.

But what we don't see every day is people rushing to

rat pack one of the people.

people in a personal dispute and then start attacking people gratuitously of the same race and then when they're down on the ground try to kill them by stomping their brains out.

That's what happened.

And so they're taking one one-on-one encounter and claiming that it justified

kicking and basically middle-aged people by young women and men on racial grounds.

Take that logic.

That would mean that the white person who was shot and killed the Congressional Aid in Washington and

then,

I don't like to use that word, big balls or big testicles, who was beaten to a pulp white teenagers tried to assault his girlfriend.

It would mean that

if out of that situation a group of white people who saw this encounter, then, and

this was actually

black on white, it wasn't mutual, then they started kicking and beating up

not the black assailants, but people in the general public who happened to be black.

So just imagine, you know, 30 or 40 white teenagers, they see some black thugs attack a white person, not one-on-one, it's even a worse parallel,

and then they start just stomping on black people and then the white community says to the black community, well, you guys started it.

You guys started it, so we finished it because of these

black-on-white encounter.

But it's even worse than that because it was just one man and one man arguing, and then these black teenagers rushed in.

And

I don't understand, again, the logic because

everybody in the black community has remarked that the crime rate is very dangerous.

It's completely out of control.

We know that people are leaving blue states, I think, six to eight million a year.

There's going to be ten to fifteen congressional seats that will change in the 2030

census.

We know that people in in Minnesota, Los Angeles, if you go down to downtown Minnesota or you look at what Los Angeles has become, the downtown, we know these big blue cities are dying.

New York may survive because of Wall Street,

but not if Mohandami is elected.

So you would think there would be self-criticism, there would be self-reflection.

No, it's the same old thing.

Can't we find some white person who's responsible for this so that we don't have to account for this type of behavior.

And this behavior was not unusual.

You see it with the mass looting, you saw it with the mass shoplifting, you saw it

again and again after the George Floyd.

And the problem that I feel bad about this, these black leaders, they just keep talking about this and they won't address the problems and they think it's a white-black issue.

It's not.

It is not a white-black issue.

It is a black issue that everybody in the United States is worried about, the black crime rate.

It's Hispanics are worried about it.

Asians are worried about it.

It's been directed with a knockout game against traditional Jews.

We saw it in San Francisco where Asians were targeted.

The Hispanic community has been at odds with the black, and it all revolves around

that people who live in large cities, especially in blue states, but not exclusively so.

Memphis is a very dangerous place.

I stayed there once four days.

It was frightening to walk around there.

And I can tell you that it's not a white-black thing.

It is, and it's not a, it is a black-black thing, too.

The black elite and upper-middle class,

let me get back to 50 years ago.

Jesse Jackson infamously said that when I walk down the street and I see somebody walking behind me and I turn and I find out it's not a black youth, I feel relieved.

He said that.

But there's no, there's no attention.

Obama never talks about it.

Eric Colder never talks about it.

It's just blame, blame, blame.

And then you get the Joy Reids and the Doreen St.

Felice's from the New Yorker magazine.

You get Luke Wood, the Sac State president.

You get all of these leaders in the black community on the left.

And

they just double down that it's white racism, it's white people are dirty, it's white people throughout history cause plagues, it's white people, I hate them, it's Ellie Mostel saying I don't want to see any white people after COVID.

And all of that does is just further polarize it.

And there's nobody who has the guts.

Trump is the only person who has the guts.

And even he was careful in his language.

He didn't say, I'm going in there because it's a 75%.

Well, now I think it's most of the black middle class is leaving Washington.

So I don't even think it's 75% black anymore.

Because the upper middle class that have really good, mostly government jobs, live in the suburbs.

And why did they leave?

They left because they didn't feel safe.

And they knew that they couldn't speak out against it.

And it's not going to change until people just say, and you know what is final

observation.

50 years ago, racist, if you were called a racist,

that was a career-ending epithet.

And today, unfortunately, it means nothing.

They have used that so promiscuously to anybody they disagree with as a political tool that it's kind of a joke now.

And so people are going I think their collective attitude is we're going to treat everybody the same in a multiracial postmodern society 65 years after the civil rights movement.

We've had a twenty trillion dollar massive transfer of capital to the Great Society programs.

We started affirmative action in 1965.

We supercharged it with DEI.

We've done all of these things and we're more polarized than ever.

And we've created the largest black middle class and professional class and wealthy class in history and yet the leadership is mostly still left-wing and still using the race card and we're just going to have to ignore it.

And

I think that's what everybody's attitude is now.

And that's why they're so frustrated because 26% of black males voted for Donald Trump.

55% of Hispanic males voted for Donald Trump.

49% of all Hispanics voted for Donald Trump.

There was a really astute and alarming

observation by a Democratic pollster and get out the person, an expert on democratic registration.

And he pointed out that the Republicans, for the first time in history, are out-registering voters in states, and that isn't the worst of it.

He says, our strategy of going into the black and Hispanic and Asian communities and just trying to register anybody we can is a mistake.

He said, from now on, we need to target left-wing people and ask that question because we are registering people who vote against us.

And that's what killed us in the 2024.

The white vote was pretty much at 57 to 59 percent in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

However, what killed us in 2024 was a marked increase in the Hispanic vote in particular, a little incremental bump with women, a little bit larger with youth, and 26% of the black male vote.

It's not a large number, but it was enough to account for that 1.7 million person margin.

And so I just think that we're at the point now that

if you know you treat people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin and you disagree with

someone and they say you're racist, nobody cares.

It doesn't matter.

I'm reviewing right now for the new criteria a book written by an African-American immigrant.

on classics

and I won't even give the author the pleasure of

advertising the book.

It is one of the worst books I've ever read.

All it's talking about, it has nothing to do with Cicero or Thucydides.

It's just

classics is a white racist construct.

Yes, I came from a different country.

Yes, I came here illegally.

Yes, I was given a scholarship to prep school.

Yes, I was given a scholarship to Stanford.

Yes, I was given a scholarship to Princeton.

Yes, I was a beneficiary of DEI.

Yes, I've been having all these things.

And yes, I am a classicist, but I do not believe that Latin and Greek should be taught.

It's a racist construct.

It's an imperialistic thing, and the whole system is rotten.

And I'm going to try basically to disrupt it.

Seems he needs a psychiatrist more than that.

Well,

that sums up, you know, Ilyan Almar saying that dictatorship was worse in the United States and Somalia.

And she said that she got here, she saw it looked like garbage everywhere.

That sums up that

Delaya Gonzalez, was that her name, that went to the Guatemalan representative from Illinois, and she went to Mexico City, and in Spanish, she said her first loyalty was to Guatemala, not as an American citizen, to her country.

And

if you don't have a civic education program, and you're not taught about the unique nature of the United States, and the left opens the borders and brings in people from very impoverished, backward countries, and Haiti is a backward country, and you bring these places people in, and you don't try to assimilate or integrate them, but you say that the moment you set foot, you're second generation or first, your moment your parents set foot or you set foot in the country, you have claims against the majority population and you're going to attack it

seemingly on principle, but factually and concretely because you expect to get something out of DEI and white guilt and transform that into a lucrative career as long as you keep using the race card.

That's your currency, then you're going to create just

a lack of empathy, a lack of credibility.

Nobody's going to want to listen to you anymore.

And you're just, and that's part of the whole anger right now.

Donald Trump came in and said, everybody is sick of this.

DEI is like a Russian commissariat.

It drags down the economy.

It creates racial tensions.

No more separate graduations, separate dorms.

We're sick of it.

We're going to treat people by their character and not their color.

And then all these professional clouds.

Oh, my God.

They can't do this.

And the irony is it would be much better in the future to say that you

were not a beneficiary of DEI, that you got your job as a professor at Stanford or Princeton or Harvard because of your scholarship and not because of that.

And it will be the best thing in the world for minorities.

Well, Victor, we've got to make a hard stop soon, and we're going to take a break.

And when we come back, I'm going to ask you one question.

You raised, we were talking about Finland, and I had this issue floating around.

It was the 50th anniversary of the Helsinki Accords earlier this month.

And I'd just like to raise that with you, get your quick views, and then we're going to be off to the races.

But we will get Victor's thoughts when we come back from these final important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

So, Victor, here's, again, it's this month, the 50th anniversary of the Helsinki Accords.

And it began, the Accords themselves have a decalogue.

And

I was reading it and I thought, well, this is really interesting given the whole current EU background

and how it just, and the one-worlders of Davos, etc.

Here are some of the...

Here are four items out of the decalogue of the Helsinki Accords.

The first one, sovereign equality, respect for the rights inherent in sovereignty.

Then number three, inviability of frontiers.

This is when

half of Africa is coming up through Italy.

Number four, territorial integrity of states.

And number seven of the Decalogue of the Helsinki Accords, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of thought, conscience, religion, or belief.

And this is at a time now when in England, if you are praying silently, you stand the risk of getting

arrested, even if you're praying in your own house and you happen to be X amount of feet from an abortion clinic.

So, Victor, I don't want to attack the Helsinki Accords, but

I don't know that Europe believes in the Helsinki Accords that were adopted

not all that long ago.

Any thoughts on that?

When the European,

you know, the European trade

forerunners of the EU,

the common market after World War II, you could see where this was going.

If they had said this is very dangerous because we're going to make a terror-free, integrated economy,

that resulted in the German miracle, etc.

But you could see what was going to happen.

Then it was going to be the European Commission and then the European Union.

And that really destroyed the sovereignty of what is now, you know, I don't know how many, 27,

26, 23, I can't remember all of the EU members, but they don't have sovereignty anymore, and they have an unelected commission that runs it.

They have a huge bureaucracy, hundreds of thousands of people.

And it is,

there is no sovereignty.

The EU can tell Poland that they have not only can't control their borders, but they have to take illegal aliens from other countries.

They can tell the Greeks you can't call a Cretan banana a real banana because we'd think it doesn't have enough length to to it.

So they intrude in the internal affairs of all these countries, and then

they imprint a socialist agenda.

It's kind of like New York City.

There's a good article today

about Mondami is a reflection, not a catalyst for socialism.

There's 600,000 people in New York that work for the government.

of some sort and there's 600,000 that work for government-related NGOs, 1.2 1.2 million people.

And I think there's 40 or 50% of people live in rent-controlled apartments.

And

once you have that embedded socialism, it's very hard to

defend the ideas of nationalism, patriotism, border sovereignty.

It's a utopian cosmopolitan movement.

And it's ancient.

It goes back to ancient Greece.

Socrates said that he was a polites tu cosmu, I'm a citizen of the world.

Supposedly, I think Plutarch quoted that much later.

I don't know if he actually said it.

But there was that Pythagorean, utopian, we're all one people,

we're all going to be equal by result.

It's something imprinted.

There's that famous saying that socialism never works and it never dies.

It appeals to something in us that we're all going to be the same.

And then when you try to implement it, you say that there's another human instinctual urge that I want to be different and I want to be controlled of my own destiny.

And therefore, socialism becomes communism and uses force to kill people.

In human nature, people want advantage, even the, especially the lefties.

They want equality, but they want their DACA, right?

They're such a strange bunch because they talk about,

you know, we saw that,

and I think we're gonna make the district attorney she wasn't really a district a DA being arrested and she threw that fit yes I'm the AG I'm the AG yeah yeah a district attorney general I should say and it was a typical left-wing thing where you don't know who I am I want privilege I want privilege and it's the same thing with

I do not want a wind turbine in my neighborhood I do not want a solar farm near me.

I don't want any, I don't want a public school in the inner city near me.

I don't, it's just, you get to the point that leftism is a psychological mechanism of squaring a circle that you're very, very selfish.

And you're so selfish that you construct an abstract belief system in which you're so unselfish.

And then every once in a while you

you show everybody what you're really what that leftism is a is a construct to hide the fact that you're a selfish person yeah and it's the it's the picture of dorian gray right it's uh

it is it's it's a very strange

uh

and i i i get back to that thing right during the george floyd uh

i walked on

Stanford campus and there was a BMW

convertible and two

guys walked out with polo shirts and

flip-flops, Stanford students, in the A lot,

very expensive, and they had Black Lives Matter on their BMW.

I mean, yeah, their BMW.

And I thought, wow.

Black Lives Matter, and you're driving a BMW convertible, and you're at Stanford.

Are you going over to East Palo Alto and tutoring inner-city kids at all?

Or is this just a mechanism that allows you to have your little fat boy

traditional lifestyle?

It's the beauty of lawn signs, you know.

I mean I used to ride my bike in the Stanford community and it went from, I'm not kidding you, I knew the houses I drove by, it went from this house doesn't tolerate racism, you know, those, there's no, to the Ukrainian flag there.

And I'd always think, I'm going to go stop at that guy's house and say, what is your strategy to give aid to defeat the Russians and get them out?

Do you want to go over there?

Do you want to give them more money?

Or what is the strategy?

And are you worried that there's been a million dead, wounded, and missing?

They have none.

Well, Victor, we're going to have three minutes and hard stop.

And I want to thank you for all the wisdom you shared.

And I want to thank the many people that write to the show or about the show on YouTube, Rumble, Victor's website, and other platforms.

And here's one

tiny little long, but from YouTube the other day from Stephanie Surface 8761, who wrote, Thank you so much, VDH, for mentioning the past history of World War II.

My grandparents were thrown out of German Silesia, which is now Poland, and killed as refugees.

Many Poles were kicked out of eastern Poland, which became part of Ukraine.

Their villages were burnt, and they were sent in cattle cars to former German Silesia to settle in the empty houses of the Germans.

They were never sure if they would have to eventually move again.

I went 20 years ago to Silesia to visit the former country of my ancestors and met still some old Poles who remembered these horrible things, fleeing their burnt cities and villages with their parents, all done thanks to Stalin's thugs.

Never forget the old Polish women who still had tears in her eyes talking about her ordeal when she was a child fleeing with her parents.

That's a very interesting and the left never talks about anything.

They think that in

1989, 90, all of a sudden these borders were created, and they have no idea that western Ukraine was Poland until 1939 and stolen by Joseph Stalin and ethnically cleansed of every Roman Catholic Polish speaker, and that became Western Ukraine.

They have no idea that Eastern Ukraine's borders are the result of Khrushchev's little

tokenism to the Ukrainian nationalists that he would allow them to have a border

that was quite generous.

And he created that border, I think, in 1956 or something like that.

They have no idea that Crimea actually declared its independence after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

For two or three years it was an independent nation.

Ukraine got it before.

They just beat Russia to the punch.

So they

it's a very it's kind of like the Balkans, that area of the world.

And it's a very volatile place with a lot of historical grievances and violence.

And yet this left-wing idea comes in as, oh,

this monster that we reset and empowered and allowed to go in there in 2014 and 2022,

we don't want to talk about that culpability, but we're suddenly going to demand that Donald Trump come in and win the war.

and get every Russian out to restore the 2013 borders.

But I'm not going to tell you how he should do do it, and I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to do to achieve it.

I'm just going to sit in the sidelines and

forget about, I don't know, 80 years of history and the Obama culpability and the Biden culpability.

That's where we are.

It's very sad.

Well, Victor, you've been terrific.

And I want to thank the folks who write to me about civil thoughts.

That's the free weekly email newsletter I do for the Center for Civil Society.

It comes out every Friday, gives you 14 recommended readings.

You can get it by going to civilthoughts.com, sign up, easy peasy.

It's free, and we're not selling your name.

So, thanks for those who do that.

Thanks for folks who subscribe to Victor's website, the Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

Follow Victor on X at

V D Hansen.

Victor, adios, my friend.

So long, folks.

Thanks for watching.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody.