Goldberg Leak, Crockett Crass, and PBS Mea Culpa

If you're like me, you have a lot of product on your bathroom counter. Well, I have found the Secret Serum, and it's Vibriant Super C Serum.
The ingredients in this one bottle can replace your day creams, eye creams, night creams, neck creams, wrinkle creams, and even dark spot reducers. Made in the USA with the highest quality ingredients, including vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, vitamin B5, and vitamin E, Super C Serum delivers noticeable results.
Simplify your skincare routine, get a healthier complexion, and minimize wrinkles and age spots with vibrance. I just began using Super C Serum last week and I love it.
My skin feels so much better, soft, moist, and fresh. And by the way, it smells beautiful like the orange blossoms outside my kitchen door.
Give it a try and you'll love it too. And if you don't find it better than your current skincare routine, you'll get a full refund.
Go to vibrance.com slash victor to save up to 37% off and free shipping. That's Vibrance, V-I-B-R-I-A-N-C-E, Vibrance.com slash Victor.
And we'd like to thank Vibrance for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

he is the author of a website victorhansen.com

the name of the website is The Blade of Perseus

and you can join us for all of Victor's writings

both free and subscribed writings

we have VDH Ultra

and you can subscribe for $6.50 a month And join us for all of Victor's writings, both free and subscribed writings.

We have VDH Ultra, and you can subscribe for $6.50 a month or $65 a year. And we'd love to have everybody come subscribe.
There's two Ultra articles each week and also a video that Victor does exclusively for our subscribers. Well, Victor, lots of news this week.
And I think the first thing heading off the news list is the leak to Jeffrey Goldberg on the strike against the Hooties. And Mike Waltz is trying to, I would say, fend off all of the bad press that they're getting from it.
And that bad press includes Senator Chris Murphy saying that this inclusion of Goldberg has violated the Espionage Act. So they're trying to get some very serious charges against him.
I was wondering your thoughts. This whole story is incoherent because there's so many Tessras left out of the mosaic.
So ostensibly, we know that they had about 15, really the top Trump people, Secretary of Treasury, they had the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, the Special Envoy to Ukraine and the Middle East, etc., etc., and the vice president. And they got together over a series of days to use this encrypted signal mechanism.
Some person of some importance once wanted to communicate with me, and I didn't even know what it was. But it wasn't signal, but it was something like that.
It was a secure thing where you text and it disappears, but that one didn't even disappear because there was records. And so, over a period of about, I don't know, two weeks, they were discussing various things, but in specific, whether to reply to the Houthis, who have basically shut down the Red Sea.
And the Biden administration had no strategy to go after the architects of their missile attacks on ships, other than just to spend, you know, two or three million dollars a missile to take down one of their drones or one of their launching pads. But they didn't solve the problem.
They didn't want to solve the problem. So these guys got together.
Somebody, they had initials, put JG. And that may have been one of the preliminary, and the preliminary selection, that may have been one of the preliminary selection.

That may have been one of the principals. Deputy something, I forgot his name.
But the number that was associated was Jeffrey Goldberg. So everybody knows who Jeffrey Goldberg is.
Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor of Atlantic. He's known because he was the one that cooked up this slur right before the 2020 election, which he alleged that four unnamed sources, later he identified General Kelly, who was chief of staff of Trump.
Kelly denied it at the time, but once he fell out with Trump, he reversed course and said that it was true. But there were 19 people in the meeting that said that Donald Trump did not say, I'm not going to the Nairn Marn Cemetery.
I was on the American Battle of Monuments Commission. I had been there.
It's a beautiful rest. It's a very hollowed ground.
And Trump,

the weather was bad that day. So he cooked up this story that Trump had said suckers and losers.
Even John Bolton, who despised Trump and was in the room, said he didn't say that. Kelly then tried to say, well, he said something like that at Arlington once.
But he said, why did they do it?

But, you know, that was kind of like the bridges over Tokyo Ray when Frederick marched and where do we get these people? Why do they do it? You know, it's not necessarily a negative thing. It's more positive.
So anyway, the point that I'm making is he had this record of being a loose cannon. He was the editor of Atlanta.

Trump said, well, it's a losing, Carol the vet and Trump said, it's a losing mechanism. True,

but it's a losing mechanism backed by Steve Jobs' widow, Lisa, who's worth about 10 billion plus

dollars and is willing to, before they go through her fortune, it will be the 25th century. And she doesn't mind.
She just wants a so-called highbrow veneer to go after Republicans. And that's what they do.
And so he has a terrible reputation as a Trump hater, as somebody who makes up stuff, as somebody as a fabulous.

And my point is this. Of all the people that are journalists, you wouldn't want him on a confidential.
You know, it would be bad enough if it was a conservative person. Okay.
So then he's looking at this stuff in amazement. Does he tell anybody, hey, I'm that JG is me, the guy that hates you all, Jeffrey Goldberg? No, he doesn't.
So he just sits there and he watches to see how this conversation over days is going to proceed. And then when he finds out they are discussing the pros and cons of going in to hit the Houthis.
And then he hears that they did do it. Then he thinks, ah, now I'm going to expose the whole thing.
And me, me, me, me, me, Jeffrey Goldberg found this out. So he brings the text.
The text, he has them all. And he exposes them of what they were discussing for a week.
So on the 24th of March, he spills the beans, but it's something that happened on the 15th. But he was waiting and waiting and getting all this stuff.
So where do we, there's a lot of takeaways from this. Takeaway number one.
Mike Wall says he doesn't know who Jeffrey Goldberg is. So that means somebody gave, he was the coordinator.
That means two things. He or his staff did not look at the initials and correlate them with a name they got from their phone, the phone number, text number.
That's derelict, number one. Number two, that's the good interpretation.
So, number 1B is, why would anybody who's working for Donald Trump have any number of this villainous person? Why would they have them on their phone unless they were calling him or talking to him or leaking? It reminds me, unfortunately, of Anonymous. Remember that guy who was leaking and leaking? Or it reminds me of Andrew Vindman, Alexander Vindman, excuse me, when he was listening to a classified talk from the president to Ukraine, and he was a dual citizen, Ukrainian expatriate as well.
And then he calls Eric Saramela, the so-called whistleblower, and Saramela never heard a word, but he got this. So he was trying, somebody, it seems to me, is so derelict or lax, he should be fired on the staff if that was where it came from.

Or they're deliberately living a double life and they're just sort of, well, Jeffrey's

a good friend.

I met him.

Oh, I know Jeffrey Gold, you know, and they put his name on there.

Or they, it didn't even have to be that.

He might have had it in his phone and JB or something.

He got a turn.

But either way, this is inexcusable to have that guy of all the journalists in the United States. Number two, it's very reminiscent of General Stanley McChrystal.
And Stanley McChrystal in 2000, I guess it was 2010, was the chief officer, the head officer, the lead in charge of all forces in Afghanistan, American forces, I think NATO forces as well. And he embedded Michael Hastings, who was a Jeffrey Goldberg.
He was a left wing lunatic. He died tragically.
He was a Rolling Stone reporter and he let him hang out with him for four or five days. And when Joe Biden, who everybody despised in the military, because he was—and this was very prescient.
They knew that he was incompetent in 2010. They couldn't—even they couldn't imagine what he would do in 2021, 11 years later, and pull out and leave $50 billion, et cetera.
So they said, Joe, bite me, one of the persons. And something to the effect, there's a call from Joe, bite me.
And McChrystal didn't say anything. And Michael Hestian put it in this long thing.
And so under Article 88, if you publicly disparage the President of the United States, of course, they don't enforce it if you do it against Trump, retired or active, but they called McChrystal back. And he said, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
And then there's no excuse for me not objecting to that term, da-da-da. I shouldn't have had a Rolling Stone person.
I'm an intelligence officer as well. And they fired him.
They removed him and he's shortly retired. But the thing was, being the Obamas, this is how the Obamas always acted.
It was always once we screw somebody over, then we give a little fillip or we just have a little afterthought and they're on our side. So they said, even though you were not a four-star general long enough before your forced retirement, we're going to allow you to be a four-star general in retirement.
And you can say that you're forced permanently, not just your last promotion, which to be permanent had to have a longer tenure before retirement. And then he evolved, I'm getting off track, but he evolved

into a Trump-hating, pro-Harris. He was the guy, remember, who said, oh my gosh, right during Black Lives Matter and George, I didn't know that Robert E.
Lee owned slaves? Oh my gosh, the Confederacy was a bad cause?

And I'm discovering

that in 2020

when everybody slaves? Oh my gosh! The Confederacy was a bad cause? And I'm discovering that in 2020, when the whole of our cities are going up and everybody hates Donald Trump and the left is, oh my gosh, I'm going to go over to that wall right now and tear off that picture that I've had for my whole life on my wall. And then I'm going to throw it in the dumpster.
And then I'm going to write Atlantic Magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, see what I'm getting to? Jeffrey Goldberg. And then I'm going to say, I put his picture in the dumpster.
And now I'm going to start a corporate leadership from all the left-wing CEOs that can come to me and I'll teach them how to be real leaders, moral and physical. So it was like that.
There's another couple of things is there was the interplay between everybody. And Pete Hexeth, you know, wanted a go-go and Waltz's go-go.
They had the little emojis, you know, fire and a fist. Everybody on the left went freaked out about that.
But then the main thing was that J.D. Vance said, I'm sick and tired.
They don't pay. The Europeans, they use the commercial lines of the Red Sea, Suez.
That's where they get their oil. And they don't, what are they going to pay? And Steve Miller sort of seconded that.
That was the MAGA base. And he said, I don't think the MAGA people signed up for this, but I'm not sure this was an optional military engagement.
What I'm thinking it was is that the Red Sea is important to us. So that's our interest, that we have ships that go through there that nobody attacks.
If they attack us, we should be Jacksonians. Don't tread on us.
But I don't really care that we, as Obama said, the said the europe you know i'm just getting tired of the europeans they're freeloaders they're freeloaders they're free riders free riders is the word he said and what he meant was what jd vance meant that they're getting free protection and they don't and i can see why he's angry about it because they trash us all the time they. They make fun of us.
They have a $200 billion surplus. They have asymmetrical trade percentages.
But you can't really say that the United States protecting the Red Sea, we're going to charge people like customers. You know, like we're here at a ticket booth.
You want to go in the Red Sea? We'll escort you through. It's like somebody going through crossing the Acheron and the Styx and protecting you from Karabaris and saying, I'll lead you through the underworld.
Just pay me. And so that was a weird thing that everybody, the Europeans freaked out about.
There were some other things about the people got angry about it. Really angry.
Hillary Clinton got really, really angry. And it was weird.
Every single person who got angry had committed the same or worse offense. Hillary Clinton said, this is outrageous.
And then it took like a nanosecond for the social media pack to say, not as outrageous as using 30,000 emails over your private server illegally, and then destroying the evidence under subpoena that included classified documents that you transmitted. And by the way, there were no classified information on these things.
They were, you know, they should have been more discreet. And then Anthony Blinken, I think, weighed in and everybody said, well, wait a minute.

You're the guy that rounded up the 51 intelligence authorities and had them lie with Mike Morale to arm Joe Biden in the debate.

And you affected an election because that really hurt Donald Trump to have that lie promulgated in national television on your prompt.

And then Susan Rice came in and she said, this is the worst thing I've ever heard. I thought, no, the worst thing I ever heard is you went on TV five times and lied to the American people in a single day to say that this pre-planned terrorist attack that you knew was coming and you had information on the Benghazi consulate and annexed.
You said it was over a video, some Coptic filmmaker, and you lied. You lied.
You knew it was a terrorist al-Qaeda-related attack. And then, not to be outdone, we brought out Leon Panetta out of the car.
What are you serious? Well, Leon, it's not as serious of you being one of the 51 intelligence authorities that said this has all the hallmarks of Russian information. When you knew the FBI had the laptop, had authenticated it, and you went out and lied to the American people to help Joe Biden win the debate, to help—he didn't win that second one, by the way – and then to win the election.
So they all came out of the woodwork, and they were all discredited. And then finally, Tulsi Gabbard and everybody went before Congress, and they said, you know, you're using this signal.
And Radcliffe, the director of the CIA, said, well, actually, we inherited. I got a phone that was reprogrammed.
You guys were doing it. What does it matter? It's like, oh, you know.
And so it was kind of a circus. And at the bottom line, it kind of, in a weird way, it'll be forgotten.
By the time people are listening to this, we're doing this on Tuesday, March 26th. I don't know if you guys are even talking about it.
But the reason that you're not talking about it, because there was no classified information. And more importantly, they saw all these people disagreeing and arguing pretty well.
And they want to fire Pete Hexeth because he mentioned some particular type of operation, etc., etc. Nothing's going to come of it.
But they need an intensive investigation. They need to get everybody who had access to this meeting in any remote way and bring them all in a room and say, I want to see all of your cell phones.
And I want to see if any of you have a JG that got this number. Now, you may think it might have been John Gibbs or somebody and you thought it was Jeffrey Goldberg, but that's not an adequate excuse.
I want to know who has this guy's number. Everybody.
And they will find him. And that person should be fired.
So spoke Victor. So spoke Victor.
Zarathusa. Let's hope that it happens.
But it seems to me that the thing that's missing in the news, and you can comment on this, I have a sponsor to read, But is the fact that they did hit the Houthi, and their strike was successful. And so...
It was very successful. It took out some of the, as I said, the architects, and they used jet aircraft, which were much with smart weaponry, and it's much, they used some predators predators, I mean some tomahawks or something,

but it was a much cheaper way to use our resources.

And I think the Houthis are going to stop it,

or they're going to lose their power grid.

And Israel's already taken out their port facilities,

and Iran has already been warned by this administration

that if you start shipping things in by sea or by air, and they include missiles, we're going to shoot them down. And so I think they're going to, it's going to work.
That was the whole point, wasn't it? To reclaim the Red Sea. People should remember that under Joe Biden, the world lost its access to much of the world's commercial waterways.
We had Panama, the Panama Canal was threatened because we had a Chinese-related company at the entry and the exit. That's no longer true.
The Red Sea was in the hands, basically, of the Houthis. The eastern Mediterranean was very dangerous.
The Gulf of Straits of Hormuz, Iran was harassing ships. You couldn't really go in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait.
China was just, you know, they were bumping Philippine ships. so we lost we being the western world and i guess jd vance would say well that's okay

because we don't need them but it's not. I think we need to step up and reclaim the waterways.
Teddy Roosevelt, I know it's kind of a dichotomy. It's what is Trumpism? I wrote a thing on the New Criterion about the contradictions.
You're not isolationist, and you're not neoconservative interventionists. It's what Walter Russell Meade called a Jacksonian, an Andrew Jacksonian.
It's like, we don't want to screw around with you. You don't screw around with us.
You touch me and I'm going to hit you twice as hard as you touch me. So it's a don't tread on me, no better friend.
Quoting Plutarch's account of Sulla, Jim Mattis, the general, has often quoted that line. It's in the Plutarch's life of Sulla where he says, Rome is going to be no better friend and no worse than me.
Well, Victor, let's welcome back a sponsor of your show, Field of Greens. We know eating healthy is key to staying healthy,

but life gets busy and sticking to a perfect diet isn't always realistic. Field of Greens

makes it easy. It's whole fruits and vegetables.
That's it. And we could all use more of those in

our diet. Just one drink and I've got my healthy head start on the day.
Every fruit and vegetable

in Field of Greens is doctor selected for specific health benefits. There's a heart health group,

Lost in the healthy head start on the day. Every fruit and vegetable in Field of Greens is doctor selected for specific health benefits.
There's a heart health group, lungs, kidney and metabolism groups, even healthy weight group and Field of Greens promises at your next checkup, your doctor will notice your improved health or your money back. I've got a 20% discount to get you started.
Go to fieldofgreens.com and use my code Victor, V-I-C-T-O-R. That's fieldofgreens.com, code Victor.
And we thank Field of Greens for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson show. And I do use Field of Greens daily, and it's as good as having a drink of coffee.
So I do really like it. Well, Victor, so back to the current pressing news, we have Jasmine Crockett seems to be coming out in front of the Democratic Party.
And it seems to be with a lot of crassness. Her recent slur has been against Governor Abbott, who has been in a wheelchair since he was 26.
And she said that he was the governor hot wheels to... She also said he was not hot.
He's a mess. And then she lied and said she was not referring to his tragic accident that Oak Tree fell on him when he was in law school while he was jogging.
It was horrific.

He's been very courageous.

And she said, well, I was thinking of wheels like train wheels and airplane wheels.

And he's deported.

It was so lame.

And then, of course, don't ever bet against the Internet.

Never bet against the Internet. There's 7 billion people out there.
There's people who are in their pajamas, proverbially in their basement, and they're geniuses. I never try to ever go against the internet because they have every word you've ever said.
You know what I mean? I mentioned about wrestling the other day that I was like a piece of flubber that was flapping back and forth. And I got like all these emails that, Victor, now remember, there's a way to prevent that.
And are you sure you went up two weight classes? As I recall, you could only go up three. You could go up three.
They know everything. And so you have to be very careful and always tell the truth.
And so she was lying because in a nanosecond, they said, well, wait a minute. Other people had invented this slur, creepy slur, Hot Wheels, and you put

like on your social media accounts and bounced them around. So you were all for it.
You've

used this term before in the sense that you've condoned it and sanctioned it and promoted

it. And then she said that she was going to hit Ted Cruz and hit him hard.
And then she said, we got to keep punching you. You punch.
You punch. So she was really calling for violence.
I wrote a column today called from, I call it from smut chic to terrorist horn you start what they're doing they're completely melting down they 27 approval we've talked about that with jack but my god they've got tim waltz you remember when they were trying to pass him off as the masculine guy this roly-po, herky-jerky buffoon? And then he said that he was going to kick the Republicans past ASS. And then he goes like this.
He prances on the stage. And he said, I got an app.
And Tesla going down, going down. He was a governor of Minnesota with multi-billion dollar portfolio.

It's like, hey, everybody,

I hope you lose money because I'm mad at...

And then you had, as I said,

that video where they all use the word S-H-I-T,

all the senators,

and then the House members go,

well, they'd got a smutty video.

We get to have one too.

So they drummed up the ninja, you know, hit this, that. And then you had that, I think her name was Senator, I mean, Mark Kelly called him an asshole, but I know when he had attacked Musk, Musk said, you're treasonous.
So then he said, you're an asshole. H-O-L-E.

And then Tina Smith, a Minnesota sinner, said he is a D-I-C-K.

So they were really getting into this smutty, potty mouth video.

We had Al Green shaking his team, trying to disrupt it.

They had to lead him out.

And we had, remember Jamal Bowman, Mr. Fire Alarms?

He got in and said he was a Nazi and a thief.

It was getting really crazy.

And then you had the Teslas that went after Teslas.

Yeah, but do you think that they are betting on popular culture is being attracted by this smuttiness?

I'm just wondering, I mean, thinking about, they must be betting that that's going to draw in people more than it's going to be repulsive. The NBC poll was weak to 27%.
I think CNN was 29% approval. They've gone down 20 points.
They lost the election. You know, they lost 89% of all the counties in the United States.
from 2020, they lost every single state. Blue or red had a better margin for Trump than he did in 2020.
Every one. He won.
He had a blowout in the Electoral College. He won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years.
They won the Senate. They won the House.
They controlled the Supreme Court. These people are politically irrelevant, and that's why they're getting into this terrorist form.
You know, Chuck Schumer, we've talked about, well, he threatened Kavanaugh and Gorsuch by name. He did the same thing again.
He said, you know, don't get mad at me. I got a bunch of Republican.
I know these Republican people, and we're're sending a bunch of our guys into it and we're going to yeah you know get in them and hold them hold them responsible it was like a threat to them and they're doing that all the time and lowering the bar of the acceptable the permissible the unimaginable. And somebody's going to take, you know, and when you have three Tesla bombs, three bombs found in Dallas at the Tesla dealer, and that same morning, the Dallas Morning News had a cartoon.
I think it was Austin, where they found the three incendiary devices. The Dallas Morning News, excuse me, they had a cartoon where a guy goes in to buy a Tesla and he says, do I get a security guard or a security plan? Ha ha.
Jimmy Kimmel, you know, that pregnant pause. Don't hurt Tesla.
So they're condoning it. They're abettors of this violence.
And this comes in the context of, you know,

Joe told a bunch of, about a week before, two weeks before Trump's first assassination, he said, told the donors, we got to put a bullseye on Trump. And then there were two assassinations.
So we're going to see something crazy. And these people are completely on hinge.
Everybody is telling them, Bill Maher and James Carville, Mark Penn, Doug Schoen, everybody who's sensible says, look, we've been here before. We went to the McGovern route, and then we went to the Jimmy Carter route, and we never got a two-term president.
Not since we haven't done it. But we got one in, I feel your pain, Bill Clinton.
And we got Al Gore, who invented the Internet. And the two of them, well, he did.
Did he say he invented the Internet? I'm sorry. He invented it.
And then for the last 20 years, every left-wing reporter who wants to put on some spurs and be a real cowboy tries to argue that he did in some remote, unimaginable fashion.

But the point that I'm making is the 92 and 96 platforms of the Democratic Party were pretty much what a Republican MAGA is today.

And they won.

And they know they can do that.

But they're an addict and they're addicted. And they love this fix because it's funny and smutty and terrorism and violence.
And they think they're cool. And now AOC is in rivalry with Jasmine Crockett.
Ilana Omar, I feel bad. She only got censored once for anti-Semitism.
Maybe Jasmine will get censored twice for the Cruz remark and then punch people and making fun of Abbott. But they want to appeal.
There's one thing that's very important, though. 26% of African-American males voted for Donald Trump.
And this is important because this was in 2024. Only 13%, pretty much what the population demographic is of African American males, voted for Trump in 2020.
Now, why four years later would a black youth between the ages, say, of 18 and 60 take garbage? Why would they vote for someone who was called every single day a racist over a first black woman running, she said she was, she identified as black, but also Asian, Harris. And the answer has to be not just that they like Trump's tough attitude and the mugshot and all that, but they don't like being talked down to.
And they don't, they want to, if you're, I think a lot of the black males were saying, hey, Al Green, this happened later, but the earlier versions of this, and all of you guys, Maxine Waters, Latita James, Fannie Willis, Nathan Wade, just cut it out. We want prices to be affordable.
We want homes to be affordable. We want low interest rates.
We want to be free in our communities from crime. We don't want 12 million foreign nationals coming into our communities, swamping our social services.
We don't like to be called crazy and made fun of when we bring that to your attention. So all of you radical black leadership, you don't represent us anymore.
Those were those city council moments where they went that. And the same thing happened to Hispanics.
So AOC doesn't represent the Hispanic vote. It was 46% to 47% voted for Trump, but 51% of all Hispanic males voted for Trump.
And so they are telling their—and here in California, over half of our legislators are Hispanic, and they're almost all left-wing, but they don't represent their community anymore. And the Democratic Party should know that.
They're bleeding 18 to 30-year-olds. As I said earlier, Michigan, 18 to 30-year-olds went for Trump in Michigan.
I just can't even believe that. What are they called? Generation Z or X? I don't know how they do that.
But this generation is rebelling against being told how to think, what to do. You can't do this.
You can't do that. You should be ashamed of your ancestors.
You should be ashamed of doubting that biological men, all that stuff. And they're rebelling.
And in reaction, they're not moving toward them. They're just saying, you know what? It's like the Obama speech, remember, during the Harris campaign when he kind of gave a little pep talk to these very bright, young, they look like 20-something African-American Harris workers.
And he kind of came in, he marched in like, well, you just came back and got my jet from, Michelle, was it the Hawaii? Was it Martha's Vineyard? Maybe it was the Colorado, man. I can't remember.
Anyway, here's what you guys got to do. Don't even think of voting for Donald Trump.
You know, come on now. You know better than that.
You don't know what's good for you. You don't know what Michelle's doing.
You don't know what Camelo's doing. You know what I'm doing.
That kind of attitude. And they just, that doesn't work well when you talk down to people.
And as if you're suffering from Marxist false consciousness. And that's what it is.

Only the elite knows what's really good for you.

And that's what this Democratic Party, hey, everybody, 80% of you are bigots.

You do not know that a man can play in a volleyball against a woman by law.

You're stupid.

Hey, everybody, you idiots. You don't know that 12 million people have a right to come into this country.
And then that's the attitude. Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back.
I have a couple more questions about that. Stay with us, and we'll be right back.
If you've been with us at all over the last six months or so, you are probably familiar with one of our favorite new brews, Wired2Fish Coffee. As you may know, their coffee is delicious and smooth, but more importantly, the company has amazing commitment to give back.
Wired2Fish Coffee gives back 25% of profits, 25% to conservation, clean water, and things like missions and evangelical outreach. From river cleanups and initiatives for fish habitat to programs that give people in slums clean water and spread the word about Jesus, Wired2Fish Coffee is in it to make the world a better place.
They also have just launched a medium roast decaf. And for avid coffee lovers, their much-loved brew is now available in two-pound and five-pound bags.
Join us and enjoy your coffee while making a difference in the world. And join a community of like-minded coffee lovers.

Subscribe and save today and enjoy discounted coffee and free freight or just give this great brand a try with discount code JUSTNEWS or JUSTTHENews. For 10% off your first order, head over to Wired No.
2 Fish Coffee Today, and make this year a year you align your coffee with your values. This is the sound of a typical cage-free barn.
Thousands of hens confined indoors forever. But at Happy Egg, our hens enjoy over eight acres of outdoor sunshine every day.
They roam, they forage, they thrive in the open air. Because at Happy Egg, happy hens lay happy eggs.
Happy Egg, look for the yellow carton at a store near you. Happy Egg.
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

You can find Victor at X. His handle is at VD Hanson and on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup.
So Victor, in the same NBC article that talked about the 27%, I know you and Jack have talked a little bit about it, but they also said in that article that a large portion of the Democratic population, they didn't give the statistic on this, said that they wanted to fight Trump even more hard. And is that, yeah, doubling down.
But is that NBC's mistake that they really don't have a population that's like that or is mbc accurately reflect reflecting what the democratic leadership should be doing based on that what they're saying now is doesn't your party registration doesn't matter and many of these swing states republicans now are out registering democrats and as i said i think it was david shore i said to jack his research astounded him. He's a demographer-polster.

He found out that contrary to... Democrats.
And as I said, I think it was David Shore, I said to Jack, his research astounded him.

He's a demographer-pollster.

He found out that contrary to

popular wisdom, that

always says the Republicans are trying to suppress

the vote by,

you know, common sense ID

requirement or proof of citizenship

during registration or

more emphasis on one-day voting

rather than this abusive mail-in early

voting. So anyway, he said if the actual people who polled for Trump and who didn't vote had voted, he would have won by five, not 1.6, but by five points.
So that reality should really shake the Democrats up, But when you have 27% of the people to a poll, let's say resident population, I don't know if they're actually likely voters or but just say 27%. And within that 27% that likes Democrats, about 65% poll that they want more radicalism, more confrontation, more, as I had called it, more smut chic, more terrorist porn.
They want that. But when you look at, you're talking about 27%, you're talking about, I don't know, you would, about 17% of the population.
that's who you're talking about, I don't know, 17% of the population.

That's who you're talking about.

And that's 17% of the population that wants to double down on all this stuff.

They hate Moss.

They are overrepresented on MSNBC, CNN, ABC, PBS, NPR, CBS, NBC, Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, New York Times, etc. So they have a big megaphone, but they're bleeding.
They're bleeding. And as I wrote an article also, they're all in these blue states concentrations.
And you look at the blue state fertility rate compared to red state, it's about 0.5 less. They're not reproducing themselves.
And then you've got a migration of 3 to 5 million people leaving these states. As I said to Jack, you're going to have about 10 house seats in the next sentence.
This blue state model is a death cult. It really is.
Most of the universities where these troubles are occurring, they're in blue states. California, New York, Illinois.
Well, Victor, let's then turn to the immigration issue. And we have three West Coast judges out of Seattle who believe that who believe who have ruled that Trump needs to allow in refugees.
And they don't say much about what their refugee status is. But, yes, 40,000 of them that Joe Biden had already somehow accepted before Trump came in.
And so their ruling is that he has to continue to let these immigrants come in. And they come mostly from, well, some of them from Latin America and some of them from Haiti and some of them from Mauritania.
And there's a subtext that they're not really refugees. They're not escaping political bias as much as the Chamber of Commerce, big corporations want people to do, you know, work.
And they want to get a green card for them. But when you have 12 million people, why would you think that you need 40,000 additional people? Why don't you do this, judges? Why don't you say that if somebody came in here illegally and they're residing illegally, then it's legal to rectify that illegality and send them back.
And once you've sent them back, then you might be able to bring in more people legally. But they're not interested in that.
All these Democratic appointed judges, all they're interested in is two things, vying with one another to show all of their people in the university, the media, the foundations, their neighborhoods, their zip codes, that they out-hated Trump versus a rival. That's what they want to do.
And they want to get attention. And they feel, as I said before, it's delay, delay, delay.
And the model, there's two models they're operating under. One is the Robert Mueller 22 months, $40 million model with the Dream Team All-Star Lawyers.
They started right in, in 2017, and by the time they were done,

they had eaten up two years of Donald Trump's first administration.

They took a deep breath, and they said,

Ah, what's next?

Oh, Vindman.

Oh, Sarah Mallow.

Oh, Whistle.

And Peachim.

And that was, you know, all summer long, August, September, October, November, December, the trial in January. And the other way was then when they impeached him again, they tried him.
Then they ate up four years of his wilderness years when he was thinking of, you know, becoming a candidate. So it was the Mar-a-Lago race.
And then it was the E. Jean Carroll suit.
And then it was the Latita James suit. And then it was the Alvin Bragg suit.
And then it was a Fannie Willis. And then it was Jack Smith.
And that ate up his $400 million. Even with the reduced fines, if you total the E.
Jean Carroll, I think it was $83 million, and you do the $375 million. That was $400 million.
Even with the reduced fines, if you total the E.G. Carroll, I think it was $83 million, and you do the $375 million, that was $400 million.
And now he has a sword of Damocles hanging over his head with the Alvin Bragg, we're going to start in when you leave the president. And that's what they're doing.
They don't have the confidence that they can go to East Palestine, Ohio,

and say, hey, everybody, you have been losers of globalization.

We're nationalists. what they're doing.
They don't have the confidence that they can go to East Palestine, Ohio, and say,

hey, everybody, you have been losers of globalization. We're nationalists.
We're going to help you. Or they can't go to Wall Street and say, we're borrowing $3 billion a day in interest.
We can't sustain $36 trillion. We've got to have a bipartisan emergency session of Congress and stop this spending.

They can't do any of that.

They're not having any positive suggestion. They're just nihilists.
Let's then turn to outside of the United States and look at also Israel's been in the news and we have them, of course, they've gone into Gaza,

and we've talked a little bit about that again since the hostages haven't been returned. But Hezbollah has also recently sent rockets into Israel once again, and I was wondering your thoughts on this heating up of the war in Israel.
Well, when Hamas, all the brave Hamas big guys in their mask and camouflage were berating the hostages, taunting them, taunting Israel, bringing back corpses of children that had evidence that they were beaten to death. And then we hear now from the hostages they were tortured,, why their captors got fat eating, you know, free, plentiful food from the UN, which they were selling for a profit.
I don't believe, by the way, much that there's a Gaza popular backlash against Hamas. That's just fake.
I don't believe that. I believe what I saw on October 7th, when they were high-fiving the death and the rape and the murder and the mutilation.

But I do believe that on some polls that there's a high percentage that would like to leave and have a nice, big, fat house in a nice, safe neighborhood like any other person. And that would mean if it wasn't in Gaza.

But that's never going to happen, because the Jordanians remember Black September, and the Kuwaitis remember the Palestinians cheering on Saddam Hussein's invasion of their country, and the Saudis remember the Palestinians cheering on Saddam going near the Saudi border. So they don't want any of them.
And so Israel said, we're sick of this. You broke your word on the hostages.
You didn't give us the right number of live hostages. You're desecrating the dead.
You're desecrating the whole idea of a fair hostage exchange. We have not treated the people who have committed horrific terrorist crimes in our jails anywhere near what you've done, innocent civilians.
So we've got the names of you people. You may think you're safe.
You're living it up in your tunnels. We're going to get you.
There was kind of a footnote to this. I won't mention his name, the Fox reporter, who we all know who reports.
He's kind of brave. He's on the scene.

But he said that Israel had killed two journalists, and then he kind of editorialized about all the brave journalists. They weren't journalists.
One of them was a Hamas sniper, and the other one was a Hamas propagandist. They were not journalists.
And so, while they were doing this, Hamas calls up Hezbollah and says, hey, we sent you and I, we sent 20,000 rockets to kill Israeli civilians right after October 7. You were great.
You sent 10,000. We sent about nine or 10.
Keep sending them. And they said, uh-uh, we lost everybody.
They killed all of our leadership. The pagers killed or maimed our second-tier leadership.
They came in here, and they found all of our depots of Iranian missiles. They can come in any day.
They told us if we... So they said, well, you've got to do something.
I said, well, we'll do something symbolic. So they sent, like, what, six or seven missiles? And immediately the Israelis went in, and bam, bam, bam.
It's never going to stop until one of two things happen. One, there is an Iranian revolution, like we saw in 2009, the Green Revolution, which for nine days Obama kept quiet about because he sided with the theocracy.
Because he had this idea of the theocratic Shias would be balanced off against the horrific, he thought, Sunni, Gulf-rich, his way of community organizing. The Sunni Arab Gulfs were the man, and the Shia Iranians were the people, the oppressed, in that Marxist binary.
So he was going to play them off, and then every once in a while they'd call up and say, Brock, can you come in here? And that was a sick thing if you look at Iran, but either they're going to have a revolution and that country's falling apart, and they're putting a lot of pressure on it with the new embargo and oil quarantine about their economy. They're really putting pressure on it, and maybe it'll crack, maybe it won't.
And maybe they have a device or two. They know that if they send one missile, one missile that has nuclear material, they're going to be obliterated.
So they're thinking about that. And the other alternative then is the Israelis are calibrating how long until the second generation of Hezbollah comes back and Trump is out of office.
And usually in America, you get the opposite party come in, maybe, and they will drop all the sanctions. They'll get their oil money.
They'll fund, and there'll be another Hezbollah in five or six years, and Iran won't fall, there won't be a revolution, they'll have nuclear weapons. So this is a rare window.
So either they're going to have to have a revolution, or sometime, I would predict between May, March, and October, if there's not a revolution in that country, they're going to give it some time.

They're going to take it out. And that would mean the Houthis, if they took Iran's ability to make money and to make weapons,

then Hamas and the Hezbollah people and the Houthis wouldn't have any support.

Because where they get support now is they go to the wealthy Sunni Arabs and they say, if you don't give us money, we're going to just be completely in the Iranian orbit.

And so then they think, man, we'll give them some blood money or protection money so they don't attack us.

And we don't want Iran running all the terrorists in the neighborhoods.

We want some of our terrorists for us, or at least counteract Iran. Well, let's turn to another international topic, or actually it's domestic as well, since Donald Trump is attempting to get as much investment in the United States as he can via his tariff policies, And it seems to be bringing in even outside influences.
And this week we heard all about how Hyundai, which is a South Korean company, is going to be bringing in 21 billion. I think 5.7 just in a steel plant.
Yeah, steel plant, some automobile parts plants. And I think they want to build a plant for making EV batteries as well.
Yes, they do. So Donald Trump the other day said he thinks he's got $4 trillion in foreign investment.
I've been trying to verify that. It depends on what date you choose.
But most people believe that between the election, when he was already in the interim, begging people to invest here or face tariffs, that there's $3 trillion, $3,000 billion. It used to be, you know, economists used to say that for every billion dollars in investment, specifically for an investment, but investment, depending on how the money is used and what type of investment, whether it's assembly, manufacturing, banking, or whatever,

you get somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 jobs per billion.

So if you had, and some people said 20,000 or 30,000, but let's just take the lowest number,

5,000 jobs for each billion.

The 3 trillion then would be 3,000 billion, and that would be 15 million jobs.

Thank you. jobs for each billion.
The $3 trillion then would be $3,000 billion, and that would be 15 million jobs that this foreign investment already would represent. And so there is about 3 million

federal workers, depending on how you categorize full-time contractors, etc.

And they are talking about reducing the workforce by about a million. If Donald Trump can green light all of this, and if they actually keep their word, because I don't know what's going to happen if there's some kind of settlement and the tariffs are not as high as they thought, will they renege and go back.
But let's say they don't. Then he's in a race right now between the midterms and actually seeing some concrete job hiring because he can make the argument, I am trying to get people off GS5, GS6 government work that we don't need because there's full of bloated agencies and bureaucracies.
But I'm trying to get high-paying jobs in next-generation AI, biotech, genetics, military, sophisticated hypersonics, lasers, all of this investment, EVs. And if he can make that argument, he'll be in good shape.
I would say as another footnote, I read the Wall Street Journal, I'm speaking today on a Wednesday. I read it Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
I would say the op-eds, both columnists and guests, are 50% negative. But I would say the news stories

of gloom and doom, recession, tariffs are destroying the country, is 90% negative.

If you look at the tariffs, so what he's basically saying are two things. Number one,

we believe in parity. We will not level a tariff on you if you don't have any on us.

Thank you. Number one, we believe in parity.
We will not level a tariff on you if you don't have any on us. And to the degree you have a tariff on us, we'll just match it.
We will not exceed it. That's what the Wall Street Journal thinks is incendiary.
The second thing to remember is that a lot of countries know what they're doing, and they believe that Donald Trump is unpredictable and volatile. So they're trying to preclude this by moving money here and assembling things in here.
The Wall Street Journal is very angry because they believe that his loose talk, his unpredictability jitters markets and investment and the Wall Street.

Okay.

So if you look at, take a big step back, what he's basically doing, he's saying that from 1970 to 2025, for 55 years, we've done it your way, Wall Street, Wall Street Journal.

We had asymmetrical tariffs. We had Keynesian economics.
And we let people invest all over the world. And we outsourced and we offshore.
So we wiped out Youngstown, Ohio. We wiped out my hometown of Salma, California.
I think I counted six big industries when I was a high school senior. We put corporate agriculture all over the world.
That was great. And what did we do? We hollowed out the interior.
So fentanyl, drug use, suicide, government dependence, that's what we got. But when you force all of that money, $3 trillion back, and you open these plants, then what you're basically saying is, I am on the side of the middle class.
And for them, it's jobs. It's making $100,000 a year.
and the stock market has gone to record heights and i'm not quite as worried about i understand

that they're integrated and you want a strong stock market and the last thing you want to do

is get on the wrong side of the investment class because they're very important. I'm not deprecating them.
But what I'm saying is, he is saying, you guys have made 100, 500% profits on this globalist project. These people haven't made anything.
They've been wiped out. So for just once, just once, kind of the Roman Braveheart, just once, just once in our life, can we do this? He's saying, let's just try to help the middle class.
And as far of a larger project where he's saying to blacks and Hispanics, he's saying, don't identify by your superficial appearance. Identify as a middle class person or upper middle class.
And you have more in common with white people that are of your class than they do with wealthy white people. Or you do with your Whoopi Goldbergs and Joy Reads and Jamal.
That crazy press. It's all just really...
They don't ever talk about that, the Wall Street Journal. They don't ever talk.
They have these young reporters, the molly balls of the world, and they all come out of these journalism schools and this, this, but they never... They need to go talk to Selena Zito in Pennsylvania, and they don't understand what he's trying to do.
And they're not, they're doing a great job, but they need to be messaging. I keep saying that, messaging, messaging, messaging.
We didn't ask for this trade war. But we're not going to let Canada with her $63 billion surplus, and Mexico with $177 billion, and China with a trillion, and Europe with over 200.
Not when we have other things they're doing to us, like sending in fentanyl, or sending back 63 million in remittances, why they're on public support here, or not patrolling the border, or welching on us and spending 1.3% of GDP on defense while we protect our country. That's the argument.
And they need to say, we didn't ask for it. And we don't want to take advantage of you.
We just want symmetry. And they don't want symmetry.
And it's a really important time right now because we're at the apex. Don't believe these people that say China is so great.
I was looking today at some statistics. China has 1.4 billion people.
We have roughly 335 million. If you look at nominal, rather than price GDP, but nominal actual cash, GDP, goods and services, they have about $20 trillion and we have about $30 trillion.
And so what you're basically saying is that they have 4.2 times the population. Just think of it.
One American, whether he's working or not, just take an American as a resident. One American is producing about 1.5 times more goods and services than four of his Chinese counterparts.
When you look at ag, you know, we're not the greatest producer in tonnage, but in value, we're still... China produces about four and a half million barrels of oil a day.
We were about... When Trump came in, we were about eight and a half or nine.
And then he gave Biden 12. Biden, of course, went down.
And then he panicked because of the midterms. And he went back up to Trump levels.
But now Trump is getting close to 13 million barrels. That's the highest production in the world.
And he wants to go up to 15 or 16. I don't know if the fracking will support that.
But my point is, China's outproduced by us with, again, one-fourth their population. We're producing three times more oil than they are.
Our agriculture is double. It's about $400 billion in value if you sell it versus their $200 billion.
And they say, well, look at the military. Well, we still, even at this late date, we have about deliverable about 5,100 nuclear weapons.
China's got about 450. We have over 10 times the nuclear weapons they do.
I know they're increasingly arming and they're decreasing that gap. We have 11 carrier groups, 80, 85.
They have two. They're building one.
They don't even know what they're doing. And submarines, we have about the same number, but every single one of our submarines is better and nuclear.
And theirs are not. They're diesel, for the most part.
So, what I'm getting at is, in every category of defense, the building blocks of society and civilization historically, in agriculture, food, in energy, in productivity, in defense, the United States is way ahead of China, but it's losing that lead at a very precipitous pace. But Donald Trump is trying to address, he's the first person who's trying to say, listen, these people want to destroy us.
We don't want to pick a fight with them, but we've got to be wealthier and we've got to treat them the way they treat us.

And that means reciprocity. And there's the days of going over and shutting down a plant in Ohio and taking all of that capital and putting it over in China so they can

ship back cheap stuff at Walmart for you. I understand the logic.
It's a deflationary,

I mean, it's a good thing, but it doesn't work in the long run.

So let's see if he can pull it off, and we should support it, because the alternative is nightmarish. But we're not in that bad shape.
We have all this money we owe. We can address it.
if Elon can cut $500 billion

and he can get this $3 trillion in investment here

and he can get this three trillion dollars in investment here and he can deregulate this economy will take off it might not before the midterms but he can still in four years he can really do a lot to stop the damage yeah well obviously all the while the democrats of course are going to be trying to cap the administration at the knees to take it down. But let's go ahead and listen to a few messages and then come back and talk, finish off the show.
Stay with us and we'll be right back. welcome back to the victor davis hansen show you can can catch Victor on YouTube and on Rumble.
So his podcast is now a videocast. So come join us there if you prefer to watch the video.
So Victor, I was referring to the Trump administration's effort to, of course, reduce fraud and waste in government. And speaking of the administration having to deal with waste, I guess you'd say, with PBS and NPR, they have a subcommittee that's interviewing the CEO of both NPR and PBS.
And Catherine Mayer is the CEO of PBS. And she finally admitted, I guess, under Marjorie Taylor Greene's questioning, that they weren't aggressive enough in pursuing the laptop story when it came out in NPR.
They ran with the idea it was authentic. Everybody should remember that injustice, because the FBI, who had about 11 people working at Twitter, was actively, along with Mark Zuckerberg, who was, he claims he was forced.
They were banning any accurate Miranda Devine op-ed or New York Post story that was trying to remind people that the FBI had the laptop. And it was leaking out.
They knew it was authentic. And they were trying to tell everybody that not one person that they had interviewed who was mentioned as a correspondent in those texts or emails that showed up

had said that that was fraudulent.

They gave,

Tony Bobulinski showed what he had sent.

You know,

it was verifiable.

The idea that they took this laptop

and they cooked it up in the Kremlin

and then they snuck around

and put it into a repair shop

and they had all this porno.

It was,

that's just, everybody knew it was crazy and yet they warped the uh they used the fbi and then when it all blew up james baker with a head legal counsel for the fbi he was probably i don't know what he's making 200 000 he ended up making seven million dollars for jack dorsey as their chief legal counsel. And all these FBI people, that was their retirement bill.
They went right and worked for about 10 or 11 of them. They retired there.
And so it was scandalous what they did. And NPR was part of it.
PBS was part of it. The thing about it is what PBS and NPR, they started, let's just say, I'll take a random number, depending on the area in which they were caught, 50 years ago.
And they did a great thing. I mean, when they had the 12 Caesars, you know, I mean, they had a history of Rome.

They had Suetonius' based on I. Claudius, the novel.

So they had great shows.

But at that time, there was not 500 channels on DirecTV or streaming or any of that.

So if you wanted to get a rare cultural experience, you had to go there.

That was what they did.

Thank you. channels on direct tv or streaming or any of that so that if you wanted to get a rare cultural experience you had to go there that was what they did and they didn't they weren't big conglomerates brian lamb was wonderful book talk and all of this but that was before youtube and tiktok where any of an influencer can go on and say i'm the history guy i have a phd or I don't.
And they can get a huge audience. And some of them are really good.
Adrian Goldsworthy, people like that in my field or Tom Holland, they're great. That didn't exist then.
But they're fossilized. They're ossified in amber.
They haven't changed. And what they do is, I think their budget is only like 15%.
I'm just taking numbers out of the air. People can fact check me, but they get this massive tax, but that's not an accurate point of subsidy because these foundations, they give them this massive amount of money and it's tax deductible or private people give them.
And they're competing with local news. They're competing with cable news.
They're competing with TV and radio. And they have all these advantages, and they're flushed with cash.
And they're superfluous now. And even that would be an argument why we don't need to subsidize them.
It would be basically saying, just, I don't know how many hundred million we give you, but you don't need it anymore. You've got these foundations, the Soros and Tides, they got multi-billion dollars, the Gates Foundation.
They can pay your whole thing. Go ahead and do it.
If you want to be left-wing, just get your left-wing money. But we don't want to pay for it.
We don't want to pay for all this propaganda. When you, you know, for years, when you turned on PBS and NewsHour, they had the left and the right guy.
Well, the right guy was the left guy, and the left guy was crazy. And that's what they did with every story.
And they knew it, and they were shameless. If you look at the dossier of the CEO, Catherine Mair, she has on her social media called Trump a racist and a sociopath.
So she's hyper-radical left herself. The problem is why they hate Musk and the Doge is that they had layered usaid department of justice fcc you name all these things agencies fbi uh cabinancies with so much clutter that nobody knew where the money was and that was all going not all but a third of it was going to left-wing agencies, university.
Why does Columbia need $400 million? They have a $15 billion endowment, just cutting $400 million is nothing. And they're freaking out about that.
Why does Stanford have to get $800 million from the government for NIH and then charge them 54% surcharges when they have $30 billion. Go back and look at their endowments in the 90s.
They were in the millions. So my point is the world changed.
And we don't need, I don't have nothing against PBS or NPR as a left-wing. hello, this is NPR.
And, you know, I'm not, by the way, everybody, I'm not Mark Levin. And I don't yell at the former Rush Limb.
I understand that. My voice has just been described in that fashion, Victor Davis Hanson.
I'm very sophisticated. And let's talk about philosophy, that kind of stuff.
There's a role for that. But just go out and compete on the private market and don't have your subsidies.
And that's why they're outraged because they got somebody caught on to what they're doing. And Musk came along and he said to Trump, it won't work to do the political thing.
This is a revolution that was cultural, social, political, economic, military. It was 360 degrees.
It's like an octopus. You've got to cut the tentacles to get to the head, and they're flopping around.
They won't let you. So you've got to cut, cut, cut, cut every aspect because it was a money machine that was funding left-wing people who had no agenda that anybody wanted.
They had enormous influence, and yet personally, publicly, politically, nobody wanted them. Nobody wants to listen to Jasmine Crockett.
Nobody wants to listen to Chuck Schumer threaten the justices of the Supreme Court by name. Nobody likes that.
Nobody wants Al Green shaking his cane and trying to disrupt the joint session of Congress. Nobody wanted Tim Walz to say he wants to kick the ASS people.
But they have power that's amplified through all these institutions and government money, and Musk came up with the idea that not only will we balance balance the budget but they're going to have to go compete now and they can't do it because their message is offensive which you brought me to one of the last topics which was columbia or the news this week columbia has promised to rectify things and one of those things is that students can't wear masks on campus, and yet we have all sorts of protesters out with masks on, of course, today. So they are very disingenuous with their promises, too.
The president said to the government when they threatened to cut 400, she said, we agree to all of your agreements. I mean, anti-Semitism, we had our own internal report.
You're right. We'll start doing it.
Expulsions for Biden? Yeah, they invaded twice and took over two halls. Oh, masks? Yeah, we can't find who they are.
And that's a passport to commit violence. So they said, we agree.
And then they turned around and a bunch of faculty members, what did you do? And she said, well, if it's for health reasons. So then they all laughed about that.
What an idiot she is. So then they went out and protested and they're back to it.
And they say, we, in 94 or in? Well, as if they're talking about health masks they can put over. And you can't deal with those people.
As I said, I went four years as a student to Santa Cruz. I spent two years abroad in school.
I spent four years at Stanford University, PhD. I spent 21 years at Cal State.
I spent a year at the Naval Academy. I spent four years at Stanford University, PhD.
I spent 21 years at Cal State.

I spent a year at the Naval Academy.

I spent visiting billets.

So I've been 23 years at the Hoover on the Stanford campus.

And I have farmed.

I've met mechanics.

If you would ask me empirically, dispassionately, disinterestedly,

where have you met the greatest number of liars that lie all the time to you? Was it farmers? Well, a few did, but by and large, they were the most honest people I've ever dealt with. Was it Jose Morales that came out one night, and your pump was off, and you and he got pipe wrenches and tried to take it apart? No, he was one of the most honest people I've met.
Was it Jilly Bob Braggs, who used to work for your grandfather, had an eighth grade education from Oklahoma? No, you always told the truth. But academics, I don't know what it is.
They deal in a world of automatic, I should say, lifetime tenure after six years. There's no accountability, faculty governance.
But when they say something, do not believe it, because they're not people of character and action and fortitude. When I mean lying, what they usually do is say something, and then they'll rationalize.
When the pressure comes the other way, they'll rationalize it. And they're cowardly.
And so you can't deal with them if you're Donald Trump. And you have to just say to them, and again, messaging is the key.
You've got to say, listen, Columbia, don't tell me that if I cut 400 million because you have an anti-SSemitic hate house and you allow people to destroy your infrastructure, why we subsidize their student loans, and why you have people from the Middle East living in government-subsidized dorms, that we have to keep giving you this money. We don't, and we're not going to do it.
And don't tell me that cancer will not be cured because of that, or we won't go to the

Mars because of that, because we've looked at your research grants. About a third of them are junk.
Complete junk. It's race, class, gender, DEI, this, woke stuff, this.
And we're sick of it. And that's the attitude you have to have in dealing with them.
And don't listen to, I'm professor of, I'm the Jane X. Smith Westcoff professor of medieval literature and thought.
And I'm the author of a seminal book on the rhetoric of manhood in medieval Bosnia. You know what I mean? Who cares? Don't listen to their titles.
Don't listen to their puffed up resumes. Do not listen to all the invective and hatred.
Just say to us, we like you guys, you like us, we're just going to part ways. And we wish you all the way.
But you know what? We're going to tax your endowment because you're not non-profit, disinterested. Your ideological factors, we're going to tax your endowment because you're not non-profit, disinterested.

Your ideological factors, we're going to tax your endowment.

And we don't want to do it, but we're going to enforce the Bill of Rights.

First Amendment, 4th, 5th, and 6th, or we're not going to give you any federal money.

And you're not going to laugh and stick your nose up at the 1964 and 65 Civil Rights Act.

And you are going to have graduations, dorms, so-called open to everybody of every race. You're not going to discriminate by race.
If anybody did what you did with your graduations and your dorms, and they did it at Walmart or Costco. They said, this is a safe space at Costco.

This is only white people. We'll be there

by the food section, only Hispanic.

And we have all the

black workers here, all the

Hispanic workers here, and all the

white workers, and they would never get

away with it. They think

they're God on Earth, they're Heaven on Earth,

and they're not. They're increasingly

satanic. Yeah, as they shouldn't get away with it.
Or as my high school friend, Bobby Gonzalez said, Victor, they're Diablos. They're Diablos.
They are, and I have another thing. He always said devils.
He always would say that to me. They're devils.
The last story is kind of unrelated to everything today, but the FBI has cracked down on another dog fighting ring and led by an ex-NFL player, LaShawn Johnson, and he had traded in and fought in 190 pit bulls. And that's kind of one of my issues is animal abuse.
And I don't like the abuse of pit bulls, but I also don't. That breed just is in addition to the problem here, that breed.
I live in an area where there are numerous pit bulls. And I know I'm going to offend anybody, and I apologize because it is a stereotype.
Because there's a lot of pit bull owners that are listening, and they have wonderful dogs, and they've taken all sorts of care to train them, and I understand that. But that's not necessarily characteristic of enough people that doesn't make that breed.
So we have a problem out here in rural southwest Fresno County when people either can't afford to get shots, or they find they have puppies, or they can't afford the food anymore, usually during recessions. But just the other day, two dogs came in.
Just the other day. They kind of took over.
These two wild dogs, boxers, they came in and they basically said to themselves, this is a nice spread here. And those other dogs are all decrepit.
We're taking over. And you know what? We're just going to take over their little igloos and we like this place and see what they're going

to do. If they come out and try to reclaim their territory, we're going to bite them.

And we had, you know, we called the pest. So, my point is, they're very dangerous and they're here

a lot. So, what happens to a person when they dump a pit bull and they come into your house?

It's happened to me a lot. But when I had small children here in this area from which I'm speaking,

I don't know where. And so the thing about a pit bull is you don't know what they're going to do.
And so once I saw my then six-year-old daughter go out there, and the pit bull was so kind. And then the next day I thought, well, maybe I can just feed it, and I'll hold it around here for a while.
Then I had a guy and I were working on a wall around my yard. We built it ourselves, six feet high, some out of cinder block, concrete block.
And he came up and he was going to jump on him. And we had shovels digging a trench and we fought him off.
At that point, I got some food and I took that dog and I won't tell you what I did with him, but he didn't ever threaten anybody. The other thing I can remember very carefully was my son and I were irrigating.
He was six years old and we were irrigating our plum orchard. We had a neighbor.
I won't mention the area around here, but it was a neighbor. And he raised pit bull.
And he thought it was funny when I would go irrigate near the border that he had two workers and he didn't want any sanitation, so he would allow them to defecate in our orchard. So it was very gross when I was irrigating.
And those days you did furrow, the feces would float down the orchard. So I would go over there and across a barbed wire fence.
I'd say, don't let your workers do that. And he would laugh because he had this big cage.
And then when I would walk back to the pickup, he would undo it. And he knew exactly how long it would take me to jump in the back of the bed of my pickup.
And I have an eight-year-old, a seven-year-old at that time, son. And so my point was simply, they were very dangerous, and we would be trapped in our own pickup while this thing was jumping.
So finally, and I always had a shotgun, so once I let off around, not too far from the dog's ear, and that dog freaked out and went back, and then he confronted me, and you don't want to, you know, I was armed. But the point I'm making is...
The owner confronted you, right? Yes, he confronted me. And he said, I said, you're a pit bull.
I've called the sheriff. And he's warned you twice.
I've called the animal control officer. And you intentionally let that dog out when you have arguments because you will not invest in a bathroom.
He was growing something. And you will not invest in a bathroom.
And you let your workers. And I have toilet paper and feces all over this orchard.
And we have to thin the orchard. And it's unsanitary.
And you won't listen. Every time I discuss this with you, you open your pit bull.
And then they go through the barbed wire fence and I have to run and you think it's funny. And I said, the next time this happens, these dogs should be put down because they're deadly.
And I'm going to shoot both of them. I want you to know that.
And I will sleep very well that night. And I hate to say that because I love dogs, but that breed, I just mentioned two, maybe 71.
I've been here 71 years. I'd say in my experience, I've had about 15 incidents with people dumping pit bulls off out here in Fresno County.
And it's scary when they come into your yard, especially when they have things like a rope around their neck, and they've been used for fighting, and you look at them and you see scars, and they've been treated terribly. Yeah.
So that should be the highest penalty of animal abuse for anybody that would raise pit bulls and... Fight them.
Fight them. Yeah.
And train them just to be mean. Every year in Fresno County, I shouldn't say every year, every month, there's a story in one of the local newspapers about a neighbor who's raising put bills that they get out and they maul a child.
It's every month. And it's always, I hate to say it, it's always the same breed.
Yeah, it sure is. Well, Victor, let's turn to your readers at your website.
And I have a reader, Michael Chu, who responded to your ideas about California recently in one of your Ultra. Actually, I think this was the American Greatness article on California.
And he says, Michael Chu says, as native Californians who live in Southern, who lived in Southern California, each year, my wife and I didn't think the state could get any stupider or weirder. However, it just kept getting stupider and weirder.
It's hard to say those, but we like many other upper, we like many other upper middle class folks simply got tired of having to live under the yoke of woke, idiotic rules, regulations and taxes, along with poverty, homelessness and crime associated with liberal superior majority that created the dysfunctional policies plaguing the once great state. Eight years ago, after spending a week outside of Boise, Idaho, we decided enough was enough and pulled the plug on California.
We never looked back and couldn't be happier. Come join us, Dr.
Hanson. We can farm a lot.
You can farm a lot easier here, and we'd love to have you here. And I think he represents, even near Boise, Idaho, I think he represents a lot of people.
I've spoken maybe in my life five times in Boise, four times. Every time I'm there, people have yelled at me, not because they thought I was somebody, just people I knew.
I think it reminded me of Fresno. Every time I've gone to Boise, I see about 10 people from Fresno, and they all say the same thing.
It's not that cold here. This is the Sun Belt.
Victor, there's this. There's a tech.
It's a beautiful city. The only problem is there's too many Californians there.
And I always say that. That's the most frequent question.
I had the flu, and I'm getting over it, but I was in Palm Beach. I was really kind of hiding and people would come up at the airport.
And the first thing they said is, why are you in California? Why don't you move? And I always said, I'm 71. That's young.
You got to get out. And then I picked up the paper yesterday and I was doing my taxes.
13.3% California. And I was getting kind of angry when I looked at the amount of money that I spoke, and I wrote all these articles I wrote, all these, when I looked at the federal and the state and the Obamacare and the FIC, I realized that I was getting 45 cents for everything I did.

But then I went online to prepare an article,

and it said that 50% of Californians were on Medi-Cal.

50%. And then it said 40%, excuse me, 40% was.

50%, every 50%, half of all births are on Medi-Cal. And then I read the Wall Street Journal.
I'm not trying to pick on it, but they have a very, I kind of like it. They have all these mansions, and you see what they're selling for.
And there were all these mansions in Malibu, and Napa, and Tahoe, 23, 25, 28 million. And then I'm doing my taxes.
I'm the guy in the middle, like everybody listening. And then you're reading half the verse and you say, you know what this is? This is Europe around 1150 AD.
And there's a key castle. And these guys in Malibu and Tahoe, they live in the top of the keep.
And then out there, there's a vast field of indentured servants that are attached to the keep. But there's a tiny little shrinking group of people that get to have lean-tos against the walls of the keep, the castle, and they sell things, and they fix things, and they're the little tiny middle class.
And that's what it is. It's a medieval society.
And there is so much lawlessness and law, excessive law, so much wealth and so much poverty, but very little in between. Wall Street Journal is so out of it.
They had this idea about, they tried to write an article and it was like, all the people who during the COVID lockdown thought they were going to move somewhere and then they liked it, but then they missed home. And so they talk about, well, we went out to Newport, we loved it, but we had to sell.
Or we went up here, and then you read the prices they sold. We sold for $2.4 million.
We swung a $1.7 million. I felt like saying, who is your audience? I understand you've got to make money, and the people who read this are affluent, but do you realize the types of amounts of money you're talking to for a person in California that makes $100,000? Take one example, and they pay 40% probably federal and state, and they ended up with 60 with the hyperinflation for staples, and you think they're going to be able to afford a $4,000, $6,000 mortgage a year.
And then when they buy the million point four little cottage, they're going to be able to pay $15,000, $16,000 in property. It's just they live in la-la land.
Gavin sits there and he thinks, I'm not going to solve any of these problems. I'm going to keep blowing up dams.
I'm going to keep 40 cents a kilowatt. I'm going to keep doing my battery farms that blow up every couple of years.
I'm not going to fix the freeways. I'm not going to touch one drop of natural gas in the Monterey Shale formation.
No more nuclear plants. High power.
A lot of poverty. But the guys I hang out with, it's a beautiful state, and we got a ton of money, and we're going to act really liberal so we don't feel guilty about living like the master of the keep.
And that's California. I think if Gavin Newsom were here, he would say to you, Victor, what else can he do?

Because to try to change the medieval back into a middle-class world would be... Yeah, you're right.
He would say, I deep... No, because he's disingenuous.
He's not an authentically honest person. He would say, well, I'd like to do that.
But the moment I did that, the tech barons and all of the political union, the SCI would kill me and I couldn't do anything. And then I would say to them, you've got two more years on your tenure.
You've got executive orders. You could start doing a lot of stuff.
It was you who decided to blow up four dams on the Klamath River. You didn't have to do that.

You could right now, I mean, Gray Davis, when they told him the brownouts were going to destroy us, and he went out like a madman. He built natural gas power plants.
And within a year, we had no more brownouts. When we had the Loma Linda earthquake in 89, they built overpasses like magic.

We have a lot of talent here, but we have horrible leadership. And they've destroyed this beautiful state.
I have such good memories of my grandparents, how they loved California, my parents, my siblings, and what they did to the state. It was a golden place to grow up.

It was wonderful.

The schools, we went to one of the poorest schools in the state,

and it was a wonderful school.

I know I didn't get, you know, Carmel, Palo Alto education,

but I got good enough.

And everything was affordable.

Everybody owned a house, a tract house.

It was, you could buy a car.

It was, no, it's this utopianism, heaven on earth socialism. You're zero socialist.
And they thought they were going to, they had all this money and they climbed up at the top of the keep and they took the trap door and they closed it so nobody else could get in. And they said, we're, we look at the world below us.
Those poor stupid people don't know what what good for you. So they're going to have to pay 40 cents a kilowatt for their own good.
We're going to write in 10 million illegal aliens so that they understand they owe their wealth to poor people in another country. That's what we have to do.
And you know what? We're not going to build roads because it's too polluting, and we'll dream up high-speed rail. Well, Michael Chu, thank you for your observation.
I'm sure it's shared by a lot of people who have moved to Boise, as we've observed. Thank you, Victor, for your wisdom today.
Can I say one last thing? Yeah, go ahead. A guy wrote me an email about three days ago.
I don't have his name with me, but he kind of corrected me. He said, you mentioned high-speed rail, and it could cost $300 billion and all.
But he said, Victor, that's not the problem. He said, if we gave you high-speed rail, he said, if God came down and handed you high-speed rail, all 750 miles paid for, it would look like BART does today.
Because he said, you don't have enough people in that state that know how to run it. And it would all be unionized.
And if somebody said there were assaults on the subway, they would bar the use of cameras because that would be offensive or racist or something. So he said, it would look like transit, it looked like the bus station.
They would ruin it. They don't have enough people to know how to do it.
He said you don't have enough people that would know how to fix it. You don't have enough people to know how to direct it.
You don't have enough accountants that would be honest. So it doesn't work.
I thought, well, that's true. Nothing.
It's hopeless.

And there are a lot of people who have decided that California is hopeless, and we hear from them quite often. So, Victor, thank you, though, for your wisdom today.
This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we're signing off. Thank you, everybody.
if you've been with us at all over the last six months or so you are probably familiar with one of our favorite new brews wired to fish coffee as you may know their coffee is delicious and smooth but more importantly the company has amazing commitment to give back wired to fish coffee gives back 25% of profits, 25% to conservation, clean water, and things like

Michigan. to give back.
Wired2Fish Coffee gives back 25% of profits, 25% to conservation, clean water, and things like missions and evangelical outreach. From river cleanups and initiatives for fish habitat to programs that give people in slums clean water and spread the word about Jesus, Wired2Fish Coffee is in it to make the world a better place.

They also have just launched a medium roast decaf, and for avid coffee lovers, their much-loved brew is now available in two-pound and five-pound bags. Join us and enjoy your coffee while making a difference in the world and join a community of like-minded coffee lovers.
Subscribe and save today and enjoy discounted coffee and free freight or just give this great brand a try with discount code JUSTNEWS or JUSTTHENWS. For 10% off your first order, head over to Wired number two fish coffee

today and make this year a year you align your coffee with your values.