Defeating Our Worst, Losing Our Best

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Speaker 2 Hello, ladies, hello, gentlemen. This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.
I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

Speaker 2 You are here to get some wisdom from the great man himself, Victor Davis-Hansen, back in the saddle in Selma, California.

Speaker 2 Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaker 2 And he's the owner of a fantastic website, The Blade of Perseus. VictorHanson.com is the address.
You should be going there. You should be subscribing also.

Speaker 2 We are recording on Monday,

Speaker 2 March 24th. Rarely do a Monday, but...
Man, oh man, Victor's had a tremendous travel schedule. So have I.

Speaker 2 So we're going going to talk about some breaking things. And this particular episode, Victor, will be up Tuesday, tomorrow, March 25th.
We've got a lot to talk about, Victor. Donald Trump

Speaker 2 has gone after the Houthis.

Speaker 2 Israel is Ba Fangul. We're back in Gaza.
We're going to take this territory piece by piece and return it to Israel. because

Speaker 2 the hostages remain.

Speaker 2 Some other interesting things. Donald Trump goes to the the double NCA, or the NCAA.

Speaker 2 Someday it will be the double NCA, I don't know. But the wrestling tournament, a huge reaction, huge positive reaction to him being there.
Musk,

Speaker 2 Tesla, Judge Bozberg, one of these reckless federal judges, so much to talk about. And we'll get to all of this when we come back from these important messages.

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Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor, it's good to see you here.
Good to see that you're alive. You are indestructible, even though pathogens continue to try to destroy you.
And

Speaker 2 you've had quite a week of travel.

Speaker 2 Went to the East Coast, and

Speaker 2 we were talking the other day.

Speaker 2 If I just may ask you to tell your little story,

Speaker 2 didn't the pilot ⁇ wasn't a pilot on one plane a fan?

Speaker 2 It was very nice of him to do that. And

Speaker 2 what did he do?

Speaker 2 He was very wanted. He just said that

Speaker 2 thank me for being on the flight. And then

Speaker 2 we had a selfie. He was a really good guy.
And everybody was nice on the trip. Of course, it's flying.

Speaker 2 So when the time you leave my farm to Fresno, you have to fly to a major city and get on the plane. Of course, everything was working like clockwork until

Speaker 2 how does a plane come in the night before and you're going to get on it at your connection and something wrong with it, but it was okay the night.

Speaker 2 I never understood that concept, but maybe pilots listening can inform me. Maybe something went bad at night or they knew there was something you couldn't get it fixed.
And we had a little delay.

Speaker 2 Anyway, it takes me to get from my farm where I'm speaking about 14 hours, usually 13 hours the East Coast. I don't know if I did very well.
I had a lot of lectures I had

Speaker 2 agreed to do months ago, but I had the flu, and it's been, you know, it was

Speaker 2 eight days and I took off, but

Speaker 2 I'm kind of still wiped out. But I'm definitely getting better.
How's it? I only mentioned that because some people wrote me and said that I look like not just Skeletor, which I can handle,

Speaker 2 but with the hat on, two left-wing people wrote and said, You look like Freddy Krueger.

Speaker 2 That I can't handle.

Speaker 2 So I couldn't, I can plead I had the flu, I have the flu, or whatever, the post-viral fatigue, I think they call it.

Speaker 2 Well, some people, I've seen a comment or two about a hat,

Speaker 2 you know, a fedora kind of hat. It's Victor, is Victor trying to be Matt Drudge.
But the Victor's Victor. Oh, Matt Drudge.
I forgot about him.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 The mysterious Matt Drudge. Yeah, quite.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor,

Speaker 2 let's talk about some foreign policy matters. Donald Trump has gone after the Houthis, and I think I'd like to ask you as

Speaker 2 a little pre-see here on how did the Biden administration foreign policy screw things up so badly that empowered the Houthis

Speaker 2 and your thoughts about Donald Trump sweeping up after another

Speaker 2 policy

Speaker 2 remember when they came in, Iran was almost bankrupt and had lost $100 billion in oil sales, was under severe sanctions, unrest.

Speaker 2 There were a lot of minority unrest inside Tehran. They've had massive power failures.
So they were reeling.

Speaker 2 The first thing that Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Joe Biden, to the extent he existed, was to beg them to get back into the Iran deal. That sent a message

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 Iranian surrogates throughout the Middle East.

Speaker 2 And by the surrogates, I would define that as the Houthis, number one, number two, these terrorist groups that operate in Syria and Iraq, number three, Hezbollah, number four, Hamas.

Speaker 2 So we know what Hamas got the green light for. We know that Hezbollah did too.
The Houthis then were getting these rockets and drones from Iran. They can't make anything themselves.

Speaker 2 And they were sending them with regularity into the Red Sea. ostensibly to punish Israel, but the point was that the world didn't do anything about it.

Speaker 2 Now, Russia and China are patrons of Iran, so they kind of liked that idea, I suppose. They felt that that commercial corridor was not as important to them as it was to Europe and the United States.

Speaker 2 Then the Biden ⁇

Speaker 2 that administration's policy, Jack, was to send a $3 or $4 million missile or more after a $10,000 drone. And we spent, I think, more money on

Speaker 2 very sophisticated, guided anti-aircraft missiles than we had in the last 20 years.

Speaker 2 And it didn't do any good. It was just tit for tat.

Speaker 2 So everybody knew what the answer was, and nobody wanted to admit it or was incapable of doing it.

Speaker 2 The answer was to tell Iran: if you keep sending these missiles, we're going to stop it, take them out.

Speaker 2 And we're going to go after the people who are doing this.

Speaker 2 So Donald Trump comes in, he's not even there 60 days, and he starts attacking and targeting the people in the Houthi command command and control structure and their stockpiles.

Speaker 2 And he's told Iran that from now on he's going to hold them liable.

Speaker 2 And the Houthis will probably want to do it again. And if that should happen, Trump will

Speaker 2 do something to Iran. Iran is in a very strange position because it's been 50 years enjoying the reputation as the agitator of the Middle East that everybody was scared of.

Speaker 2 And then when you look at it right now,

Speaker 2 it only has one claim to deterrence, and that is it may or may not have

Speaker 2 a nuclear bomb. But otherwise, it has no air defenses.
Its economy is shot. It's under severe sanctions now.

Speaker 2 Trump is even going after people who stealthily buy Iranian oil against this Western embargo. The Hezbollah hierarchy has been wiped out.

Speaker 2 Hamas, did you notice during the hostage exchanges that they were bullying the hostages and they were braggadaccio with their mask on and their camouflage uniforms.

Speaker 2 And then what happened? They had a war again with Israel. The ceasefire ended.
And what happened to those six feet tall, strapping guys with mount moss? Didn't they come out and start fighting

Speaker 2 hand to hand, block to block? They just disappeared into their tunnels. In other words,

Speaker 2 their only claim to being tough and macho is to go pick on defenseless, starving hostages and then to ridicule people, but it's not to go out and fight the Israelis.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 we'll see what happens, but we're in a period of flux. The Middle East has not been in this flux since 1974 after the Yom Kippur War and the

Speaker 2 recession of the Soviet Union out of the Middle East for a while due to Henry Kissinger's diplomacy. So we'll see what happens,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 we'll see what happens. You're going to see something happen on the campuses, too, because

Speaker 2 after we talked about Mr. Khalil,

Speaker 2 and we'll see what happens to him, but the more that we learn about him, we're not learning extenuating circumstances. Maybe put it that way.

Speaker 2 They're not, well, I really wrote this track calling for a ceasefire or negotiations, or I was really for the Palestinian. It's hardcore, Hamas.

Speaker 2 It's hardcore, great thing on October 7th. It's hardcore.

Speaker 2 Let me negotiate on behalf of the Deves, apartheid Deves, that stormed two halls in Colombia, disrupted $2,000 worth of damage, and drew the ire of the president herself.

Speaker 2 So the more we learn about Mr. Khalil,

Speaker 2 the more it doesn't look good for him. And now the existential question is just simply,

Speaker 2 does the United States have the right to say, we blew it, we invited somebody into our country with a student visa who then transmogrified that into a work visa, who was a foreign national, who supported a state-designated, Department of State-designated terrorist organization, wrote literature promoting mass murder, wrote our distributed literature calling for the destruction of Western civilization, and represented the students who systematically committed violence and anti-Semitic harassment.

Speaker 2 Now, do we have a right to say

Speaker 2 we wouldn't have done that if we'd known who you were, your real character? So, why don't we just go back where you came from and have a good life?

Speaker 2 Go to the West Bank, go to Gaza, go to you're an Algerian citizen, go to Syria.

Speaker 2 You've been in Lebanon, but don't

Speaker 2 come here and

Speaker 2 get money from the UN or NGOs or Colombia.

Speaker 2 We don't need you. We don't need you.
You don't bring anything to

Speaker 2 our country except grievance.

Speaker 2 You know what's all it's about. It's not about free speech.

Speaker 2 It's about somebody coming in. You have an invitation for a party.
You invite people in.

Speaker 2 You're sitting there at your party at dinner and this guy starts mouthing off how horrible your food is, how horrible your house is, how he has a right to be at your dinner party.

Speaker 2 And finally, you say leave. And he says, no, I have a right for free speech.
That's what we're talking about. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Victor, you know, it's interesting, but back on Gaza, well, we'll get to Gaza in a second, but in the Middle East, it seems like our position is ascendant, at least under Trump and Israel.

Speaker 2 But the troublemakers of the Islamic world are ascendant elsewhere. And I was at a National View Institute conference.
They had an idea last week, and Ali,

Speaker 2 Ayan Hersi Ali

Speaker 2 spoke. She's terrific.
And she said,

Speaker 2 she was asked what her real fears were. She says the collapse of Europe.
She said the UK, she believes, is on the brink.

Speaker 2 Sweden's prime minister has admitted he's essentially lost control over the Islamic world. The question is, what do they do about it?

Speaker 2 That is a good diagnosis, but what is the treatment and what is the prognosis? In other words,

Speaker 2 Europe has about a 1.6, 1.5 fertility rate, and they now have anywhere from 7 to 10 to 15 percent of the population is foreign-born. I think Germany's got the highest at 16 percent.

Speaker 2 The vast majority of these people, there's a lot of Ukrainian refugees, but the vast majority are from the Middle East, and they're not acculturating, they're not integrating, they're not assimilating, and they're very bitter because they look at their prosperous hosts and they think they're decadent.

Speaker 2 They think the women are too promiscuous, they're too,

Speaker 2 I don't know, they're too free, they're too liberated. And it gets back to what Bernard Lewis talked about a long time ago.

Speaker 2 They have this strange dichotomy, this desire to be in the West and to be experienced to all of its pleasures and attractions and appetites, and then to hate the people who offer that to them and to hate themselves.

Speaker 2 In other words, remember that going back to the 9-11 murders,

Speaker 2 I think there were six of them were in Las Vegas the night, that week before with

Speaker 2 pornography, gambling, drinking. Nobody put a gun to their head and said they had to do that.

Speaker 2 Why was Bin Laden, when they went to his compound in Pakistan, they found realms and realms of pornographic websites and things?

Speaker 2 And so there's something about this that nobody really wants to talk about, that these people from the Middle East come to Europe, they don't want to become European, and they double down in a way

Speaker 2 they were not happy in their home.

Speaker 2 They had an Islamic paradise, but they felt that it didn't give them liberty, freedom, or economic opportunity, so they went to somewhere that did, and then they immediately began to despise the host, like the fellow who just attacked a

Speaker 2 43-year-old rabbi in Orleans,

Speaker 2 Orlaine.

Speaker 2 in France the other day. Macron said that this is terrible.
And they put him in, I think they put him under psychic psychic observation.

Speaker 2 He doesn't have a psychological problem. He has a hatred problem.
Right. And he has a lack of deterrence.
He thought that if he were to do that, put it this way, if

Speaker 2 a bunch of Christians who were on a pilgrimage to look at historical sites in the Middle East, let's just pick a country, Egypt, Jordan.

Speaker 2 Syria, Lebanon, and some of them started to target the Muslim population and started hitting them. What do you think would happen to them? Oh, my gosh.

Speaker 2 They'd be dead. Dead in a moment.
So I think Europe's going to have, you're right. It's coming to a point of no return, and that would mean they're either going to have to

Speaker 2 people green cards and have them re-vetted, or they're going to have to deport the people there. They have to deport all people there who are there illegally, but they're going to have to decide

Speaker 2 to integrate them. If they don't integrate them, they're doomed or they're going to be in a civil war.
There's the other thing going on, though. This is happening because of the left.

Speaker 2 It's the left's therapeutic policy of you saw that with Merkel open borders. There's something nihilistic or self-loathing about this postmodern West.
We saw it with the Biden administration.

Speaker 2 Nobody can still, it's like we woke up and we're thinking, wait a minute. In 2021, 23,

Speaker 2 were there really 10,000, 20,000 people coming across the border while this crazy Majorca was saying it's secure? Why?

Speaker 2 Why did they do that? Did they want more constituents? Did they want more welfare

Speaker 2 recipients? Did they want people to cause chaos? Are they anarchists to nail us? Why did they do that?

Speaker 2 And we can't even believe it. And so now it's going to take

Speaker 2 to find all the people who came illegally, even the people who were flagrantly committing crimes.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, we're going to get your thoughts on Israel and Gaza in a second. But first, folks, let's talk about what's happening in the markets.
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Speaker 2 Victor, before we get to guys, I just want to mention one thing.

Speaker 2 Today, Mia Love, who was a black Republican congresswoman, the first black Republican congresswoman ever.

Speaker 2 She was from Utah, served a few terms, and she passed away. You're very young, 49.

Speaker 2 And, you know, I think of her,

Speaker 2 I know she wasn't the trumpiest person in the world, but she was such a hardcore pro-lifer. And

Speaker 2 I think about the lieutenant governor of

Speaker 2 Virginia also, Winsome Sears. And these women, if they were,

Speaker 2 how we

Speaker 2 genuflect before the first, the Democrats do. But she was a real trailblazer and a good woman, too.
And,

Speaker 2 you know, I don't hear her being talked about on MSNBC or CNN for breaking barriers.

Speaker 2 I really like Mia Love. And the irony was, although she was hurt politically because she didn't buy in, I mean, she wasn't a Trump supporter.
I don't mean that derogative worry, buy in, but in 2017,

Speaker 2 she wasn't a Trump supporter. But if you looked at her record in the Congress as a Congresswoman from Utah, it was indistinguishable almost from MAGA supporters.
It was in in the 90s.

Speaker 2 So she was a Trump supporter, de facto, de Jury, maybe not.

Speaker 2 She had a very,

Speaker 2 she was only 49. I felt really bad when I read about it today, yesterday.
49 at the zenith of life, three children, happily married, congressional career, a very articulate,

Speaker 2 highly educated, highly intelligent black woman, conservative, as you pointed out. And she was fighting a three-year fight with a glioblastoma.

Speaker 2 And my mother died of a malignant meningioma, a brain tumor. And I watched her, and I, you know,

Speaker 2 I was trying to help when I was in my 30s, trying to find new avenues and things. But a glioblastoma is something else.
And they've made enormous strides in that medicine.

Speaker 2 Doctors are maybe listening know what I'm talking about. They've got all sorts of drugs and

Speaker 2 new types of radiation chemotherapies, but it's a terrible sentence to have a glioblastoma.

Speaker 2 Malignant meningioma is bad enough, or an astrocytoma, but gosh, I felt so bad when I heard that she fought that for three years.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, tough

Speaker 2 person, wonderful person. She's like Aeon Herciali.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the Republican Party and the conservative movement have been blessed by dozens of these very articulate black women.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and courageous because they're not only afraid to take the positions but then to run for office.

Speaker 2 There don't hate the black Republican wars.

Speaker 2 It's funny. When you see black conservative women, they're not in the majority of black women.
And in the same fashion, they're not like the majority of liberal Jewish Americans.

Speaker 2 But when you see conservative Jewish Americans, they remind me of conservative French intellectuals. When you see a French intellectual that's conservative, they're brilliant because they have to be.

Speaker 2 They're under such attack. And the same thing is about conservative Jewish Americans, black women that are conservative.
They have a constant struggle because

Speaker 2 they get incoming fire 360 degrees from culture, race, religion, everything, and yet they're on their toes.

Speaker 2 I really like French conservative intellectuals for some reason.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Pierre Manon, Raymond Aron, I just had a belly full of it with I was at the Philadelphia Society meeting.

Speaker 2 And as you know, my dear friend Dan Mahoney, and there were a number of actually Will Morrissey, who I know you know from up in Hillsdale. And just

Speaker 2 there was lots of discussion of the French right. And you're dead on, Victor.

Speaker 2 They are rare and they are very

Speaker 2 good example when he kind of converted to conservatism.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Malro, who was close to de Gaulle.

Speaker 2 I remember that book about Cambodia, I think it was translated,

Speaker 2 The Royal Way or something. I read his

Speaker 2 anti-memoirs when I was younger.

Speaker 2 I don't know how true all of it was. People have suggested that he exaggerated, but if it was true for a guy who wasn't

Speaker 2 I mean

Speaker 2 he did more than most people people did an entire ten lifetimes if half of what he wrote was true anyway

Speaker 2 I feel bad about me alove I really did

Speaker 2 Victor we're gonna

Speaker 2 get to get to Gaza and Israel in a minute we'll do that when we come back from these important messages

Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on

Speaker 2 Monday, the 24th of March. And

Speaker 2 today's episode will be up on Tuesday, the 25th. Victor, here's a

Speaker 2 headline from the other day.

Speaker 2 Israel resumes war in Gaza with plan to conquer Strip and a quote: If the Hamas terror organization continues to refuse to release the hostages, I've instructed the Israeli Defense Forces to capture additional areas, evacuate the population, and expand the security zone around Gaza through permanent, I love that word, permanent control of the area by Israel Defense Minister Israel Katz said in the statement: the longer Hamas continues its refusal, the more and more land it will lose that will be added to Israel.

Speaker 2 So, Victor, two things. One, your thoughts on what's happening.
And I'm just curious, I didn't ask you this ahead of time, if you've ever met Katz or know anything about him.

Speaker 2 No, I haven't. I haven't.
I've met members of the Israeli, current Israeli government,

Speaker 2 but I haven't met him.

Speaker 2 But there was also

Speaker 2 simultaneously with these announcements, both from Trump and Kotz, there was a poll that was conducted that suggested that a majority of people in Gaza would like to be relocated in more peaceful circumstances.

Speaker 2 And I think you're seeing that

Speaker 2 it... You cannot have Hamas in control of Gaza.
And yet, the tunnel labyrinth is of such a magnitude, and it's so hard to get them. And

Speaker 2 they're existing right now because of all the hundreds of billions of dollars in food, clothing, shelter that's pouring in. They steal it.
They run it all. They run the distribution.

Speaker 2 They're like the mafia. And they charge their own people.
And their own people are even terrified to pull that they don't have. This is what's so aggravating about Mr.
Khalil. From his safe

Speaker 2 perch

Speaker 2 at Columbia, he can disseminate and encourage anti-Semitism, but

Speaker 2 the people whom he is supporting are inflicting enormous damage on Palestinians in Gazans, and he doesn't seem to be worried about it.

Speaker 2 If he was in Gaza and he was living there and he saw daily what Hamas was doing, I'm sure he might have a different

Speaker 2 attitude than being in subsidized housing owned by Columbia University. So

Speaker 2 we can see that all I think all the country when Donald Trump about a month ago in front of Netanyahu said, well, I think we know we have to displace the population and then it's beautiful, it's got great beaches, we'll get all foreign money, golf money, everybody, Western money, we'll build this beautiful Dubai type situation and then we will have passport control and let people come in, but not Hamas.

Speaker 2 And everybody thought, what the what's he talking? But the more, it's like everything Trump does,

Speaker 2 the first

Speaker 2 sentence, the first paragraph, the first narrative, it's so unorthodox or against the grain or never heard it before. But then when you start to digest it,

Speaker 2 I'm not saying that, you know, we're going to absorb Greenland, but the idea that big fat Greenland sits there undefended while China and Russia are going through its airspace and maritime waters, there's going to be a remedy.

Speaker 2 I hope it's the autonomy of

Speaker 2 Greenland with a defense agreement with the United States of mutual assistance are basing.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 there has to be a solution that has not been because every single solution has not worked. The idea there's going to be a separate independent Hamas state in Gaza is never going to happen.

Speaker 2 It's never going to happen. That's like going across the Rhine in March of 1945 and then surrounding and all of a sudden having an armistice and saying the Third Reich under Hitler's replacement

Speaker 2 at that time Goering was still alive. Himmler, we're going to let Himmler and Goering have their little rump state here.
They made an agony. No, it's not going to happen.

Speaker 2 I wonder, Victor, you mentioned

Speaker 2 twice now,

Speaker 2 the tunnels. And I wonder just how much of a failing that is of our intelligence over the years that such extensive work was done and paid for by us, essentially.
We knew what was going on.

Speaker 2 We knew it was going on. What we were going to do about it.
I mean, we had eight years of Obama was pro-Hamas. We had four years of the people running the Biden administration was pro-Hamas.

Speaker 2 So essentially,

Speaker 2 out of the last

Speaker 2 20 years, we only had four years of an administration, the first Trump administration, that was,

Speaker 2 I should say the 16 years, that was even worried about it.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it was very strange. I mean,

Speaker 2 I was looking at the pictures not too long ago and comparing them to the cartel, the Mexican cartel tunnels, which were very sophisticated. But the Hamas were much better designed.

Speaker 2 They had reinforced concrete rebars.

Speaker 2 They didn't have any wood supports like the cartels.

Speaker 2 They had everything, internet, and they had sophisticated German bulldozing equipment and tunneling equipment. It was all going on.
Everybody knew what was going on.

Speaker 2 And when you looked at, I had gone to Gaza in 2006, I think. And when you looked at that,

Speaker 2 what was going on,

Speaker 2 that was when they were pulling out the Israelis. Everybody was,

Speaker 2 you know, this was what everybody has this idea the Israelis are the aggressor.

Speaker 2 All they want is, every time they have a solution, they get all excited about it. They were saying, you know what, we've got all these hot houses.

Speaker 2 We've got this export market that we've trained the people there.

Speaker 2 We're going to get everybody out of Gaza. They will have no complaint against us.
They'll have their autonomous country.

Speaker 2 And we even have American money that's going to continue these sophisticated

Speaker 2 winter vegetable and winter fruits and things like that to ship to Europe. So they even have a big, we're just going to give it.
And

Speaker 2 when you listen to that, human nature being what it is, you think, no, they're going to interpret your largesse as weakness to be exploited, not as magnanimity to be reciprocated. And they did.

Speaker 2 That's exactly what they did. So that was Chiron.
That was his idea to get everybody out and we'll have a lasting peace. Yeah.
Never going to happen.

Speaker 2 Not if the United Nations and the Europeans and the NGOs fund all of these radical groups that brainwash people from the age of three years old to hate Jews. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, I wonder how, once the area is taken back, how many decades it's going to take to undo all that

Speaker 2 mining?

Speaker 2 Well, anyway. Oh, I'm sure they've mined every single

Speaker 2 their whole attitude is there's going to be some Western Israeli or American or somebody's going to come in here one day and try to explore these tunnels and we're going to booby trap them and kill as many as we can.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's a death machine. That's what it is.
It's a cult of death. It's a nihilistic cult of death.

Speaker 2 When I saw those poor, emaciated hostages up there, and all of these young men emerging out of the tunnels and shadows and these crisp new camouflage and screaming and yelling with masks on.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 what reminded me of the students at Columbia, one of the demands to get their $400 million, that is Columbia's federal money, is that they have to outlaw masks.

Speaker 2 Nobody wears a mask unless you're on an airplane. I saw a couple this week, but they're wearing masks for one reason, and that is

Speaker 2 they're so bold and brave, but they don't want

Speaker 2 their identities revealed. Yeah.
And that's what Hamas does.

Speaker 2 Not funny, Victor, but the cult of death and tunnels. I just I d read this to I got in front of me.
I'm going to spring this on you. Andrew Arthur, who works for the Center for Immigration Studies.

Speaker 2 That's Mark Ricorian's

Speaker 2 group. He's got an op-ed in the New York Post today.
And, you know, the cartels who are tunnelers

Speaker 2 on our border, I think it's

Speaker 2 a border again. They too are, they are demented with people now.
Here's what he wrote. Cartels using money to enhance their operations and to run camps.

Speaker 2 This is, you know, they're doing the coyote business here of

Speaker 2 bringing people up because the Biden administration says come and the Catholic NGOs say come. And what happens to the people that come? Well, they have to deal with these thugs and murderers.

Speaker 2 And they run camps like the one uncovered outside Guadalajara two weeks ago.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, this is like alchemy.

Speaker 2 They had tennis shoes and clothes, and then they had a crematorium. I mean, it was a deliberate emulation of the death counts.
And this is what we're dealing with.

Speaker 2 And these are the type of people, cartel people, M13 people, trend people.

Speaker 2 and this gets so infuriating that these, we'll talk about it in a second, but these individual regional judges can rule that even though these people came in illegally, even though they came in with an intent to harm and hurt people, even though they're agents of sinister forces, even though they, in many cases, are in terrorist-designated groups.

Speaker 2 and they should have no they have no legal right to be here, it's illegal to take them back home. I don't understand that.

Speaker 2 And all of these judges, if they had to live in areas where I live out here in southwestern Fresno County, which has had an enormous gang problem, M13 and not too long ago in Mendoto had overrun the whole town.

Speaker 2 And one day I was driving, I won't mention the name of the street, and I was driving down, and all of a sudden I saw eight or nine, ten males in their

Speaker 2 boxer shorts, all

Speaker 2 arrested, sitting along the side of the road with about five different federal agency sheriffs, police, highway patrol, immigration, and with masks on, some of them.

Speaker 2 And that was about a mile from less than a mile from my house. So if they had to live in areas like that, any of these judges,

Speaker 2 they wouldn't be so cavalier about

Speaker 2 grandstanding.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, let's, I know you and Sammy talked

Speaker 2 about the judges

Speaker 2 at some length, but I wanted to layer on to that. And I encourage our listeners, if they haven't caught the weekend shows with Sammy, that they do so.
But this one judge,

Speaker 2 Bosberg,

Speaker 2 and he seems to be one of the prime instigators of stopping the deportation. But I wonder, Victor, if Judge Bosberg had been around 80 years ago and had been a federal judge in 1944,

Speaker 2 given

Speaker 2 their

Speaker 2 assumption of the power that they have now, they would have thought, he would have thought, hypothetically, he could have stopped the D-Day invasion. He could have stopped the Enola Gay.

Speaker 2 I mean, where does their power end?

Speaker 2 Chuck Schumer bragged about it. He said, look, don't try to remove me.

Speaker 2 I got all of these 50-something left-wing judges, and they're doing a great job. And what he's saying is the lowest rung of federal judge can affect the entire country.

Speaker 2 And they all have something in common, two things in common. They're all either Biden

Speaker 2 or Obama or some of them older Clinton judges. And they're doing, this is Law Affair 2.0.

Speaker 2 This is just a continuance of Judge Mershon, whose daughter made millions of dollars trading on her father's name as a Democrat. She was an activist consultant.

Speaker 2 Remember Judge Michon and the Alvin Bragg?

Speaker 2 This is the same thing of Judge Kaplan and the Eugene Carroll civil suit, left-wing judge who said even though Donald Trump had not been convicted of rape, it was a minor difference sexual assault and rape.

Speaker 2 This was the

Speaker 2 same thing with Judge N. Goron, you know, hamming it up in front of the cameras for Letita James, trying to get this astronomical, putting gag orders on Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 It's the same idea. They went, Mark Elias and all of these Democratic operatives find

Speaker 2 cherry-pick individual district judges, and they file the suit or the DA, whether criminal or civil in those jurisdictions that they know they're going to be a blue state judge or a blue state county, a blue state jury.

Speaker 2 In these cases, these executive orders. We had another one, Anna Reyes, I think she was.
She was famous because O'Biden, she just got appointed.

Speaker 2 She was a naturalized American, and she was, well, the Biden administration bragged not about her qualification. He said, this is the first LGBTQ Latina judge.

Speaker 2 She just ruled and put a stay on the transgender prohibition that Pete Hexes had done.

Speaker 2 I remember, I'm pretty sure, I know listeners will correct me because I'm doing this by memory, but Judge Bosberg was a FISA judge.

Speaker 2 And when Kevin Kleinsmith altered that document and lied, That was a felony, a very serious felony.

Speaker 2 And that affected, and that may well have affected the 2016 pulse of that election with all of that Russian collusion.

Speaker 2 And here you had the FBI submitting documents to a federal judge in which they had forged and adopted the evidence and the whole Papadopoulos, Carter Page stuff, surveillance. All it was bogus.

Speaker 2 And what happens with that? Any other judge, if that had been

Speaker 2 any other judge, they would have said, wait a minute, you're an FBI attorney and you forged a document and you sent it to me.

Speaker 2 They would have thrown the book at him. But if you read what he said at the time, I remember what he said, oh, this is, he's suffered so much, Jack.
He's just suffered.

Speaker 2 It was so much, it was so stressful. He didn't know what was going to happen.
He's remorseful. So we're just going to give him a temporary, we'll just give him probation and some community service.

Speaker 2 And then the bar, I think, temporarily disbarred him, and he's back in action. And that was this judge.

Speaker 2 And then we had this Judge Furman. Remember him? He was the one that has put the stay on Khalil.

Speaker 2 And I think his brother, correct me if I'm, he was another left-wing appointed judge, and his brother was an economic advisor to Barack Obama. So they not, they just don't pick Democrats.

Speaker 2 They pick ultra, or to quote Joe Biden, ultra,

Speaker 2 when he said ultra-mega, these are ultra-Obama, ultra-Biden, ultra-Clinton judges.

Speaker 2 You know, can you imagine in any other profession that this would go on?

Speaker 2 What if you were chairman of the English department at Stanford and you said that all of your syllabuses in your department shall,

Speaker 2 I don't know, Jack Kerouac's on the road will be required reading.

Speaker 2 And then you said, in fact, every English department in the United States is going to have the same reading list as I, because I have ruled, because I am a chairman at Stanford.

Speaker 2 So this judge in this jurisdiction in Washington, every single person in the United States is going to be subject to my thought because as an

Speaker 2 Obama-appointed judge and a Democratic activist with a long history of progressive thought, and that's how I got appointed, I have decided in an imperial, autocratic, oligarchic fashion that everybody everybody in the United States will be subject to my rule.

Speaker 2 And of course, the subtext to it all, Jack, is

Speaker 2 Donald Trump is a lame duck president,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 he's only here for four years. He can't be re-elected.
So let's see. He was going great guns, and we interrupted him now for two weeks, three weeks.
He's got to go to a circuit court.

Speaker 2 We've got a lot of liberals in the circuit court.

Speaker 2 Maybe they'll cherry-pick that too.

Speaker 2 And by the time the Supreme Court, we saw that there was some ambiguity on the part of the Supreme Court. By the time this all gets done, we ate up,

Speaker 2 I don't know, a year. This is getting back to the 22 months, 40 million Robert Mueller.
After it was all over, the left said,

Speaker 2 well, I guess we were wrong about collusion. We lied about it.
Ha ha, you guys just lost 22 months of your reign. And then they said, and it doesn't end there.
In Act.

Speaker 2 Now we've got an impeachment because Mr. Vinman was on a call and he called up his friend Eric Saramella and then he got together with Adam Schipp, which they lied about.

Speaker 2 And we've got an impeachment to eat for three or four months. That's how they operate.
And

Speaker 2 what's lacking here, Jack,

Speaker 2 in my little rant,

Speaker 2 what's lacking here,

Speaker 2 everybody, is has anybody heard any counter-positive proposal? So, when Tim Waltz is dancing on the stage and hamming it up about his little app,

Speaker 2 and that he's got, oh, it's so great, it's going down the Tesla, even though he's got a multi-million, if not over a billion dollars in Minnesota investments.

Speaker 2 And then he kind of apologized, and then he's talking about

Speaker 2 Musk as the a-hole, and then he's talking about Musk as the Nepo baby, creepy South African. And then he's talking about that part of the problem with the MAGA men is they're not masculine like he is.

Speaker 2 And he's got

Speaker 2 this guy that is 71 years old.

Speaker 2 And I did wrestle for three years. And he was, I suppose, that I would like nothing.
I mean, I think every male listening to this,

Speaker 2 if you were walking alone at night in a city, your dream would be that

Speaker 2 like Tim Waltz would walk by you and try to hold you up or something.

Speaker 2 Tim Waltz coming out of a dark alley. He's the epitome of,

Speaker 2 I don't know what, I don't want to get down to his level, but when you have all that stuff,

Speaker 2 and then you think Elon Musk has just saved Boeing and saved NASA and rescued two people, and astronaut Kelly can't say a nice word about him other than he's an a-hole.

Speaker 2 So we get all this, but what I'm getting at is:

Speaker 2 why doesn't Chuck Schumer go on and say, look,

Speaker 2 we have no problem

Speaker 2 with reducing spending. Barack Obama used to give speeches about it.
We were ahead of you guys. Clinton balanced the budget.
We know how to do it. So here's what we want to do.

Speaker 2 I know it's not the Reagan years where the tax rates were in the high 20s. We've got up to 38, so we can't really raise taxes.

Speaker 2 But what we can do is work with you guys, and let's get a freeze across the board. And then we'll work toward a balanced budget.

Speaker 2 I haven't heard any of that. I I have not heard any of it.
Or when they say something like

Speaker 2 well, you know, we don't ag

Speaker 2 we want to remind you guys that you guys were the free traders. You were the Milton Friedman libertarians.
We were the tariff.

Speaker 2 Clinton had tariffs. Obama had tariffs.
We like tariffs. So let's just be reciprocal.

Speaker 2 Let's get together and get a tariff policy a bipartisan. Oh, now I know we opened the border.

Speaker 2 I know we did, and we withheld illegally congressionally approved funds that were designated to finish the wall.

Speaker 2 But whatever happened in the past, I think everybody realizes it's much better now that zero people essentially are coming across illegally than 10,000 a day.

Speaker 2 So let's work on - have you heard them say comprehensive immigration suddenly? I haven't heard that word. That's all they could talk about.

Speaker 2 So what I'm getting at is they don't have one concrete proposal, either to work with with Trump or to take credit for a successful program, nothing.

Speaker 2 And Mark Penn got on the other day, and it was like, I watched his video, it was like, oh my gosh, they've gone from 47% neck and neck with the Republicans all the way down to 27%.

Speaker 2 And some of them are lower than 27. And he was saying they're going to destroy the Democratic Party because they're nihilistic.
They don't have one positive counter proposal.

Speaker 2 Bernie Sanders was going on about climate change. Okay, Bernie, tell us exactly what you want to do.
You want EVs? Do you want to build nuclear plants?

Speaker 2 Because with AI, we're going to be out of energy. What do you want to do?

Speaker 2 You want to go out here in California on Manning Avenue and see the thousands of acres of precious farmland that have been taken out to build a solar farm when we already have two minute much daytime power and now we're going to be able to build a battery.

Speaker 2 The last time we built a battery plant in California at Moss Lande, it caught fire twice.

Speaker 2 So they don't have concrete counter proposals. So they do these tricks.

Speaker 2 It's either Gavin Newsom with his little stick about podcasts as he tries to triangulate for the next election, or it's street theater with the campus protest and torching Teslas, or it's potty mouth, F-word, S-word, A-word.

Speaker 2 video stuff. That's about it.
I can't think of anything else.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, all of the reference of these people, they're in shambles. What happened to the Black Lives Matter movement?

Speaker 2 The people absconded with all the money. They took it.
They're all in retirement, nice homes. Even the BLM sanctuary space in Washington is being dismantled.
How about this, Jack?

Speaker 2 I could not get a memo from a Stanford administrator for four years without these there, they, he, she. What happened to the pronouns? They're gone.

Speaker 2 I haven't seen any memo from an administrator with a pronoun. They just bing, they disappear.

Speaker 2 But you, and I want you to elaborate on this after, because I'm going to read a message here first,

Speaker 2 but you still think that we're on the cusp of a kind of a civil war.

Speaker 2 Well, what Donald Trump was trying to do is he got

Speaker 2 when they were trying to destroy him for four years, he got a lot of brilliant people around him. Amen.
Everybody remembered that.

Speaker 2 And he said, you know, I didn't have people who agreed with me in my first administration in every case at cabinet heads and advisors.

Speaker 2 So I'm going to get everybody, no exceptions, and we're going to sit and contemplate. And they came up with the idea that the left was not waging a political revolution.

Speaker 2 They were waging a cultural revolution as well. So they are going after the universities because they're not universities anymore.
They're indoctrination centers.

Speaker 2 They're looking at taxing the endowment. They're looking at anti-Semitism.
They're looking at

Speaker 2 gouging the federal government with 50, 60% overhead on grants. They're looking at everything.
And it's a multifaceted effort to bring the country back to sanity.

Speaker 2 And it can't just be political. It's economic, political, cultural, social, military, everything.

Speaker 2 And it's kind of like they pulled up this rock and they looked underneath this mossy rock and here was all these

Speaker 2 strange creatures at the trial. You know what I mean? It was like USAID and this $40 million

Speaker 2 for the Wuhan virology lab to help kill us again. Here's some money for the BBC so they can say they hate America more effectively.
Here's money for the LGBTQ people in Nigeria.

Speaker 2 It was all a monstrosity to keep this whole university, left-wing foundations, NGOs, government going. And they said we could either do what every other Republican has done,

Speaker 2 George W. Bush, George H.W.
Bush, what Mitt Romney ran on, what McCain ran on. We'll just let it go.
Just say, you know what? We'll try to trim around the edges.

Speaker 2 We'll kind of hack the Thornton Bush and do it here, or we're going to try to uproot it. And if we uproot it, they're going to go absolutely insane.

Speaker 2 Imagine if you were at a Republican

Speaker 2 potentate's meeting in, say, 2010 and presented the idea of getting rid of USAID.

Speaker 2 You'd be shown the door of the room immediately. Or Rick Berry, remember when he ran in 2016 and

Speaker 2 he said, and I'm going to eliminate the Department of Education. I'm going to eliminate the Department of Energy.
And

Speaker 2 what was the third HHS or something? I can't remember, but he forgot. Well,

Speaker 2 he had a brain. I liked it.
I think

Speaker 2 he was on the right track. He was.
He was also on Painkillers at the time. Hey, Victor.
We have a couple of other things to talk about, but I just want to take a look at the picture.

Speaker 2 I forgot about his bad back. He had a terrible back.
Well, he was on, I think it was actually that moment where he had that

Speaker 2 missing third H.

Speaker 2 They went after him, too. They remember that he was gone.
They had some rock they found with an inscription on his golf course, and they claimed that he was some kind of white nationalist. Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2 Well, but first, before we talk about more things, I want to take a moment for our sponsor, Open Phone.

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Speaker 2 for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor, you mentioned, by the way, Jack Kerouac.

Speaker 2 He was a very dissolute guy, but remember when he was in his final years, he was pudgy, post-alcoholic.

Speaker 2 Not post.

Speaker 2 He was. He was pretty much.
He was bisexual, too, with Alan Ginsburg and Neil Cassidy. And then at the end, he was for the Vietnam War.
He was like Steinbeck.

Speaker 2 Remember, he flipped and he was for the Vietnam War and everything. He's very conservative.
Well, he let me tell you something.

Speaker 2 First of all, folks should Google him in Buckley because he was on an episode of Firing Line and he was pie-eyed.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, it was really wild. Well, he also died reading National Review.
And the weirdest thing happened, I'm sorry to go down a rabbit hole here, but when the former

Speaker 2 managing editor, Priscilla Buckley, she died. She was Bill's sister.
She was just the loveliest lady. And her nephew said, call me up one day.
I was still the publisher.

Speaker 2 Jack, I have all these boxes of Priscilla's stuff. So 24 of the 25 boxes were books, and the last box had all kinds of folders of interesting things,

Speaker 2 kind of shocking things. But there was a file called Kerouac, and Jack Kerouac had submitted an article to National Review, and we were getting it set, and he died.

Speaker 2 So the article was never published, but I had it there in my hands, and I had to deal with his estate.

Speaker 2 And he was a conservative, even younger. He was, you know, he was very Catholic, and he prayed the rosary rosary a lot.
I remember he went to Columbia, too.

Speaker 2 I think he was an English major in the writing program. Ken Kesey, you know, was electric cool acid test by Tom Wolfe.
He was in the Wallace Stegner.

Speaker 2 He financed that tour with One Flu Over the Cuckoo's Nest for government revenues. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Even that one, was it Sometimes a Great Notion? I really loved that movie with Paul Newman and Henry Fonda. They made a movie of his second big novel.

Speaker 2 He had a very tragic life, too, Kenkeese. His son died.

Speaker 2 He was a wrestler, too.

Speaker 2 I think he was a

Speaker 2 state champ.

Speaker 2 Well, let's talk about wrestling, Victor, wrestler. Donald Trump walks into the NCAA Wrestling Championships, and the house roars for him.
And

Speaker 2 I thought it was cool. I'm not from a wrestling family, although in high school, I worked

Speaker 2 cooking. We had big wrestling, huge tournaments at my kids' high school.
And there's something about wrestling families.

Speaker 2 I mean, there's just, and the wrestling teams, there's just a great dynamic relative to other kinds of sports. That was my impression.
Well, they started it.

Speaker 2 When I was a junior in 1970, and I was a terrible basketball player. So in winter sports, they started a wrestling,

Speaker 2 excuse me, I was a freshman.

Speaker 2 1967, they started a wrestling team at Selma High School. And I was on the first wrestling team on the JVs.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I think we didn't win a match that year. But I learned something about wrestling.

Speaker 2 I mean, we went, it was, my dad was such a wonderful person, but he was so frustrated because, you know, we went all around the San Joaquin Valley.

Speaker 2 We were out there at Gustine, and then it was like a two-hour bus ride. And I get back at midnight, and he'd say, What are you doing? I say,

Speaker 2 I signed up for an early AP class or something like that. And I would

Speaker 2 And he goes, and then I was always trying to lose weight. I was 6'1, and I was in the 127-pound.
I wanted to get down to 121.

Speaker 2 So I was spitting all the time. And my grandfather, every morning I'd run around the ranch, and my grandfather would be out irrigating.
And he'd say, please,

Speaker 2 he'd hand me a chocolate bar. Please, I had to find you.
You got to eat this. You're going to kill yourself.

Speaker 2 But I was kind of like son of flubber. In other words,

Speaker 2 I went out for three years,

Speaker 2 but I had a reputation of not being a good wrestler, but a person who wasn't able because I was like a lanky, you know, it couldn't be pinned.

Speaker 2 They had a rule you couldn't go up to more than two or three weight classes because everybody get the flu and sick. So when I was in 121, if I would go to all the, I never missed any of the meets.

Speaker 2 So we'd go to Doss Palace or way out in the middle of nowhere, and they would put me in the 145 class, and I would just grab onto somebody where they, for six minutes, they flipped me back like a fish on a wharf, and they wouldn't let go.

Speaker 2 There was a very famous guy, I won't mention his name, he's really strong, and his father was there, and I grabbed onto him,

Speaker 2 and he threw me six or seven times. We turned it, we flipped around, I did a crossface on him, so he couldn't do it.

Speaker 2 And the whole point, you see, is not to lose your team five points by being pinned, but by

Speaker 2 just lose by default, by points. So the coach would say to me, Look, I don't know, I don't want to do it this to you, Victor, but we don't, what's his name is Sick with a Flu in the 146 class.

Speaker 2 So you're going to go up 20 pounds. This guy is the Central Valley's runner up.
You go out there and you grab him, and you do not get pinned.

Speaker 2 I would get, I don't think I ever got pinned, but man, I was, I don't, I think my record was something like six and twenty.

Speaker 2 Another thing I noticed was about wrestling, this is an interesting fast, you can't tell how good your opponent will be by his physique.

Speaker 2 I was really scared when I was wrestling once. This guy looked like he was Arnold Schwarzenegger at 127 pounds,

Speaker 2 but he looked so formidable, and I beat him, but he was not very strong. And then I remember another time

Speaker 2 I was ahead, I looked over, and this guy looked like he was

Speaker 2 one of those

Speaker 2 tub of beans. Yeah, he was just poly-poly.
And I thought, this is going to be so easy. And he had little twigs for arms and his huge belly.
Man, I got on there.

Speaker 2 And he got that weight going. It was a bam, bam, bam.

Speaker 2 It was like a cannonball at a siege, and I was the gate. He just bam, bam.
I remember the next day I got up, I was all bruised, and he beat me.

Speaker 2 But I don't know, there's something about wrestling that was weird about it.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of tense, and I get really, you know, you look at the guy when you're going to,

Speaker 2 you're all in the weight classes in the chairs, and you look across the mat, and you see the guy you're going to wrestle in the next 10, 15, 20 minutes. He kind of goes,

Speaker 2 And then you, when you're the next guy, then you're up there in the waiting thing, and you're going like this, and you're, and, and you're all, you know, like 15 years old.

Speaker 2 I was actually, I just turned 14, 15 and 16.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 you have all this, you know,

Speaker 2 there's this guy, I can, I'll just make one other thing. He was really good.

Speaker 2 He was an African-American guy, one of the sweetest guys from, I think it was Los Banos, but he was something like 22 and 0.

Speaker 2 And he was looking at me right before, and my coach came over and he said, Now, don't psych yourself out, Victor. You've got to go in there like you can beat him.
And I said, Coach,

Speaker 2 there's no way in the world that I can beat this guy. He's impossible.
And we went out, and

Speaker 2 the guy before had been a big sweat hog, and there was still sweat on the mat, and they hadn't quite cleaned it.

Speaker 2 And the first thing he did is he ran at full speed to take me down, and he fell on his back. And I just jumped on him.
And I came within like two seconds of pinning him.

Speaker 2 And then he just kind of rose from the dead.

Speaker 2 And the rest of it was like jellyfish again.

Speaker 2 But I always liked our coach. Don't get psyched out.
Just because he's bigger, stronger, and better than you doesn't mean you can't win.

Speaker 2 Again, you know, it's an, as you know, an individual sport, right? One-on-one. But

Speaker 2 there was always a sense that wrestling teams, there was some camaraderie that kind of transcended other teams. Even basketball teams,

Speaker 2 it's like golf.

Speaker 2 I've never played golf, but it's like boxing.

Speaker 2 It's a team, but it's an individual sport. You can't hide, like in football or basketball or baseball.
I mean,

Speaker 2 especially football, if you don't make a tackle, you can say that, but you're just out there alone. And yet your points will help your team.

Speaker 2 And, you know, so you have all these strategies, don't get pinned.

Speaker 2 If you win by points, it won't help your team. At this point, you've got to pin the guy, do anything to pin him.

Speaker 2 You know, you get down to one minute and the coach is yelling you, don't get pinned and we win, then you're like scratching around. You know,

Speaker 2 you're like a steer with a guy trying to rope you as you try to evade.

Speaker 2 It's a fascinating sport.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 before we head into the final break, Victor, and then we're going to do one other subject before we close out today. Any thoughts on

Speaker 2 what were your thoughts of Trump's

Speaker 2 ideas at that NCAA tournament?

Speaker 2 It's very good that he does this, like the Madison Square Garden when he walked in that time with Joe Rogan, Dano White,

Speaker 2 RFK,

Speaker 2 to that thunderous applause. Just a reminder to people that he has that when he ⁇ this is the all-American Midwestern, small-town, rural,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 it's really something.

Speaker 2 And to see all of that support reminds people not to listen to the media.

Speaker 2 I think everybody, if you look at the real clear politics today and you look at some of the latest polls, they're about dead even. And even I think Rasmussen and

Speaker 2 Morning Advantage or whatever, they have him ahead a little bit, are dead even.

Speaker 2 And that's a pretty amazing thing, Jack, given this comprehensive

Speaker 2 counter-revolutionary policy he has. And everybody gets kind of depressed

Speaker 2 and well,

Speaker 2 it's so chaotic.

Speaker 2 But actually, most people really do want Doge to cut, and most people really do want affordable energy, and most people really want to find a legitimate ceasefire in Ukraine, and most people really do want a closed border, and most people really do want illegal aliens, especially those violent, to go back home and try it again if they want to come, but only legally, and that finished the wall.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 he's on the right side of everything, and the hysteria is all we hear, but that's not the story. So when he goes to this wrestling thing and you see this overwhelming response,

Speaker 2 you know, it's kind of like when he was at McDonald's and that iconic moment when that Indian-American couple, and he said, we're just so happy, we're just ordinary, you're not ordinary.

Speaker 2 And then his wife said, but but thank you for taking a bullet. And he kind of looked around like he was a philosopher, said, you know, I guess I did.

Speaker 2 Those are good moments for him. He's very good in on-script

Speaker 2 authenticity, genuine moments. Yeah.
Yeah. And the more he does that is the better.

Speaker 2 I don't know why you made me, you just made me think of Obama mocking him at that White House correspondence dining at the birth thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah. But

Speaker 2 the soul of that was,

Speaker 2 Mr. Obama, if your literary agent had not had a flyer for your memoir who said Barack Obama was born, and I'm quoting, in Kenya, in Kenya.

Speaker 2 And why did she write that? She wrote it to gen-up sales as if you were a naturalized America with genuine African roots. It says that you were born in Kenya.

Speaker 2 That was a flyer they distributed to promote your book. I have written, I think now, 26 books.

Speaker 2 I can tell you, Jack, in 26 cases, no agent, no literary promoter, working future, no ad person, no any of them have ever written anything about me without my knowledge.

Speaker 2 The idea that they wrote that without his knowledge is preposterous. I'm not saying he was born in Kenya.

Speaker 2 What I am saying is he thought it was kind of cute that they could spread that little thing for a while and get sales for Dreams from My Father, which she probably

Speaker 2 pride himself.

Speaker 2 His books were full of lies.

Speaker 2 His girlfriend, which was a composite of girlfriends, the whole book was fiction.

Speaker 2 I think Garyl wrote that about it.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, we've got time for one more topic, and that will be we are going to go back over the topic of Tesla's, which I know you and the great Sammy Wink have talked about it, but there's an angle here I'd like to get your take on, and we will get that when we come back from these final messages.

Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show recording on Monday the 24th. This episode's up on Monday the 25th.
I said at the outset, Victor's got a website.

Speaker 2 We have a ton of new listeners and viewers, even. We're on Rumble.

Speaker 2 Sammy showed me some info about this podcast on YouTube. Hundreds of thousands of people were very interested.

Speaker 2 I hadn't been out because I'd been sick, and I went out on the plane.

Speaker 2 And by the way, I took an influenza A test to make sure it was no longer positive before I went. Okay.

Speaker 2 Yes, and

Speaker 2 I tried not to cough. This is the first day, really, I haven't coughed in over two weeks.
But anyway, the point I'm making is most of the people who came up at the airport or talk,

Speaker 2 they used to say, well, I read a book, and there wasn't very many, or Fox, but almost all of them, their point of reference was a podcast, which is really good news that people are tuning in.

Speaker 2 I was shocked. I saw my friend, I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago.
My friend said he saw me on YouTube.

Speaker 2 I didn't know what he was talking about, but I guess we're on YouTube. So, well, anyway, but

Speaker 2 because we have all these new listeners and viewers, should know about your website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

Speaker 2 And when you go there, you will find links to Victor's weekly essay for American Greatness, weekly syndicated column, the archives of these podcasts, links to his books and many appearances.

Speaker 2 And then there are some special things.

Speaker 2 They're under a little insignia Ultra. Victor writes two pieces exclusively every week for The Blade of Perseus, and he does one exclusive video.
So you should subscribe.

Speaker 2 If you're a fan of Victor's wisdom, that means you should be subscribing. It's $6.50 a month.

Speaker 2 Do that times 12, and you'll come up with some number. But we discount it to $65

Speaker 2 for the full year, the blade of Perseus.

Speaker 2 Victor, yeah, you and Sammy were talking about

Speaker 2 Elon Musk and Teslas and the, of course, the attempts to firebomb Tesla dealerships and harass Tesla owners. But I saw a link the other day, and I think I sent it to you, about

Speaker 2 that someone

Speaker 2 released the names of every Tesla owner in America for what nefarious purpose? Obviously,

Speaker 2 for trying to encourage locals to

Speaker 2 cause mischief and damage. I know you're an owner of a Tesla.
Do you want that known where you live? And that some nut's going to show up at your house?

Speaker 2 I don't know. I'm worried about it.
I was gone,

Speaker 2 and three Fresno County sheriffs showed up at my house, and they said they had gotten a 911 call from somebody that there was an event going on.

Speaker 2 So I'm assuming that was some kind of, I don't know if it was a prank or swatting, because it was right, it was almost the same time as this,

Speaker 2 they were very nice, my wife said. Very, I mean, they didn't come out guns drawn, but somebody obviously called them for the point of having more than one sheriff show up, three of them.
And so

Speaker 2 and every once in a while

Speaker 2 it's one of the weirdest things about the left because, as we have talked about, Elon Musk voted for Hillary Clinton, and he gave an interview in which he said he voted for Joe Biden.

Speaker 2 He didn't endorse Donald Trump, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, until mid-July after the first assassination attempt.

Speaker 2 And so he was canonized, especially in California. Everybody loved,

Speaker 2 everybody was

Speaker 2 everybody I knew things like this in the Stanford-Palo Alto era. If you talked to them, oh man, the Tesla is the only EV that works.
It's got the greatest range.

Speaker 2 It's just so much better than everything. It's so wonderful.

Speaker 2 And then to see them go from that because he endorsed Trump, then to hate him, try to destroy him. And

Speaker 2 I was thinking about Tim Waltz when he said that

Speaker 2 he went after Elon Musk, he was a horrible person, or Bowman said that he was a thief. I wanted to say, what have you done in your life, Mr.

Speaker 2 Bowman, other than be kicked out of Congress after you turned off even your left-wing constituents for

Speaker 2 probably committing a felony and getting away with it about

Speaker 2 fire alarm?

Speaker 2 Yeah, a principal who used to, whose duty was to tell people never to do that and endanger it, does it himself? What have you done, Mr.

Speaker 2 Walls, except every single thing you said about your military record, the conditions under which you went to Iraq, the conditions about the rioting?

Speaker 2 Your wife said, open the windows so we can smell the burning in the air. What have you done compared to Elon Musk?

Speaker 2 While you were saying all this about him, he was providing free internet service to Ukrainians. If they didn't have it, they would be in big trouble for their command and control.

Speaker 2 He was providing to a left-wing community in Palisades and other places in Los Angeles area free internet. He was rescuing two people that NASA and Boeing could not.

Speaker 2 He was, in addition to that, most of the people that are attacking Elon Musk are doing it on X.

Speaker 2 And Jack Dorsey wasn't... Jack Dorsey, the previous owner, was not only censoring them, but he was inviting the FBI to come in.
And remember, the FBI's chief counsel, James A.

Speaker 2 Baker, rotated into a $7 million a year job at Twitter. They all did.
There's about 12 of them that retired and went right to work. And they had why?

Speaker 2 Because when they were working for the FBI, they were doing all they could to censor the news and collude and do things like stop Miranda Devine and other people from reporting about the authenticity of the FBI-controlled Hunter laptop.

Speaker 2 So I don't understand it, what they're doing, but I hope Pam Bondi, she's got great rhetoric, but she's still assembling her prosecutorial team. But it seems to me that

Speaker 2 they've got three or four of them they caught red-handed.

Speaker 2 They should bring them in and see if they want to make a deal and tell us exactly where they got the information, who is paying for this, and they need to go after them. When you have

Speaker 2 Jasmine Crockett going on video and telling everybody to resist and to stop, and bring, I think she said the word bring him down. We're going to bring him down.

Speaker 2 And then she has that little qualifier about violence. Or as I said with Sam the other day, Jimmy Kimmel, hey, everybody,

Speaker 2 don't burn Teslas.

Speaker 2 That's right at the point of racketeering Rico. It really is.
Right. And so I wish stay with him.

Speaker 2 Gosh,

Speaker 2 the left is an expert at going after people with so-called conspiracies after January 6th. But

Speaker 2 you can imagine that guy and all those late-night guys.

Speaker 2 By the way, I watched recently, I forget where I found the link, a couple of old Johnny Carson programs and compare it to these clowns, all of them on all, except for, of course, Greg Guttveldt, and the narrow aspect of America they talk to, and how they degrade America and how out of sync they are with America and how these networks make them their prime guys in the late evening.

Speaker 2 I just don't get it. I don't either.
It's like the left doesn't even make a ⁇ what I don't understand is in this counter-revolution of the last 70 days, they don't even offer a defense.

Speaker 2 Nobody says, well, why are you cutting USAID $40 million to Wuhan? That was necessary. And of course the BBC needs our ⁇ that's state support.
That That needs our group. That needs our support.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we've got to do that. And

Speaker 2 Boeing's a lot better than, it's a lot better company than Tess,

Speaker 2 Elon Musk SpaceX.

Speaker 2 We don't need SpaceX. We could have just packed them on that.
It came home okay.

Speaker 2 Why don't they just make all these arguments? But they don't. Or, you know what? 36 trillion million, big deal.
So we have 125% of GDP. So we pay $3 billion

Speaker 2 a day in interest. That's okay.
That's sustainable.

Speaker 2 What's the problem? And you have AOC, AOC, OC. Oh, gas has dropped 40, 50 cents a gallon.
That's terrible. We can get it back up there.
Stephen Chu said that. Remember Obama's energy?

Speaker 2 So why don't they just make the argument is what I'm trying to say. But they don't even make the attempt when they're caught.
They don't even make... Oh, the border is closed.

Speaker 2 There's not 10,000 people swarming around? Oh,

Speaker 2 how'd that happen? Well, let's bring it back. We can do that.
Donald Trump, you better let in 10,000. That's what we did.
But they don't. They don't even.
And they don't because all of

Speaker 2 their issues, they're polling 20 to 30 percent. And the biggest gift to Donald Trump is that all of the polls show that the independent voter, conservative Democrat does not like what's going on.

Speaker 2 But the vocal base, when they poll Democrats, they're angry that they're not more left-wing.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. They're going to move that party even further and further to the left.

Speaker 2 And, you know, when you see people like Mark Penn or Douglas showing, and then you see nothing,

Speaker 2 there's nothing that Gavin Newsom does that's not overtly political. He has no ideology, really.

Speaker 2 Vaguely center-left. But when you see him bring on Steve Bannon and people, you know, Charlie Kirk and people on it,

Speaker 2 he's just saying, you know what?

Speaker 2 California, there's a poll, Jack, that, and we can talk about it next week. We're going to talk to that about on the next show.
Yeah, but Californians have had it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 50% of the people are on Medi-Cal, and Medi-Cal is

Speaker 2 $7 billion in the whole quarter of the people are not paying their power bill. I mean, you're talking about civilizational collapse.
50% of all the births are Medi-Cal.

Speaker 2 40% of the population is on Medi-Cal, and it's flat broke. Meanwhile, these 1% that pay 50% of the income taxes are fleeing.

Speaker 2 Now, wait till Ron DeSantis gets property tax.

Speaker 2 He's going to try to end property tax in Florida. If he does that, you're going to see a bigger stampede from California.
My gosh.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor,

Speaker 2 when you're on Gavin Newsom's podcast,

Speaker 2 I don't think that's going to happen

Speaker 2 about it. The second coming.

Speaker 2 I'd wrote a quote. Oh, we can talk about that.
Yeah. Speaking about Colorado.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Okay.
Well,

Speaker 2 you've been terrific. Hey, Victor,

Speaker 2 I got to read something here from one of our

Speaker 2 listeners, viewers. This is from Rumble.
We thank folks. Now there are so many places to leave comments.

Speaker 2 I've got to look at YouTube more now, see what people say. Jack, shut up, please.

Speaker 2 But here's from Rumble, Dolly Freedom. Love to comment on Rumble.
Victor, I'm addicted to your insights and witty imitations of people.

Speaker 2 Thank you for distilling otherwise chaotic and confusing events into intelligent and bite-sized pieces of information for normal folks. By the way, 70 is young.
Stop saying you're old.

Speaker 2 All the best Dolly Freedom Freedom. Yeah, the flu.

Speaker 2 I've had it for a week of fever and then a week of wiping. Well, I worked the whole time, a week of

Speaker 2 travel. and then this is my third week and I'm feeling better

Speaker 2 and I haven't can't imagine

Speaker 2 because I I thought I got over the Skullator slur but then the Freddy Kruger affected me

Speaker 2 you you are I say this in a manly Christian way you're a beautiful man I want to thank the folks who send me emails because they've they've signed up for Civil Thoughts which is the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society where we are trying to strengthen civil society Civil Thoughts comes every Friday, 14 recommended readings, a bad joke.

Speaker 2 I know you'll like it. We're not selling your name, so it's totally free.
Go to civilthoughts.com, please, and sign up. I know you're going to enjoy it.
Victor, you've been terrific.

Speaker 2 Thanks, folks, for listening and for watching. Thanks to our sponsors, and we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.
Bye-bye.

Speaker 2 Thank you, everybody, for listening again. Much appreciated.
And watching watching now.