WWI Consequences and Democratic Angst

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Safeguard your wealth, protect your future while there's still time. Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson show.
This is our Saturday edition where we do something a little different in the middle segment. So we'll be looking at the consequences of World War One today, or Victor will be.
So stay with us for that. But at first, we're going to talk a little bit about Tesla tax and Supreme Court, not decisions, but opinions by judges on things.
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Well, Victor, I wanted to just start off with the pressing news or what is the pressing news only because there's so much violence going on against Elon Musk and Tesla in particular. So there's lots of attacks on Tesla and strangeness coming from the left as far as the leadership and their support of that violence and burning of Teslas and shooting at Tesla.
Tesla, whatever. I want to say service stations, but Tesla.
Charging stations. Charging stations.
Yeah. Well, we've never seen anything like this.
The price of the Tesla stock has been cut in half. It's a multi-billion dollar loss.
But the point is that we're watching with these judicial decisions and the Tesla, a full-fledged revolutionary effort to emasculate an elected government that has only been in power for two months. And I'm speaking on March 21st, so it's only been January 20th to February 20th to March 20th, 60 days or so.
And they feel that they lost at the polls. They lost the House.
They lost the Senate. They lost the presidency.
They don't control the Supreme Court. They lost the swing states.
They lost the electoral college vote. They lost the popular vote.
And so rather than defer and allow people to govern in the way that Biden did during his four years. They have tried to obstruct, and that obstruction manifests itself in two ways.
One, they're using regional federal judges. And the weird thing about it is Judge Chuck Schumer, who is under assault because he voted not to shut down the government, it was an irrelevant vote.
They didn't have the votes to filibuster anyway. But the left went after him that he now is almost pleading with the left to listen to what he's been doing.
And he said that we are sending Democratic activists into Republican areas and town halls, for example, to shout and scream and yell. But he also said that we have appointed, under my leadership, I don't know what he said, 49 new federal judges, and these are the core of a judicial resistance movement.
And what he means is that on matters of trimming the federal workforce or cutting out USAID or deporting gang members or deporting Hamas terrorist supporters, that they will always find a judge, cherry pick a judge at a lower court to issue an injunction. and that will shut down the entire federal government on behalf of an unelected agency.
So what they're basically saying is agencies have an organic life of their own and they're sacrosanct. So your elected government, the Trump administration that was elected, has no right in the executive branch to determine how federal agencies function.
And we're going to stop it. And they do so with a certainty or the resignation that it's going to be overturned either at the appellate court or at the Supreme Court.
But they have here the idea that that will take weeks, if not months. And they're going to file so many George Soros-funded and Mark Elias-directed efforts and these PACs and political committees and commissions and funds, think tanks, etc., that they can slow down the Trump administration.
Or they can get an appellate court, which I doubt they can, to sustain it. But when they get to the Supreme Court, even there, they believe that through this public pressure of constantly demonizing Trump and saying this is a constitutional crisis and he's acting illegally, that particular justices such as Chief Justice Roberts or Comey Barrett will join the three liberal justices to give a five to four ruling.
In any case, it's an effort to stop an elected government. On the other hand, there is a grassroots, I don't say grassroots in the sense that it represents very many people, but it is an effort to appear like a grassroots in which left-wing money is directed at various so-called non-profits, and they are organizing online protests at dealerships.
But more importantly, there are spinoff efforts, and these efforts are known to democratic operatives and mainstream politicians who now go on and encourage people to oppose Tesla. And then they now put a little caveat, but we don't approve violence they have egged on violence how does that egg on violence work it can work like Jimmy Kimmel uh who's in late night comedian and he can say something with like the following with a pregnant pause so he says hey everybody don't use violence to stop Tesla.
And then everybody claps and applauds. And that is a signal to go use violence.
Or you can have herky-jerky Tim Walz, who's really lost his mind lately. He's been calling Trump a fascist, a Nazi.
And now, I think yesterday he said that he wanted to fight and he was fighting at a Zoom interview with Gavin Newsom, who's in the middle of a pseudo transformation to the center. But Waltz said that he wanted to kick the ASSES of MAGA people.
I mean, he doesn't look like a very formidable character, so I don't know what he meant by that. And he said, you know, I don't necessarily mean a world wrestling type of deal, but he's very buffoonish.
But then he got on stage and he got an app and he said, I got this app and I just love it because I can see how much Tesla has dropped and it goes like this, 200 million. And I'm thinking, you have over, I think he's got well over a billion dollars in Tesla stock invested in the Minnesota state portfolio.
So what this buffoon is doing is telling the taxpayers of Minnesota, I am so happy that one of our investments lost its value. And that will mean we'll have to make up the revenue through greater general fund expenses.
So he hates Musk so much that he would like to, he's willing to damage his own stock portfolio. It doesn't make any sense.
And then he said, of course, that Musk was a South African.

And we... willing to damage his own stock portfolio.
It doesn't make any sense. And then he said, of course, that Musk was a South African, and we've heard that before, that he's disloyal, because suddenly the left believes if you're not born in the United States that you're disloyal after telling us that anybody who is naturalized is exactly the same, or I shouldn't say naturalized.
Anybody who resides in the United States, whether they're legal or illegal, have the same status. I noticed they're not saying that about Mr.
Khalil. Well, he's not even, he was born in the Middle East.
Well, he's not even a citizen. And yet you accord him more rights than you do Elon Musk.
So, So, and they call him a Nepo baby, nepotism baby. He didn't inherit that money.
He created SpaceX. He created, bought and rebooted X Twitter.
He created Starlink. He created Neuralink.
He created Tesla from nothing. He's the greatest inventor and

entrepreneur that we've seen in a hundred years. And yet they keep trying to demonize him to such

a degree now that you go on the internet and you just say Tesla attack and you will see hundreds

of videos of people driving down the freeway and somebody stops their car and gets out and then starts to harass the Tesla driver. Or even Tim Walz, can you believe this? A former candidate for the vice presidency says to the public, just take some dental floss and rub it on that Tesla and break off that emblem.
In other words, deface your car or somebody else's car. That's the former vice presidential candidate of the United States.
Did you hear that John Cusack call for further violence? Yeah, I did. He said, now we need to have further violence.
Yeah, I don't know. Pam Bondi, I mean, and they've had attacks now in about 15 cities.
And the whole point is that all of us that own Teslas are supposed not to want to drive them or want to sell them and destroy the resale value of them or destroy new sales. I'm going to give my Tesla to my son and I'm going to go out and buy a new one just to prove what they're doing is insane.
But they're trying to destroy a company. And this is all happening contemporaneously with, of course, the failure of Boeing, the failure of NASA to rescue two astronauts.
and they're counting entirely on this huge spacex rocket the most powerful in history to take up the dragon capsule and do what the government and boeing could not and bring these people back down safely which work like clockwork and the person who's responsible for that is now demonizes a a basically an inauthentic citizen. And why is all of this? Because he had the audacity to say, do two things.
In 2016, he endorsed Hillary Clinton. He said that he endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, and he was criticized for Trump for saying that.

In 2024, he chose the other candidate, number one.

And number two, he said that he would use his expertise and do to the federal government what he did to Twitter.

In other words, he was able to reduce the workforce and increase productivity and profitability.

And what he's doing now in the government is he's saying, I've got to cut, cut, cut a trillion dollars. We owe 1.7 trillion we're borrowing.
I can't cut 1.7. And I'm trying to do it without cutting Social Security or Medicare, at least not the stuff that's completely and obviously fraudulent.
And we know that Barack Obama and Joe Biden themselves, along with Bill Clinton, said there was billions of dollars of fraud in Social Security and Medicare. If this was Bill Clinton right now or Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the left would be cheering it on, that they were fiscally responsible.
And remember what he's trying to do. He's trying to help Trump bring in investment.
So they've got $2 trillion of promised new investment, which will result in plants, employment, all sorts of new opportunities. So these workers are going to be reentering an economy in six months where the unemployment rates rate is probably going to be below 3% and we're short skilled workers.

So for all

of that, they're trying to destroy his

company and trying to injure people.

When you see something like

and I was

I just went on the internet just a

few minutes ago

and here's the stuff you see. A man

walking and putting his

hand inside his pants to bring fecal material out so he can smear it on a person's Tesla. Another man going around a Tesla woman driving by herself.
He knows she's a single woman slamming on the brakes so that she has to stop in the middle of the road, getting

out and berating her.

She didn't know that she was going to injure her.

Or a third one where a person drives along, rolls down the window, starts throwing garbage

out the window, projectiles that could cause a wreck.

That is all coordinated.

These people go online and they get this, and we have people like Jimmy Kimmel and John

Cusack and Marco, all of these people, Jasmine Crockett, all of them, and they start to, Tim Waltz, damn, damn, damn. And then they say, but we don't, we don't, we don't approve of violence.
And then these people take it into their own hands. You know where this got started, to be very frank, it got started in the May, June, July, August, September, October, George Floyd riots.
We saw what happened in January 6th. Everybody says, well, you pardoned them.
Well, many of those people were in jail for four years, four years. What happened to the 14,000 people who were arrested during that riotous period that Antifa and BLM instigated where 35 billion damaged, arson, 1,500 police officers injured, 35 people murdered or killed, died, police precinct, federal courthouse, conic church torched, tried to rush the White House grounds, sent the president and his family into a bunker.
Nothing happened. Very few people were ever prosecuted.
And that created a culture on the left that you can do. And we've seen it the same thing at these campuses with the pro-Hamas, pro-terrorist demonstration.

There is a sense on the left that we are so morally superior in our causes that we are exempt from any consequence of the violence we commit. And so to restore deterrence, they're going to have to arrest people who use violence.
And if they find that they were organized or talking to people on the internet in an organized fashion, they're going to have to apply RICO standards. Well, Victor, before we go forward, I would like to take a moment for our sponsor, Factor.
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And we'd like to welcome back Factor as a sponsor of the Victor Davis Hanson show. So Victor, you were talking about Elon Musk.
And he was interviewed the other day and they were talking to him about his private life, basically. And they asked him, how long do you sleep? Because Donald Trump famously sleeps three to four hours.
And Elon said a normal thing, like, I sleep usually about six hours every night. But then they asked him, what is the rest of your time? How is it spent? He goes, I work.
And that was just it. It was incredible.
He just says, I'm just working if I'm not sleeping. And that's that.
And that's how he does it. And so he's really quite incredible.
Well, he doesn't seem to. He's not a Kardashian.
And he's not in the social pages. And he doesn't.
He has, I think, a lot of his time. I think he has 12 or 13 children.
So he's got a lot of parental responsibilities. Donald Trump, three to four hours.
I don't know how that's sustainable. I don't get a lot of sleep, but I try to get six hours.
And sometimes I don't, but I cannot imagine anything less than six hours. I know when you get older, you need less, but he's a workaholic.
He's under enormous pressure. They're trying to destroy what was the largest automobile manufacturer in the world in terms of its market capitalization value.
and they've done half their job and they smell blood and they're trying to destroy him.

And the real danger is that when you keep calling somebody a fascist, as Tim Walz called him, and a Nazi, as Tim Walz called him, and a Nipo baby, and as other members of Congress have called him, un-American, and you depersonalize and delegitimize somebody and you keep lowering that bar,

you're going to see another Crooks-like figure, a young nut.

And he is going to conclude that if he were to do something terrible or attempt something terrible, as they did with Trump, then the people who are smearing feces on cars, smearing, painting graffiti on them, burning them, sending Molotov cocktails into the showrooms of Tesla dealers, slashing the cords on Tesla charts, that that group of people will, I think you're iconic. They'll make you into a mythology.
And that's going to be very dangerous.

Very, very dangerous.

And you know what the worst thing about it is?

If they did that, the people on the left would not feel bad about it.

We're in a very revolutionary period.

I don't think people understand that.

It's a Jacobin French revolutionary Robespierre brother where violence is now being condoned. And you can see it with the language, the coarsening.
Astronaut Kelly called Donald Trump, I mean, called Musk an ass, H-O-L-E. We see Waltz calling these names.
We have all of these congresspeople using the the senators using the word S-H-I-T. It's getting so that they're trying to come up with ways to do what politically they have no power.
They're impotent politically. People did not want their message.
They did not want the border. They did not want inflation.
They did not want the transgender message. They did not want the overseas policies.
They didn't want any of it. So they voted against it, even though they were outspent three to one and they had no media in the sense of the mainstream media.
And yet they rejected it. And now there are people who are rejected or trying to find ways either quasi or illegal.

Yes, and it seems to me that when you look at these people that are either saying things, their leadership, or the people that are a little bit more, I guess, ordinary, they seem kind of crazy. Did you see that young woman who was inhington state and she was yelling at a mayor about a pride flag and um and and competing with a veterans mia pow actually flag and he just dressed her down but the whole key to that was she just looked really crazy um complaining People can, yeah, I think the point is people can look crazy all they want, and I don't care.
There's a lot of crazy people, even some on the right. But when that craziness is translated into violence or disruption, and that is praised as any means necessary, and we're seeing it on the campus.
I saw that the entire year, 2023, October 7th. When you have people camping out and disrupting traffic at the Stanford campus, and you have a president who knows that's illegal and breaking the rules and lets that go on, or when you have students that go down and tear off posters of Jewish people who are taken hostage by terrorists.
Or when you have a professor or a lecturer separate students that are Jewish from the rest of the class. Or you spray Hamas slogans on these iconic sandstone colonnades and make poor maintenance workers have to clean up after you.
or you go into the president's office and trash it. And you do that with exemption.
We've only now seen some felony charges that are proceeding through the justice system for the people. But that sends a message, and Columbia sends a message, and Cornell sends a message, and Cooper Union sent a message, and all of this Tesla sends a message that if you're on the left, you are going to receive exemption.
And part of it was due to Merrick Garland and that Justice Department. They deliberately tried to show people that if you protest an abortion clinic peacefully, or if you go to a school board meeting to express your distrust or disbelief about transgender men in women's sports, the FBI would go after you, or they would have a performance art SWAT raid at your home.
And that gave the left this sense of impunity or exemption. and now it's cascading out of control.
And we see where it's going. It's going to be complete violence.
What's going to happen, if they continue to do that, if all of these left-wing young people, and they seem to be left-wing young people, but I saw some with gray hair, if they go up to Teslas and they start to throw a Molotov cocktail or they start to deface it and some person's coming out of a supermarket to his car or in the case of the woman that was accosted in the middle of the freeway who was on her way to a doctor's appointment. If they do that, someone is going to react violently to that violence and then we're going to be in big trouble.
It's going to be a spiral into civil strife, and they won't stop it. And it's very important when Pam Bondi says that they're going to use the utmost powers of the Department of Justice.

What she needs to do when they find people people who have committed violence and that violence was coordinated, they need to charge them with conspiracy and racketeering across state lines. And they need to prosecute them for felony convictions.
We've learned one thing about a lot of these young people from the rare suspensions on campus. They're not the poor.
They're not even the lower middle class. They're all the children of the middle class or the children of the upper middle class or the upper middle class themselves.
They put a high premium on their name, reputation, status, and salary and title, degrees. And if some of them were convicted of felonies, felony to commit violence, felony of all of that, then it would send a message.
But they have to do that, and they can't let them off. And we'll see what happens.
But I would predict, unfortunately, we're going to see a lot more until that happens. We're going to see a lot more violence.
Well, if this Democratic Party goes the way of the Jacobin, I think it was a slur after about 10 years to be called a Jacobin in the European community. They used to call Napoleon the little Jacobin to slur him.
There's a Jacobin magazine today. The left uses it.
They love the idea that, what, 19,000 people were executed in various fashions, including the guillotine. 6,000 people of the clergy were murdered.
And it was a year zero movement. They renamed the days of the week, the days of the month.
I think they made the week from seven to ten days. They worshipped the superior being, radio, secular.
They destroyed everything they could in a culture. This is very similar.
It's a cultural revolution. We're changing the number of genders.
We're changing our foundational date to 1619. We're doing things that no one ever thought.

We're paying reparations after eight generations

to people who were never slaves

from people who never held slaves

in states that were never anything but abolitionists.

It's a very radical, fluid period.

It really is.

And I hope we can get through it.

I don't think the Democratic Party is going to live down, as you said earlier, two things.

The George Floyd incident that transformed that party into this radical, violent sect,

and the covering up of Joe Biden's presidency and his craziness.

I think those two things have really turned people away from that Democratic Party. I just don't see them living that down, but maybe they did five things that they haven't apologized for.
And I mentioned it on one of our earlier videos. They covered up Joe Biden.
They didn't just cover up his enfeebleness and his dementia. They castigated and demonized anybody who told the truth.
And then we were supposed to think that after it was all over, the New York Times and all of these venues were going to be applauded because they said, oh yeah, you know, we made fun of you. We said that you were ageist, that you were crazy.
You were right the whole time we were covering up. We're sorry.
They didn't even say we're sorry. And then the second one was, of course, was the Wuhan lab they lied about and protected the Chinese communist government and Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins that had subsidized that research.
It always was known from day one that the virus that killed a million Americans and sickened with long COVID, 7 million, 8 million people still suffering from it. That originated in that virology lab controlled by the People's Liberation Army.
The third thing was they knew that Christopher Steele was a complete fraud, that he invented that whole dossier and that James Comey, who hired him as an informant, and Hillary Clinton, who hid her payments to them, did their best to disseminate that thing and lie and destroy the Trump campaign. The fourth lie is we know that 51 intelligence authorities knew the FBI had that Hunter Laptop Biden in their possession.
They knew it was authentic. And then the likes of Leon Panetta, James Clapper, John Brennan, Michael Hayden, Anthony Blinken, Mike Morrell, and others promulgated and organized and cooked up that lie.
right before the October 23rd debate, which allowed Joe Biden to lie through his teeth

that the laptop was a problem. and cooked up that lie right before the October 23rd debate, which allowed Joe Biden to lie

through his teeth that the laptop was a product of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

It wasn't just a lie that it wasn't Hunter's.

It was a lie also that Trump had created it with the Russians.

That was the inference.

And then the fifth and worst lie was Alejandro Mayorkas. It would be like me saying, I'm not in a hotel room right now.
I'm home. Oh, that? Oh, no, no.
Something's wrong with you. I'm in Selma, California.
I'm not in Palm Beach sitting in a hotel room trying to get over the flu. I feel I'm at home.
That's what he did. He said, the border, it's secure.
It's rock solid. It's secure.
Oh, those people? Well, that was because we didn't have comprehensive immigration reform. And you're thinking, you're such a liar.
You let in 12 million people. And what was the subtext of that lie? I'm lying through my teeth.
But you know what? When I'm done and you impeach me and you come in and with a click of your fingers, you shut the border down and make people enforce the law without comprehensive immigration reform. We won.
We won. You lost.
Did you ever see that weird movie shooter with Mark Wahlberg?

He was an assassin who was framed.

Yeah. We won.
You lost. Did you ever see that weird movie, Shooter, with Mark Wahlberg?

He was an assassin who was framed.

Yeah, that's one of my favorites.

And what's his name was the actor.

He's a really good black actor, and he was a partner of Mel Gibson.

Oh, for... He was in um he was a partner of mel gibson oh um uh for for um he was in it anyway anyway he he was he plays a crooked officer and and when he's all caught and exposed he goes over to mark he says and what are you going to do about we win, you lose again.
We win. And ultimately in the movie that he doesn't.
But the point is, that's the Mayorkas attitude. I'm out of office.
You impeach me. Joe Biden's not there.
But guess what, you guys? 12 million illegal aliens, 500,000 felons. You go find them.
And you know what? Every time you think it's going to be easy, you can even get a Trent gang member, one of the worst people on the planet, and you can try to deport them. And our judges are going to stop you in mid-flight.
So you can make fun of me and say, I was lying. And we win, you lose again.
And that's what their attitude is. That was the

biggest lie of all time that the border was secure. They didn't know what they were doing.
Yeah. Well, before we go to a break, Victor, since we're on the subject of the Democrats, just one last question about that party.
Has Chuck Schumer had it? He doesn't seem like he's going to return to any prominence.

He's 74

and

I'm 71. I don't know.
I'm pretty busy, but I like to. I don't think I don't know how these people do it.
I mean, you saw what Mitch McConnell looks like now, 82. And we saw Nancy Pelosi.
I really think that when you get in your 70s, it's time to retire and let. I'm not an ageist, but somebody who's 71, I feel I couldn't.
That's one thing. I think Donald Trump is feeling that 78, Joe Biden, 82.
Donald Trump's separate. He's a force of nature.
Nobody's ever had a constitution like he is. That guy can go out.
He can fly all over the country. He can shake a thousand hands, and everybody around him's got the flu, cold, COVID, and he's indestructible.
Just amazing. So he's a separate category.
But Chuck Schumer represents, there's a play by Euripides where Cadmus and Tiresias are these old traditional Greek figures and the whole new cult, it's kind of like the Democratic Party, or the Bacchians. Everybody's dressing up as their Bacchians and they're going up in the mountains and they're drinking mead and alcohol supposedly.
They have fiercest little pieces of a little wand made out of a pine tree. And they're going in these ecstatic rites, kind of a charge against them as they're engaging in sex and alcohol.
We don't know, but it's honoring the god Dionysus and liberation. Weren't they supposed to all be women that were doing this? Like it was an all-woman? Supposedly.
Supposedly. But that was the idea on Mount Cithairon.
But there were men involved too. So Euripides, who was one of the, I mean, I don't know if he's got the mastery of detail, plot, characterization, and drama like Sophocles.
But man, he has the best insight into human nature. If you look at Medea or Alcestis or any of the other great plays, Hippolytus.
But when he has these two guys come on stage and they're like these old fuddy-duddies and they're trying to be hip and I'm a Bacca and they go, oh, look, your little costume needs adjustment. And, you know, they're just supposed to be pathetic.
And the point I'm making is Chuck Schumer does not know what to do with AOC and Jasmine Crockett. So he thinks he's going to.
Well, you know, I got these federal judges through and now they're just taking the law in their own hands and they get trouble? Don't I get credit for that? And we got guys in red states that are going to these meetings and shouting and screaming, don't I get credit? So he starts confessing to all of these unethical things he's doing, as if he's trying to be a Bakian or something. And he's pathetic.
And he has a very bad record of despicable behavior.

And I always go back to that 2020 iconic moment when he assembled an anti-abortion, I mean, a pro-abortion throng outside the gates of the Supreme Court, why they were in session.

And he said, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, you sowed the wind, going to rip the whirlwind. You don't know what's going to hit you.
And then a few months later, these people turn up at the justices' homes. Merrick Garland doesn't do anything.
And we get an assassin who calls his sister home. So I want to shoot Gorsuch.
I don't know what to do. She says, please don't.
That's what he had helped engender. And he was the one, along with Barack Obama, remember, who kept telling us that the filibuster, I'm quoting directly, was a racist relic.
Obama said that at a funeral of an iconic civil rights leader.

But when he was in the Senate, of course, when he was in the majority, he said that the filibuster was a racist relic. And then he himself filibustered Judge Alito and tried to stop him.
And then it wasn't so racist. But Schumer is all back.
He's always, it's racist when we're in the majority and obstructionist. When we're in the minority, it's essential, like he is now.

Well, in the play, didn't Pentheus and the old fuddy, did he get their heads chopped off or something?

Not to finish off the analogy, but.

Pentheus did.

Dionysus tricked him into thinking that he was a Bacchian, and he up there and he looks at all of these things and he gets turned on. He's supposed to be repressed.
He's sexually repressed. And he goes up and his mother sees him as a, because they were, part of the thing is they kill livestock.
And his own mother, a gal who cuts his head head off and then she brings it on a platter

and Dionysus

who's a cruel god

then kind of waves

a wand and she gets

out of her ecstatic movement

and sees what she's done that she killed her own

son Pentheus

and then like every Euripidean play

for 700 lines the half first half, you kind of

sympathize with the people who are against the people who are excessive control freaks.

Then the last 700 lines, you start to see that there is something about their order and the

forces of liberation are dangerous. So you think Pentheus is a repress he's only about 15 he's a fanatic he's going to stomp out all the sex and then they trick him into thinking to go up there they entice him to go up there then they change his appearance so that the people he he's repressed and wants to participate with they kill him and at the, you start to sympathize with what he was trying to do in a way.
And the forces of order. And then Pentheus and, I mean, the two old guys, Tiresias and Cadmus come back.
And they have a very famous line to Dionysus, who's now kind of, I told you, you don't worship me, I will make you go crazy, and I will find the most sexually repressed and alcoholic repressed of any of you, and I will make those secret desires consume you, and you will destroy yourself. Whereas if you just worship me a little bit and let out these emotions with alcohol and everything, you would have been happier.
But I will. And then Tyrese says something very important.
He says, and it's a very iconic line. He said, God should be better than men, us.
They should be better. And that was a very radical thing to say, even in fifth Athens.
And so that's sort of what Schumer is. He's son of an old fuddy-duddy, and he's trying to be hip, and the squad hates him.
And Jasmine Crockett hates him, and the Antifa BLM, such as what's left of it, they hate him. The Black Caucus hates him.
And the more they hate him, the more he tries to plead that he's such an effective legislature. He was a guy, you remember when he shows, I'm just old Chuck Schumer here flipping my hamburger on my grill and he's turned it on.
And he's got cheese things on top, the cheese squares on top of all of his hamburgers, and he's going to flip over. He's never cooked a hamburger in his life, man.
He's just representative of transitory. That generation is gone.
Dianne Feinstein's gone. Barbara Boxer's gone.
Nancy Pelosi's gone. Jerry Brown is gone.
Bill Clintons are gone. Chuck Schumer is on his way out.
And they're replaced by absolute lunatics. The Antifa BLM wing.
And these people are these people have been a great gift for Donald Trump because no one in their right mind would like to turn over anything to them. And you look at their polls, I didn't think they could get lower than 37%.
The Democratic Party is now down to 25% approval. And this, that they think that terrorizing Tesla, I mean, think about it.
Tesla is a big, and I think it's nine states is the best selling car. And all these people who bought it originally for the first five years were on the left.
They thought that he was a hero to give them a, you know, a workable choice to the hated internal combustion engine. So you're going after your own constituents and trying to destroy their property.
I was here in Palm Beach and somebody gave me a ride, very nice person. I won't mention his name, but it was a new Mercedes electric vehicle.
It looked like a spaceship. It was beautiful.
But then when I asked about the range, it was 240 miles, in which he said that he would like to take longer trips but couldn't, whereas Tesla's 330, and some of the models are nearly now up to 400 miles. It's a spectacular engineering feat, and yet it fits every checkoff.
It fits every requirement requisites of the left. Give us something that is high power.
Give us something that's beautiful. Give us something that's comfortable.
Give us something that's fully automatic. Give us something that has no exhaust.
Something that doesn't create heat. Just give us that.
Just give us something you can fill up at your own home. And they did.
And now they hate him. Well, that's crazy.
But that brings us to our break. And then we'll come back and we're going to talk a little bit about the consequences of World War I.
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No missed customers. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
You can catch Victor at X. His handle is at VD Hanson and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.
So if either of those social media outlets are yours, please join us there as well. So Victor, we're going, we looked at World War I and now you were going to talk a little bit about the consequences of World War I, which were probably more profound, arguably, than even World War II consequences.
So I'm expecting a lot here. Well, World War I, remember, broke out on July 28, one month to the day following the assassination of Grand Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, of all places, killed by Serbian nationalists.
And that set off this chain reaction of alliances that kicked in. And four years later, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, November 11th of 1918, at 11 o'clock in the morning, the war ended with the complete defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary and their associates, such as Bulgaria and some Eastern European countries.
And the result was, first of all, it had a name.

It was called the Great War, the War to End All Wars, but it was not called World War I. That would not be renamed until 1939 when people look back, even actually not until 1941 in general use, when the invasion of the Soviet Union and the United States entry on December 10th and 11th,

excuse me, 8th and 10th, 8th and 11th of December 1941. But my point is that after this catastrophic 17 million people were killed, probably somewhere around 10 million in combat.
It's still debated. Spanish flu killed people in

the trenches, especially took the allies that the Germans had the high ground on their trenches.

They were better built and the allies thought that they were just going to be ad hoc and never

intended to live there for four years. It was horrible.
The conditions under which soldiers

fought. Okay.
It's over with what was the result of it.

The first tragic result was that General Fauch, the commander of all Allied forces, French general, and General Pershing, commander of American forces, and Douglas Haig, commander of British forces, had said to their civilian superiors, the German army is beaten. After four years, this incredible fighting machine is exhausted.
It's beaten. And we can walk into Germany.
We can get through the Hindenburg Line. And they had already broached it in some places.
And Woodrow Wilson, who came into the war in April 1917, had enormous influence because the British and the French were exhausted. And he brought in two million new American soldiers.
And he commandeered the Allied cause and said to Clemenceau and David Lloyd George, we're not going to be punitive. They were going to follow 14 points, which became the basis of the Versailles Treaty, which unfortunately, the war ended in November with an armistice, not a surrender of 1918.
And by the time the Versailles thing started, it was January 1919.

And it would go on for six months.

And two-thirds of the Allies went home, and the Germans had created a new lie, the stab in the back,

that we surrendered 60, 70, 50 miles inside France and Belgium.

We were never defeated.

The Jews, the communists, the socialists stabbed us in the back.

Whereas Pershing folk and Haig said,

you've got to go into Germany and occupy it, and remind the people they were defeated like we did in World War II. And the way the Germans had done to the Russians when they had knocked it out in February of 1918, we had just treated the Germans the way they treated the Tsarist Russia, then maybe we wouldn't have had a World War II.
But anyway, what were the results of it? The German army was more eager for a replay as losers, and the defeated allies were less eager for a replay as winners. So 20 years later, or almost less than 20, we started the entire thing again because Germany didn't feel it was beaten, felt that it was stabbed in the back, and it felt that it had rearmed more quickly and more effectively than the Allies, and they could quickly take all of Eastern and Western Europe.
And they did. And then they made one tragic mistake, two tragic mistakes.
They invaded the Soviet Union, their partner, under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. And their Japanese partner attacked the United States.
And Adolf Hitler, like a crazy person, declared war on the 10th against us. Otherwise, we wouldn't have probably had.
and then when they had a world war in which they could not win, that's World War II. But the other thing about World War I was not just the insurance, there'd be another world war.
Germany, for a third time, would be involved in a major war in Europe within 100 years. But there was the destruction of these empires.
There the destruction of the Austria-Hungary, Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and that meant that the Balkans now were completely energized by nationalist movements. So when they cobbled together Yugoslavia, you had Bosnians, you had Serbians, you had Lonegrans, you had all of these diverse religions and peoples cobbled together in a place.
And the idea of national destiny had taken over. So you had a new country called the Slavs and the Czechs were cobbled together.
Czechoslovakia had not existed. Bulgaria, all of it.
So it was an unstable situation tucked between two great powers. And so the empire of Ferdinand Joseph was destroyed.
It was gone. The great city of Vienna was no longer an imperial city.
That was number one. The next thing, the British empire was on its last legs.
It had funded this, the Bank of England had funded this war and they were flat broke. They owed billions of dollars to the United States for loans to equip them and finish the war.
And they had thought all over the world, their fleet was huge, but it was unsustainable given that Britain had been overtaken by the United States in terms of industrial power, etc., etc. The only thing that gave it somewhat of a new life was the fact that Germany had been defeated in World War I and the Bolsheviks had taken over Russia, and Europe was still temporarily in the Depression.
In Europe, the United States fared worse than Britain did, but it was the cost of

World War I had destroyed the British Empire, and it would fall apart after World War II.

And the third empire that it did destroy was the Ottoman Empire.

And it saw the rise of, in the last year, the New Turks, a Turkish nationalist empire. The thing about the Ottomans is they controlled most of the Arab world and most of the Balkan and parts of southern Russia.
And because they were a conglomerate of Muslim peoples, and sometimes they were not Muslim peoples that were under severe occupation, the Turkish element to the Ottoman was not, the Seljuk Turks was not emphasized as it would be. But once the empire was pruned away, its core at Constantinople and Ankara became very nationalist and modernist and secularist in response to its Islamic former colonies.
So Turkey would become a very right-wing nationalist under Ataturk, but the Ottoman Empire was done for, and there was Arab nationalist movements. And this would start in with the Israel question and Palestine, Transjordan, and the effort for Arab nationalism.

The other final big consequence of World War I is it really cemented the modernist movement where all of the traditional genres that classicism was felt to have got people into the war and the old idea, decum et decorum es pro patria mori, it's a fine and noble thing to die in half of your country. That had been ridicule.
That was right out of horrors that you don't want to do that anymore.

And I think in 1936, the Oxford Debating Society voted overwhelmingly that they wouldn't know youth would die for king and country again. And you could see it in art.
What had been impressionistic art was now on its way to really representational, abstract art, modern art, so that nothing on the canvas resembled anything the eyes saw. There was no more any attempt.
You can see in the work of Picasso or Salvador Dali, and then later Jackson, that whole movement. And then the same thing with novels.
There were no heroes anymore. There were anti-heroes.
There were flawed heroes, ambiguous heroes. Poetry had no meter.
It had no rhyme. It had no poetic vocabulary.
It was just prose that was chopped up on the page, so to speak. And there was the emancipation of women, the vote.
There were all these radical reforms in culture and society. It was no longer to be hierarchical, much more radically democratic.
And old Europe disappeared after World War I. The old regime disappeared.
The ancient regime in France was gone forever. They famously instituted the League of Nations, which after World War II became the United Nations, as our audience probably knows.
But just recently, just to show you, and it's interesting you leave that out, even though it's quite often talked about as one of the results of World War I, because the UN recently passed a resolution that Putin needs to leave the Ukraine and give up all of the territory that he has gained and just get out of there. And they passed this resolution in the UN, completely useless.
I mean, obviously, Putin's not going to do that. The League of Nations had nothing, nothing, no accomplishments whatsoever.
I mean, when the Italian fleet went into East Africa, they had to go through the Suez Canal. And they were sanctioned 1936-7 by the League of Nations.
And the British fleet was the biggest fleet in the world. And they could have easily stopped them.
And they let them go right through the Mediterranean, even though they were under League of Nations sanctions. In 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Little Finland.
They expelled it. They sanctioned it and they quit.
1938, Japan had, 37 had invaded Manchuria and they were sanctioned. They quit.
And it was absolutely creepy. They had no, it was just an invading society.
And then they thought they were going to reform it when the big three, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, decided they were going to have a security council of the major powers, unlike the League of Nations. So they were going to be executives and not just the General Assembly.
So whatever the security council wanted to do, they thought that because Stalin was our friend that had fought Hitler, that the presence of Great Britain or allied United States, China, which they thought was under Chiang Kai-shek, the good communist Stalin, and de Gaulle's France, the big five, they would control the world. And it turned out within a couple of years that Stalin was a rank anti-Western dangerous Stalinist communist.

And China was under the hands of Mao Zedong.

And the gold didn't like the United States particularly.

And they couldn't do anything.

All right, Victor, let's go ahead and have a break and then come back and talk a little bit about our Supreme Court in the current events today. Stay with us and we'll be right back.
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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson show. So Victor, there's been a couple of things going on in with the Supreme Court.
The first thing is a case where judges Roberts and Amy Comey Barrett joined Sotomayor and Jackson and ruled that the Trump administration needs to pay out the $2 billion to U.S. aid that has already been contracted to various whatever companies or NGOs.
So that was one thing. And then the second thing is more recent this week.
Roberts has given an opinion, not a formal opinion in a court case, but just his own opinion that Trump shouldn't be talking about impeaching district court judges and that that's inappropriate to what's going on. And so I was wondering your thoughts on Supreme Court.
Well, the $2 billion is, I mean, the budget of USAID, depending on how you define all of its programs, somewhere like $55 billion. So you're talking about 4% or 5% of the budget.
You know, it wasn't a death knell to Trump's efforts. But the argument was that if you have congressionally approved monies, even if they're in the executive branch and dispense to the executive branch, and they have been approved by Congress, then the executive has to spend them.
But what if the executive sees that they're being improperly spent, or they're spent in ways that do not reflect the intention of Congress, in his opinion? So it seems to me a false ruling. I think the executive has the power to do what he wants within executive agencies within his purview.
But it's also asymmetrical because we didn't have this problem apparently when the Congress voted, when the Republicans took control of it, to build the wall and fund the remaining, basically the remaining thousand miles. Joe Biden came in and they said, are you going to build the wall? Congress is a lot of the money.
And he said, not one foot. And I didn't hear any justice on the Supreme Court say, because there were people who sued, and they either ignored them or they didn't get to court or they didn't find a receptive judge, but no one said you have to spend that money, which he did.
It was Congress that ordered him to spend it, but he chose not to. And the other thing is that if you look at all the judicial obstructionism by lower court judges in the Biden administration, i.e., did conservative groups try to find traditional conservative judges to stop some of the craziness of the Biden administration? There has been more suits successfully leading to federal court injunctions in 60 days than there was in four years.

It seems to me incumbent upon the Supreme Court that whatever they think, this is new in American history, that in 60 days they've done more judicial obstruction by lower court unelected judges to nullify or new to an elected government than ever. And remember, Joe Biden said that the Supreme Court had blocked him from canceling hundreds of billions of dollars of contracted student loans.
And he said, he bragged in the State of the Union, I got around that. I got around that, meaning right before the midterms, he tried to win votes by giving free stuff to young indebted students.
And then later he was bragging that he managed to do it. I don't remember anybody sanctioning him.
So I think what Judge Roberts might have done is something along the following. Of course, when we disagree with a federal judge, our first impulse should not be to impeach them.

However, we must realize that we do not use the judicial system to cherry pick what we feel are consenting are favorable judges and courtrooms to impede the work of an elected government. He could have done on the one hand or the other.
So that's what got people angry. and if you look at the attacks on the court,

the judicial system,

the left is now saying it's a constitutional crisis to how dare they say that they'd like to impeach a judge. But it was they, the left, that said if they got power and they controlled both houses of Congress, they were going to pack the court.
They were going to have 15 Supreme Court justices. They were going to be given six liberal justices to counteract their six to three minority.
They were going to have new district judges. In addition to that, they were the ones under Schumer who, as I said earlier, threatened Kavanaugh and Gorsuch.
They were the ones that allowed people to show up at justices' homes. And they're like teenagers who get their allowance cut off.
They get angry at their parents. So when the justices rule in their favor, then they're iconic and sacrosanct.
When they don't do it, they either have to be circumvented or disparaged or threatened by their name, physically threatened. And they've done all of that.
So I don't take anything seriously what they do, except they've been very successful for two weeks stopping. And what we're talking about, we're not talking about the substance.
So basically, no one's talking about, do you really want violent trend gang members here from South America that kill people and execute people, came here illegally and were dumped here by governments that hate our guts? Do you really, really want those people here when they're illegally? And why is it harder to remove somebody who came here legally than it was to let somebody in illegally? They don't answer that. And you really, really, really want to have people from the Middle East come here who cheer on the murder and mass rape and torture and dismemberment of 1,200 Israelis.
You really want those people and who rah-rah Hamas and are openly overt about a terrorist designated group like Hamas State Department is designated terrorists? Do you really want those people here? No, you don't. And yet the judicial system is designed to protect those people as if they're American citizens.
They don't understand that maybe an American resident has the right to be here. I mean, the right to say what he wants once he's here.
But because he's not a citizen, he doesn't get a lasting privilege to be here until he's a citizen. So he's a resident and that's dependent on renewing a visa.
And the visa is renewing on the pleasure of the U.S. government.
The U.S. government can have all sorts of reasons why they don't want a guest to stay here very long.
And one of them is if you support groups that want to destroy Western civilization. Yeah.
And that's what they say. That's what that Khalil.
Did you see that letter that Khalil wrote to, I think broadly, but the Guardian published it. It was just trash.
I don't understand what that newspaper's thinking. It was a left-wing newspaper.
Oh, this is all about free speech for me, and that he was just in support of Palestinians who were suffering from genocide in Israel. All these things that you expect him to say.
But why would The Guardian publish it?

Because it agrees with him.

It's a left-wing, anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, anti-United States venue.

It's also from a country, London, that is basically run by the Middle East mounds.

It's basically like Al Jazeera,

huh? Yeah, it is.

The Guardian, Al Jazeera, same thing.

I think on that question

it is, but the point is, here's somebody

when he says that

he defended

and helped organize as

head of the

Apartheid Divest, Columbia's

Apartheid Divest movement. On Apartheid Divest Movement, on two occasions they stormed into halls at Columbia and Barnard and used violence to physically take them over.
They went into classrooms and physically tried to disrupt the class. They targeted Jewish students.
They sent out brochures and pamphlets praising, they call it the Al-Aqsa flood. They loved October 7th.
So here's a guy who was openly celebrating a terrorist attack on civilians that murdered them and was openly supporting a movement whose charter said that they wanted to destroy Western civilization and was actually the spokesman and the negotiator for groups that had broken in and destroyed things. And he was doing all this originally on a student visa and then on a green card, a work visa.
And he was supported by all these non-government organization, third-party, left-wing scholarships.

I don't think he really had a job other than for these people.

He worked for the United Nations Relief Fund, which we know was a part of, in many cases, was a part of the Hamas killer movement. So he has no leg to stand on.
And yet the left, as a rule right now, the opposition Democratic Party and the left in general, whatever issue there is, they choose what 30% of the public is for. That's what 30% of the public thinks that you should not deport Hamas supporters.
30% of the public thinks that it's okay to use violence against Elon Musk or Tesla. 30% of the public wants illegal immigration.
30% says you shouldn't deport. 30% said biological men, if that high, should play in women's sports.
30% of the public feels basically to give a blank check to Ukraine. And so that's what they're beyond.
That's all separate from Donald Trump. They keep thinking that everybody, they can gin up so much hatred of Donald Trump, but the reason they can't succeed is because the issues that he ran on and that he is trying to implement have 70 percent popular support.
If I cut a video for the ultra today, if Donald Trump would just use that tragic voice and say, I don't like tariffs. I just want no tariffs.
I don't want to hurt Canada. I don't want to hurt Europe.
I don't want to hurt Mexico. I'm just trying to get their attention to have treat us the way we would like to treat you with no tariffs.
Or if you have 200 billion if you're Europe or Mexico, 107, just get it down to 10 or 15. We can live with that.
And but that's what he's on the right side of all the issues is what I'm trying to say. Well, the last thing, Victor, since you mentioned the Ukraine war, there's some interesting stuff that has developed in Europe.
And one of them is that Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland, all four of them have pulled out of the treaty to end landmines, I believe it is.

So they don't want to be part of a treaty anymore that bans landmines, which suggests to me that they're a little bit worried about what Russia might be doing on their border.

That's how I read that.

Well, I mean, what they're all doing are making demilitarized zones near their border.

So they're using fortifications, barbed wire, and they're making vast fields of landmines. And I don't know, that might stop a traditional armor attack, but I don't know how it's going to stop what we've seen the war develop into, where you have hundreds of thousands of drones that just can go anywhere.
That's not going to stop them. But again, Europe has a come to Jesus moment.
They have 2,000 jets that are not American. They have 10 times the artillery platforms of Russia.
Russia has 140 million people. They have 500 million people.
Russia has now, it's depleted. It's got about 800,000 men under arms.
Europe has 500,000. So even in its disassociated state, it's got so many assets apart from the United States that they can easily defend themselves from Russia.
But what they don't have is the willpower. So they're kind of like France and Britain and Belgium and the Dutch and the Danish and the Norwegians and the Greeks in 1940.
All of them put together had a larger army, more aircraft and more tanks than did Germany

alone. But when Germany threatened to come in and did come in on May 10th, 1940, then it was

you, no, you, no, you, no, you, no, the Dutch should go this. We need the Belgians.
You should

give this. We should have.
No, no. Everybody thought the next person was going to fight.
And that's what the problem was. They seem to be worried about what Donald Trump is up to, which I thought was interesting as well.
Though we're good friends, obviously, of Poland and the... Yes, and we shouldn't listen to anything France or Britain has to say,

and not that we're hostile to them, but we have 11 carrier groups,

one aircraft carrier, 1,100 feet long, 110,000 tons of displacement.

They usually carry around 80 to 85 Super Hornet, you know.

They have a larger air force on that one carrier of deployable aircraft than many countries, most countries. There's 11 of them.
So even in our depleted state, the Europeans know that A, they have the wherewithal they want to stop Putin from coming in again under a peace deal if they were a deterrent factor. But number two, they think that we are so much more powerful and so much more united that they can always talk a great game and then look over their shoulder to see how many planes, tanks America has.
That's what they do. And they can't be counted on.
They can't be counted on for anything. The only two questions on the Ukraine issue, again, they've all been settled.
They're not going to be in NATO. And they're not going to have the ability to put the Crimea and the Donbass back under Ukrainian control.
There's just two issues. How far can Vladimir Putin be forced back to where he was in 2022? And how do you keep him from invading again? And the answer is you have to have a DMZ that's fortified, landmines, everything, and you have to have a commercial corridor as a tripwire.
And he's depleted right now. He's exhausted.
And then you have to arm Ukraine to the teeth without putting in NATO. And that's the basis for peace, whether you like it or not.
Graham Allison wrote that in the foreign policy essay this week, and he's not a conservative. And he basically said he didn't like Donald Trump, but Donald Trump's vision is the only thing that's going to work.
All right. Well, Victor, the last thing, and I don't know how much we can get

from these JFK files.

It doesn't seem like very much is coming out

that would stop the conspiracy theories

about JFK's assassination.

As far as I can tell,

it seems to me that there's thousands of files

that they kept classified

that really aren't doing anything

to answer any questions. I was wondering your thoughts on the JFK files.
Well, I mean, November 22nd, 1963, you know, it's almost, it's over. You're getting into the seventh decade.
So why were these things declassified in the first place? Ostensibly, they were classified because there was a lot of people still involved that were alive. So when you read the names of FBI agents or CIA agents or diplomats, if a person disagreed with that person's behavior or he came off negatively in one of these memos, then that person's, you know, when you got the president of the United States who was beloved like JFK being shot, then ostensibly all these people could be blamed, sued, shot, if we knew who they were, all the names that involved.
So I can see on that. The other problem is the more that they try to protect these names and addresses and players in this terrible drama, the more the conspiracy theories said, well, they're hiding something.
But I know the Warren report was flawed, but it's going to be very hard to find evidence in this new trove that suggests that Lee Harvey Oswald did not go up into the Texas Book Depository in Dallas and shoot John F. Kennedy.
We know now with reenactions, it's possible to use that whatever it was, 6.5 Italian rifle bolt action. It's possible for a marksman like Oswald to have shot the president.
That was possible.

They reenacted that. Person can do it.
We know he had a motive. We know he was there.
The only question that remains is, did Lee Harvey Oswald operate with somebody else that was in the area scouting around, making a diversion,

a grassy knoll, or was he operating for a larger group that wanted Kennedy killed?

And there's usually three groups that come under suspicion. The mafia, because John Kennedy had some connections with members of the mafia, via Judith Exner and other people.
Or was it the Cuban government that was still angry over the humiliation of the Cuban Missile Crisis and efforts that had surfaced at the CIA had plans to kill Castro? Or was it the Soviet Union that was orchestrating all of this? And I don't think they're going to find evidence that the mafia and the Soviet Union and Cuba did it. But I'm not ruling it out.
I don't think they're going to see that there's a second shooter. At best, what's going to happen is there's going to be some murky suggestions that Oswald had contacts with people that would have liked Kennedy killed, or there might have been some evidence that somebody saw somebody who had a diversion or something.
I doubt it. Trump, he kind of raised expectations when he said that what was in it was going to shock people.
But we'll see. It's all handwritten.
They haven't codified it or automated it or, you know, it's not decoded or it's not automated. So you can't really go on the Internet and just have a word search.
They say they're going to do that. We'll see.
We'll see. Well, Victor, thank you for all of your wisdom today.
And thanks to our audience for choosing to join us on this Saturday. I hope everybody is well out there.
And, Victor, I hope you get rid of that cough sometime soon. I'm going to day 15.
I've got a long flight tomorrow. But once I get home to the farm, I should beat it.
Yeah, let's hope that you do. And I'm glad to beat myself without that.
Although I have to say this flu has, in the afternoons, I still get a little bit, you know, knocked out. You look like you're very pale.
You look like, no offense, you look very pale. I know I need to get out in the sun.
So it's starting to get warm here, so we're happy about that in California. I've had a long day.
I had long days in Palm Beach. 10-hour days.
And you have an engagement in a few minutes, I understand. Yes, I have to go speak.
Oh, I've got to speak in 10 minutes. Okay, we'll let you go.
Thank you, Victor Davis Hanson. And thanks for everybody for joining us.
This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson. We're signing off.
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