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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I am Jack Fowler, and you are here to listen to and gain wisdom from Victor Davis Hansen.

There he is drinking his special

tea.

Yeah, that's three months now.

Maybe needs a little elderberry wine in it or something.

Oh, that's elderberry is a natural

immunological

boost.

Okay, well, the things you learn from watching a Nick at night, in my case,

today we are recording on Monday, May 12th, a day that so much has happened.

This particular episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show will be out on Tuesday the 13th.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, from where, from which he has just returned to sunny California.

Maybe we'll get Victor's take on what he did out in Michigan.

Amongst the many things we'll get Victor's take on are China's tariff agreements with the U.S.

or initial agreements, which have the stock market up nearly 2.8%.

Today, Donald Trump issues an executive order for a pharmaceutical price cut.

We have crazy congressmen in Newark.

We have a Times Square statue of lunacy.

We even have a new Pope.

I don't want to expound on that too much, Victor.

But we'll get to these and other topics, including the release of Israeli-American hostage Eden Alexander, all that when we come back from these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor has a website, I forgot to mention, the blade of Perseus VictorHanson.com.

Go there.

You'll find links to everything Victor writes and links to these podcasts.

They're the archives, his ultra articles, which you can read if you subscribe.

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Victor, you're all settled in.

You ready?

Yes, I am.

I'm ready.

Can you hear me okay?

Yeah, I can hear you terrifically.

Ready despite being 20 hours of travel.

Yes, it took me 20 hours.

I got to SFO and I managed it at my fumbling age to get an Uber and get to Palo Alto and then get my car and then drive nearly four hours to Selma.

And

they had a large group.

They had almost 5,000, someone told me, at the Hillsdale graduation.

And I think it's going to be published in Primus, the talk I gave.

Very impressive, the way they handle ceremonial functions.

I mean, they had the entire athletic complex completely with chairs.

I sat next to Pat Sajak most of the time.

He's a very nice guy.

He's the chairman of the Hillsdale Board of Overseers, trustees.

And I went to lunch, dinners.

I think I went out every meal with faculty.

They had three huge dinners or breakfast, lunch, and dinners.

So it was

if I didn't have to fly with sinnitis, I would have been

tickled to death.

You got an honorary degree, too, didn't you?

Yes, I have a PhD from the Hillsdale Graduate School.

I can put it next to my honorary law degree, Pepperdine, and a couple of other honorary degrees.

I can practice law and government.

If you're interested in Victor's commencement talk, I think we could

go on YouTube and find Hillsdale commencement.

And Victor wore a great hat.

Not as great as the hat he's wearing right now.

I hope you got to keep that hat, Victor.

Hey, Victor, as I said at the outset, so much dramatic stuff happening today.

I would gauge it for Donald Trump a pretty good news day, all in all.

Let's start off with the stock market skyrocketing because of the news that the Trump administration, through

Treasury Secretary Besant, has struck a deal meeting in Switzerland with Chinese officials.

There's going to be, what's the word, total reset from Donald Trump, total reset in trade with China.

Your take on this, Victor?

I don't understand the outrage.

I mean, in the Wall Street Journal, I really like Andy Kessler's calling, but he was very critical of terrorists.

So

everybody should realize why they're doing this, the Chinese mercantile system.

They're not doing this to earn foreign exchange and then have comprehensive health care.

They're not doing it for pensions for Chinese employees.

They're not doing it for low-interest loans for them to buy houses.

400 million Chinese citizens have never seen a Western doctor.

They're doing it to buy on the open market the expertise to rearm themselves and do the Belt and Road imperial system.

That's why they're doing it.

So what Donald Trump is trying to do is to lower the amount of foreign capital and exchange they have at their disposal and save American jobs.

So, if he gets this $1.2 trillion surplus down to $500 million, and that sounds to me like he might be able to do that, cut it in half without destroying the,

and then wean us off slowly of Chinese dependence, it's a fantastic

boon.

And you know what's so weird about it, Jack, is that every economist that I know of has been warning us, whether it was Warren Buffett in Forbes magazine 20 years ago, whether it was the Obama economic advisor Jason Fuhrman, whether it was Charles Munger, that it was nonsense, it was not sustainable to be running these huge trade deficits.

They said it, not.

Donald Trump.

He was influenced by people like them.

No other president has really addressed addressed it.

No other president has talked about the trade deficit.

Nobody's talked about the budget deficit, not since Bill Clinton and Newt Ginrich balanced it, the budget deficit.

Nobody's talking about the national debt.

Biden, I never heard Biden, did you ever hear him say one word that we're paying $3 billion a day in interest?

I didn't.

So he's trying to address that.

And Wall Street was so influenced by the left-wing media and the investor, 8% of the population that owns

90% of the market capitalization on Wall Street.

But they didn't look at the real indicators.

So you look at jobs.

Jobs had a phenomenal growth.

They were, for two months in a row, they defied expectations on jobs.

They defied expectations on inflation.

They defied expectations on corporate profits.

There was movement on cutting the budget deficit, which

Wall Street likes.

It looks like for all of the Republican

mutinies, divisiveness, they're going to get a bill that's that markedly deregulates and keeps the tax cuts.

So all the news was good, and then they got the trade that the big,

the elephant in the room is China.

And if they can make movement, then South Korea is next, and then Japan,

and then Taiwan, and then Singapore.

They'll all fall in place.

The last people to do it will be their so-called enemy, friends that we protect, and those will be the Europeans.

They will be the most unhappy if Donald Trump is successful.

Maybe rivaled by the American left that's just openly now hoping for a recession.

But it's amazing.

I went back, Jack, today and looked at some of the things the Wall Street Journal had been writing during the Judgment Day in March, you know, when the stock market went down.

And

it was just crazy.

And even a week ago, it was just crazy that everything's terrible, that we're going this and this and this and this, and the real estate market's crashing and this then I looked at some what my colleagues had been saying

at our institutions retreats and what they have been publishing and it's the same thing so what do you do now do you do you do you pivot and you say well Donald Trump this is just temporary but the tariff will ruin the economy eventually is that what it is true because they're aimed at really to get get the tariffs down on both sides and i i don't it it just, I've never seen anything.

I don't think they realize that if he does get

$7 to $8 trillion of foreign investment, we've never had that before.

And we've never had an end to illegal immigration.

That's a multi-billion dollar drain, bringing people in and giving them $17,000, $18,000, $20,000 a year in support.

There's all the, and then bringing all this energy online, coal, natural gas,

it's a multifaceted effort.

And if it all works, and I think there's a good chance it could,

we could see a real economic boom and nobody's boom and nobody's talking about it.

Yeah.

Well, we should, the people you're criticizing should be aspiring to that, not laying out the markers for that, but certainly can happen.

Victor related on trade then also is

is pharmaceutical price cuts.

The president issues an executive order

granting America most favored nations

status, essentially, for price on drugs and a dramatic cut in drug prices for many Americans.

I saw the Breitbart headline.

I don't know if they were quoting someone, but it said, no, they were quoting.

So I think they were quoting Robert F.

Kennedy Jr., saying, you know, for all these decades, Democrats have made

the mantra of pharmaceutical price cuts

one of their big issues.

And here comes Donald Trump, and he actually executes.

That's what

they get the angriest about.

Because if you look at their bread and butter issues,

supporting auto unions

or cutting drug prices or not touching Social Security or middle class, you know, getting tax cut, he's doing all of it.

And yet,

he puts it what I'm trying to say is, politically speaking, strategically speaking, he puts them in this unique position again and again that they have to renounce everything they once believed in so that they can maintain their ideological purity and hating Trump.

It's the book and the counterpart to the Never Trumpers.

You look read the bulwark and you look at the names there and just take Trump out of the equation.

And they are arguing mostly for abortion.

They're arguing for

that Donald Trump should not be building up the military.

They want to, but not if Trump wants to.

And they don't like the tax cuts, the deregulate.

They're just arguing against everything they told us they believed in for 40 years.

And he has that ability.

He has ability to make people flip up backward, flip over and

become ridiculous.

And that's what he's doing.

Still harken back, Victor, to that document.

There were so many things that 53 signed this and 79 signed that, but the

100 Republicans who some of them who had prestigious positions in the Bush.

The diplomatic corps, those guys, the economists, 100 blue chip economists, the 18 Nobel Prize winners that said there was going to be a recent...

I get so sick of all.

The 51 former intelligence authorities that said the laptop was Russian.

They have zero credibility.

Zero.

But the Republican one that they actually endorsed Kamala Harris.

What did they think was going to happen?

Can you imagine if she was

a bad person?

Yeah, I can imagine.

We would have right now 10,000 illegal aliens coming in every day,

and Putin would be threatening us with nuclear weapons.

The war would be no talk of a ceasefire.

There would be no movement on Iran whatsoever.

Israel and the United States would be at loggerheads.

There would be no talk of of trade imbalances, no talk of budget and balance, no cutting a federal employee.

There would be more spending money, printing it.

You know, Biden printed $7 trillion.

And then there would be all these lies.

Don't believe these people when they said, oh my God, we were culpable.

We knew that he was non compos mentes.

And we went, no, no, you only did that because he lost, he pulled out, and then she lost the election.

Had he stayed in and won, or had she won, you would still be lying and protecting him and vilifying people who told the truth.

Now they have a new

meme, and it's that Donald Trump is senile.

Joe Biden, yes,

we agree now that we lied to the American people and we had a cabal to hide it, but we only did so because we're principled.

Now we were principled.

So now we have to play fair.

And by our new standards of cognitive assessment, Donald Trump is senile.

He had a bad gait.

Here's a guy with a

78-year-old guy.

Do you know very many people 78, given their joints or tendons or what, can go out and play nine holes of golf?

I don't.

It's pretty amazing what he does.

And

when I was younger, a 78-year-old man would have been huddled over the image with a cane.

When I was growing up, they were all dead.

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I thank the sun for shining on my face here, Victor.

So, you know, it's a sunny day here in Milford, Connecticut.

We'll take what

we can get.

Before we head on to the break, and we're going to talk about,

your views, Victor, on some of this madness from our Democrat congressman in New Jersey, Times Square.

I don't know, this Times Square statue is just like beyond fascinating.

You've seen,

I assume you've seen Joe clips of Joe Biden appearing on The View.

And I think he gave an interview on BBC.

And

who said it?

Mark Helpern

had a take on it.

It was

Biden Inc.

has no money.

No money.

They're paying him for all those interviews, by the way.

He wouldn't do that.

They're paying him.

That's why he has no Hunter.

Hunter's out of commission.

Hunter's art is worthless.

It's always worthless, but it had value when he was president for grifting purposes.

And now,

is Jim Biden going to step up and say, hey, Joe, I'll go back to China.

I'll go over to Romania.

I will go to Ukraine and get us some money?

No.

And Joe can't do it either.

Not just because he's cognitively in decline, but because he has no clout.

So he has no market value and everybody knows it.

So they're broke because they have a high.

He has three homes.

He's 70, I mean, he's 82 years old, and he's got to pay property tax.

He's got to pay maintenance.

He's got to pay insurance on his big homes, and he has no income.

So Jill's going to step up and sell her tell-all memoir and rat out the Obamas and Kamala Harris and maybe get 10 or 20 million dollar advance.

And the book, people know that they won't get that money back, but

it's a gift for the cause.

But yeah,

he goes on these places that he went on the view to show everybody that he wasn't in mental decline, and he proved that he was.

And then she had to, you know, he does, you know, he does this.

He goes like this.

He closes his eyes and then he gets hoarse and then he just starts thinking and nothing comes into his mind.

And he just, oh, well, just forget it.

Trying to recalibrate doing that.

Yeah, I mean, I feel sorry for him.

But on the other hand, he put himself in a position that really endangered millions of Americans.

And he

well, outside of trying to get money to pay day-to-day bills, I wonder, I haven't looked into this, Victor.

I haven't seen anything about a Joe Biden Presidential Memorial Foundation or library.

I can't imagine people donating to such a thing.

Right.

Well, there's not a good precedent because we know the Clinton Foundation library, all that stuff was involved with Hillary,

you know, selling Uranium One and all that.

Then we got the old scams, yeah.

Yeah, and Haiti scams, the phone scam.

Then we've got Barack Obama's Stonehenge.

It's the ugliest thing I've ever seen.

It looks like a monolithic stonehenge.

They say the eventual cost is going to be $1 billion.

They destroyed a 20-acre park, five years, and it's nowhere near completion.

And he was bragging for the first two years about DEI and minority contractors.

And I think they just ripped him off or they're incompetent.

But so I don't know who

Obama got, he's going to raise a billion dollars and he can't do it.

And so Biden won't raise $100 million.

And if Obama had a billion and he couldn't do it, because if Joe Biden does, you know what the left wing will say?

How many gay people are contractors?

Do you have trans people, cement mixers?

Do you have

sheet rock people that are disabled?

All of that stuff.

Yeah, one-arm paper hangers.

Yeah, where are they?

Yes, yes.

That's what the high-speed rail is.

They had a little poster not too far about all the different groups of people, 2% this and 6% there.

Yeah.

Not one foot of track has been laid after 10 years and, I don't know, 30 billion.

And Gavin now thinks,

I got to get rid of this albatross, so Trump cut it off?

I'll just blame Trump.

That's great.

He did it.

So sad because not to get off the topic, but if they just spent $5 billion, they could have widened the three north-south laterals, 101.5

and the 99, even though one's a federal highway.

They could have widened them to six lanes, and they would have saved thousands of lives.

But that's what the left does.

They pursue these green unicorns and they get people killed.

Well, Victor, when we come back from these

important messages, we're going to get your take on madness in Newark and Madness in Times Square.

And we'll do that when we come back.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show recording on Monday, May 12th.

This episode is up on the 13th of May.

Victor,

I just have to mention, you know, there was a new Pope.

There is a new Pope, Leo, the

14th.

Could I interrupt and ask you as a

Catholic monarchist critic

and assessor?

We hear two different narratives.

One, that he's a left-wing person,

and this is an anti-Trump appointment.

And then we hear the exact opposite, that actually he's a closet conservative, and he was nominated as the first American Pope so that he would have influence in this dynamic Trump era, which is it?

Or neither?

I don't think it's either.

I mean, I don't think he's, I don't think he's Francis II.

I think he's a Catholic and a traditional,

well, not so.

Had you known him before?

Had you ever heard of him before?

No, no.

I hadn't either.

Frankly, I don't know anyone that does know him, but it's kind of refreshing.

One thing about

the predecessor, Francis, was a disdain for America, and we've talked about that previously on the podcast.

And remember, he came to Mexico and he stood at the border, and he,

you know, he gave the malok to the U.S.

Did you hear Tom Holman the other day?

I mean, everybody has this image of Tom Holman as if he's gruff or he's in our, he's actually very bright.

And he said, the Vatican has walls, it doesn't let people into their own sovereign territory.

As long as they have those defense capabilities, border security, let them not judge others.

It was kind of, you know, right all the New Testament, lest they be judged.

So we're doing what the Vatican, he was essentially saying, we're doing what the Vatican does.

We're trying to protect our sovereign space because that is, it has unity, we have a particular culture.

And if the Vatican wants to lecture us, they should just make a big hole in that wall and let in everybody who wants to go in there and claim, I don't know,

Victor Hugo sanctuary.

Sanctuary.

Right.

Quasimoto.

Yes, I'm Quasimodo, and this is a sanctuary Vatican.

Yeah, I think

conservatives and Catholics, conservative Catholics, should be generally pleased with what's well, you know, the Pope's got to become the Pope.

Let him play it out.

But it was a good day, all in all, for Catholicism.

I know some Trump people, he's not MAGA, and you know what?

He shouldn't be MAGA, he shouldn't be anti-MAGA.

A lot of them are taking credit for him, though.

They say that if Trump hadn't been president, he wouldn't have been.

The Vatican was seeking to have influence with a very touchy, sensitive administration that's getting more powerful.

Maybe the Holy Spirit is pro-MAGA.

Anyway,

you know, I'm ashamed, Victor.

I live in Milford, Connecticut, and that's where I'm recording from right now.

And do you know the people of Milford founded the city of Newark, New Jersey?

I did not know that.

They did.

It's our claim to fame.

And Newark was the scene of madness last week at the ICE Detention Center.

And three Congress,

who was it now?

Let's see.

The mayor was arrested, Raz Baraka, who's running for governor.

He's running for governor.

Then we have Congresswoman LaMonica MacIver, who's a body slammer.

And then

the Congressman Bob Menendez, who's the son of the corrupt jailed senator.

And I forget the name of the other.

There were three

congressmen or two congresswomen.

And Victor, I'm curious, wasn't this an insurrection?

Yeah, it was.

They put their hands, if you were in the Capitol and you put your hands one finger,

well, if you were in the Capitol with horns like the Buffalo Man, you just walked around and palled around,

you were in solitary confinement and you were probably in jail for a year before your hearing even came up.

And some of those guys served, you know, three to four years before they were pardoned.

But they hit, if you look at the tapes, they assaulted assaulted federal officers.

That's a felony.

And then they played the race car,

the mayor did, and he said it was because then he went on,

he and others went on this long rant that without DEI and they're bringing in Afrikaners because they're a white racist immigration policy.

They have no idea that the well, they do have an idea that the last half century, the whole point of Teddy Kennedy's legislation was to deny immigration from Europe and to encourage it from poor regions in Asia and Latin America, which would be the natural constituents of the new great society welfare state.

And nobody said, you people are racist.

You're trying to deliberately bring non-white people who are poor, but that's what they were doing.

And he's not looking at Africaners as white people.

He's just saying, we have a refugee policy and we're having all these people come across the border who are not being refugees from anybody.

They just want to get money or their drugs,

couriers, or their, you know, they just want to get out of poverty.

But these people

in South Africa are being killed on their farms.

They're being targeted.

And so I'm glad that he's doing that.

There's another thing, there's a subtext.

I got to be very careful how I word it, but

the left-wing black elite, and by the mayor, congresswoman,

we had a quote from Illian Omar that surfaced about white men.

Remember white men?

She said that white men were very dangerous, the most dangerous people in the United States.

That's not borne out statistically either in terms of domestic crime or terrorism.

And then we had Jasmine Crockett talk about white boys.

She said the word

white boys.

Then you factor in that Susan Rice, when she was removed from that board, the Defense Policy Board, in fact, she was appointed by Biden as a last-minute Rush appointment.

And then Trump did what Biden did, and he did what Obama did.

And I'm speaking as a presidential board member on the American Battle Monuments Commission.

I was just summarily fired.

I didn't write an op-ed about how unfair this was.

But then Susan Rice said this was because of the white male cis Christian religion, da-da-da-da.

people around Trump and Pete Hekseth in particular.

And then we have Letita James that has played the race card.

She's playing it right now.

We had Alvin Bragg who's playing the race card.

We had Fannie Willis who really played the race card.

And we had the London Breed.

We had the Karen Bass.

We had all of these

mayors and

Kim Fox playing the race card essentially.

And then you look at the polls, the Raspbussen poll on the 100 days, 62% of Hispanics, much more than white people, were in favor of what Trump had done.

But the interesting fact was 39% of African Americans approved.

So what I'm getting at is that the African American hate Trump, hate white people,

elite leftists, they're out of touch with their own constituencies.

Because 40% of them like the people that they call Hitler and racist.

And I don't know what the ultimate result of that's going to be, but in the terms of Hispanics, 45% of Californians' electorate identify as Hispanic.

And if you've got 62%

supporting Trump, and you read what the Hispanic leadership, like Representative Garcia and all these people, are saying,

they are going against their own constituencies.

And they're not talking about what their constituencies, like middle-class white people, same, want.

They want affordable homes.

They want affordable energy.

They want affordable gas.

They want safe streets, they want secure borders, they do not want illegal aliens in their social service system, etc.

And they're not talking about any of that.

They're talking about transgender stuff and hate Trump as Hitler.

And that's they're just out of touch.

And what's really interesting is

that this elite African-American left-wing political class is making the argument that Donald Trump is racist because he's got rid of a racist system of DEI.

And what I mean by that is you either hire, promote, admit on the basis of race, or you don't.

If you do, you're in violation of the recent Supreme Court ruling and basically the civil rights legislation of 64 and 5

and the 18th Amendment.

So that's what, and they are racist.

That's what they talk about all the time.

White, white, white, white, white.

White, white, white, white, white.

And

i think a lot of the african americans are saying to them i i'm just tired of this man you guys use us you use us you don't do anything for us as middle class and upper middle class workers or people trying to get a house and then you say you represent the black community and you just you know you're like the blm there's a poll that just said that most americans thought they did nothing nothing for the african american cause and they all stole the money and bought their homes and i think people are getting really sick of it.

And I don't, I kind of feel sorry for the left-wing black elite because there's an earthquake moving in this country, and they don't get it.

And they're doubling down.

And what they don't get is people are sick of race.

They're sick of it.

The whole George Floyd, post-George Floyd DI, and racism, and this, and the good racism, and white, white, white, white, white, and white, white boys, white boys, they're just sick of it.

And yet they keep pounding this into the ground.

And Crockett said one thing that showed her terror.

She said that her own party was going to nominate white boys.

Well, if that were to be true, it'd only be because somebody like you, Jasmine, would destroy the party because 40% of African Americans wouldn't vote for you.

And 62% of Hispanics, maybe 70, wouldn't vote for you.

And probably 65% of white people would not vote for you because you're an abject racist and you're incompetent and you're a complete phony.

You went to prep school, you paid $30,000 for your tuition, and then you talk with a ghetto inner-city accent when you feel that you're going to be a populist demagogue.

But then when you get on certain venues, you switch, kind of like AOC does that to a lesser extent.

Elizabeth Warren does it to a lesser extent.

The past master, of course, was Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

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Victor, speaking of

constituencies, I think the black elite constituency is not a black electorate.

It should be, by the way, if you're an elected official, it should be everyone who lives in your district, regardless of all those things.

But their constituency are whites.

There are elite whites.

There are white foundations, white academia.

That's the true constituency for the black elite, isn't it?

Yeah, it is.

It is.

That's who they are.

They're joined at the hip.

And this whole progressive project,

the DEI, the ESG, the Radical New Green Deal, it was essentially bi-coastal, wealthy white people,

very wealthy white people, the big foundations, the big donors, the Silicon

Con Valley grandees, but also the professional media, medical, lawyer, professional classes, business classes.

And their basic initiative or agenda was that they are doing pretty well and they have conquered all their existential needs.

They have homes, they have cars, they have money in the bank, they have stocks, and then they feel they're not going to live to be a hundred because the planet is warming up or they feel they're going to go to

atheist hell because they did not help the poor or they didn't

let a murderer out.

So, and they want to find a way to be pious and good at somebody else's expense that they never care about.

And that's who did this.

They did all of this stuff.

And what do I mean by this?

I'm talking about running up all these debts.

I'm talking about all of the Soros crime wave.

I'm talking about the vast printing of money.

I'm talking about the open border and illegal aliens.

It's the Gavin Newsoms, the Nancy Pelosi, the late Diane Feinstein, the Barbara Boxers, Mellaharrh, all those people did this.

But I shouldn't say, I mean, I'm not to imply that Camilla Harris is white, but

blame me.

But

as Donald Trump said, he doesn't have a problem with whatever she is this week.

I like your two lines about Soros, crime wave, and atheist hell.

By the way, related to this, all Victor is,

of course, New York.

get the New York Post every day.

And a headline the other day was anger in her district in the Bronx and Queens, AOC's district.

She's AWOL.

She's too busy with Bernie, running around the country.

She has the Bloomberg effect.

I created that term about 10 years ago when you had all that snow in New York and Bloomberg couldn't get it out.

Then he started talking about supersized Coca-Cola.

Remember that?

And

that's what the left does when

they can't provide oil or gas or electricity or highways or dams.

Then they get on to transgender this and supersize cokes there and outlawing

natural gas stove because they always can't address the existential felony, so they focus on the misdemeanor.

Well, I'm glad you see there's an earthquake or hear or feel there's an earthquake coming, Victor, because, yeah, they're like in Newark, they're all doubling down, making

murderers and criminals their heroes.

Yeah, they really like murders.

I don't know why they like,

but they also like wife beaters and people that beat up pregnant women and hit women in the face and bloody their eyes and threaten to kill them.

Not just Obrego Garcia, but I guess his name was Ruiz Flores Rue, the guy in Wisconsin that the judge was trying to protect.

And then these people on the buses were a rogue's gallery of criminals.

And here they are hitting federal officers.

In a perfect world, I think what the officer should have done is just said, hold on, hold on.

These people are very dangerous, and we're trying to protect the public from what they have done to people, but we'll make a deal with you.

If you stop hitting us and assaulting us, we will give you each one of them in your personal custody with the prohibition that they have ankle bracelets on.

If they break the ankle bracelets out of your GPS home area, then you're going to pay for the consequences financially.

And maybe they would do it.

They would adopt a criminal.

You know what I mean?

Let's start that movement.

Victor, one last thing.

I'm just springing this on you before we move to, well, we're still going to get to that Times Square statue, but I saw a poll.

I mean, it's kind of related to all this and where Democrats are going.

And four in five young Democrats are embarrassed to be Americans.

I think Bill Maher went off on this

rant about this in his latest

show.

There just seems to be no upside, no positive, no, here's where we want to go for this party.

It's a party that's that's lost, leaderless.

What's the strategic?

But you know, they get that, but that's just that poll reflects the 50% that are in college, and that's all they hear all day long.

They really do.

They hear it from their student, the

radical Hamas people, they hear it from the DEI people, they hear it from the faculty, and they just, it's kind of like being in the Soviet Union in the last day.

You had to be a member of the party and the nomenclature and the apparatus.

Otherwise, you're, and that's what they do.

They just, they just gravitate to where they think approval and certification lie.

But when you actually see them, they're not leaving the United States.

If they don't like the United States, we have Mexico right across the border.

If they don't like Mexico and they want to speak English, go to Canada.

But when I go abroad and I see these people,

I don't see that they hate America.

They have American express cards.

They're at very nice restaurants in Florence or Venice or Rome or Paris.

When I go by an American embassy, I see a lot of people going in and out that are Americans.

I don't think they're all Trump supporters by any means.

Most people who go to Europe are...

A, wealthy or pretty well off, and B, on the left side of the ledger.

And yet, they come back.

I think even Richard Gary's coming back, isn't he?

He said he's going to come back.

Maybe Rosie O'Donnell will come.

Yeah, I think he said that he's coming back to the hated United States.

But they know that to the extent they ever left the United States, they know the difference.

And I can tell you with someone, I think I've been to every Middle East country except one of the Gulf states and Iran.

I haven't never been to Iran.

And I can tell you that once you go there to

Libya or you go to

Iraq during the war or you go to Syria or you go to Jordan or gosh, I went to Egypt right after the Yom Kippur War.

Once you go to those places,

it's just an alternate reality.

It's an alternate reality.

We have a bad bureaucracy, but those bureaucracy, you can't get anything done.

And they can do anything to you at any time, the police.

There's no constitutional rights, you can't drink the water.

It's just a different reality, and these people know that.

So, any of those nations, I don't know if you've been to Tunisia.

Yeah, I've been to Tunisia a lot, I think three or four times.

That is the most

suitable of the Arab countries

outside the wealthy Gulf states.

Right.

Hey, Victor, let's get your take on Times Square, and then we'll take a break.

You know, I don't know if all of our listeners are following this, but a, I don't know, it was a 12-foot mammoth statue of a,

I don't know, a chubby, stocky black woman, kind of with an attitude looking.

I guess that's the point

is now temporarily in Times Square.

She's not holding up a middle finger, but I think the whole thing is a sort of a middle finger.

Yeah, I didn't understand that.

One of the Fox Network hosts wrote me,

he or she, I won't give it away, was

working on their monologue and they sent me that picture and they said, what's your impression?

And I didn't know about the story.

I just looked at the statue.

I thought it was

Letitia James.

I really did.

It looks just like her.

So I thought, wow, they're canonizing this woman who committed mortgage fraud and said her father was her husband, all this stuff.

But it looked just like her.

And then, you know, I don't understand why they would do that.

What's the purpose?

I mean, there's there's a lot of beautiful African-American, trim, athletic women, just like any other race.

And I'm not sure that people in the African-American female community are any more obese than white people or Hispanic people.

But why would they take someone that was obese and make her the defined?

Is it because they maybe it's empirical?

Maybe they looked at all of the mayors and, you know, Lori Lightfoot, or she's not obese, but maybe they looked at Kim Fox or they looked at London Breed or they looked at Karen Bass or they looked at Fanny Willis and they said, There's a model here.

Angry black women on the left that take on power and speak truth to power and attack white people.

And we've got to make them iconic.

I guess that was it.

But I really did sincerely think it was a monument to

State Attorney General Jane.

Well, yeah,

I'm cool with

monuments and statues that have an attitude when they are warriors.

Yes, or there's somebody famous or they've done something.

But what are these?

I don't know who the person is that.

Yeah, again, it's the doubling down on, yes.

I mean, if you look at the prosecutors

that are,

does anybody think that that profile of middle-aged African-American hard-left inner-city prosecutor, I know they got elected by the inner-city community, but you think the inner city community supports them now?

Do you think the people, the white liberals that voted in Karen Bass support her now?

They threw out London Reed, San Francisco, did left-wing voters, mostly Asian voters.

So I don't see that if she represents the left-wing professional political class,

I don't see that there's a lot of success there.

I mean, there's a lot of, the director of my institution, I could see Condalisa Rice, she's an international diplomat, and I can see,

you know, I can see Barbara Jordan, oh my gosh,

she probably had a better vocabulary and was better grammatically and syntactically spoken than any congressperson of her age.

And I wasn't a big fan of Julian Bond.

He was very left and he got worse, but he was very well spoken.

So my point, and you know,

I don't know what they're trying to transmit, what that's supposed to resonate, what profile or stereotype they're aiming at.

Well,

we will see if it, if it's on a I don't know if it's on a roadshow.

I think it's only up temporarily in Times Square.

Who knows where next

it will go.

Victor,

I'd love to and I think our listeners and viewers, which there are many now, thanks folks, for

typical Victor podcast has over 100,000 people checking this out on YouTube.

I think folks would like to get your take on India and J.D.

Vance.

And then today's other big news is about the freeing of Israeli-American hostage Eden Alexander.

And we will get your take on these two topics, Victor, when we come back from our final messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

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Allison, Joe, Paul, and many other moderators, they're just, they dig up stuff, good stuff, of Victor's past and the present.

Victor,

let's start with the news of the day.

Eden Alexander was freed today after 600 days as a Hamas captive.

He'd been handcuffed in a cage, and he was tortured over those 600 days.

But he's free now.

Thank God.

Any thoughts on that before we go?

Well, I mean, when you're a Hamas killer and murderer and you're in Israeli custody and you have a brain tumor, they take it out in a very sophisticated brain.

surgery as they did to the late Hamas leader.

So this guy lost over 100 pounds.

I don't know how he was, what, 64 or 5?

How does a 64 or 5

year old person live?

And he must have been a lot of time in the tunnels that are moldy and dark.

And he wasn't given a top.

He probably had one or two medications he wasn't given.

I don't know how he survived.

Whenever I hear these things, I just think, if you were in that place,

how long would you survive?

And I don't think I'd survive more than a month.

I think most people think that too, knowing that any moment they were going to kill you, torture you, and they would lie to you and tell you this and that.

It's very

primordial.

So then the question is, why did they release him, the last American hostages?

They released him because

Donald Trump is in the Middle East, and he's going to cut another deal, apparently,

in conjunction with the Abraham Accords, and probably have a trade deal and financial investments.

I don't know what what he says it's going to be big news, but I imagine he's going to say that X billion dollars are going to be invested by these Gulf monarchies, and this country is now going to recognize Israel in steps.

And

privately, they all said

we support whatever you're doing.

We're not afraid of the Israelis.

We're afraid of Iran.

What are you going to do about Iran?

We don't want a big war, but we want that nuclear threat dealt with.

And

I don't know.

They think that

he's going to give them all they want, and Hamas knows that.

And then Hamas is looking around and they're saying, hmm, we got a crazy American president now that is perfectly capable of going to sleep every night and not waking up one of his five hours worrying about our fate.

And now all of our supporters that we've sent over to the United States,

they're scared stiff because they've been vandalizing and protesting violently and destroying, and they're going to get deported.

Marco Rubio said that the other day.

They've got the pictures and names of them.

And I think they're just waiting to do it very quietly and just say, you know what, we don't have to have a hearing.

We just don't want to reissue your visa because you're not a very nice guest.

Just like the guy comes into our house for dinner, we don't have to go to court to get rid of him.

We'll just say, we don't want you here.

And so they're squatters.

Yeah, they are squatters.

They They come over here and they say they're going to be students and study, and then they come over to support a terrorist organization, literally.

And then they look at Iran and they think, wow, the Houthis are cutting a deal with the Americans.

They're not going to be sending any more.

Anytime they send a missile anywhere near the Israeli airport, they lost their airport.

They lost their port.

And

no doubt both the Israelis, the Americans have given them a list of targets and said, just keep doing this.

We don't really care.

It's your choice.

These are your power plants.

These are your overpasses.

These are, you know, they're just going to go down.

So they decided they're going to throw in the towel.

And there is no Mr.

Hafez Assad.

He's gone.

That country.

The Kurds are now cutting a deal with the Turks.

I didn't think

that would ever happen.

Iran has no air defenses.

Hezbollah,

I guess, what, three or four thousand of their leaders and operatives are walking around Lebanon, missing, what, an eye and a hand, and obviously recognizable from the pagers and stuff, cell phones.

So it's not been good for any of them, and they know that.

And so they're thinking Trump is going to either blast us and clear us out of Hamas and turn it over to the Israelis and the Arab Gulf monarchies to fund and build a,

you know, kind of like a Middle East city and not let anybody in.

And we, And

half the population of Gaza would probably like that and thinking that they would like to come back in.

So that's why they're doing this.

And they don't, you know, they're letting one hostage go by, go back.

And

it's all this is like the border when Joe Biden kept saying that we had to have comprehensive immigration reform and the Congress wasn't acting and he couldn't close the border.

And Mayorkas, who was a pathological liar, to tell you the truth, he just lied every day to us.

They're whipping people.

They're They're doing that.

And now the same thing about the Middle East.

You can't do anything.

You can't come down decidedly on the democratic Israelis side.

You have to be equal and treat the terrorists the same way you do.

No.

No, no.

It didn't work.

A symbol of the Biden versus Trump is that a report just came out, I don't know if you saw it, Victor,

of the

what do you call it?

The dock.

Yes, the pier, the floatable.

They thought they were going to be, you know, it's D-Day, and they had the mulberry piers from World War II.

That's so ironic because the Mulberry Piers,

they floated them all the way to England.

They both were there.

One of them, the rare storm in a century, destroyed.

But the other one was functional.

It's still there when you see it, parts of it.

And that means that our great-grandfathers, in my case, my grandfather's generation, they could build something that we can't.

And they got people, wasn't there over 40 40 people injured trying to

get two injured and one killed?

Killed.

And for what?

To facilitate giving money to terrorists and food so they could stiff their own constituents?

Yeah.

If you were Hamas, if you were living in Gaza and somebody came in to you and said, put a mask over your face so nobody knows who you are, and I have a voice synthesizer so nobody can ever find out your voice.

Would you like the Israelis, Israelis, the hated Israelis, in charge of food shipments to you, or would you like Hamas?

I think the majority would say the Israelis.

Well, Victor, one last topic.

I just want to mention another big story is that

I think it's fair to say Donald Trump is kind of forced a face-to-face

between Ukraine and Russia that will take place in Turkey later this week.

I think it's later this week.

And that hopefully, and I'm confident you and the great Sammy Wink will discuss that when you record later this week.

But on another war front,

J.D.

Vance and Marco Rubio, mostly Marco Rubio, have secured another ceasefire between India and Pakistan.

I'd like to get your take, though, on Vance and his initial comments.

Here's a, I think I'm reading here from Fox.

Yeah.

As the two sides sparred with airstrikes, Vance told Fox News that the conflict was, quote, fundamentally none of our business, end quote, and that all the United States could do was to, quote, encourage these folks to de-escalate a little bit, end quote.

Those comments fueled fears inside the Trump administration that the conflict may spiral out of control.

JD,

I think it was a mistaken thing to say, dude.

Who cares what I say?

What are you doing?

No,

you're right.

I wrote about this in the new criterion.

It was called MAGA Agonistes.

And there is a paradox that they're Jacksonians.

I mean, no better friend, no worse enemy, don't tread on me.

We don't want to get involved, we don't want to nation build, we intervene only for our friends and our allies and our interests, not to nation.

That's true.

But at the same time, Donald Trump did destroy ISIS, he did kill Soleimani, he did kill Baghdadi, he hit a lot of people in Syria, he's hitting the Houthis very hard.

So

squaring that circle between interventionism and isolationism is what I think Walter Russell Mead recoined the term Jacksonianism.

Okay, so when that Snapchat leaked dialogue with Pete Heckseth and Michael Waltz, the former national security advisor, we saw J.D.

Vance weigh in and said, this is not in line with

MAGA, but it was in line with MAGA because

the Houthis have been vastly reduced in their clout, and the Red Sea now is open again to international.

And maybe he would say, well, it doesn't benefit us, but it does.

Because a lot of these people trade with us, and it's good to have the Red Sea and the Suez Canal operative again.

And in this case,

India has, I don't know, a reported 300 to 500 nuclear weapons in Pakistan, 150 to 250.

And we're in a unique position because in the Cold War, India was pro-Soviet, even though it was a democracy.

And we were backing what were occasionally democratic governments in Pakistan.

And now we've kind of flipped.

We're now more pro-Indian

and less because of Pakistan's support for terrorists in the Taliban, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So what's my point?

We have familiarity with both sides.

We've been allies with both sides.

And all we're trying to do is it doesn't cost us anything to send an envoy over there, and which we did, and

mediate because we're the big power and we have trade advantages, we have clout economically.

Trump is not going to send either one of them a big check.

If he has any clout, he's trying to say, We're not going to sell you F-35s or we're not going to sell you F-16s or whatever.

So, he does have some clout, and it's kind of like Ukraine and Russia.

The problem with

all these people, they never talk about the humanitarian aspect.

I never heard one word from Obama about all the people who got killed in 2014 because of his hot mic appeasement of Medeved and Putin.

And then I never heard a word.

All I heard from Biden is we're going to do whatever it takes.

You're going to do whatever it takes.

What does that mean?

There's been some reports out that it's between 1.5 and 1.7 million dead, wounded, killed on both sides.

And the reason that they're having trouble getting a peace in the Ukraine, just to go off topic a second, is that what is Vladimir Putin going to tell the Russian people?

I got Crimea and I got Donbass institutionalized as our own, A.

I got a commitment that Ukraine will not be in NATO, B.

And I went 40 to 80 miles beyond the Donbass, and I have a new DMZ.

So I cut away 10% 10% of Ukraine, and that was worth a million dead Russians and wounded.

I don't think so.

I think he's got a heart.

When this thinks, the music stops, he's going to go have to tell

the nomenclature who are still there that it was worth it, and it wasn't worth it.

And he didn't absorb Ukraine.

And Ukraine's now got the best well-armed army in, you know, and he's not going to be able to take all of Ukraine.

And his military has not performed as he said it would.

And so

he's not going to be able to do anything.

So my point is that we're not trying to nation build, we're not sending U.S.

troops, we're not spending a lot of money, but it makes sense

to

be an honest broker and try to relieve these tensions.

And we have a...

I don't know the breakdown, but I have a feeling we have a lot more immigrants from India.

We have a lot from Pakistan, but I think there's a lot more from India,

especially at the high levels of government.

So

I think,

you know, we're going to be involved whether we like it or not.

I think, Victor, we've seen the last few months since he became Secretary of State.

Marco Rubio seems to have real gravitas.

He showed that right off the bat when

he was the fireman that was sent down to Panama.

He understands Trump.

I mean, he was a rival in 2016, but he understands the whole dialectic of trolling and 51st state, and Panama

might have to reneg on the treaty, and Greenland would be a great addition.

They all end up,

you can argue that we polarize these countries needlessly, or you can argue that he actually got a lot more Danish investment and more autonomy in Greenland, and he got the attention of Canada.

And they are now committed, they claim, to spend their 2%

of GDP on defense.

And they claim that they're going to try to reduce the $63 billion surplus.

And Panama claims that they're going to get rid of the Chinese at the entry and exit and let BlackRock take over.

All of these have to be followed up.

But the point is, that was the whole point of

the trolling, the Art of the Deal.

Go back and read the Art of the Deal.

I read the Art art of the deal and the art of the comeback when I wrote the case for Trump, and it was, you go into your negotiations, you want, you demand 70 or 80 percent of the deal, your interest,

and you scream, and you yell, and you look like you're crazy, and then you bargain down to 53, 55 percent deal, and you win.

That's what you wanted all along.

And then you never, ever attack

either during the negotiations or afterwards, your rival.

You always say that they're good, they're nice, they're smart,

because you never know when you're going to have to deal with them again.

So when Biden was accurately calling Putin a tyrant and a killer, a murderer, yes, but that's true, but it doesn't help solve the Stalingrad or the Somme or Verdun.

It doesn't stop the killing.

I mean,

you're going to have to deal with him one way or the other.

in a negotiation, unless you think that you're going to arm Ukraine and they're going to go on to Moscow.

And that's not going to happen.

Not with a country with

6,000 nuclear weapons.

It's just not going to happen, whether you like it or not.

And that's what the left can't.

I don't know what the argument of the left is right now on Ukraine and all of these things.

We were leftist then and now we're interventionists or we're

nation builders

like George W.

Bush or we're neoconservatives or just anything that Trump is for, we're against.

But they have no coherent foreign policy.

Well, they seem to have bloodlust.

They love abortion.

They love dead bodies.

They like low fertility rates.

They are not bothered by a million abortions a year.

That's true.

They hate a two-parent family as a norm.

They feel that that's homophobic or transphobic.

And

people don't like the model.

I think it's 3 million people a year are leaving the blue states for the red state.

And their fertility rate, if you look at the red states,

26 or 28 of them that are more red than blue, they have a much higher, they're almost 2%

fertility.

And the blue states are shrinking.

They're by 1.45.

Well, I did my part, Victor, but Mrs.

Fowler and I are

done.

I had three children, so I was over the 2.1.

I have five.

Yeah, five.

It'd only make me a grandfather.

I'd be happy.

All right, Victor, we've come to about the end of the show.

You've been terrific, of course.

And I want to read three comments today.

I think I got them all from YouTube.

And thanks, everyone.

Whether you listen on Apple or Spotify or wherever you are on Victor's website, you can listen to the podcast off the website.

Or if you're watching it on Rumble or YouTube, we thank you for doing that.

Thank those who leave comments.

Try to go through them.

Here are three.

From Jill Clark, 6076.

I finished all my chores listening to this program today with a smile on my face.

I love listening to Victor's stories of family and growing up.

His mom sounds like a wonderful person.

Thank you for a great show, as always, guys.

Then, speaking of fertility and children, Jenny D, 1111, she writes,

I'm one of the unmarried with no children that's happy.

We talked about polls of

unmarried and married children, no children, happiness a couple of episodes ago.

That's just how my life turned out.

Majority of my friends have kids, three to four children.

Of those, most are married.

I think all are happy or mostly happy.

I love my friends' children.

I'm also one that supports and believes in moms that are able or want to stay at home with their kids.

My mom was able to be a stay-at-home mom, and I'm so grateful for that.

Not all of us spinsters are angry feminists.

Ha ha.

Thank you, Jenny.

D.

And finally,

this is about a guy that just got off an airplane, Roland Roddenbush, writes, Dr.

Hansen, you are right about flying.

It has become a nightmare, but please don't confine yourself to your home.

You have so much to contribute, and doing it in person is the most effective way to communicate.

You know, I think I shook a thousand hands the last three days.

Nothing I must have done 200 selfies, and I talked to a lot of people in the plane.

And I had a raging sinus infection headache.

But I'm not whining.

I wrote a little thing for the Ultra about flying, and I gave you a typeset.

It's, yes, the government is culpable.

Yes, the DEI hiring on pilots.

So we're kind of in a race.

We've got much more

reliable planes.

We have better avionics.

We're less dependent on human air.

But at the same time, no offense, pilots, but the pilots below that I fly and I look at the pilots when they go, the pilots below 40 are not the same as the old breed, the techniques.

And I don't know what that means.

The old breed was flying more dangerous and more pilot-involved planes.

This generation has an easier plane to fly, and we have better, but they're not as skilled.

But that's only half of it.

The other half that makes flying so terrible is I'm writing right now as I'm thinking

that we have the narcissistic passenger and that's the guy I'll give you very quickly Jack you're all ready to board and by the way there's rows one to two group one to two and five to six and are separate and then the throng goes like this and they have no computer that says oh you're in group five you can't get carry-on get out no they just let them in and then at the last moment you're all there's always one attendant it seems like 737 max 180 passengers You're ready, and you look at it, you think, I got a connection, and then right when she's ready or he's ready to open the thing and say, military personnel,

then somebody goes to the desk and they go, Now you have an upgrade, why don't you have an upgrade?

And I,

why is my baggage too big?

And you're so everybody's murmuring, you blank, blank, blank.

You are delaying our boarding for 10 minutes.

And then that person, the other type of the narcissistic issue,

they tell you, this is the size of the carry-on.

So then the carry-on that fits in the overhead is smaller than the handbag.

It's huge.

It's like a tuba case.

They come in and they get in the aisle and they're struggling like this.

There's 50 passengers and they get on the cell phone.

Hi!

Yes!

I'm in Salt Lake right now.

And they stop everybody.

And then somebody tries to go around them and they don't even look.

They hit you and they do this.

And then I call this one, Jack, the rummager.

I'm writing this column right now in my head.

This rummager is you're sitting there, you're in the middle of your aisle seat, and everybody's boarding, and you're thinking, oh, God, I got a 47-minute connection, and we're already late taking off.

And this guy's in the window, and he goes, oh, can you excuse me?

I've got to get my pad in the overhead compartment.

And then he gets out.

Everybody gets out.

He stops the whole boarding.

He goes in there.

He ruffles everything for two or three minutes.

And then he's, and you say to him, With all due respect, could you just wait until we get, you know, 8,000 feet?

No,

and then he blocks everybody up.

And then you're sitting there.

And

you know what?

I try to do, Jack, is

my father always lectured me.

You're never going to make it because you don't dress well enough.

Because I always wear casual.

But now I wear a sport coat and slacks.

Because when I go on there, I see people in yoga pants that are too, too tight.

I see people with sweat pants.

I see people in beachwear.

I see people who say that they're not barefooted when they're wearing thongs.

They take their suckers.

Yes.

And then I see dogs next to my feet passing wind.

And then I see, I know airline food is not.

French cuisine, but I see these chili boats, sushi, Big Macs, that smell right next to you.

They break out all all this stuff.

I was with, I won't want to give too information because maybe the person, but I was with a person who must have been 5'1.

I'm 6'1.

And she kind of announced to me that her carry-on would take all of the space where her feet was.

So she had two little feet next to the window, and all the other space was taken by her bag.

And so she said, did I object?

And I said, well, we'll see.

And I just quietly took my right foot and kept pushing, pushing back like I was reclaiming the southern border and just pushing it, pushing it, pushing it.

And then she said, oh, I can't have this.

I said, no, sorry.

It's against the rules.

I have to enforce them.

But there's so much selfishness.

And then, you know, the other one is

they announce, we're having a full flight today.

Would you please put the carry-ons?

There's no more carry-on space.

We would.

recommend that some of you check it in.

And then somebody's coming in with a carry-on that they didn't check.

It's like roller, you you know, roller wheel, and it's huge.

And you think, that person's going all the way back to row 40, and there's no way in the world that that is going to fit.

So they go back, and they go like this, and they go like this, and then the intendant, it takes five minutes, and they have to go all the way back out and check it.

And you just want to tell the person, you idiot, did you ever think that was going to fit?

So it's mostly the passengers.

And

they get very angry, but they're very selfish about, I don't mean the passengers, the majority, but 10% of the people are the most selfish people in the world.

Their own personal

predilection, it takes precedent over 200 people.

You're like sardines, and one bad sardine in a can rots the whole thing.

And

they just do stuff that is so selfish.

And

it's...

It's really amazing.

And

I feel for the attendants.

I do.

They're really good, most most of the airline attendants.

And they have to put up with these people.

And it's like it's worse.

I used to, as I said to Sammy, ride the Greyhound bus to college sometimes.

And this is worse than what I remember on the Greyhound bus.

Well, speaking of the Greyhound bus, that's what I, when I started reading that comment from Roland Rodenbush, he wanted you to get your John Madden on so you could take a bus and travel.

Oh, I hadn't thought of that.

Yeah, I'm going to go.

I have to, you know, I just got home last night.

I've got to go down to newport beach to speak for hoover and i said i'm not flying flying to san francisco from fresno then all the way down to john i'm just going to drive the 300 miles so from selma but yeah i'm going to drive whenever i can i drove last night from sfo four hours so i

i'm not going to

um

you know

if you can avoid going getting in an airplane you're going to avoid it that's your yeah i had my CT scan, and the guy was really great.

He just said, you have your both your sinuses are blocked, and you're going to have to have it cut open to get it out unless you can steam it out or not fly or just relax.

I'm going to try to do natural health.

I'm going to listen to RFK.

I'm going to write him a letter and say, RFK, how do I get rid of a three-month chronic sinus infection without taking the mRNA vaccination or something?

No.

It may have a connection with rotor.

That's what I'm going to get.

Believe me, I only have one choice whether to do it with local or go under.

So I'm trying to debate.

All right, two last things, Victor.

One is I write Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society.

And it comes out every Friday.

It has 14 recommended readings, articles I've come across the previous week that I think you will like.

So how do you get it?

You go to civilthoughts.com, sign up, put in your email address.

We're not charging.

We're not selling your name.

I know you're going to like it.

Thanks to the folks that write me and say that they do indeed like it.

And then the final thing is: you know, often in these shows, I say Victor Davis-Hans, who happens to be a farmer, a philologist, a classicist, military historian, but also a performance artist, as you saw a little bit ago.

Victor is a before we leave.

Could I add one category, Kane?

And I know

this is of interest to you because you fly more than I do.

And I count, not in this recent, but on a trip two trips ago, I counted the number of wheelchairs.

And I really think that wheelchairs are great.

I have a disabled granddaughter, so I really think I understand that.

But number one, I was trying to study this phenomenon.

So in the loading area, I saw two people that were getting up and out of the wheelchair.

very easily.

So they were in it, and there were nine wheelchairs.

And this is the second thing, getting back to flying.

You know how many people escorted them onto the plane on average?

Have you seen this with like five people, like the whole family goes on early, the first time?

Grandma, here's the thing.

There's grandma.

You can't walk?

Well, we have five rollerbags.

We want to go on right now.

That's what they do.

So then I thought,

I'm going to watch the Skybridge, right?

So when you walk out, you can see the little name.

They have iPads now with a name and stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah, there were seven when I took off.

There were two.

So I guess the motivation is for 30 or 40% that don't have doctor's notices or something.

And I guess it's,

I got to get on and get, I don't want to walk and I want to be

maintained in a nice, you know, ride all the way, not just to my destination, but ride my way into the plane.

And then

I want to get all the overhead space and I want to board first by myself.

And then when I have a connection,

I was cured at 30,000 feet of my ailment.

And now I do not want that wheelchair because if I get that wheelchair, I'm going to be the last to get off.

They don't want that.

So I think they should just make a rule that said, if you want a wheelchair, you have to...

you have to board, you cannot leave.

You have to be on that wheelchair to get off.

And that would end it right there.

That would help the people who are really ill and disabled.

And there's a lot of them.

I think 19.

I won't mention the city that I was in, but it was a retirement community.

19.

And we took off 70 minutes late.

And in Fresno, my record is, I think it was 11.

And one person, there's one person was responsible for that.

finally the attendant that was boarding us later she even had to go in there and stop all the boarding and help and though i i think there were four people my wife will attest that we came home from europe

and there was an ethnic group flying in i won't mention the ethnic group There was about 30 wheelchairs and they were all lined.

They were all lined along the side and the TSA people, which are private, I think, in San Francisco, had had enough and they put them separate, and they all were out of their wheelchairs in a big, they were out talking in a circle.

And I think they just said, you know what, 27 is too much.

And you guys are going to just sit there for a while until we figure out whether you want to come through customs or you want to be wheeled through.

But now you're all standing up there angry.

It was really.

It's miracles.

It's amazing.

Everybody was saying, look, look at them.

They're all standing up.

Look at 27 wheelchairs.

So I don't know.

I'm I'm getting on a rant, but I don't like to fly.

I don't like to fly.

I don't like to fly.

Take the bus.

Take the bus, my friend.

I don't like to travel.

Well, you're going to.

I've done it for 50 years, so

it's, you know,

50 years of it.

You need to stay home and watch who's dumping.

On the other hand,

if I have my little operation, I feel like if I had an open sinus, I'd feel like I died and went to heaven.

Then I might say to you, gosh, Jack, I miss flying.

I want to get back on that plane.

I doubt it.

I want you to come to Milford, Connecticut, and hang out.

Okay.

All right, Victor, you've been terrific.

Thank you for all the

humor you shared today.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

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

Thank you for listening and viewing.

Much appreciated.