The Coming of New Eras: Trump Shines and WWII Unwinds

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Victor is the Martin Annalee Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

So, Victor, Trump, I thought something light, and we like Trump on this show, so a little bit has happened this week with Trump and his visit to Paris, where he was treated as though he were the president, which kind of cracked me up.

And then he also has been urging Putin to take a ceasefire.

And I thought that was another interesting Trump story today.

What are your thoughts on either of those?

Well, you know, they destroyed, as I said earlier, they destroyed Mike Flynn in 2020, in early January, because they said, or actually earlier even,

because they said he had called the Russian ambassador and he was not formally in office till January 20th of 2021.

So

is there no Logan?

I mean, no Logan Act never existed, but this is what is so fascinating: is that the left is not objecting because they know that they've seen Joe Biden deteriorate even markedly

from November 5th.

So when he wanders around or he screams or yells or he just disappears or Joe Biden has to be in Notre Dame, it's quite fascinating.

Fetterman is

almost a Trump supporter now.

And they're not, I mean, they made their point with

Matt Gates.

We understood that, but I don't think they're going to be able to oppose

successfully any of these nominations.

Maybe

they can't stand

RFK because they see him as an apostate.

And even Kimberly Strassel today in the Wall Street Journal, I'm speaking on Friday, it said that he's a kook and quoting Trump that said he was a kook, but Trump said he was a kook when he was running against Trump.

So there's and she's saying it's up to the Republicans in the Senate to reject RFK because of what he said about energy, what he said about open borders.

He was a hard-left Bernie Sanders leftist.

So

I don't know if there's going to be successful opposition to RFK and then there's I think Gates and Cash are going to make it and

the left is going to focus on Tulsi and and RFK partly because they're Democrats and they don't like people who stray from the reservation.

The other thing is

Joe Biden is trying to subvert Donald Trump.

So

he's selling at five cents on the dollar portions of the wall material that Trump

was ready to build and then of course he stopped it and it was rusting but it's still good.

So he's been carting it away and auctioning it off and now I think as today they've stopped that.

But think of the logic.

I would rather rip off the American taxpayers and give this stuff away, this high-quality steel, to the highest bidder than allow my successor to exercise his constitutional rights as president to use the material which had already been congressionally authorized.

And I think the...

I don't know, but the logic must be, well, if we auction all this stuff off, when he comes into office, he won't have anything to build.

Otherwise, he'll have a supply to build for three or four months or weeks, and then he'll have to get congressional authorization for another one, and maybe we can stop him in the Congress for more steel and more wall.

But don't ever believe Joe Biden, anything he says.

He's a pathological prevaricator.

I don't want to say he prevaricates.

He's not a prevaricator.

He's a liar.

And he never tells the truth if he can help it.

And so this idea that he was going to have a smooth transition, he's pardoning people.

He's giving record numbers of clemency, 1,500 people.

Some of them, it's outrageous what he's doing.

And

he's trying to subvert.

Donald Trump.

Yeah, we're right back again.

With all due respect, the Clintons, they were doing little tiny things when George W.

Bush came.

into office, as we all remember.

They would remove keys on the computers in the White House, and they would put little notes in binders that they'd open up and say F FU and all kinds of stupid things.

And then when Obama left,

Obama's gift to Donald Trump was Operation Crossfire Hurricane to go after Trump from day one.

Remember that James Clapper and John Brennan and Comey were in the Oval Office all during the run-up to the campaign, and they were forging Russian collusion mythology right there.

Obama was in on it.

So they always do that with a transition.

George Bush was very magnanimous when he left for Barack Obama.

And

Obama tried to subvert Donald Trump.

And Donald Trump didn't, I mean, you can argue about January 6th, but that was not aimed at Joe Biden.

He didn't try to, you know, sabotage Joe Biden.

They impeached him right before he left office, and they tried him as a private citizen.

And I say they, that was the Biden administration via the Congress.

Biden's administration was in power, and Donald Trump was a private citizen and okayed that,

even though it was a congressional trial.

And then

they never paused.

They went after him.

So

it's a very strange time and the world is sort of saying,

wow, the collective madness is gone.

The United States is back.

There's not going to be any more $50 billion giveaway to terrorists in Afghanistan that started the Ukraine war.

And they're going to try to stop this war on our borders.

There's 1.5 million dead and wounded.

And they're going to try to do something to stop the killing.

And wow.

He's going to let Israel do what they have to do to get rid of this theocracy if they have to in Iran.

He's not going to say, you can't do this.

You can't reply to Hezbollah because we won't give you any bunker busters or 2,000-pound bombs or anything.

None of that.

So

Hamas wants to deal.

Hezbollah wants to deal.

Iran wants to deal,

and the Europeans are relieved.

So I guess the message that you see is that the United States is no longer crazy.

For four years, they said that they told the world there were three genders.

For three years, you looked at the people in the White House, and you saw an energy sub-cabinet-level person stealing women's luggage.

You saw the Assistant Attorney General dressed up as a woman talking about trans issues all the time.

You saw the Transportation Secretary talking about racist clover leafs.

You saw the Homeland Security open the border and destroy it by intent and let in somewhere around 12 million people.

And you saw the Department of Interior person just

stop federal leasing on federal lands of energy.

The world is looking at this and they're thinking the United States was crazy and our friends were worried, our neutrals were drifting away and our enemies were emboldened.

And we got a war in Ukraine, we got a war in the Middle East, we got a resurgent China threatening Taiwan, sending a balloon over the United States, and now they're thinking it's over with.

It's the weirdest thing in the world because in 2017 to 21, they told us that Trump was the disruptor.

And now it's like,

well, we've seen four years of Trump, and we've seen four years of Biden.

We

prefer four years of Trump.

The United States was leading.

It was powerful.

It got rid of Solemani.

It got rid of Baghdadi.

It corrilled Iran.

It almost broke Iran.

Putin stayed in place.

He didn't go anywhere, unlike during the Obama and subsequent Biden administrations.

He was tough on China trade.

The border was finally secured.

The economy was recovering from COVID at a roaring pace.

That was pretty good for all of us.

What's weirder is that you get the impression now when you listen to James Carville or Pod,

those people on Pod of America, whatever they're called,

you get the impression

or

Joe Scarborough, it's like they're almost saying the jig is up.

You think so?

I feel like they're going to change.

They're going to change.

No, no, no.

I don't mean that they're going to change or they're lamenting or they're regretting.

Yeah.

But they're coming to terms with the fact that this did not work.

It doesn't mean they won't try it again.

It doesn't mean they'll not try to impeach Trump if they win the House.

It doesn't mean that they will not try to server.

It doesn't mean the media is going to stop lying.

But don't they get it that people are on to him?

Even that Charlemagne the God was talking about the pardons.

That's what I mean.

I think they're saying, you know what?

We did our best.

We hid it from the country that he was demented.

And he was senile.

And we used him as they call him.

Remember, Obama had said,

if I had a third term, I'd like to have a guy with an earpiece in his ear.

And I would call in instructions.

That's exactly what he did.

But now they're saying, you know what?

We had our best effort.

We screwed up the country.

We succeeded.

We destroyed as much as we could.

And now the four years are up.

And the guy is senile.

So we have to go back and regroup.

It's kind of like the Red Army, you know.

Okay, they invaded the Germans.

They encircled us.

We lost all these troops.

And now we're going to go back.

We're going to fight.

But we admit that we were stupid to trust the German.

They know what they did.

They know that it was a failure.

They know that they can't continue.

They know they can't win the American people.

They know that their

trans issue, their border issue, their crime.

Nobody wants it.

But they don't have anything left.

Like, is this party just gone?

Yeah, they're like a little punk that you have in high school.

He comes up behind you and he hits you in the head and then you kick his rear end and then he says, well, I'm sorry, I tried to hit you from the back of the head.

And then he goes away, but you never trust him.

You know he's going to do it again.

So they're going to do this again.

I'm just saying that they now understand they're defeated and nobody wants what they have to peddle.

And they're confused.

So this is a period of the madnesses.

I think everybody says that what happened to the United States?

Was it COVID?

Was it

the lockdown?

Was it the George Floyd madness?

But we were in a period of four years of collective madness.

We tore down statues, we renamed buildings, we seeded downtown areas.

There's still a BLM Plaza in Washington, D.C.

Yeah.

We destroyed the university's reputation.

Nobody likes the universities anymore.

We unleashed onto anti-Semitism that we have not seen in the United States in this entire history.

We went crazy.

We had these nutty people that were occupying bridges and yelling to kill Jews in 2024 America and 23.

This was a crazy period in American history.

That's what it's going to be seen like.

And we weaponized the FBI.

We destroyed the reputation of the FBI.

Christopher Wray is a scoundrel.

He lied to Congress.

He now we know he had FBI.

He didn't call them operatives.

He called them informants.

And then he said, well, just three of them were on assignment, meaning, hey,

who are these guys that from time to time inform on us?

Oh, they want to go to the rally?

That's okay with me, but they're not official.

They're not official.

They're not official.

So when they ask me under Congress, I'll say I don't know.

But we make sure none of them are arrested.

Not one of them.

I don't want any of them arrested.

So you know that some of them were in the Capitol, a few, and some of them were in the grounds, and they were probably rounded up.

And somebody told them, no, no, no.

These people will be arrested and they'll cough up the information that they are here with FBI sanction.

So he was a, he was, if you think, if you look at the Catholic surveillance, the pro-life surveillance, the school parents, the performance art raid at Roger Stone's house, the retrieval service of the laptop of the Ashley Biden diary.

You know, the local enforcement contacted the FBI with the Hunter laptop 38 that was missing in the bin.

They would just disgrace themselves.

They really are.

Everybody's afraid of the FBI now.

We may find out more once the Trump administration gets in there.

When Cash Patel gets in there, he's going to get on the phone and he's going to call up about 20 of the most hardcore, patriotic, professional FBI people.

of the old school that left under the DEI madness, the Comey madness, the McCabe madness.

And they understood.

And he's going to call them all in and say, You want a job?

Yes.

Would you just tell us what was going on and bring the, where's the documents?

Where do we find this stuff?

And

you're going to expose stuff you won't believe.

Yeah.

Christopher Wray was the slickest of all of them.

He was third ranking.

Everybody thought he was kind of a non-entity, but he was actually more dangerous than Comey and McCabe because he was slicker.

Comey was an egocentric, narcissistic loudmouth.

Remember, he tried to, you know, he gave the press conference about Hillary and she's guilty of destroying these emails.

She shouldn't have been using this server, but nobody would ever prosecute her.

And then he thought, oh my God, I disgraced her.

Then right before the election, he comes back and says, well, they were transmitting these things on this thing to this, her, you know, the laptop with...

All this information and then he just made it worse.

And then he memorialized the term he used, the private conversations with the he was just a scoundrel, but he he was a narcissist.

And McCabe was a pathological liar.

He lied

three times or four to federal.

That was the IG's report.

Yes, and he's still lying on AMS, NBC, and CNN or whichever one he is on.

And then there's Ray, but Ray was a lot smarter than the other ones.

When he wanted to lie, he just said,

I have an appointment.

I can't be here any longer.

And he jumped in his FBI jet and flew to his vacation home.

And he was very slick.

slick.

Yes.

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So, Victor, we still have anti-Semitism going on on campus, and we had two incidents this week.

One was at George Mason University, and I would like to thank Instapundent for these stories.

The Students for Justice in

Palestine

defaced the student center at George Mason University, and their homes were raided.

And they found all sorts of propaganda, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, guns, and ammunition in these homes.

And then the second story was the University of Michigan,

there was

anti-Israel radicals who were throwing urine-filled mason jars through the University of Michigan Regents

window, Jordan Aker, who is Jewish, and he's had that happen many times, but that's the most recent of the assaults.

And so, this anti-the first story at George Mason University is really telling because you can see that anti-Semitism and radicalism are tied hand in hand.

Well, I mean, these are things that no one would imagine just five, ten years ago, that

you would be attacking officials of a board of overseers and throwing urine at his house.

We had the same thing in California with

Jewish overseers on boards and stuff that people went after them at their homes.

And then it also exposes this other lie that we were told that the pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian was peaceful.

Even though anybody who listened as I did when I walked across campus to what they were yelling, it was all eliminationist rhetoric.

It wasn't, and there wasn't, finally in their desperation, they'd made no difference between Israel and Jews, not that they ever thought there was.

So it was anti-Semitic to the core, and they got away with it for four years, and they heightened that anti-Semitism

after October 7th of 2023.

So this is the question.

How do they get away with it?

How do they

have

weapons?

Remember, they said they were antique weapons.

Oh, they're just antiques.

No, they weren't.

And they had all this literature, and these people are, many of them are here on visas.

So

the point I'm making is they plugged into the diversity, equity, inclusion industry.

And they said that in our Marxist binary of oppressed, oppressors, nobody in between, victims, victimizers, we declare the Palestinians victimized, oppressed.

And we

declare the

children surviving third generation of the Holocaust the oppressors and the victimizers.

And they have no historical claim, of course, as the original Aborigines inhabitant of the Middle East in the Jews of Judea.

So that's what they told us.

And

here's the punchline.

And we can't be culpable.

We can't be victimizers because we're non-white.

We declare ourselves that, forget about skin color or whatever, but they just said that they were a minority.

And under the Obama legacy DEI, it redefined affirmative action, oppressed, oppressed, as anybody, not black, anybody, anybody who said they were not white was de facto a victim.

And at that point, in 2009, you started to see things you'd never seen before.

I'll give you some examples.

I know a lot of people from India that were immigrants.

Prior to 2009, people would tell me, why don't you write about Indian Americans?

We are darker than blacks in some cases, and we get nothing.

My child applied to Harvard.

My child applied to, they got no affirmative action.

Can I just say as well it should be?

I mean, why they're not.

No, exactly.

Because many of them come as the per capita

income of the Indian Indian American community is much higher than the so-called white.

But my point is this, I'm not trying to blame or praise anybody.

But after Obama, then if you appointed a person from India, no matter what their class or status or money, then that counted as a DEI appointment.

Same thing with Arabs.

Same thing with blonde, blue-eyed Argentines.

And it was in that matrix,

one of the many baleful legacies that was bequeathed to us by that toxic personality, Barack Obama, whose main directive or agenda was just to cause chaos and be nihilistic and hurt people.

That's what he said.

That was his mission.

It really was.

And the point I'm making is the Palestinian people and the Middle East people then grafted their cause onto that.

So suddenly then, it was a civil rights issue way over there on the other side of the world.

And anytime, as I had tried to do, to write, or when I visited, to talk to people,

and I'd say, so you're worried about refugees, you're worried about the Cypriots, you're worried about the Volga Germans, you're worried about the Prussians who left, you're worried about the Poles that were ethnically cleansed by Soviet Ukrainian.

Oh, no, I'm not.

I'm only, there's only, you're worried about the million Jews that were, what, forcibly expelled from other Arab countries after the 47, 56, 67 wars?

No.

There's only one people in the world who were refugees, only Palestinians.

That's all we care about.

And so they had this cause, and then they took it to extremes.

And this administration will go down as the worst administration in history.

It was institutionalized anti-Semitism.

It was institutionalized anti-white DEI madness, the people that O'Biden allowed to take over, or he himself picked.

And what I'm getting at is

people are going to come in now and they're going to stop the madness.

And they're going to say, you know what?

I don't care what color you are.

I don't care what status you claim to be.

I don't care what your cause is.

If you have weapons that are against the law, if you occupy the president's office, if you chase Jews and try to hurt them into a library, and if you have a green card and if you had a student visa, we don't care what the university says because they're corrupt.

But if you break a statute, if you can find any federal statute,

you're going to be expelled.

You're going to lose your green card if you're working.

You're going to lose your student visa, and you're going to get your promise.

You're going to go back to your nation of origin.

And that's what's coming.

And you will see that there will be,

I thought, you know, when I left

the campus for the summer,

I was told by reading literature that was handed out to me that and listening to people scream on their megaphone that this was nothing, this occupation from October 2023 all the way till May 2024.

It's nothing.

Wait till you get back in the fall.

Then it was really going to hit.

And guess what?

There was almost nothing because the first time the university meekly, they purred like a little kitten and say, please don't do that.

We might have to do something.

That alone was enough.

But after the election, everything is quiet because they know what they've been getting away with and they know there's no support for it on the part of the American people.

It's not that they're pro-Israel, they are, but that's not the issue or they're anti-radical Palestine.

They are the majority, but they just want the law to be enforced.

And they don't like guests coming over here and breaking our laws under the idea that they're oppressed victims

by fellow Americans.

So I think they're going to see a lot of really different things come.

I really do.

I think Tom Holman, when

he looks at people's visas and he sees people who have broken the law with a right, if I was a student right now and I was on a student visa and I have broken the law and I have a record felony or a serious misdemeanor, I think I would just self-deport.

Because I think if it's a federal offense, I don't know what the status is on federal law versus state misdemeanors or felonies, but I think I would self-deport.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break.

And then our middle segment on our Saturday show is a little bit of history.

And we're looking at the end of World War II, and we have the conferences and post-war world left to talk about.

So stay with us, and we'll be back.

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Welcome back.

So Victor, you're going to look at the conferences at Yalta and Pot Stan today and then the entry into a Cold War between two allies in the World War II.

And so I'm interested to see how does that all unfold

given their alliance in World War II.

Yeah, remember that what had happened is that Joseph Stalin, who

was on top of a volcano, was very reluctant to travel.

He was a dictator.

Remember, he had been caught by surprise, and after 11 days of being silent

in June of 1941, he didn't know when they came to his DACA whether they're going to arrest him or not.

So he was paranoid.

So Joseph Stalin didn't leave this.

He didn't like to fly either.

He didn't leave the Soviet Union.

But the course of the war changed radically

in November, December of 1942 and January and 1943.

Now, what do I mean by that?

What do I mean is the Battle of Stalingrad, the 6th Army surrendered in Toto in February of 1943.

Number one.

And number two,

the Germans were checked in the fall of 42 at El Alamein and the British under Montgomery were now starting to pursue Rommel.

And he was faced with an American invasion in November of 1942

in Morocco and Algeria, both on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean side.

In the Pacific, remember the Battle of Midway had occurred in June 1942 following the Battle of Coral Sea,

and there had been a series of horrific five sea battles off the coast of Guadalcanal.

Guadalcanal had been secured by early 1943.

The U.S.

Navy had defeated in those battles.

Ultimately, they did, the Japanese Imperial Navy, and they were now pouring new battleships Essex.

So what I'm getting at is the entire complexion.

The bombing campaign had just showed a little bit of hope

in that there were some

fighter escort over occupied France.

But it really was going to be still very dangerous.

But the point is the Allies thought we better talk about something.

And Stalin won't move.

So the first one was in Tehran

in

November 1943

and that was the very preliminary, it was based on the idea that

the Allies were probably going to win and Churchill and Roosevelt

Churchill did not trust Stalin and Roosevelt did trust Stalin.

Roosevelt even said

I know we got fooled, Chamberlain got fooled by Hitler, but Stalin is no Hitler.

He won't fool us.

And actually he played Stalin off against Churchill to make Churchill envious that we had greater power.

So in this conference, they outlined the very

idea that the United States and Britain were going to invade the French coast somewhere and take the load off the Soviets.

Sometime in May or June of 1944, in the upcoming year, within six or seven months of the conference.

And in addition to that, the Soviets then would have a new offensive to help the Americans, so they're going to help each other.

They also divided, they said they were going to divide Germany up and they were going to insist on unconditional surrender.

They also outlined the very vague notion of a United Nations, and they didn't let Charles de Gaulle come, even though at this point there wasn't really

a notion of a French government.

Fast forward

to the Yalta agreements of

we go from November of 1943 at Tehran, and then we go into February of 1945.

So now we're almost a year

and a half almost, and now we're going to meet at another conference.

Again, Stalin does not want to travel.

He's going to go to the Crimea, which the Soviets have now secured.

The The war is very different now.

Very, very different.

We have had

complete success in the Pacific.

The Philippines is

pretty much secure.

We're ready to go into,

we're planning the Okinawa campaign.

The B-29s are just, they're starting to reformulate their strategy.

They haven't gone into March.

And the Germans are now, the United States has crossed the Rhine River.

And it's, or it's, most of it is at the Rhine River, and some is going,

we'll go across in March.

So what do they decide at Yalta?

Stalin is in a much stronger position.

Churchill is starting to experience some unpopularity at home as the British are worn out and they see that the war is coming to a close.

He's going to have to hold an election soon.

Roosevelt is going to be dead in three or four months.

So,

what I'm getting at is the position of the Soviet Union is much stronger.

And

two other things have happened.

The ratio of American troops after D-Day versus Britain has gone from about two to one to eight or nine to one.

But the total ratio of American and British troops vis-a-vis the Soviet Union has changed.

It's about seven to eight to one.

So

the British at Yalta are much

weaker than the Americans, and the Americans and British are both in terms of manpower in the battlefield.

during this conference, you know, in February of 1945,

Joseph Stalin is in the driver's seat.

And so

they're trying to bargain from a position of weakness.

And what is the weakness?

There's too many Russian divisions and they're heading west very rapidly.

And we are trying to get across into Germany quickly.

And we think the Russians may get there before we do, and we don't trust them.

So they tried to tie Stalin down and said, look, we'll do this.

If we get...

The Americans, remember, were closer somewhat than the Russians at that point.

I shouldn't say at that point.

During the Yalta conference, the Russians were within 100 miles of Berlin.

But the Germans were putting up a much more dogged resistance.

So the Allies said this.

We will not go be.

We will take two-thirds of Germany and we will have

Britain, the United States, and yes, France.

We will let France.

And they didn't let de Gaulle go to Yalta.

That was a big mistake because that French hostility, anti-Americanism, ingratitude, that

originated at Tehran and it came into full fruition at Yalta because the French now had American divisions that were

they were armed and within, they were incorporated within American divisions.

They had liberated Paris thanks to Patton.

And they were starting to, under de Gaulle, reform their nation and they needed some assurances that nobody was going to, you know, and they were going to get the Alsace-Lorraine back.

There was a new confidence, and yet they didn't allow

de Gaulle or the French interest to be represented.

Remember that Roosevelt, not Churchill, Roosevelt hated de Gaulle, despised him.

Churchill, for all the intimity between French and British, admired de Gaulle.

Even spoke a sort of French, you know.

And anyway, at this thing, what did they come away with at this conference?

It was kind of tragic.

Stalin agreed that within two or three months of the victory in Europe, and everybody understood the Japanese were going to last longer at this point than the Germans, that two or three months within the fall of Germany, the Soviet Union was going to transfer the bulk of its army to the east.

and it would fight Japan.

The problem was

that at Yalta in February they had no idea that the atomic bomb was going to be successfully

June 16th.

Just in four months it was going to work.

So that was number one.

And number two,

the US was going to invade Okinawa in April.

And number three, just a month later, the

B-29s from the Mariana Islands were going to demolish the Japanese city starting on March 9th.

So we were in a transition where we we didn't need the Soviet Union.

But there had been such losses

on the island hopping that Roosevelt was desperate to get the Soviet Union.

So they agreed that they would help us in Japan.

Remember, they had a non-aggression impact with Japan.

They hadn't been doing anything.

In fact, as I said earlier in the broadcast, you would send a Liberty ship from Oakland and it would take material to Russia and the Japanese soldiers would wave it on if it had a Russian flag on it.

If it it had an American flag, they'd sink it if they could.

So that was one of the things.

Then they said that the French had to, their territory, and they said, well, how about the French?

We didn't invite de Gaulle, but can't they have a zone of occupation?

They were the original allies with the British.

They said, yeah, they can have it, but it comes out of your share, West Germany.

This is going to be West Germany.

French, American, British are going to consolidate it.

And then the Soviets are going to keep East Germany.

And Berlin, they decided this is what was

Berlin is going to be divided, but it's going to be inside the Soviet sphere of influence.

Think about that.

So and at Yalta they really did believe that they were going to unite the country, that the Soviets would live up to their agreements at Yalta.

And what were the agreements?

We are going to let the Poles, the Hungarians, the Romanians, the Czechs all vote, and they will have free and fair elections.

And Molotov said, are you sure you want to do that, Stalin?

And he said, don't worry, we have more troops than they do.

And as soon as the thing's over, we'll just put our puppets in and liquidate all the opposition, which they did.

There was a final thing they decided at Yalta.

They said to

Stalin, now that we're on the same team, Joe, or now that we trust each other, Remember back in 1939 when you were on Hitler's side and you stole one-third of Poland?

Could you give it back?

Because we're going to recreate Poland.

So we're going to go back and recreate 1937 borders, 38 borders, before Hitler and you and everybody's...

And he said, no.

No, no, no, no, no.

That's part of Ukraine and Belarus now.

And they said, well, where are we going to get Poland?

He said, you get it from Germany.

And

this has been German for 500 years.

He said, just take all the Germans and we'll just ethnically cleanse them.

So they leave the Sudetenland, okay.

We'll get rid of them and the Volga Germans will persecute them.

But all the ones in East Prussia and Prussia and Pomerania, they all have to go back to the occupied zones.

And they didn't want to go to the Soviet zones.

The Americans said, wait a minute, you're going to flood us with 14 million refugees?

Yeah, some will die.

Two million died.

So they brought all of that back.

And then they gave, the Soviets said,

we're not going to give back Poland.

We're going to steal Pomerania and Prussia from the defeated Germanies and we're going to give it to Poland.

So they carved out a new Poland

that was two-thirds the old Poland.

I'm just giving rough numbers.

And a third, maybe almost half.

But Poland would be smaller than it was before World War II.

This is kind of relevant right now because everybody's talking about Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, and borders, borders, borders.

And he violated border.

It's even worse than that.

Present-day Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, as we know, until 1989, 90, 91.

And what is a large swath of southern Belarus and western Ukraine was Polish for 500 years, and it was Roman Catholic, and it was Polish-speaking.

And they were ethnically cleansed by the Soviet Union from 1939 on.

And he did not reverse that ethnic cleansing in 1945, even though he was our ally.

American Poles were very angry about that.

They were promised that Poland would have its borders returned.

But in Roosevelt's defense,

as Stalin said, how many Roman Catholics, how many divisions does the Pope have?

They also agreed to divide up Austria and stop the Anschluss.

in the post-war period.

And this was kind of interesting.

There was an agreement which will be ratified by the Potsdam Agreement that

after the European War, that there's going to be certain countries,

Churchill drew a napkin, you know, on a napkin,

that we were going to save.

I'm not trying to say quid pro quo, but it was basically understood that the Soviets had the ability to go into Turkey and take over the Straits into the Black Sea, the Bosphorus, and the Dardanelles.

And they had the ability, as they were going into Bulgaria and Albania, they could have gone into Greece.

And Churchill said, this is the foundation of Western Civ.

You give me

Turkey and Greece, me being in the West, and I will let you conduct the free elections in Poland.

And they knew what that meant.

I'm signing away the freedom of Poles.

Jerry Ford, you remember in that presidential debate,

at one point said, oh, Poland was always free.

No, no free elections.

Yes,

and then they made a deal that there were two countries

that

neither one of them would incorporate into their bloc.

In other words,

there would be no Western Finland, like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and there would be no Western Austria.

So that Austria would be occupied.

Finland had agreed it had lost 10%, 15% of its territory in the Winter War.

So Mannerheim had saved the country, but Finland would not be Russian-occupied, but it would be a satellite of Russia.

And they said that we are now,

once the Germans invaded Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Baltic countries, and we push them out, we're not going to give them up.

So those are formally, we're going to destroy.

And so Yalta signed away the freedom of all those Baltic people.

They became Russian.

How did Austria get out of all of that?

Because they were very smart.

So they, after the

zones of occupation were ended, the Soviet Union,

it pulled out and we pulled out.

But then Austria then said,

and Russia and the United States agreed, and that was ratified.

that was ratified in the Potsdam Agreements,

that Austria would not join NATO and Austria would not be part of the Warsaw Pact.

And that's why, you know, when people talked about

agreements,

you know, and they always, when they talk about agreements and peace treaties, they always do two countries, Geneva and Vienna.

At least they did after World War II.

And those were because

that

status that they were non-aligned.

I don't know, Austria was much more pro-America than Finland or Switzerland could be, but they were non-aligned.

But the point I'm making is that

in July of August of 1945, the last Potsdam Agreement, and by the way, that's the last one that Joseph Stalin would attend.

He only attended three.

He did not go to the

Quebec Conference.

He did not go to the Cairo Conference.

And he made sure the Chinese were not there.

And he got...

So after Potsdam, then they met.

And remember, what happened at Potsdam is Churchill lost the election right in the middle of it.

So Attlee was there.

And Roosevelt had died in April.

So Truman was there.

So

there was Tehran, and then there was Yalta.

And then the final one occurred after the war was ended.

And that's where we gave away the store.

to get Stalin to fight the Japanese, but he waited, waited, he only fought for two weeks.

And he took the Sokhalin Islands and the Kural Islands and stole them from Japan.

And then he went and basically carved out a zone.

We divided Korea and we divided Vietnam.

And he took North Vietnam and he took North Korea.

He didn't take them in the sense that incorporated him, but it was clear that you could not interfere with the affairs, and he installed communist governments.

And that was going to be,

my God, if you look at the Americans, you're going to talk about 80,000, 90,000 dead Americans because of that Potsdam Agreement.

And so Potsdam was the last one, and it was over in early August.

And think about it, August 2nd, I think, 1945, it's over, and we dropped the bomb on the 6th and 9th.

So we really didn't need to do it.

We didn't need to give them anything.

If they had just stopped.

And you know what?

Truman was rumored that he didn't start till July 16th because he wanted to know that the atomic bomb had worked in the desert.

So he went to Stahl and said, hey, we got this new weapon.

Stahl knew all about it.

His spies had scouted it out.

He knew more than Truman did about it.

He said, I hope you use it and drop it on the Japanese.

So when you look back at the Potsdam Agreement, you say to yourself,

so we gave Entree into the Soviet Union and we even gave them landing craft so they could go into the Kural Islands and the Sokalan Islands.

And then we allowed them to go into Korea and we allowed to go in Vietnam and they didn't contribute anything to the victory.

They took, you know,

they were into Mongolia.

They controlled.

They did all of that.

And we had the bomb.

And a week after the agreement was over, we forced Japan to surrender on our own.

But they were so paranoid at Potsdam of what they'd seen at Iwo, and especially Okinawa, the greatest losses of the U.S.

Navy and Marine Corps had come in April, May, and June of 1945, right on the eve of the Potsdam.

And Harry Truman was paranoid about going into Japan invading.

So he wanted Soviet troops side by side to invade

Japan.

And they said they would do it.

But then right after the agreement was over, they said, you know what, you were right, the bomb worked, and we were going to have three to five bombs.

And we think the

plutonium bomb,

fat man, will work.

We think it'll work.

And so it was kind of ironic that

that agreement was kind of unnecessary.

So it reified the fact that the Soviets were going to have all of Eastern Europe.

They were going to have 40% of Germany.

They were going to be entrenched in Europe.

They were going to control the Baltic states, incorporate them.

They were going to be right on the doorstep of now Sweden.

If you were Sweden, you would continue your neutrality when Finland is now gone and Austria is neutered.

And the only thing you could say we got out of it, we saved Greece and we saved Turkey.

And

we gave Turkey, the

Turkish government got the right to adjudicate the Bosphorus.

And so there was something.

And then they also gave a bone to the Iranians.

They said, you know, at the Tehran conference in 1943, we're both going to help Iran become an independent country.

And of course,

that didn't work out too well.

There was a coup, dictatorship, Mossada, CIA, British intelligence, da-da-da-da.

So

I guess part of the problem was that Churchill lost the election in July of 1945, right during the conference.

Roosevelt was dead.

Truman was new on the job.

Stalin had increased his ratio of troops in Europe to almost, I think, seven, as I said, seven to eight to one.

And he and these Soviet divisions, people thought, you know what?

Soviets lost 11 million soldiers and they lost

another 10 million civilian dead.

and their country is ruined and there's no way they're going to be able to have 400 divisions.

They had 12 million men.

They had 12 million men under arms when the Potsdam was being decided and unlike us They didn't have them in the Navy and they didn't have them in the Air Force.

They had them in the Red Army on the ground in Europe.

We had 12 million men, but we had 4 million men back in the United States, at least 4 or 5 million.

We had a huge two million man navy.

We had a huge air force.

But in terms of raw power to influence the decision-making at Yalta and Potsdam, it really helped to have 400 Soviet divisions.

And that's how World War II ended, and that was the creation of one year of peace, and then you know what was going to happen from Yalta and Potsdam.

You just looked at the map and you said,

ah,

Korea has a border with the Soviet Union.

They're going to invade from the north and try to take the south with, yes.

And

communist China is going to win the revolution.

It's far away.

And they have a border with North Vietnam.

And they're going to invade.

And Berlin is divided, but it's 70 miles inside the Soviet East German bloc.

So they're going to cut it off, and we're going to have to save Berlin by what, flying planes over it, and we did coal, oil, gas, food, medicine for a year.

And so the whole framework of the Cold War for the next 50 years was decided at Potsdam.

Was there an alternative to it?

Yes, there was an alternative to it, but it would be very dangerous.

You would have had to keep two or three million soldiers in Europe.

You would have said, you're not going to do anything.

You would have said at Potsdam, we're not taking soldiers out of Europe yet, because we don't trust Stalin.

We're going to say we're going to enforce these agreements by U.S.

atomic weapons.

And you would have had to say, we don't want you anywhere near Japan.

Don't get near it.

We fought the Japanese, you didn't.

We did.

We lost the soldiers.

You did.

You didn't.

We did.

But to let them come in at the last moment and take islands and cause cause problems for the next half century in Vietnam,

it was a disaster.

Yeah.

Do you,

since you mentioned it, that Berlin was inside of East Germany and it remained for the entire Cold War part Western, the city itself, part Western and part Eastern Germany.

Why didn't the Soviets press that to make the city all theirs?

Why were they, but

not enough to do it because it does remain solid.

far.

Well, the first time they didn't do it is because Harry Truman

decided, he didn't know whether to save it or not.

So he talked to

the Air Force, and he said, can you supply Berlin with food by not...

He didn't want to take American troops, which were already being withdrawn from Europe, and try to fight the Soviets and make a corridor in there.

He said, I'm going to do this.

We're going to take DC-3s and we're we're going to fly them every hour.

And we're going to keep the Western sector alive.

And we're not going to attack the Soviets.

If they attack us,

then they're going to regret it.

And he could do that because in 1945 and 1946, the U.S.

Air Force was superior to the Russian Air Force.

It was a tactical ground support.

It had no strategic bombing command like we did.

We had about 10,000 B-24s,

B-17s, and British Lancaster bombers in Europe.

We could have wiped out, we could have bombed and carpet bombed, and we had

P-51s, which was the best fireplane in the world.

It was still a year or two before jets came on the

Russia took most of the scientists, the jet engineers and architects of the V-1 and V-2, back to Russia.

But for that period, we had the bomb, they didn't.

We had a superior air force, they didn't.

We had the world's largest navy and could blockade anything if they got into war.

And they knew that.

So Truman was calling their bluff.

He said, we're going to save, if we save Berlin, then we save the Germans, West Germany, because they won't go any further.

And he said to Stalin, you're not going to go any further than what you did.

And they kind of, Churchill and he kind of worked out, we're not going to try to reverse what you did in these Eastern blocs.

We'll have to go to war.

Because Stalin was saying the same thing to them.

Well, they're all under Russian control, and we had free elections, and they all voted for communists.

And I don't know what happened to the democratic elements.

They seem to have died prematurely.

They're all dead.

He killed them, most of them.

And do you want to fight World War III to get them back?

And they said no.

And he said, okay, if you don't want to fight World War III, you can have Turkey, you can have Greece, we'll make Finland and

Austria sort of neutral.

I'm kind of

generalizing.

I know that people listening say, well, Victor, there's this fact.

But this is just the general outline.

But Truman did hold the line at Berlin.

And when Kennedy came in,

think of that.

That was 12 years later, 13 years later.

There was a Berlin crisis because Khrushchev was threatening to cut off Berlin again.

And that's when Kennedy flew in.

He said, Icht ein Berliner, I am a Berliner.

And what he said was to Khrushchev, we're going to pledge the United States cities

as collateral against the safety of Berlin.

What he meant was,

we're going, if we have a nuclear war and we have to hit you and you hit us, we're willing to do it to save Berlin.

Germans should remember that today.

Of course, they look at it a different way.

You were going to fight the Cold War on our soil and all this.

But there were other things at the Potsdam.

They'd agreed to try the war criminals, and

they agreed to let the individual

states try them in their own countries.

So although they did have Russian and British and American judges, they also had Russian trials that were separate from Nuremberg, and they were a little different.

That was the famous remark of Stalin at Uyalta when he told

Churchill and Roosevelt, the only way we're going to stop these creepy people is to take the 50 or 80,000, 50, 80,000 people that survived in the German officer corps, and I'll just kill them all, shoot them.

Whoa.

And Roosevelt said, well, why not just kill 49,000?

You really don't need to kill 50.

And he told Churchill

he's joking.

And Churchill says he's not joking.

And Churchill stormed out of the meeting.

So this is a shock to all humanity.

And Her Majesty government will never allow this.

These were people who, some of them, were not Nazis, and that.

Yeah, and Churchill was right.

He was.

He was right.

He was right about most things.

And Roosevelt was wrong.

But in Roosevelt's defense,

here's a picture of Algeria at Yalta's, I recall.

You had people in the State Department, as Churchill did with Kim Philby ring.

You had people in the State Department that thought that the Soviet Union was the victor of World War II and saved all of humanity, and it was a wonderful, equal place, and the United States was toxic, and they were giving everything from the atomic to the hydrogen bomb, the Rosenberg, all these people were communist agents.

And when China fell, China was our friend.

We had spent billions of dollars to China.

And we'd even helped Mao.

You know what I mean?

We were very naive.

We gave a lot more to Shang Kai-shek, who was corrupt, but he was a lot better than Mao.

And then to see that thing just wiped out and given over to the Soviet bloc

and with all this arms that we'd, and we'd given 25% of the wherewithal of the Soviet Union in World War II under Lin Lees, and to see them turn around and break every agreement.

And then people in the United States said, this is despicable.

He made an agreement with Hitler and honored it.

He made an agreement with Japan and honored it.

He made an agreement with Italy and honored it.

He made agreements with us and we helped him and he broke every one of them.

And the first person to see that was Truman.

People forget about Truman that he was not just a Democrat, but he was dealing with left-wing Roosevelt,

kind of precursors to the Obama wing of the Democratic Party.

They were hardcore socialists.

And Eleanor Roosevelt hated him.

You know, they hated, the Roosevelt people hated Truman.

And

now, not that he was such a great guy.

I mean, he could be a mean SOB, but he really saw.

He said that, they said, they came to him and said, why are you doing this to Stalin?

That SOB lied to me.

He said that.

And so

we were going to pay for the next 50 years for the naivete at, and that's why the Poles

and the Hungarians, you know, the Hungarians 1956, the Poles under Lech Bovinsa later.

the Romanians not until 80, they all resented that.

And then we said, what was our reply to them?

Well, the Poles had a good point they were invaded.

But the Hungarians and the Romanians, nobody asked you to join the Third Reich.

You did.

And you invaded Germany.

So what did you do?

And you killed Jews.

And the Czechs and the Poles were less culpable.

That shows you all that all those decisions made at Yalta and Potsdam had long, long

legacies and impacts, all the way to today.

If you go to Berlin today, you'll see a difference between what had been Eastern and what is Western in terms of just the wealth that you can see in the West.

The irony is, though, that the people in the East who lived under communism

ended up being more suspicious of communism than the people in the West that were free from it.

Sure.

Although you could argue that this alternative for Germany,

the new German right-wing party, has its greatest strength in Eastern Germany.

But

Merkel was a product of that, too.

She was one of the worst, 16 years, I think she was one of the worst German chancellors they've ever had.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take our last break and then come back and say a few more words about Syria.

I know that we talked about it on Friday, but we'll come back and a little bit about immigration.

So stay with us.

We'll be back.

Welcome back.

You can find Victor at his

on X,

and his handle is at VD Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

So Victor, Israel has recently, and I know we talked about Syria already, but just between the times we recorded Friday and Saturday, they have bombed Syrian arsenals

to get rid of, obviously, weapons that might get into hands.

They would rather not have them.

I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that.

You can understand why they're doing it, because those weapons have been given to Hezbollah, and they have been used against Israel.

And Israel says this is a brief window when it's totally chaotic and there's nobody in control and we know exactly where their airplanes, their tanks, their personnel weapons, we know where them and we're going to destroy them all and it will save us for 20 years.

The problem is

that when that creepy government disappeared,

each interested party started to bomb.

So the Russians have been bombing.

They've been bombing the anti-Assad,

and they just claim they're all ISIS.

They're not all ISIS.

There's some that are actually pretty good, some bad, some worse.

But they claim they're bombing only ISIS.

And then there's

the Americans, and we are bombing

the pro-Assad people and any other ISIS opponents of them.

So get this, everyone.

We have been

more or less

anti-Assad and helping the anti-Assad people because the Assad people were Iran, Hezbollah, but

we weren't always doing that because some of the people that were fighting the terrible Iranians and Hezbollah were terrible ISIS people.

So the United States is bombing, has been, Russia is bombing, and Israel is bombing, and they're all bombing at various times similar targets and different targets, depending on their perceived national interest.

And the suffering is 600,000 people have been killed.

10 million have left.

600,000 since this war started, the last 10 years.

600,000.

And 10 million of them are all over.

When people talk about, you know, Merkel let in everybody, it started with these

the refugees from Syria.

They fled into Turkey and then Erdogan told Merkel, I need billions of dollars.

I'm going to send them all to Germany.

And so she bribed Erdogan.

Finally, after they took over a million of them, Germany, and they still haven't been assimilated.

And then they fled into Europe.

So

it is a complete mess.

There is no Syria.

It doesn't exist.

It's just...

And there's Christians, there are Alawites, there's Shia, there's Sunnis, there's

Westernized Syrians in the big cities, and now they are being bombed by the United States, they, areas of Syria, and Russia, and Israel.

And when it's all said and done, we have no idea who's going to take over, and we have a deep suspicion there's going to be

an area on the Israeli border near the Golan in that area that's just going to be a de facto DMZ with the Israelis having free access to it.

There's going to be even a larger swath up near Turkey that's going to be,

you know what I mean?

It's just going to be

Turkish it sounds like Libya when you say that it Syria doesn't exist more or less well Libya was what it was um that was that was a present that Samantha Power Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton gave to us when they thought that the Qaddafis were

evil evil they were but they thought we'll bomb them and then they're gonna George Washington and Lincoln are gonna come out of the ashes and form a democracy yeah So

that was their legacy, and it's going to be like Libya.

It's just

one thing I think everybody should just take a deep breath

and get back to culture.

There is no history,

there is no history of any constitutional, consensual society in the Arab-Islamic Middle East.

I know people say there is, but when you think about it, there is not.

Not Ottomanism, not the caliphate, nothing.

And so the idea that people

who have lived under these regimes, whether they're Baathist, Communist, dictatorial, authoritarian, Islamic, theocratic, are suddenly, and I believed that once in Iraq, that maybe instead of just leaving, we could have had something.

It was a mistaken idea.

I think it was good to get rid of Saddam and then leave.

But

it's not going to happen.

There's not going to be a Syrian democracy.

The people who believe that are usually expatriate Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis that are in the Western universities.

And

they parrot this idea that you've caused all our problems, the British and French colonialists and the American imperialists.

And if you just let us be, we would have had a democracy.

Yeah.

Even Mossadegh, the Iranian, I hear that all the time from my Iranian friends.

You guys overthrew Mossadegh.

He wasn't really a Democrat.

No.

He had a lot of authoritarian.

One last topic, then, and we'll leave

the, I know that you and Jack are going to talk about pardons, and I'll leave immigration to you, which has been popping up in the news lately.

But we also had Pete Hagseth saga continue.

And recently, ProPublica, that publication, claimed that Hagseth lied when he said that

he had been accepted at West Point.

And the ProPublica apparently got that information from West Point itself.

And I think that's what's new, that

the

university itself, or the military university itself, had lied to ProPublica.

ProPublica is, they're just what you think they are.

They're a left-wing megaphone.

The whole story there was West Point.

And if he hadn't had his own copy of that letter of acceptance, he kept it, then they would have perpetuated that lie.

Po Publica would have said, yes, he's lying, because West Point knows that he applied there.

They had the records.

If he did, there's always records.

I can tell you something that I taught at the U.S.

Naval Academy from 2002 to 2003 in the history department.

And I would say that the students were wonderful.

And

I have taught, I was a Nimitz guest lecturer at UC Berkeley.

I've taught at Hillsdale College as a visitor.

I've been a visiting professor of classics at Stanford.

I'm at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

I've been a visiting professor of public policy at Pepperdine.

And I've had various little, I guess you'd call them, lectureships for three or four days at various universities, maybe five more.

I have never,

never

been at a more liberal place than the U.S.

Naval Academy in 2003.

I'm talking about the command, superintendent, the

commandant, the chairs of departments in liberal arts, maybe not engineering, but English history.

It was weird.

It was really weird.

I'd never been at a place where people were so left-wing.

I mean, the first talk I heard was a U.S.

Marine captain who was on the faculty giving a lecture about the Okinawa campaign saying,

and the Iwo Jima campaign, saying that Iwo Jima, to start off with, was completely unnecessary.

It was a complete lie that they had any utility to save B-29 crews.

There was no military objective, and we only landed there to kill yellow people.

That's what he said.

And when he got to Okinawa, he said, We committed atrocities.

And I just said, I was freaked out.

I had only been there two or three weeks.

I said, I think if you read E.B.

Sledge with the old breed, you should go read that.

And maybe, and it's not a raw-rah pro-American, it's a tragedy of war memoir, but go read what the Japanese were capable of and what they did.

And not just to American, to Okinawa civilians.

So

that's,

I don't know what to say.

I'm not surprised that West Point

conveniently,

if Pete Hexeth is confirmed, and I think he will be, I would take a hard look at the academies and I would say, you are going to emulate a different paradigm than I would look at the U.S.

Naval Academy.

I said,

you've got to get, you're not a civilian university.

So so you are going to have rotating billets among mostly officers i know you have a lot of civilian professors that get tenure but we're going to get rid of tenure we're not going to create a mimic we're not going to mimic harvard yale and princeton because we want to be like them we're going to have officers who have PhDs in the humanities and they're going to be rotated in and out, but we're not going to give lifetime employment to civilians because if we do, they're going to come from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, you name it and they're going to be left-wing and they're going to think that they have a lifetime appointment to inculcate young officers in left-wing ideology.

That's just what I saw.

I mean you can argue with me, you can say I know I wasn't popular there, I liked the people I met, but

Again, I had been at Berkeley and I had been at Stanford and I had been a graduate student at Stanford and I had spoken, I've probably spoken at 400 universities at that point.

And I have never been in a climate where there were so many left-wing professors that were so vocal.

And

I just couldn't believe it.

And I had wonderful students, and

they were not like that at all.

Yeah.

So it's no surprise that West Point entered the smear campaign against Hag Seth.

Boy,

the thing about all these appointments, just to finish, is

these people are very culpable.

And so when Trump,

I know you can fault some of the nominations in theory, but what he's saying is there's not going to be,

and I'm not trying to attack Rex Tillerson, I don't know him.

I know Jim Mattis, I like him, but there's not going to be a Jim Mattis, a Rex Tillerson, a General Kelly, a John Bolton, for good or bad.

There's not going to be those people that are

bipartisan, esteemed the status quo.

Because he feels there's not going to be a Jim Comey, there's not going to be an Alexander McCabe, there's not going to be an Anthony Fauci,

because he believes that they have a paranoid hatred of someone like himself who is not of the Republican or Democratic establishment, whose strength lies in a populist appeal to change things, and they will conspire to subvert him in the manner of Anonymous.

or John Bolton or all of them.

And so when he picks people like Pete Hekseth or Jay Bacharya or Cash Patel, he's looking for three things.

Are they qualified?

Yes.

Do they have experience in the discipline they're going to direct?

Yes.

Number two,

will they write anonymous letters about me?

Will they call up the Washington Post or New York Times and say, promise this is off the record, but you don't know how crazy Donald Trump is.

You don't know how much I'm fighting him.

You don't know what I'm saving the United States.

Can you put this op-ed in the New York Times if I sign it anonymous?

They're not going to be any Alexander Vinmans, you know what I mean?

Hey, I was on a call with Donald Trump, and he said something.

I'm going to call up Eric over there, my friend.

You can be a whistleblower.

You weren't on the call.

I know it's against the law for the break security protocols and confidentiality, but I'm going to rat out the president of the United States and mischaracterize his call, and you're going to get it secondhand and start his impeachment.

He's not going to have any of that.

And that's why he's.

So the second thing is, besides some intimacy with the field that they're going to direct, they have to be loyal.

And the third, the third is,

the third is,

I think, if possible, I would like to appoint someone who has been a victim of the very agency's excesses which it is going to direct.

Tulsi Gabbard,

terrorist watch list, basically, They put her on.

Intelligence.

Now she's going to direct intelligence.

The intelligence went after her and called her a Russian asset and made it difficult for her to fly.

Cash Patel, head of the FBI.

The FBI monitored and surveilled Cash.

Pete Hexeth, they went to war on him when they read War Against Warriors.

Jay Bacharia, NIH, we know what the NIH did to Jay.

People were trying to actively stop the Great Barrington Declaration.

So that's what he's doing.

And

I think that's why he will be successful.

I really do.

I think it was brilliant what he did.

I think he's getting people who...

I don't think we realize the difference.

In 2017, we were all,

well, Donald Trump is a newcomer.

He needs conservatives to guide him.

So maybe he can go to the Bush, Cheney, Romney, Wing, or McCain.

I didn't believe that.

That's what we were told.

And get people to give him status and authority and their impromptu that he's okay.

And they did.

And those people deliberately got together and said, I don't want these populist Yahoos.

When he gives an order, we'll find ways to circumvent it.

If he starts to say NATO's got to up their contributions and he gets a little, we'll just stop it and we'll call up the NATO people and say, he didn't really mean it.

Or we're on your side.

Or if he starts saying, we're going to close the border, we'll call up the Border Patrol and say, yeah, you know, he just walked through it.

That's how they thought.

And that's not going to be there today.

And so they're going to have people there who are going to, you know, they're going to be somebody in the State Department.

And that's going to be Marco Rubio, and he's going to call Pete Hexeth in the Defense Department,

and then they're going to call Pam Bondi and the Justice Department.

And then they're going to call Cash Patel and the FBI.

And they're all going to say,

how can we best work together to further the Trump agenda?

Rather than trying to, what?

Outdo each other or subvert Donald Trump or sabotage the other person or see who could leak the most creatively to the Washington Post?

Who can talk to an NPR person off the record?

It's going to be very different.

At least it's going to start.

They have to do it very quick.

They have to hit the ground running.

They've got to be united.

And before anybody really knows what's going on, they've got to push through this agenda.

And they've got to get the Senate to have no more than one or two defections.

And now they're down to, what, two House?

Trump's going to have to say any House member who thinks he's going to be on the cover of the New York Times by stopping the majority in the House,

anybody who thinks he's going to be Matt Gates again,

you're going to regret that you ever did that.

He's really going to have to exercise control and help the Senate and the House stick to the agenda.

Well, to finish up that thought, I have a comment by Mike Morgan on your recent Obama's Mystique is Evaporating article.

And he says this, My sincere hope is that Mr.

Trump can realize the opportunity of unity that Mr.

Obama simply did not want.

Mr.

Obama had the opportunity to be the most unifying figure in American history and simply chose, in my opinion, the exact opposite path.

So thank you, Mike Morgan.

That was a nice end to the show.

Thank you, Victor, for all your wisdom today.

I would just say an ending.

I wrote an article.

It's the end of the evaporation of the Obama mystique as mentioned.

And the big

loser is Barack Obama.

because he lost his puppet, his veneer, his facade.

There will be no more, there won't be a fourth.

We had a third Obama term, and it turned out to be the most disastrous president in history, and it's at his door.

He was the one that staged the first coup to put Joe Biden as the only primary candidate by forcing Bernie and Elizabeth Warren and Pete Budejik out.

And a three-time loser, Biden lost Iowa, lost Nevada, lost New Hampshire, and they put him as the only candidate.

So he could phone it in with the proverbial earpiece.

And

he got his wish, and he destroyed the country almost in four years.

Then he staged another coup, and he got rid of Biden, and then he put Harris in there.

I know he says, well, I didn't want Harris.

I want, no, no, no, no.

You put Harris in there.

And then that proved a disaster.

And then you were going to play the firemen, you and Michelle.

And you called Trump a fascist, a racist, a dictator.

Of course, a racist.

And then you told African-American, you don't know what's good for you.

You don't know what's good for you.

You're suffering from false consciousness.

You're enabling, if you vote for Trump, you're enabling racism and sexism.

And they said,

See you wouldn't want to be.

And I ended that column by saying, and so Obama disappeared, uncertain whether he would be flown in his private jet to one of his four mansions.

And that's where he ends up.

And the American public had it all exposed to them by all these new outlets that are subverting the old news.

Yeah, everybody was criticizing him.

Everybody was criticizing.

They saw, you know what?

I'm sick of Hopi Changy.

It doesn't work anymore.

If you think that you love an open border so much and Tompers are racist by busy, then just open your estate at Martha's Vineyard and host people.

If you think that

the Sorrel's crime, then just stay in Chicago and live there and walk around the the streets of Chicago like your constituents are forced to do.

If you think global warming is going to flood the planet and raise the oceans,

then don't build a house on the beach in Hawaii.

It's very simple, Barack.

Just don't do it.

And if you think Washington doesn't get anything, then don't live in a mansion in Colorama.

Go back home like Harry Truman, George Bush, and every other president except you.

So he's a phony.

He's a complete phony.

He cashed in the last year.

He met with the Netflix executives while he was in office.

He didn't do anything the last year but make contracts.

He and Michelle ended up with what, two, three, four hundred million dollars?

For what?

Yeah.

I don't think they're creative storytellers.

We found out that their memoir wasn't even a memoir.

That was exposed by David Garrow.

It was just a fable.

He invented stuff in it.

It wasn't, and he changed it.

Oh, it wasn't quite a memoir.

It was an inspired story

incorporating both fiction and nonfiction.

Yeah.

So, in other words, you lied about everything.

So, I think, I don't want to be too crazy, but he did lose his prestige.

So, did Oprah.

And, you know, they really thought,

Obama thought, she's a black woman, and I'm going to bring out all of the black superstars.

Myself, Michelle, Cardi B, Beyonce,

Jay-Z,

and Al Sharpton, and that's going to get the entire black vote.

And the black young people and middle...

No.

No.

No, no, no, no, no.

We're starting to see everybody.

We see other people on podcasts.

They're not, they're husbands.

They're old fogies.

You're an old fogey.

We don't listen to you anymore because we have to deal with the illegal aliens in Chicago.

We have to deal with Saturday night in Detroit.

We have to deal with 27% inflation on staple goods like everybody else.

You don't.

So don't tell me what to do anymore.

I know more about what's good for me than you know what's good for me.

That was the message for at least a third of the black community.

Yeah.

And I think that they ran that vacuous campaign on hope, change, joy vibes.

And people started listening to podcasts and on looking at social media and at the issues.

And I think the people went for the issues.

People should remember that the more you hear anti-white racism from Joy Reed, that's just blatant now, or the superstars in the WBA, you know,

you hear all that stuff.

It's not necessarily at all, I don't think, reflective of the black community.

I think it's a real anger that the black community is integrating in a way that it hasn't in the past with Hispanics and whites and Asians with a common class solidarity.

So we are starting to see a historic realignment where

a quarter to a third of the black community, and this isn't amazing.

People say, oh, Victor, it's all not even half.

That is amazing given the propaganda that this left-wing machine pours out about racism and slavery and all this, but at least a quarter to a third of the black community is saying,

I don't have anything in common with Oprah or Al Sharpton or Obama.

I have more in common with people who have to pay 50 bucks for a sheet of plywood or they can't afford their car insurance or they have to deal with a bunch of people killing each other in my neighborhood at night and then they get out the next day or I have to deal with a bunch of people that are illegal aliens, gang members from Venezuela that are in a hotel across from my home.

That's who I have.

People worried about that are my friend, not necessarily people who superficially resist.

And that is a radical change.

And that is why

the Joyreeds and the Obamas and the Opas keep calling people racists.

They're trying to say, no, no, no, no, no, you're mistaken.

You're not educated.

You're not sophisticated.

You're not a billionaire like I am.

You're not a multi-millionaire.

I know what's better for you.

It's white people who are your enemy.

Just keep that, because that's how I got successful.

I rode that white racism.

That's how I got elected.

That's why I'm a multimillionaire.

Don't do that.

If you do that,

I lose my credit, my cred.

I'll lose my money.

I'm supposed to be your representative and speak for you.

And I don't think it works anymore.

Yeah, I hope it's all failing.

It seems to be.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of the podcast.

We'd like to thank our audience.

They make this podcast happen.

So thanks to you all.

Thank you, everybody.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen.

We're signing off.