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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is the Friday news roundup in which we look at the news of the week.

And we've got Daniel Penny was acquitted or found not guilty this week, and also Syria is on the agenda.

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

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com, and the name of the website is The Blade of Perseus.

And I hope that everybody comes to join us.

So, Victor, we have, as maybe not a surprise to most of us, as it came out as it should have with Daniel Penny, that he was not guilty.

And I know we've agreed that he shouldn't even have been tried, but nonetheless, and I think what's interesting this week, besides the fact that he was not guilty, is that there were all sorts of protesters out there.

The Black Lives Matter in New York's founder, Hawk Newsom, has called for vigilantes from the black community.

And I was wondering your thoughts on this current uproar, for lack of another another word.

Well, I mean, there's no statistical evidence for any of their charges because

their argument is that had

the victim been

white, then Daniel Penny would have what?

That's what I want to know.

Can you answer that?

Well, he would have done something different, they think, but no, he wouldn't have.

He wasn't.

They would have done something different.

If that person had been white, he would never have been charged.

Oh, I see.

The only reason, and if he had been black, he would have never, the assaultant had been black, he would have never been charged.

Everybody knows that.

So BLM is protesting something that was an injustice, but it was an injustice done to Daniel Penny.

If a black ex-Marine had

subdued Mr.

Neely,

he would be considered a hero.

And BLM wouldn't have said a word.

No.

If a black ex-Marine had subdued a white person who was homeless and had been arrested 40 times and was threatening the safety of people, the BLM person would have been bragging on him.

So it was utterly racist.

And then, if he wanted to make that argument that Daniel Penny's race was an

indicator of racism,

then he should bring some statistics.

Can I give you some?

Yes.

In the FBI statistics, whites

are

underrepresented as

assailants.

They are overrepresented in interracial crimes as victims.

Jews make up about 3% of the population.

In most states, but in New York in particular, which is relevant to this, they make up about 50%.

of the targets of hate crimes.

African Americans compose about 12% of the population.

They make over 25%

of the assailants.

In other words, the BLM people should say if this is a height hate crime,

fellow blacks are more than double,

more than twice as likely as their demographic to commit crimes.

And so-called whites and Jews in particular are far more likely to be the victims of interracial crime than their numbers otherwise should indicate.

Number two,

there's only about 8%,

9% of all violent assaults and murders are interracial.

But among that 8 or 9%, and that's several thousand,

blacks commit violent crimes toward whites on whites, six times more likely

than whites commit interracial crimes against blacks.

Okay, number three,

after the George Floyd

death, killing, whatever term one prefers, there was the Washington Post article or survey.

They looked at, did the police kill unarmed blacks at an inordinate rate?

First thing is there were more whites killed than blacks that were unarmed by police people.

Number two,

what is the correct basis of

calculating?

What is the data?

Is it just anybody who's killed or is it to find a proper ratio to see whether somebody is

acting in a racist fashion?

And here's the correct database.

All the people who were arrested by the police,

if you look at the 11 million,

I think it's 11 million people who were arrested that were African American, and and you chart how many people were killed while unarmed,

then

there is no, you can say of all the people who were killed on armed, there were a lot more white on armed targets than there were black, but there might have been a higher percentage of black killed on target on arm than their percentages would indicate.

But not if you don't just look at the population, but you look at the number of people who come in contact with the police.

So,

what data point, what criteria is he looking at that would show there's a consistent pattern of some type of racist behavior on the part of white people who end up killing black people when the reverse is far more common.

And whether we define that as hate crimes, or we define that as interracial crimes, or we define that as the police shooting unarmed suspects, whether black or white, as a percentage of those that they encounter.

So there's no evidence in it at all.

And could I ask him another question?

What did he think Officer Bird was doing?

Where was he when Officer Byrd was doing?

Ashley Babbitt was 5'3.

She weighed about 105 pounds.

She went through an already broken window in the Capitol, and that was culpable.

That was a misdemeanor.

But she didn't have a

40 arrest record.

She wasn't threatening to kill people.

She wasn't shouting.

She wasn't leveling threats to a captive audience in a subway.

She went through

a window.

And one of the remarkable things about that was she wasn't going toward Officer Berg.

She was going toward other law enforcements that were fully armed with semi-automatic weapons.

He shot at a 90-degree angle or from an angle, from the side,

without even giving her a warning, shot and killed her.

He had a record of sloppy handling and he was chastised and put on, I think he was put on notice for 30 days that he had left a loaded service weapon, handgun in a bathroom.

And he had, so my point is, if the BLM wants to get mad at interracial killings of unarmed people,

then why doesn't he say we've got to stop the unarmed people being killed, whether by the police or by volunteers that are trying to stop something?

We just let them do what they want.

Because that's what he didn't say a word when Ashley Babbitt was shot and killed by an armed officer for doing nothing, basically, but going into a broken window.

That's a misdemeanor.

And so

she didn't pose the level of threat that Mr.

Neely did by any means.

She didn't have the criminal record that Mr.

Neely did.

She was a

loyal, patriotic veteran, and she was female, and she was shot by an officer who should have known better.

Daniel Penny was just a person who was on the subway and said, if I don't stop this, there's going to be somebody severely hurt.

And he volunteered to stop it.

And there is some question, and I think the preponderance of evidence, despite the

coroner in New York, was that he had either chronic health problems as a homeless person or he was under the influence of drugs that contributed to his so-called suffocation.

I don't think that anyone said, oh, Officer Burb shot her, but she wouldn't have died had she, A, been not been on drugs.

She wasn't on drugs.

She wasn't any.

He shot and killed her.

So I think everybody, what I'm getting at is

when you see the African-American woman that testified at the trial that Daniel Penny had done the crowd a service because they were all in fear of their lives, and this man was a perennial chronic serial bully who loved to get up to unarmed people and get in their face and do all sorts of antics.

And then he meets this.

ex-Marine who said, you know what, I'm not going to sit here and watch you do that.

Well,

he made that he had a, he's done that apparently at least 40 times earlier because he's been arrested.

But his luck ran out.

Luck ran out and he encountered somebody that said no moss.

And I think people are sick of it.

I think that the fact that that African-American woman and other, there weren't a lot of white people on that subway, and there weren't a lot of

non-white people, people of color, who said Daniel Penny was reckless and he shouldn't have done it, there were a few.

And the father who came in and said that this was horrible and he lost his son

had been nowhere in his life.

And

his mother was murdered by her boyfriend.

Where was the father when that was happening?

He only appeared outside the courtroom and to announce that he was filing a civil suit and he was trying to grift off the death of his son.

The father, yeah.

Yes.

So I think everybody looks at this of all different racist backgrounds and says, you know, we're done with this.

We're done with the racist thing.

We're not going to listen to it anymore.

There is racism, but it cuts both ways.

And to try to make this into a racist thing was just pathetic.

Yeah, did you see that woman imitating Reverend Wright

saying GD America?

I didn't understand that because that destroyed Reverend Wright's.

She basically said this, G.

D.

America, GD America, I'm going to emulate the famous Jeremiah Wright.

And I'm going to do that because

when those video clips were circulated day and day out,

you know, not God loves America, God,

that ruined his persona.

Is that what she thinks is what she should do?

I'm going to copy his career trajectory.

I'm going to say things to offend 340 million people.

So it was stupid.

And

I don't know.

I think everybody's just tired of this.

They're just tired of the juicy smallets and all of this race baiting.

And I think that was what the election was about.

And I think a lot of African-American people are tired of it.

I think so, too.

A lot of them jumped ship and went to vote Republican.

Yes, we don't know what the

the ratio of African American men was, but it was getting close to a third.

And that's amazing given the propaganda of the left-wing Democratic Party and the fact that you had a black woman on, so maybe a third, 27%,

maybe 28% of African-American males said, I don't care if Kamala Harris says she's black.

I'm not going to vote for her because all of the issues that she's embraced are not to my benefit.

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You know, I was going to say one other thing.

Yeah, go ahead.

It was more dramatic than that.

There were a lot of African Americans involved in this case.

There was the victim, who was African-American, but there was also the DA,

who everybody thought Alvin Bragg, who assigned a white prosecutor who was very left, they felt that he was using race up for his upcoming election.

But the mayor was also African-American.

And the mayor said, this is not about race.

In fact, he praised Daniel Penny.

There were four people in the jury who were not white.

They obviously had a say in the verdict because he was acquitted.

And so what I'm getting at is we're getting to a point now where the people who testified were not worried about race.

They were just worried about someone was threatening their safety in an era and a time when people are terrified to be in these cities.

And someone stood up for them.

And the black mayor of New York saw that, and he didn't even think of race.

He just said,

we want people to stand up for the unprotected.

And the

district attorney who was trying to demagogue, who happened to be black, Alvin Bragg, filed two weeks de facto because he saw that he might get some mileage out of it.

But the people who came forth and testified, one of the most convincing was black, as I said, the jury.

So what I'm getting at is that it wasn't about race because people on both sides of the issue were of different races.

You had a white prosecutor, a radical prosecutor, and she was the person who really did an injustice on Bragg's directive.

But you had African Americans that were testifying on behalf of Penny, and you had the mayor defending him.

So I I think what it shows is we're starting to move beyond race, and people, as I said, are tired of this, this demagoguicic

Al Sharpton made an appearance.

I thought, wow, this is how many years, 40 years after Crown Heights?

Which wasn't a race, and they said, you know, race riot.

The New York Times or Washington Post said, there are race riots, whites against blacks after Crown Heights.

No, there weren't.

There were no Jews that went out in the street and tried to kill blacks.

It was all Al Sharpton's genned-up racial war against Jews.

That's what the whole Crown Heights thing was about.

So I think

we've come a long way.

And I think this election really got people really angry on the left because Kamala Harris really tried to fuel racial animosities by calling him a racist.

The Obamas did all the time.

Every time Michelle and Barack went out there, they brought up Charlotte, misquoted it, and then at the very last thing they tried to get as much mileage out of the

jokester who mentioned in a bad joke about Puerto Rico and garbage.

They tried everything, and they were completely refuted.

They were the big losers of this election.

Everything about them failed.

They came at the convention, they said he was a dictator, he was a fascist, he was a racist, Charlottesville, da-da, da-da.

And then when that didn't work, and polls started a chart that showed that in key states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, the margins necessary for a Democratic candidate to win among the black voting blocs were not there.

Then they started lecturing people.

And the lecture went like this.

They may not have intended it, but the lecture went like, well, you know, I just came out of Colorama, my $9 million

mansion, and I had to come over from Martha's Vineyard,

my 40-acre play, 20 acres, and what do we pay for that, Michelle?

15 million?

15?

With a fake black patois.

So he has his Chicago mansion.

He has his Calorama mansion.

He has his,

I don't know what you call Martha's Vineyard, 20-acre estate.

And then he's got, that wasn't enough.

He had to have a new one right on the beach in Hawaii, $10, $15, $20 million.

So with all that large ass, and what did he do to get it?

He was just, he played the role of Barack Obama, the first black president who can find and spot and detect racism.

What I'm getting at is then he comes when all of that boilerplate did not work, calling Trump racist, racist, racist, racist.

And then he started to do something that really blew up in his face.

He started to go to constituencies and said, you know what?

This is not resonating.

This is what he was thinking because you are ignorant and you do not know what's in your interest.

And you need a mellifilous, college-educated, former president and multi-multi-millionaire with four mansions to tell you what's in your interest.

You're fooled about the inflation.

You're fooled about the border.

I know what's going on because you know what?

All you have to do is get money and privilege like me and then the border doesn't matter.

That was really what the message was.

And they rejected that.

They did.

This was one of the biggest exposures of that

fraudulent Obama mystique that you've ever seen.

It's evaporated.

And then when you look at the

flip side abroad, remember what he gave us, everybody?

He gave us the modern Middle East disaster.

He and his assistant National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, they cooked up the Iran deal.

They cooked up the 400 million in the middle of the night on pallets they sent in for hostages.

They cooked up the idea of ending sanctions and punitive actions.

And their whole theory was: we are going to empower

a different Middle East.

There's going to be the head of the octopus, Iran.

There's going to be one tentacle in Hamas, one tentacle in Hezbollah, one tentacle in the Houthis, and one tentacle with Bashar Assad in Syria.

And we're not going to dominate.

So John Kerry is going to invite in the Russians, as he did, remember, and they're going to monitor WMD,

and they're going to prop up the Assad.

And then we're going to tell these terrible Israelis and these terrible Saudis and these Gulf corrupt monarchies and Sunni Arab overdogs, it's time that the Persians and the Shia, the underdogs and the oppressed, as a community organizer, I can see that, that you can't.

And we're going to have creative tension.

So the Sunnis and the Jews are not going to be the big bullies anymore.

There's going to be an alternative crescent.

Damascus,

Tehran,

Beirut, Gaza, Yemen, all of them are going to be empowered by us, and away they are.

They're going to be free from sanctions.

Hey, Israel, they might kind of sort of get a nuclear bomb.

Wouldn't that be terrible?

Ha ha.

So that's what they did.

And it blew up.

It completely blew up because they didn't count on, they hated Netanyahu, the Obama administration.

They called him a

C.

Chicken.

Remember that SH?

He's chicken.

Oh, really?

Yes, and they made him.

I remember that.

Yeah, they did.

And of course, Harris and Biden boycotted his congressional lecture.

And never in their right mind did they think after October 7th, when you remember Anthony Blinken was calling for restraint almost immediately before Israel had even digested the slaughter.

Never in their right mind did they think tiny Israel would destroy Hamas and then would take on the supposedly indomitable,

you know, just terror, fearsome Hezbollah

and blow it up with pagers and walkie-talkies.

Walkie-talkies, yes.

And then go after their

supposedly 150,000 rockets you can't do.

And they did.

They went after all of them.

And they neutralized them.

they neutered them and then they turned into a tit for tat twice with iran and when the tit for tat was over with they told the world they sent 500 projectiles in here and they did nothing we just sent about 10 bombs and missiles from our planes and they did everything they took out their air defenses and now we're sitting here and where is Mr.

Khomeini and where are all the Iranians saying, death to the Jews, death to the Israels, with the great little Satan, the little Satan, we're going to do this.

We heard it all.

Now it's your turn.

Start it.

Start the ball rolling.

You have it.

There's the Israelis.

Go after them.

Send in another

500, but you won't do it, will you?

Because you have no defenses.

And you know that the moment you send a projectile into the Jewish state, they are going to take out all of your nuclear facilities and they're going to take out all your ability for a generation to sell oil.

So you can talk all you want, but there's no audience because all of your terrorist surrogates are gone.

And now the latest one is Bashar Assad.

He's gone, and that country is a mess.

It's broken up into Christian

protectorates, Kurdish protectorates, quasi-ISIS rebels, Shia groups, Sunni groups.

It's a mess.

It's like Libya.

And

Donald Trump said, we're not going to get anywhere near there.

But my point is the whole Middle East that Obama tried to screw up, and it was stable till he started.

And then every time there was a chance to restore the damage that he had inflicted, Jared Kushner and those people were doing the Abraham's Accord.

They got out of that terrible empowerment of Iran with the Iran, he would weigh in.

He and Ben Rhodes would weigh in.

Remember John Kerry was going over to Paris during the Trump administration?

For the people who always yelled, Loganak, Loganak, Loganak.

He was meeting with the foreign minister of Iran.

And now it's all blown up.

And Israel blew it up.

And you know what the weird thing about it is?

There's a chance it's going to be more stable than ever because there is a 50-50 chance that Syria will be off the table as an effective terrorist threat to its neighbors because of the sheer chaos that it's in.

And Iran has got a rendezvous with an Israeli airstrike.

And it may not know it, but it does.

And now

the combination of

Bashar Assaad saying, Can I come to Russia, please?

Putin says, Well, you know what happened.

Now my planes, my ships, they got to get out of your country.

I lose my, we didn't have a place.

And, you know, John Kerry invited us in.

So we had our base.

And now you lost our base.

So we'll give you something in Siberia.

You can stay there, but we're not going to send one dead Russian because we've lost a million Russians, dead, wounded, and killed in Ukraine.

And they said,

well, how about can I go to Tehran?

No, no, no, no, no.

You come here, they'll try to kill you, and they might hurt us.

And we've been on the receiving end of Israelis' effective countermeasures.

We don't want you here.

And you owe us, well, I don't know, $440 billion in oil.

Pay up.

And he says, well, I don't have a country to pay up.

And then he has the law, you know, and they say, well,

where's our money?

And Iran says, I don't have any money.

This crazy Trump is going to put an oil embargo.

And then, well, go get help from Hamas.

Well, there is no Hamas.

Well, then go to the Houthis.

Israel took out their port facilities.

They're scared Trump's going to bomb them.

What are we going to do?

This is the, what I'm getting at is this is the ultimate logic and trajectory of the Obama, bankrupt, angry.

We're going to take the so-called oppressed as a community organizer and we're going to empower the dictators and people think dictatorial anti-American illiberal regimes and we're going to do it just to be mean and we're going to show Israel and all these other people that we're going to balance and give the the on the oppressed if you don't think that's accurate as soon as he came into office people believed in Iran that hopi changy

false false narratives remember yes I do

and they went out on the street and the Green Revolution for 11 days they had a million and a million plus people.

And they were close to really getting some

traction.

And if the United States had come out and have supported that, and they didn't say a word, because in his calculus, oh no, we don't want a bunch of neoconservative

Iranian democracy people.

Our whole calculus of redoing the Middle East depends on a theocratic, crazy,

anti-American regime that

kills people and kills gay.

That's That's what we want.

We don't want to support the dissidents in the street.

They've done so much damage abroad.

And one of the things about the election is people looked at those people and they said, you are one-eyed jacks and you flipped yourself over in this campaign.

You were the ones.

You were the ones that said your dream, Barack said, is to phone in.

Remember that?

Would you like to run for a third term?

Yeah,

if I didn't have to do anything, I'd just stay here in my basement and call in.

That's what he did.

So they had a facade, a veneer, a puppet, Joe Biden.

And they knew he was non-composment.

They knew he was demented.

They knew that.

And they thought all he has to do is play the Star Trek Galt role like this, just kind of stay in a chair, and we will get a third Obama term so radical because Joe is a much better facade than we were.

Everybody thinks he's old Joe from Scranton, the working class Catholic union, pro-union, and

we're going to stick down the throat of the American people an open border and monetary, modern monetary theory, spin, spin, spin, and we're going to get out of Afghanistan, the humiliating faction, teach us a lesson.

We're going to teach ourselves a lesson.

We're going to destroy deterrence.

We're going to give the new Green Deal people everything they want.

We're going to go into the woke DEI

and we can all do it with good old Joe Biden.

It doesn't even know what's going on.

And that was the price he had to pay so that he and Jill could get the limelight.

When we got rid of Pete Buttigig, we got rid of Bernie Sanders, we got rid of Elizabeth Warren, we got rid of Spartacus, we got rid of all of them.

And we got rid of them because they couldn't get elected.

They were too left-wing.

But he, he was a useful idiot.

And so he did that.

The only problem they didn't count on is he couldn't quite pull it off for the fourth year.

So he blew up in that debate.

And then their facade vanished, and then we had the the puppeteers exposed to everybody.

And that got them really angry.

They said, wait, the puppet doesn't work anymore.

Let's cut the strings and get her in here.

And she turned out, she didn't have a natural dementia, but she had a cognitive problem.

She was no more articulate than Joe was, but hers was inured.

His was

a, I mean,

problem of age.

I was going to say, that's why I was stumbling.

Problem of age, but I went back and looked this week at some of his early speeches.

Yeah.

They were incoherent.

They really were.

The only difference is they were even meaner than his ultra-maga semi-fascist fascist spanner of the opera speech.

Yeah.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit more about Luigi

Mangioni.

And I wanted to ask you, too, about Joe Biden, who supported the Syrian,

supported Assad actually and sort of closely

with the current rebels and I was wondering the wisdom of that but let's take a break and come back and talk about that

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor has a an

account on X.

His handle is at VD Hansen.

And he has a Facebook page, Hansen's Morning Cup.

Come join him there.

So, Victor, yeah, Joe Biden, I thought it was strange because I thought, wow, there's the regime and then there's these rebels, but who knows which one's worse?

Like, who would come out and support either one?

But Joe Biden came out in support of Assad.

Yeah, it's very similar what's happened to Libya when Hillary and everybody,

Samantha Power, Hillary, they all, Susan Rice convinced a reluctant Obama to bomb Qaddafi.

And he was in reform.

His kids were westernized.

They were doing things.

I was there in 2007.

And they were giving people cell phones.

They were inviting in archaeologists.

They were inviting in natural gas, Italian companies.

So it was in a slow meltdown.

But no, no, we had to go in and do our Arab Spring thing.

And we bombed.

I think we killed the person who saved my life, the surgeon that was in the clinic.

I was told that later, this clinic was

bombed.

Wow.

He was a wonderful doctor,

Egyptian.

I was told by somebody who had gone back to Libya that that Red Crescent facility where I was was hit.

I haven't confirmed that.

I've never heard from him since.

He had written me a couple of things.

And the point I'm making is that

Trump saw that.

And so he tweeted out, I think yesterday, in capital Trump letters, Trumpian letters.

We don't know who these people are.

We've got to stay out.

Assad was bad, but we don't know who if these people are worse.

Just keep out of it.

And

I don't think he means we want them to kill each other off.

It's just that you don't have the wisdom wisdom after Afghanistan and Iraq that you think you do, all you smart people who are now advocating that we arm the rebels or we get on this side.

There's six or seven rebel entities.

And the people who are the patrons of all these are not us.

They're fellow NATO member Turkey.

The Sunni, Turkey, Ottomans, and Mr.

Eridoyan, who's threatened to send missiles.

What is Mr.

Erdogan?

He's threatened to send missiles into Gaza to kill Israelis.

He's threatened to send missiles in to kill Athenians.

He's threatened the Cypriots.

He threatens everybody.

I mean, he's a NATO ally, and we don't even trust him.

And so he's behind this.

He was the one that fueled it, and he wants one thing out of it.

And that's to kill as many Kurds and

prevent one quarter, maybe a larger percentage of his country from breaking off.

And

they all feud, but there are Iraqi Kurds, Iranian Kurds, Turkish Kurds, Syrian Kurds.

And their dream has always been to carve off something from each and make an independent Kurdistan.

That's what he wants to stop.

And that's why he, and he also wanted to make sure that Assad would not keep arming, for he did arm or allow sanctuary for Kurds in Syria that were attacking his neighbor, Turkey.

So it's so complex and convoluted.

The idea that the United States is going to go in and find

some ex-ISIS people and ship them over to Langley and train them, you know, or something.

It was very funny what Netanyahu said today.

I don't know if people remember, he's on a criminal trial, but he...

He's kind of a Trumpian figure, too.

He turned that trial, like Trump did, when he went out and talked to people in New York, as an occasion to show everybody what he had been doing when he supposedly was drinking

bribery.

Bourbon had been giving him his bribes and cigars.

He said something to the effect, I was working 18 hours a day.

I think I can just smoke cigars when I'm, you know, I was in my 70s and I've got this crazy president, Biden, who's telling me I have to do this and this and this and this and this.

And at one point in this Netanyahu excursus,

he said something that was really funny, but tragic.

He said that Blinken and Biden and their foreign policy team said, you know,

you people, and this was both,

this was mostly during the Obama last year with Biden as vice president, but it continued, you people are not going to give

We're not going to give you one inch of 1967

Palestine.

You're going to go back to the 67 borders.

And I think Netanyahu said, well, half of Jerusalem, you know, that people live in.

And he said, no.

And he said,

we will guarantee you because we're going to make an independent 1967

Gaza and Palestine.

And I think Netanyahu said, rivers to the sea, that doesn't mean that they want that.

That means they want to destroy us.

Oh, no, no.

We are going to protect you because we're going to train the Palestinians.

Remember that?

They gave them M16s and all we're making a Palestinian internal police force to stomp out terrorism.

This is what I'm getting at, laboriously so.

We are offering to fly you, Mr.

Netanyahu, over to Afghanistan.

This was circa around 2015 or something.

And we will show you the wondrous transformation of Afghans that we, American Special Forces, our experts in civil control in a war zone have done.

We have trained, we have trained an

Afghan militia and national defense force.

And if we can do it in Afghanistan and effectively stomp out terrorism, i.e.

the Taliban, then

you're going to have to follow that model.

We will allow our experts to come over to the West Bank.

and train you Israelis how to deal with the Palestinians with dignity, sober and judicious, and create an internal

Afghan-like police force.

He said that the other day.

That is so absurd.

That's crazy.

I know.

And he would have got everybody killed, just like everybody, I mean,

there was

so much death and destruction and humiliation.

And from that,

that was the

IED that blew up the Biden administration.

Before August 2021, Biden was just keeping quiet.

I know people can say, no, Victor Blinken and Sullivan got humiliated in Anchorage in March.

Remember that when the Chinese basically said, hey, boy, you're a racist.

Sit down.

He snapped to attention.

But the point is, after that pullout, two things happened.

Biden never polled above 50%

again.

And we never had deterrence again.

And Vladimir Putin was looking at that very, very closely, as were the Houthis, as were the Iranians.

And most of the catalyst that destroyed the Obama vision was empowered by that humiliating destruction of deterrence on our part.

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And we welcome the continued sponsorship of Solaire.

So we missed one thing that was a contrast to the Daniel Penny

case, and that is the Luigi Mangioni, who killed the CEO of United Healthcare, Brian Thompson.

And the rhetoric that's going on about that is just amazing.

I mean, he is being celebrated by some of the press.

And I was wondering your.

Some of them, that Washington Post, I guess he was a journalist or blogger, Taylor Worren.

Yeah.

She was on Piers Morgan, and she said she was joyful.

He really nailed her on that.

But there were a lot of people who supported that and thought and they

these are people of the left, the humanists, remember the kind people that the meek shall inherit the earth?

People that are stewards of our environment.

They saw a man in hit style go up with a hoodie, walk up toward a man and shoot him in the back and murder him on the pretense that he was a capitalist insect preying on people.

They had no evidence that United Health, this man, had any direct, I mean, he was the CEO.

I mean, would you rather not have insurance?

The problem with the insurance industry is not that we have private insurance.

Go look at England or Canada.

And so I guess if he was in Canada and he wanted his back surgery, which he said was blown, he wouldn't have been operated.

He'd have to wait a week.

So

a week.

A couple months.

I should say a year.

If I'm in an emergency situation, he would be in the

hallway.

But the reason that we have problems is we don't have any competition.

And the government came in and said, we're going to have Obamacare.

And I can tell you that as some person that has some health problems, especially in my 50s, when I would go to a doctor pre-Obamacare,

and I didn't have any pool, I didn't have any money, I just had a CSU health plan.

You could make an appointment and you would see a doctor within 15 minutes upon arrival.

And there, in each specialist's office, there was three and four people.

After Obama, forget it, after Obamacare came into wide-scale practice, you would go in there and the doctors look at you and they're not, they don't get near you, they're sitting on a little stool on a computer and they are memorializing the patient before that had his three minutes.

And they say, just a minute, just a minute.

And then they finish and then they open up their laptop again for you.

And they say, now what's going on?

Just a minute.

And they type.

And all they're secretarial.

And then you say something.

And

when I go to, I won't mention the specialists, but when I go to one,

it's like zombie land.

There's patients that'll get up and they've been waiting an hour and a half, and they'll go just open the door to

the waiting rooms, you know, where the doctors are.

They'll come into the treatment rooms, and they'll just, well, what's going on here?

You know, there's a room.

I've seen that happen so many times.

And then the assistants go, no, no, no, get back out.

Your time.

And I've been here for four hours and I drove up from the foothills.

And it's a mess.

So if you're really upset about healthcare, then you would want competition, you would want startup companies, you would

want to take a good look at the

law industry, ambulance chasing, limitations on settlements, etc., and the pharmaceutical industries, big pharma.

In fact,

In our interview today, I did one with Stephen Quay, who's been a frequent guest on our podcast.

He turned out, I mean, PhD, MD,

CEO of a private pharmaceutical company that's trying to cure breast cancer, but also a recipient in the past, a faculty member worked at Stanford.

And

he basically outlined what RFK wanted to do, and he was very supportive.

He said there was a lot of legitimate concerns about the mRNA vaccinations, as there are in general if you don't have proper trials.

He said there is a revolving door of pharmaceutical

government employees that adjudicate the use of pharmaceuticals with the idea that they will make 20 times that when they retire and be rewarded and then become lobbyists, the revolving door, just like the military and defense contractors.

He talked about obesity and the types of food that we allow that Europe does not.

You know, the prevalence of high

fructose corn syrup, everybody, that's kind of a, I hate to even mention this, everybody's beating up on, I'm not sure that the corn syrup's any worse than the cane sugar, but the natural cane sugar is used in antithesis a lot

by organic drinks.

But the point is that, you know,

one quarter of all Californians I mentioned to him that came into the hospitals for,

I think it was last year and the year before, for any reason whatsoever on a routine blood test was found to be pre-diabetic or diabetic.

And so there's all these things you can do that are positive that have to be done, but it's not the insurance companies alone that's the problem.

And when you look at this person's background, he went to a $40,000 a year K-12 prep school.

He was valedictorian, then he went to University of Penn.

His grandfather was a near billionaire.

I mean, he was in everything: radio stations, resorts,

rest homes.

You want to talk about something that's controversial.

It is rest homes and their government contracts and their government contracts for medical services and medicine.

He should look at that very carefully.

And then he was anti-capitalist.

And I'm thinking, well, he's been floating around with all this stuff.

How does he live?

How did he get a 3D printer?

Those are five or six, $10,000.

I think, yeah, $10,000.

$10,000.

How did he get that?

How did he have no source of support?

How do you do any of this?

And so then he had back surgery and he was angry and he put, you know, I've had one, two, three, four, five, six, seven major surgeries.

Have I ever said,

I'm really mad at Olivia

because I had a ruptured appendix and they gave me ether and I woke up three times on a table and they had no antibiotics and no painkillers.

And then they didn't really properly sew up my muscles.

And I've had adhesions ever since.

I can't even do a sit-up because of that.

I never said that.

I said something like:

you had a dull ache on your abdomen, and you're an idiot to go all the way over to Libya and then ignore it for a week.

What were you thinking?

And you were in a third world country, and somebody fought to save your life who was an Egyptian doctor who came in his pajamas two days after your appendix ruptured.

If there's anybody to blame, it's you

not inadequate, and it was inadequate medical care without, you know, pharmaceutical.

But they were being embargoed, as they reminded me.

Mr.

Hanson, you almost died.

You almost died because your country is cruel.

They will not let us have antibiotics.

They will not have us.

proper pharmaceutical and you were paying for mr.

George W.

Bush.

But if he was angry at his surgery, then wouldn't he go after the surgeon and not the health care provider?

I don't know, but he can't.

And

he could put his pins up on his back.

He was an heir to a fortune, so it wasn't like he lacked the money to pay if he had to pay extra because the health care provider.

It didn't make any sense.

There's only one thing that makes sense about this whole thing.

That he went to private little prep schools on the East Coast, and we know what they're like.

They are more woke than the Ivy League itself.

And then he went straight into the Ivy League.

And we know what the University, we saw what the University of Pennsylvania president said under oath

right before she was fired.

She didn't, you know,

Representative Stefanik just sliced her and diced her, you know, and she quit.

So my point is,

he was spoon-fed all of that.

boilerplate about terrible capitalism, da-da-da-da-da.

And he never really had to go out on his own and be a waiter or a mechanic or do anything like most Americans do.

So he was a boutique radical.

And then he threw a little fit when they arrested him.

Did you see that?

He kind of jostled.

There was a small African-American woman that was trying to subdue him.

I thought, who do you think you are?

You just murdered a person.

If she had been some gigantic person, he wouldn't have done that.

But she was a man.

He's a coward.

I said, you cowardly shot somebody in the back and executed him.

You executed him.

And now you're shouting and you're resisting arrests.

You should get down on your knees and pray forgiveness for what you've done.

And this idea that you're going to become a folk hero because you're the point of the spear in resistance to the health corporations, it's just preposterous.

It really is.

And I'm not a, you know,

I've had claims rejected.

I really have.

I've, you know, I had, when I went to Stanford, I still had my CSU plan, and I thought, wow, two plans.

And what they would do was fight over who had to pay.

And sometimes neither one would pay.

And I never said anything.

I mean, okay, this is a bureaucratic mess.

Try to call up, put me on hold for an hour.

I understand that.

And then finally, it's just quicker.

I'll just pay the $100 or whatever it was, $200.

I had hand surgery, and they told me up front that your insurance is only going to pay.

Like it was a quarter of it.

And do you want to do the rest or not?

And it was basically just leave if you don't want to pay the rest.

You know, what are you going to say?

I don't have a thumb.

They don't work supposedly.

What he doesn't understand is

he doesn't understand that he has never been in a social.

I lived in Greece two years and almost three.

I had a severed ureter from a kidney stone.

I went to a Greek doctor, and I'm not criticizing him, but he took an x-ray that

it it wasn't even an x-ray, it was like a 1940 x-ray machine.

This is 1977, 78.

And he said, oh, it'll pass.

And then he told me to drink olive juice and lemon juice, olive oil and lemon juice, and jump up and down when I went home.

And he gave me a big shot of morphine.

I did.

And I got an infected kidney.

And two days later, I couldn't urinate, and I had this gobs of blood.

And I went to the Avangelismos emergency room.

It was like Dante's Inferno in the basement, not the top, I wasn't ever in the top, and it was filthy.

This is 78, it's not that, probably not that.

It was a state-run government hospital, and they just said,

we'll give you some morphine, and you can lay in that bed over there.

And then finally,

I called my parents, and I said, I don't have any money and I don't know.

And

they sent my older brother over and he had, I think, 700 700 bucks or 800.

I went to a private clinic.

I sat in a bed for six weeks getting morphine every day.

And the doctor just took an x-ray every come in once a week.

How are you doing?

Have you, I don't think I've gone to the bathroom in two weeks.

Well, you know, drink water.

And then finally, he came in the seventh week and he said, you've got a torn urine.

We just did a IVP.

They had, you know, he had took me to this other clinic and he said, you've got an infection.

You're going to die in 36 hours.

You've got to get home.

So he gave me those non-disposable old-fashioned steel needles, a little packet of morphine six.

And there happened to be a professor at the American School that was going home and I kind of got in the same flight with her and she watched me and I injected myself in the thigh and I got home and my father, being the old bomber pilot, picked me up at the airport at three in the morning or his old station wagon and made a little bed in the back and drove about 90 miles.

And I met a wonderful

surgeon,

Jack Schiff Sr., his son is, I think, a urologist.

He looked at me and he said, oh my God,

that thing should have been out in a moment.

That was never going to pass.

And I said, what is it?

And he said, well, I'll show you a real exit.

It was called a staghorn calculus.

It looked like a...

decapitated Texas longhorn.

It had two longhorns on one side, and each one

was embedded in the side of the ureter.

Oh, my God.

And it was just kind of like falling down, tearing.

It was like a razor blade going down a tube, tearing the sides, and it was leaking.

And I was in there for, I don't know how long, seven hours.

They came big cut through my back, went through, repaired it.

I was in the hospital for two weeks.

And that's from socialist medicine to U.S.

medicine.

And

I never wrote and said, this is terrible, what the Greek, you know.

I was in Sparta.

We were climbing a fence.

Somebody shook the fence.

I fell and got impaled on the barbed wire.

It cut two tendons in my finger.

I went to a clinic in Sparta, and they gave me a live tetanus shot.

Live.

And then they'd forgot to tell me that you're not supposed to have protein when you get that live tetanus.

And I had some eggs on the way home.

We stopped at a truck stop.

I mean, I just looked like I was,

I looked like the red devil.

I was in a red devil suit.

I was just bright.

But my point of all these horror stories, if you go overseas and you deal with socialism in Libya or socialism in Greek, and I've gone to a Turkish doctor,

it makes America, whatever the faults this ignoramus does not understand,

American medicine is still the best in the world.

And you look at the, Stephen Quay, we were talking about survival rates of all the money we spend,

still, the breast cancer survival rates are higher in the United States than here.

I think I have five friends my age.

Two have lymphoma, one has bladder cancer, one had head and neck cancer.

That's a death sentence almost.

And after five or six years, they're all alive.

And they've all survived.

And they have a good shot.

I think they will live to a normal lifespan.

They went through hell.

They had radiation, some of them, some of them had operations, chemo.

But this idea that

it's somehow a terrible system, and you want to shoot a health care person because you're angry and you quote the Unibomber manifesto, and then you throw a little tantrum when you're arrested.

I don't think he understands that he's going to go up on Murder One.

And

who knows?

Maybe he'll have Alvin Bragg as the prosecutor.

Yeah.

Well,

let's hope that he gets his just desserts.

I think he will get his just desserts.

But

every time I was, you go in a Greek hospital for six weeks and get, you know, I had to take methadone when they came back.

That's what they gave me in the hospital.

Said, you've had too much morphine and dimerol.

You're going to take methadone.

And not that I was

addicted, but that's what they would not give you anymore.

They looked at this Greek chart, they translated it and said, You've had the maximum amount of morphine.

How is that coming off of it?

It was just jittery.

I was like this, it was like I was shivering the whole time.

Wow, for how many days did that?

Oh, for three months.

My father,

I went into the hospital in May in Greece with the kidney stone that tore, and I weighed, I was 6'1 and I weighed 178 pounds.

Came back, I weighed 128 pounds.

And my father was wonderful.

He said, I don't,

I just don't trust this junk.

So you're coming home and

they gave you some dimerol and coating.

I threw it away.

We're not going to do any of that.

The only way to get off that junk is get off it.

So you're going to get on your cutoffs.

And I'm going to get the little tractor and you're going to walk around the ranch, two-mile perimeter.

You're going to get tan as a Hawaiian surfer.

And I'm going to feed you eggs.

bacon and we're going to have a big big New York cut steak that was big then before ribeyes And we're going to have another one at dinner.

And then I'm going to get some ice cream and syrup, and we're going to fatten you up like a hog.

And three months later,

I was tan.

My scar, they about cut my back in half.

It was about a foot-long scar.

It was...

They had to because they get in there after all the damage.

And

I had no desire to take drugs.

I think my dad said, well, we're going to let you take aspirin and maybe some Tylenol, but it's not addictive, but nothing else.

Just so I threw away all that prescription painkiller.

And I said, well, I'd like to sleep.

Well, you know, you'll get tired walking and then you'll be tired.

Yeah, he probably remembered what it was to come off those fights.

I deserved it.

I was such a smart ass, excuse the language, but when he would give me these lectures, I'd say, hey, Dad, are you on mission 29?

Exactly.

Or is it 36?

Are you going?

And then

finally, he got mad and he said,

you said mission 36 over Cobe.

Yeah, we lost five planes that way.

55 men blew up in front of me.

And I felt, you know, like, wow, he slapped me down.

I needed that.

Yeah.

I had a wonderful father.

I really did.

And he was really good.

He was post-mission.

He was coming down off of the stuff they had to give him to get all the way out there.

He was really good.

When I went in,

when I had that happen, he said to me,

you have torn your tendons overseas and had to have your finger

operated on.

You

almost died and had to be flown home.

Do you get the message?

That you drink the water, you don't take care of yourself, you don't study the country.

And then he passed away and I was sitting in...

you know,

Libyan

Red Crescent and the woman, they had a nurse that was a Pakistani and she said, I think you died tonight.

But don't worry.

Wow, that's good.

You can pray to Allah.

You can pray to Allah.

And I said, I think I'll play to Jesus Christ.

And it was like this voice came out of me.

I said, I don't think I've done any wrong, and good things happen either here in the next world for a good man.

She was so wonderful.

She said, Yes, yes, that's a prophet.

That's a prophet.

Jesus is a prophet.

But my point is, when I was in this shock, 106 105 temperature three day two days of ruptured appendix gangrene going up my take out some of my intestine when this is all going on

i was thinking of my dad i thought you stupid idiot he told you that you are reckless and you go overseas and you've done it on 1973 you did it in 78 and now here you are in 2007

and you're doing the same darn thing.

He was right.

I wish he was around.

He would have told me, don't go there.

If you have a bellyache, get it fixed.

Yeah, but here you are today because medicine is wonderful.

Medicine is

wonderful.

And the guy who actually diagnosed in Greece,

they called in right before I went home.

They finally called in somebody who really knew what he was doing.

And he was the one that took an IVP.

It wasn't a very good machine.

And the dye was, they gave me too much dye, but he looked at it and he said,

who's had you here for six weeks?

That's a torn ureter, and you're infected, and you've got about 36, and I don't trust our medical care to do this type of operation.

You get home immediately.

And he went and called the American school, and they arranged for me to get a flight.

Yeah.

And so

he was wonderful.

And he was trained at the Mayo Clinic.

He was Greek.

He was good.

But he was the only, I wish I had knew of him and to get a hold of him from the beginning.

He was a wonderful guy.

I remember his name.

I won't mention it over there.

But he and the doctor, Abub,

I think his name was Abub, and Libby, I owe my life to both of them.

This person needs to put all that, things like that in perspective and get down on his knees and kiss the soil and say, I am so lucky to live in the United States.

I am so lucky to have this opportunity and all this education.

I'm so lucky not to have to be a waitress and have to work two shifts to feed my family.

I'm so lucky about some of the people I just saw this week, you know, working, working, working, working.

I walked through the almond orchard and I saw a guy out there with a chainsaw by himself in the dark almost,

chaining the neighbors' almond leaves, you know, almond limbs.

I thought,

just, you know, 100 trees back, 100 trees back, cut, cut, cut, starting when it's a little bit too dark, but you want to get the whole job in.

And I thought, how about I was thinking of this killer today when I was watching that?

And I thought, wow,

this man needs to go and do that for a week, a month, a year with somebody who has to work like that and to get some dignity and appreciation of this country.

Because he didn't get it in his prep school, and he did not get it apparently in the University of Pennsylvania, and he didn't get it on his wandering, meandering

going to Stanford, Japan, Hawaii.

No, no.

People that do that have the, somebody made that money.

His grandfather made that money.

His grandfather did.

And I can guarantee you, his grandfather didn't give lectures about the evils of the American health care system or want to kill an executive.

Something about too much money and too much leisure and too much therapeutic empowerment of our youth.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back back and talk a little bit about Liz Cheney and Kamala's campaign staff.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

So, Victor, recent information has come out about that January 6th committee that Liz Cheney was on, and she apparently deleted 117 files of, I think it was subpoenaed subpoenaed information

so that the recent oversight committee couldn't find it, I guess, and nobody could find it.

And I was wondering your thoughts on that.

Her attitude about that was that I'm going to,

what would she say?

I'm going to put the DOJ, the Trump DOJ on notice if they try to investigate me.

Doesn't she get it?

She's entitled.

She has the idea that doesn't she understand that she was the number three ranking Republican House member who voted almost 95% with Donald Trump?

So you're on record,

Liz, you were on record of a whole hog MAGA.

You were on schedule to be the Speaker of the House.

And

I think your father had advised you and said that this is a more powerful position that you're in line for than even vice president because it has a longer tenure, and you can really adjudicate the passage of laws and everything.

So, what does she do?

She thinks that Donald Trump, I mean, you could argue that this was a buffoonish demonstration.

You could argue that the president should have said, everybody get back and

but there were legitimate questions.

We've talked about Mr.

Rosenberg, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter, who said it was a joke.

He used, I didn't say it, he did, a joke.

He said there was no real danger of an insurrection.

You can look at the lie.

If it was really an insurrection, Liz, why did you have to lie about it?

Why did you have to say that five officers killed themselves when that happened up to six months later?

And why did you have to say that Officer Sicknick was killed when he died of natural causes?

Why don't you listen to some of the people on the left who said there was a plethora of FBI informants?

And why didn't the FBI just come forward?

Mr.

Ray refused to address that under oath.

Why don't we have the full testimony of all the Capitol officers who made the decision not to come and who told them not to come in force?

Why, when you knew there was going to be a demonstration, did you not have enough law enforcement?

And if you're going to have an insurrection, as you allege, why was nobody found inside the Capitol with a weapon, a gun?

Why was Ashley Babbitt killed?

Why did you try to hide the identity of Officer Byrd when the moment George Floyd was killed, the officers' faces were plastered over all the nation's newspapers?

But you couldn't find who shot her.

And he was protected, and his dubious service record was silenced.

Why, why, why, why?

And why when Donald Trump finally did say, I expect you to assemble peacefully and patriotically at the Capitol to protest.

Why don't you say that insurrectionists don't tell their people to do that?

If you're going to run an insurrection, you don't say, please assemble peacefully.

You don't say that, even if it's not sincere.

So there were so many questions.

So what you would want to do if you had a January 6th,

you would do what you always do.

You tell the minority leader, you get five people, we have six, and we iron it out.

We rag the conservative witnesses if we're liberals, and if we're conservatives, we rag the liberal.

That's what we do.

But they didn't do that.

For the first time, they refused the nominations of the ranking Republican, Kevin McCarthy.

So there was only two people on that committee, and they only had three, they had two things in common.

A, there was no way in the world that they were ever going to be re-elected.

They were completely dead on arrival the moment they took that job, as the only two, and that's why they were selected.

And the second was they had both voted to impeach Donald Trump prior to that.

So here you have two people that were not representative of the opposition, and then you didn't,

they didn't want anybody else.

And so Kevin MacArthur said, I will give you some names.

And they said, no, we don't want your names.

We only want those two because those are obsequious lockies that hate Trump more than we do.

And they have no political future and they blame Trump for it.

And so they will make ideal bipartisan veneers.

And that's what they did.

And apparently they interviewed people and when this is alleged, we haven't proven it, but the allegations are that when they had testimonies that were contrary to that narrative,

they didn't.

They either didn't take them into consideration or they deleted the files on 117 occasions.

So my point is, I don't know what happened.

And people listening don't know what happened.

But I can guarantee you, 98% of you who are listening want the following to be done.

Just to have a hearing, not a revenge tour,

just a hearing.

Just make it, you can make it under,

you can do it in silence, make it a confidential, classified hearing, but just say we want to know where all the information is that was collected and whether it is lawful, if any, is deleted.

Was that lawful to delete them?

And who deleted them?

And why did they delete them?

And you get the impression that they really wanted this narrative to destroy Donald Trump.

And Liz Cheney thought, you know what?

After this is over, he lost the election.

He not only lost the November election,

he lost the January 5th special senatorial election.

So he lost both Republican seats in Georgia the day before.

And Loeffler and Purdue lost.

He'll be blamed for that.

He is politically inert.

He's done for Trump.

He's leaving in complete disgrace.

And I'm going to rise like a phoenix out of his ashes.

And I will be the player.

And I'm going to run on the idea that Kevin McCarthy and anybody, anybody who wasn't 100%

against Trump.

And I'm empowered now because, look at this.

I turned to the punt and tree, and I have David French, I have Jonah Goldberg, I have Bill Crystal, I have David Frum, I have George Will.

They're all saying that I'm the next heroic figure.

So that all went to her head.

And she made the biggest political blunders of any major politician I've seen.

She refuted all of the earlier conservative positions that she held de facto by signing on to this fanatic, never-Trump, left-wing effort to destroy Trump.

And she lost by 40 points in her home state.

I know.

That was just devastating.

And rather than learning from that and saying, you know what,

all she had to do was say, you know, I am a conservative and every single thing that I voted for Donald Trump 95% of the time, I still believe in.

I want a secure border.

But not when the people who

are

funding the PACs and her campaign contributions and all that money is coming from the left and all that support's coming from the left, and the Never Trump right.

She made a calculated decision, and it was a terrible decision that she did.

Like all of those Never Trumpers, they're in the Orwellian situation now where,

A, they're on record that everything they told us for 30 years on abortion, on the border, on the economy, on deterrence, they refuted just because Donald Trump's fingerprints were on those issues.

So

they refuted everything.

So it's almost like saying, well, we just wanted to make money.

We wanted speaking fees.

We wanted columns and books.

And it was pretty lucrative.

And now, you know what?

We didn't like Trump.

He's mean to us, and I don't like him.

And now I'm just going to flip on all those things, suckers.

Don't ever take.

And everybody's saying, well, do we believe you now or then?

Which is it?

And are you going to flip back when Trump's gone or what?

So

that's who she was part of.

Yes.

And she's destroyed her political career.

I have no animus toward her.

I've met her.

I've had dinner with her before.

She's a very bright person.

Her father is very bright.

Her mother did a wonderful job at the NEH

under the elder bush.

But my God, I have never seen a slow-motion political suicide like hers.

And she doesn't get it to this day.

She has completely destroyed her career.

And now the final irony is

Donald Trump is in Notre Dame Cathedral.

And all of these people who said he was Hitler, it's like they're at the Führer bunker.

They're all running over to him.

I was watching them.

They were elbowing each other.

There was the German.

There was a Belgian guy.

There was...

I thought Macron was a Siamese, and I hate the metaphor, but a Siamese twin.

He was clinging to him.

He wouldn't let him go.

He thought, this is my guy.

I invited him here.

I got to get all this reflected glory.

And then you get the impression from the left in Europe,

wow,

we never really meant that he was Hitler.

We just wanted to defeat him because the left, we're with the left.

But privately, privately,

thank God he's elected.

Because he's going to give us the moral support to close our borders.

And he's going to beef up NATO.

And he's going to have a deterrent defense.

And he's not going to get into embarrassing quagmires abroad, but he is going to retaliate against people like he did Soleimani and Baghdadi and ISIS.

And he stood up to Putin.

Putin never went anywhere when Trump was president.

He did under

George W.

Bush.

He did under Biden.

He had done it earlier under Obama.

He did not do it.

That's what they're thinking.

And then the reaction is the American left.

It's kind of like,

Logan act, Logan act, Logan act, Logan act, Logan act, Logan act.

He's not exercising restraint.

He's not the president.

He's making foreign policy.

Why there is an active president?

And then the left goes, wait a minute.

There is no president.

There's no president.

Yeah, everybody's happy there's a president.

Yes, and there's no vice president.

Where's she?

She went to Hawaii and apparently drank it up and partied or relaxed and then made that video.

She looked like she was a bag lady and she had no makeup and looked like she was slurring her words.

And she's on a permanent,

she's kind of like Hillary after 2016.

Remember when Hillary would would walk through the forest and they asked her at one point, what are you doing?

I'm having red wine.

She was just drinking, and

it was traumatic.

They had destroyed Hillary when she lost that election.

It was such a, remember she was down trying to get a mandate in Arizona and Georgia and didn't even campaign the last two weeks in the swing state.

So there is no president.

Joe is not, I mean, and then they had this picture from Notre Dame.

Joe Biden, I could not believe it.

Was enjoying his company.

Oh, my God.

she was staring at him in a way she's never stared at Joe Biden.

And it's like, I don't have to point him in the right direction.

I am now my own person.

And here's a powerful president.

Everybody wants to be around the United States.

And I'm going to get near this sun and get a little sunlight reflection on me and get a tan from him.

That's what her whole thing was.

There is nobody right now for the next 40 days who is president.

I know.

None.

None.

We're in a big experiment.

Maybe you don't need a president because there's none now.

And Joe can't do it.

And it's, as I said earlier, it is a real

debatable thing if he's going to be able to finish.

Because he is just.

I liked him better when he looked the other day when he took off his stocking cap and he had that white hair.

He looked like...

It was electrical, like sort of Einstein-looking mask.

He looked like the guy that was in Back to the Future.

That guy.

And I thought, wow, he looks more natural now.

You know what I I mean?

He didn't have that reptilian, he's just kind of like,

happy-go-lucky.

But the point is, we have no president, and the left is now just quiet.

They're thinking,

well,

I'm not going to say anything, but it is true that people respect the United States when they see Trump.

And it is true that he is dynamic.

And it is true that a lot of stuff we did was stupid.

And we've got to blame the Obamas now, and we'll just kind of shrug, and we'll go after Trump and try to put him in jail at some future date.

But right now, thank God that he's in there, because he is

de facto telling our enemies abroad, don't try it.

And he's not saying like Biden, don't, don't, don't, don't.

He's saying,

in the long-storied history of the United States, you will not understand what we're going to do to you.

Yeah.

And so

somebody said to me, I got an email today from a reader, and he said, well, Trump, you're a hypocrite, Mr.

Hansen, because Trump said he threatened Hamas and he said he was going to do something to Hamas.

And there's nothing he can do.

It's just empty rhetoric like Biden.

Oh, there is something he can do.

He can go right to Gutter and he can say to the government of Gutter, we have that big, beautiful billion-dollar plus base that you built for us to protect yourself from your enemies.

And you're not very popular in the Sunni world, even though you're supposedly a Sunni country, and we're out.

We are out of that base.

We want nothing to do with you.

You are a backstabbing, Al Jazeera, hosting, unreliable ally, if not a frenemy, and we don't want anything to do with you.

So there's not going to be an American to lift their finger when you go the way of Assad.

Because you're a corrupt government.

He can do that.

And he will go to the people in Hamas, and he will say to them, knowing Trump, he will say, this is what we're going to do.

You have a cousin in the United States, you have a nephew, and they're all on green cards or student visas.

We're just going to declare you a terrorist entity.

And anybody who has a passport from the following countries which have,

you know, that you use to come here,

they're not going to be in the United States anymore.

And then he's probably going to do what he did with the Taliban.

He's going to give them a picture from CIA or satellite intelligence or IDF or Mossad and says, this is where this, this, this, this is.

And it's not going to be there tomorrow.

Yeah.

And we'll see.

You're making every American out there listening smile bigger and bigger and bigger.

I hope it all comes to fruition.

Because they're smiling because they're patriotic Americans and they wake up and they say,

what was this nightmare?

What was this dream of four years?

What was the border?

Who was this Majorkis guy?

Why were they lying to us?

Why didn't they just say we want to destroy the United States and get it over with?

Why did they let in 12 million people?

Why these thugs from Venezuela?

What was printing all this modern monetary theory?

What was all the DEI?

What was the

trans dancing and the cross-dressing at military bases?

And

what was this guy in the administration stealing women's luggage and the assistant surgeon general?

What was it all about?

It's just too bizarre.

I can't figure it out.

That's what they're thinking.

And now they're thinking, it's gone.

It's.

We've all woken up to a new day.

There's no more Wizard of Oz.

There's no more Wicked Witch.

We're back in Kansas again, right?

Yeah, that's what they're thinking.

And I'm thinking it too.

Me too.

Well, Victor, that's the end of our show today because we're up on a little bit of a hard break.

And we'll save Kamala Harris's campaign staffers for Saturday.

So join us on Saturday and thank you for joining the news roundup on the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thank you, everybody.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen.

We're signing off.