A New Trumpian World

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, but you're here to listen to the star and namesake.

That is Victor Davis-Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor's got a website, an official website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its web address is victorhansen.com.

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Today's, we are recording on Saturday, December 7th.

This particular episode should be up on, let me do my math straight, Tuesday the 10th.

Victor, there's so much domestic stuff to talk about.

I think, though, we should begin...

With getting your thoughts about what's happening in Syria.

And we'll end the show today since it is December 7th, the 83rd.

I hate to call it an anniversary, but 83 years ago today, Victor, Pearl Harbor was attacked, and the Japanese were engaged in many other activities around the globe.

And to get your thoughts on, as the military historian that you are, the acclaimed historian, on the broader efforts of Japan on that day.

But first, we'll talk about Syria.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

Victor,

I think this is creeping up on a lot of people

who are interested in foreign policy, but Syria.

So today,

reading the Daily Mail this morning, the question here is: Is Assad on the ropes?

His Russian and Iranian supporters, mercenaries, however you want to call them, they seem to have fled.

So,

it looks like by the time this episode is up, the rebels will have taken over Damascus.

So, Victor, who are the rebels?

What's happening?

Is this change of this regime, this looming change, in America's interests?

Is it in Israel's interest?

Is it in the world's interest?

Well, it would be in our interest if both the Sunni insurgents, which are supported by the Turkish government, and Mr.

Erdogan, remember, said he wanted to send troops to Gaza, and he said he was recreating the Ottoman Empire, something I wrote about, the end of everything.

It would be nice if both sides lost, sort of like the Iran-Iraq war.

But not that we want bloodshed and death of innocents.

But

in my view, it's preferable that the Syrian dictatorship is out, even though it's going to be a lot more chaotic.

And then Turkey is going to be the new player.

But why is it happening now?

I mean, they were completely, they had tried to take Aleppo, and now Hama is, they're going to take the two or three largest cities.

The Russians are doing what we did in Kabul.

They're leaving.

quickly

the

big sea base there.

So why is this happening?

I think it's because of three things.

Number one,

Iran has been defanged.

What do I mean by that?

Hezbollah's hierarchy is destroyed.

Hezbollah has helped them.

Hamas has been destroyed.

Israel has humiliated Iran.

Israel has told the world that they sent 500 projectiles into our territory.

They did nothing.

And we sent a minuscule amount and took out their entire air defenses.

So now Iran, they sent up a ballistic missile with a satellite.

They're trying to, they don't know what to do, Jack, because they're sitting there paralyzed.

They thought, well, to save face and to energize our surrogates, we've got to hit Israel back.

But if we do, they're going to wipe us out in the sense that they'll take our nuclear facilities and they'll take our oil exporting.

So they're in a Mexican standoff right now, and there is growing unrest in Iran as there always is.

but this time they know that

there's another wild card, and that's Donald Trump is coming into office.

Last time he came in, what did he do?

He slapped an oil embargo on them.

He said, No more, don't even think of an Iran deal, don't think of getting a nuclear weapon.

He cut off their surrogates, Hamas, took away $700 million.

It was funneled to the PA, and by

indirection, Hamas as well.

And

he's back.

So Iran is looking around and he's saying, you know,

we don't really want to get involved with you, Hezbollah and Hamas, because you're kind of inert.

And if we do, he's going to put a big oil embargo on.

And we have a lot of, so the whole thing is in turmoil.

Russia's bogged down.

Its two patrons are Russia and Iran.

Iran is paralyzed and Russia is bogged down in the Ukrainian war.

So it doesn't look good for them.

And I would imagine that the Turkish government,

because they do want these, they want, it's also directed at the independent Kurdish movement on its border, they want to take control of Syria and make it into a puppet state.

And I suppose you could say, in theory, well, Victor, we have a NATO power who's going to get rid of a dictatorship, and that'll be that NATO is in the driver's seat.

Not really, because it's a NATO power in name only.

Should not be in NATO, but we're not going to get there.

I saw Victor, he gave some some talk this week.

I saw a very short video clip, Erwan,

however,

the madman running Turkey,

almost, I think it was praising the end of Western civilization or something like, something to that effect.

I mean, he is anathema to NATO.

Well, I mean,

he said that the most glorious day in the history of Turkey was May 29th, 1453, what we call Black Tuesday.

When

they stormed Constantinople, destroyed 1,100 years of Christendom in Asia, and then butchered somewhere between 7,000 and 15,000 people, and then enslaved the rest.

And that was the end of Constantinople.

He thinks that was a wonderful event.

And he's bullied Greece, he's bullied Cyprus, he's bullied Israel.

And

we don't trust him with some of the components of the F-35, which which were under Turkish auspices.

He's flirted with Russia, but now, you know, there's no honor among thieves.

So he thought he would flirt with Russia.

Now Russia and Turkey are at each other's throat.

He's an opportunist.

He's terrified of Donald Trump.

And Trump, as he said

in Bragadas the other day, he said he had done more in three weeks than Joe Biden did in four years to restore sanity and calm.

And he's true.

He did.

So

it's in flux.

And everybody, you have to be careful with Assad because everybody thinks he's not half as al-Sad, his father, so

he's more brutal than his father.

So the idea that he's going to go quietly,

he'll do a Samson and pull the whole country down upon himself and kill as many people as he thinks he needs to.

They've killed over a million people in Syria in the last decade.

Remember Nancy Pelosi went over to him

during the first year of the Trump administration, or the Bush administration, I think, or at least twice, and sort of flirted around with him and said that he was

a valuable supporter.

And the Bush administration said, not really.

He's letting all the terrorists go across the border into Iraq.

But

it doesn't work to talk to this guy.

And if he's gone,

maybe some of these former ISIS members that are under the control of Turkey will be marginally better.

I don't know.

But it's good that they're weakening each other.

Yeah.

Victor, you mentioned, of course, you know, obviously we all know Trump is back or coming back, but he does really seem to be the president in a way already.

Right before we started recording this episode, I saw a video clip of him arriving in France, where he is today.

He was meeting with Macron at the opening, the reopening, shall we say, of Notre Dame.

And he's treated like...

like he's the president of the United States.

And you can't help but

forget, again, other than when you see great pictures of crazy Joe Biden with his hair blowing in the wind, looking like Ebenezer Scrooge.

He looked natural with his hair all

brown cream.

Didn't Rush used to call him plugs?

Yeah.

Plugs grew out.

He looked more natural.

Yeah.

He looked like that guy in Back to the Future.

Remember him?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah,

there was like static electricity and

a hurricane at the same time.

It's funny about all this.

They went so paranoid about Trump and they destroyed Michael Flynn, about the ossified Logan Act.

Remember that?

Trump is negotiating.

He's not even president.

That's against the law.

And now it's like,

take over, please.

Get rid of him.

We don't want him anymore.

Let Trump be president now.

So he's Logan acting everything.

He is the virtual president right now.

Everybody knows it.

And Macron, why would he...

Macron, they said, did you read the news accounts where it said it was very important to him that Donald Trump showed up?

I did not.

No.

Really?

Yeah, he did.

He said that.

And Donald Trump agreed to go over there.

And

it really sort of

I don't know what the word is, but it dovetails with the French right that one of their main

talking points is that they're defenders of the West, of Christendom, of traditional France, and then to see the President of the United States go to Notre Dame probably helps them more than it does Macron.

There's a very revealing picture when they're walking today, and Trump has his head turned away in disdain, and he's huge.

You know, Trump dominates the picture, and then there's this sort of petite Macron, looks like a dandy, and he's clutching Trump's right hand.

You know, like they're holding hand, but Trump seems to be bothered by it, looking in the opposite direction.

Like, who is a scadfly?

So,

and I say that as a big supporter of France.

I like the French.

I always do.

And I think they're good allies.

But it would be nice to see a conservative, a real conservative government in there.

Yeah.

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Victor, let's get domestic.

You saw, did you see, I know you saw the dust-up

on Capitol Hill this week where

acting Secret Service boss Ronald Rowe was before the special committee investigating the assassination attempt against Donald Trump.

I did.

And he got into it with Congressman Pat Phelan a little too

protesting too much, it seemed, way too much.

Your thoughts about what you saw?

Well, when I first saw it, I thought this was not, you know, in my tist-tisk, aristocratic

personality.

I thought this is beneath the

dignity of the Congress.

But, you know, ever since that young fellow with the jockstrap filmed himself in a passive sexual act, they didn't have any decency after that, and they didn't really do much to him.

But the point,

I thought at first the congressman was yelling, but then when I looked at it and I saw it twice, he was reacting.

He was calm.

He just said on this commemoration date, traditionally the person assigned

to protect the president has to be there.

And he had heard, apparently through back channels of unhappiness among Secret Service rank and file, that the acting Secret Service, Mr.

Rowe, had kind of, what would be the word,

squirmed his way in for a photo op to be...

Oh, grandstanding, yeah.

Yes, at the expense of

the people who actually do protect our presidents.

And that was a legitimate, the person was basically saying, in the context of the Secret Service's dismal performance in these failed, but not so easily failed, almost successful assassination attempts, something is wrong.

And you're now the nominal head, and yet we're hearing, basically, he said, I don't know if he said you're hearing, but that's where the information came.

We came that there's more,

there's low morale, and here you are.

next to the president when you're not really an active Secret Service rank and file person who's ready to do it.

You're the administrator and you've just gone in there for the phone.

And he went ballistic.

How dare you talk about that?

This is horrible.

And he just started screaming.

And all he did was, if there was one little smidgen of doubt that Donald Trump is not going to remove that guy, I don't think he's civil service,

he dispelled it.

I think anybody who saw that guy's outburst said, wait a minute, the person who is responsible for protecting the United States first family and retired presidents has to be cool, calm, and collective.

And this man is completely out of control.

This is the second or third time he's done the bulldog, flat top, tough guy, FBI glass look, glasses look.

We're sick of that.

We've seen it with McCabe.

We've seen it with Comey.

We've seen it with all these people.

Fauci, we don't, we don't, it doesn't do anything to us.

We've been there, done that, we're so over it.

And so when he thinks he's going to play the bulldog, and that's going to show that because he can scream and yell at an elected congressman, this unelected bureaucrat, that that's going to impress people, that he brings that same rigor and toughness to his job.

No, all that shows you is that he is unstable and he shouldn't be anywhere near the protective cadre that's responsible for keeping Donald Trump alive one more day.

Yeah.

I think, however many months it is now, four or so from Butler

and maybe maybe three from

Palm Beach.

It almost came as close in Palm Beach.

Right.

That guy would have had a better shot.

I mean he would have shocked the president.

Yeah.

I don't feel any

as an American

I'm more confident about our Secret Service today than

I don't feel any more confident that the left said, oh my gosh

They almost killed him.

We better stop calling him Hitler and no more New Republic

covers covers with a mustache on it.

No more Kamala Harris saying that he's Hitler.

Because you know what might happen?

All of these nuts out there, as we've said before in this, will conclude, hey, he's Hitler.

You know what we do with Hitler?

You shoot him and you become an instant hero for the ages.

And second, the Secret Service is pretty mediocre and two amateurs got pretty close.

And I'm a much better gunman.

So therefore, if I do it a third time and succeed, I will be a popular cultural hero for the ages.

And that's the message that they're sending.

So to ensure the president's safety, you have to get a new crew that has zero tolerance for any lapse or mistakes on the part of the Secret Service.

And then secondly, you've got to chastise people who call him Hitler.

And of course, that would entail, let's be honest,

who has used the Hitler,

well, that's retired generals.

We have a retired four-star general who said he he was equivalent to the people on the other side of D-Day.

We have another four-star who said that he was a Mussolini-like fascist.

We have another person who said that he was a liar.

We have General Hayden, who's former CIA director, that said his border policies were analogous to Auschwitz.

Well,

if you're going to recreate Auschwitz, then some killer is going to think it's a noble and fitting thing, decorous thing, to kill him.

So all those people, I'm not suggesting that they all be be brought up on Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

I'm just saying that from now on, I think this administration is going to, especially if Pete Hexsep is nominated,

he's going to tell all the retired officers there is such a thing called the retired,

the Uniform Code of Military Justice A, B, it does

cover flag officers.

C,

there's not going to be anybody during this administration who's calling the President of the United States a fascist Hitler-like figure.

There's going to be no more

revolving doors.

We're not going to have people going into civilian positions in the Pentagon at the highest levels and then revolving back to their homes on defense policy.

Defense contractor boards are as lobbyists.

And I think we're going to have no more joint chiefs.

who think that they're in the chain of command when they're in an advisory role.

And finally, we're going to consider it treason if any four-star general calls up, without the knowledge of the President of the United States, a communist counterpart and warns him about the proclivities, dangerous proclivities of the president.

Any other country, Millie would have been, that act would have been considered treasonous.

And if you didn't, you think that's an unfair characterization, he's been calling him fascist.

Remember that, Jack, for the last week before the election.

And then all of a sudden, Trump is elected and he says, yeah, I thought about it.

He's not a fascist.

We'll be just fine.

In other words,

he's going to be president.

And if I keep this stuff up, they're going to prosecute me and court-martial me under the

uniform code of military justice.

He's having this Joe Scarborough come to Jesus moment.

By the way, Rachel Maddow is really angry about because she's told all of us, you don't talk to him, because not only is he a fascist, but he's guilty of winning the election through Russian collusion.

Yeah,

we should talk a little about Morning Joe.

By the way, I have a lot of friend, not mine.

I have a retained friends policy.

I know you do.

You're very close to your friend.

Yeah.

By the way, speaking of bluster, I know I'm springing this on you, but this Boston city councilwoman, Tanya Fernandez-Anderson, did you see that?

I did.

She got arrested for, because because she's a Black Lives Matter activist.

She was one of the most crude

public servants you ever saw at a city council meeting, happened to be the city council of Boston.

And she did get arrested, I think, yesterday.

The thing that got me, Victor, was she got arrested

leaving her apartment or wherever the hell she was living.

The cops picked her up on the sidewalk.

How come the FBI wasn't knocking her door down at 6 a.m.

in the morning?

You know, you know, James O'Keefe with his underwear.

Well, right.

Or the pro-life

stone because they don't want to be called racist, I suppose.

But she had a little tweet where she said, did you see it?

I'm a proud black woman, African immigrant.

And she had

a pro-Middle East or something, anti-Zionist.

She tried to punch every button.

And basically, you wanted to say to her, let me get this straight.

You came from a very impoverished, Islamic, traditional African society.

And all of the values that you're champion, you apparently don't champion very much because you wanted to leave all of that.

You had an embryo of Islam, and you were around African culture and language and people, and yet you chose to come over to this racist, homophobic sexist society.

And then you wanted to list all of your affiliations that were, you thought anti-American and then you took our generosity as one of our guests and how did you repay it?

You hired people in your own family and you probably got kickbacks from them and then you made the taxpayers of racist Boston pay for it and now you're outraged that finally the FBI in a very anemic fashion said, could you please step in our little car?

We think you might have

committed some felonies.

And

yeah, she's up there with.

I looked at some of the things she said.

I didn't know you were going to ask me about it, but I had been curious.

There's only two public figures that I can see that are more overtly racist than she is.

One is Joy Reed, who just cannot talk about anybody but white people.

She hates white people.

Right.

Talks about them all the time.

Megan Kelly is wonderful on Joy Reed.

And the other is that, have you seen that Representative Crockett from Texas?

She gets up every once in a while and she goes on these, I have these former Confederate, I was a slave,

150.

She is really out there with her hatred of white people.

Oh, my gosh.

And I think we're getting to a point where there's so many different interests in our country that the anti-white,

we can't be racist because we're not white, so we can call, that's over with.

I think there's so many, it doesn't work.

We have so many different people who can,

you know, in California, we have 45

the Hispanic population is the largest population.

And when you look at hate crime statistics,

by far the 2% to 3% Jewish population makes up 50% of the crime victims.

And the perpetrators are all overrepresented except so-called white people.

So nobody talks about this, just like that dead horse I beat about the people who die at twice their numbers of the demographic in Iraq and Afghanistan are white.

But

that's going to be something everybody talks without fear anymore.

You're a racist if you're racist if you look at somebody's superficial appearance and then you use that to confirm a stereotype, negative stereotype.

And that's what she does.

All of those people at the same time.

Well, what may have worked for her in 2020 is not working anymore.

Victor, we've got a couple of other things to get your views on.

I think Trump's first hundred days would be a good place to start, and we'll go there when we come back.

Wait, wait, before you go.

Did you say first hundred days?

Well, we've already, I think we're high into that.

I detect a tyrannical reference to the hundred days of Napoleon

when he tried to overthrow the constitutional monarchy

of the Bourbons, who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

You were trying to put in there, subconsciously, a Napoleonic autocratic references.

Trump's 100 days.

Forget about it.

Okay, you got me.

You got me.

I know.

It's because I'm reading de Gaulle's war memoirs, and that's what

I'm saying.

You also do the okay thing like this?

Is that how you do it?

I don't know what you're white to do.

I forget.

Hey, but we'll get to some of this stuff when we come back from these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Again, we're recording on Saturday, December 7th, 83 years from the

day when

I think America changed fundamentally in 1941.

The

surprise attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor.

Victor, before we move ahead, I do want to let our listeners know we have a lot of new listeners.

That Victor has a website.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

The web address is victorhanson.com.

You should go there regularly.

Why?

Well, you'll find the archives to these podcasts, the links to Victor's weekly essays and syndicated column,

links to his books, links to his other appearances.

And Victor writes exclusive pieces, two or three a week, for the Blade of Perseus.

They're called ultra articles.

You have to subscribe in order to read them.

It's only five bucks a month, $50 discounted for the full year.

So do check it out.

Do subscribe.

And

if you're already a subscriber, I think the Blade of Perseus makes a great Christmas gift.

I think you might think the same thing, Victor.

I had written down here.

Now I can't find my piece of paper, but you've got a current series

on the day we're recording.

You're on your ninth installment on analyzing Trump's

nominees on the paywall, yeah.

And this was, I just finished with Pete Hexeth.

And it coterminous with it, I also wrote a syndicated column about what the Trump nominees will not do.

And I mentioned that Pete,

if he's confirmed, will not take a private Pentagon jet and fly across the country like Leon Panetta did.

He will not, as a former Defense Secretary, should he finish his tenure,

lie as Leon Panetta did and said that the 51 authorities like himself knew that the laptop, and then when he was caught on it, not apologize, but double down on national TV.

He's not going in.

He's not coming in from Raytheon, and he's not going to go back from Raytheon Raytheon as Lloyd Austin does.

So I think that if you look at the fundamental existential things you want in a Defense Secretary,

intimate knowledge of the military, preferably people who've been in combat, people who can write and think and have published authors.

He has an Ivy League.

All he doesn't have is the resume that got us in this mess.

The same is true for this, starting, Jack,

today and Monday and Tuesday, it's on Cash Batel, whom we've had on this program.

And I'm kind of amazed at all the hostility toward him because

if you look at his resume,

if you want somebody with intelligence and law enforcement and investigative appearance, gosh, investigative, he was the guy that

Devin Nunes turned loose to crack the whole caper of Comey and steel and the dossier.

He worked for the Pentagon.

He's worked as a prosecutor with the DOJ in

anti-terrorist capacities.

He was a public defender.

He's got everything you would need according to the deep state, but

they're after him because he hasn't been a law enforcement officer.

That's like saying Donald Trump shouldn't be president because prior to 2016 he wasn't a president or,

you know, Elon Musk.

He was an elected official.

Elon Musk didn't know anything about electric cars before he took on the big three.

And then

he's got kind of a photographic memory.

I know a lot of people in government, but he's one of the most

blunt,

graphic, tough, but also he has a very unusual intellect and memory.

Victor,

people should go,

we just said go to the Blade of Perseus.

They should look, search in the podcast archives.

You did an interview with him earlier this year.

It was terrific.

It was,

this guy is so good.

They're mad at him because in a moment of exuberance to the hated Steve Bannon, they hate Steve Bannon.

He said, we're going to come after the people.

But he went, the people who broke the law.

Right.

So if you're Anthony Fauci and you testify under oath and you say that the

National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, along with the National Institute for Health, No Way, No How, gave money to support gain-of-function research on virology, in virology that was banned in the United States.

And then you find out that he looked at Rand Paul with a straight face after he had...

what, recirculated $600,000 to his pal, Peter Dasick, who had rigged a Lansen independent investigation to confirm that it wasn't.

It was all a fraud and lie.

And so all

people like Cash are saying is

if they lied to Congress and they did it under oath,

it has to mean something.

Same thing with Liz Cheney and those people in the January 6th.

You shouldn't go after them, but if it comes to the people's notice that they destroyed subpoena materials or they had interviews that they destroyed the evidence, I don't know if they did.

But there's nothing wrong with looking at that.

I do.

Did you see Obama, Jack, what he said?

Was this about his speech at the Obama Foundation the other day yesterday?

Yeah, one of them was at the foundation and one.

Can I just say it was the ultimate example of projection I've ever seen?

Go ahead, Victor.

No, you're right.

He said basically, one of the things we do not want to do, and Donald Trump, well, first of all, he said,

you know, I'm supposed to talk about democracy.

Democracy is pretty low on people's agendas now.

Meaning, what?

there was a record number of republicans that never voted with such numbers in history for a presidential candidate they had never won the popular vote so isn't he saying that a two-party system is good and you don't want a uniparty and then of course when he got on to donald trump was a threat you think well what would he what would you constitute a threat keeping it trying to take obama's name off the ballot trying to turn five local and state prosecutors after obama impeaching Obama twice, trying him as a private citizen, raiding his home.

Maybe they could take the

Trump SWAT team into...

That would be hard though, Jack.

Where would you go?

You go Calaroma, you go Hawaii Mansion, or you go Chicago Mansion, or you go Martha Vineyard Mansion.

But the point is that everything that he accused Trump of

he and his successors did to Trump.

Some people say, no, no, that was Biden.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

He sat in the Oval Office while John Brennan and Clapper were there talking about active CIA-FBI surveillance.

And if you think

he didn't support radically changing customs and traditions to suit him,

he used the filibuster to try to stop Alito, one of our best judges, tried to stop him by filibustering.

And then he turned around at a funeral service and said said that the filibuster was a racist relic and it had to go.

So whatever they're in the majority has to go.

When they're a minority, then you have to use it to stop a judge from being confirmed.

I think he lost so much capital in this iteration of the Obama appearances because,

again, I don't want to beat a dead horse, but that iconic moment when he told those earnest African-American political democratic activists,

he said, you don't, basically, you don't know it, but you're suffering from false consciousness, and the African-American male is voting for a racist and sexist.

And only people like me, who have experience with such intricacies of human nature, can advise you.

And basically, they looked at him with daggers.

I think that we translated their looks into a text.

They would have said.

So you were the community organizer who, the last year of your presidency, when Trump was running against Hillary, you just outsourced yourself to Netflix and all of these tech companies.

You ended up making $100 million.

Now you're worth a half a billion, and you've got four mansions, and you've got a 2,000-gallon propane tank while you lecture us about global warming.

And you seem to think global warming is an existential threat, and it's going to put our seashore underwater, but you seem to have a propensity to buy homes on the coast at Hawaii and Martha's Vineyard.

Right.

And flying private.

Yeah.

Private, private, private, with a big fossil fuel footprint.

I think he's just such a hypocrite in so many different fields.

And

he does that hope and changey stuff with that fake cadence.

Everybody said, no, just talk, Barack.

We know it.

We've been there.

We suffered through it for eight years.

We know the phony black accent.

We know all of the, I'm not going, the Predoridio where you say, I'm not going to attack my enemies, but I won't, I'll admit the fact that Donald Trump is, you know, that's what he does, is a fascist or something done with him.

He really lost currency in this election because he lost his capital out there.

His stock

has fallen dramatically.

Victor, this video, this

was on X,

his talk at the Obama Foundation.

I thought it,

look, I don't like the guy.

I've never liked the guy.

But I thought it bordered on pathetic.

His tone, his rhetoric.

And you may be the last one in the room to realize

how the mighty have fallen.

It was what we always talk about.

It was

exactly what the left's thinking.

The left is thinking if I were Donald Trump and the left or the right or whoever had done to me what we did to Donald Trump and we were in power right now.

I know what I'd do if if I was Donald Trump against me.

I would go after him and use every branch of government the way that Biden did against him.

And therefore, Trump, because I'm a morally superior person to Trump, they think, Trump will surely do something, because we would if we'd suffered what we dished out to him.

But you know, he's not going to do that.

He's already said success is his revenge.

And

so,

again, this is the guy who really was the father of of Russian collusion because it was hatched out with Operation Hurricane Crossfire, Crossfire Hurricane in his office.

And people told him that it was going on.

And he knew that.

He knew that.

He knew the CIA was involved.

He knew the FBI was involved.

And he did nothing.

Or he encouraged it.

And he knows that.

He knows that.

This is a guy, you know, that...

Every time that he had a chance to divide the country and demagogue for political benefit the racial issue, he He said, you know, Trayvon would look like the child I never had.

Right during the trial of George

Zimmerman, where that really, he interfered in a lot of legal proceedings.

Remember after the Skip Gates thing where he just casually said that everybody knows the police harass black people.

Right.

And he just said stuff like that.

You know.

America's not only exceptional in the way that the Greeks and the British think their country is exceptional.

He just went somewhere and apologized.

Did you see that?

It was somewhere.

No, I'm sorry.

It was Biden went to Angola and apologized for slavery.

I thought he slept the whole time.

But I didn't know he was afraid of the sleep.

He does one of two things, sleeps or apologizes.

Wow.

I guess one thing

people of Angola

were sorry that

nine generations ago

Europeans partnered with your ancestors to enslave fellow black Africans.

If he'd said that, at least it would be.

And we were tutored by the Arab Muslim world who took more slaves out of Africa than Westerners did and continued far longer and continue today

in some places.

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Victor, I don't want you to repeat anything you may have discussed with the great Sammy Wink.

You do four of these shows a week, podcasts, two with me, two with Sammy.

Did you talk about,

I know you talked about Biden's pardon to his son.

Did you talk about

the possible, because you mentioned Anthony Fauci and Liz Cheney before, did you talk about these potential other pardons for these other characters?

If you did, we're...

I've never heard of that before,

that you would give blanket pardons

for any subsequent discovery that they had engaged in criminal activity, nor do I understand the mindset of an Anthony Fauci or Liz Cheney who would accept any.

Oh,

let me think about all the bad things I did.

Yeah, I need protection.

Give me a pardon.

Because it's going to come up.

So it's ridiculous.

And this is a person who said, remember those, have you seen that clip on the internet where someone has compiled all the times in conjunction with Biden's six refusals of

any idea, thought of pardoning the Son?

People, the commentators said rule of law.

What a contrast.

Rule of law

just shows that Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

Yeah, so

it's a mess.

And as we

Hunter, that pardon, as I said to Sammy, but I didn't really dwell on it, is a pardon for Jim Biden and Ashley Biden, three generations of Bidens, the grandkids, the children, and then Joe and Jill.

And they all had demonstrable lifestyles that is impossible to explain on a public servant's, even four years in the private sector, Joe Biden, after the Obama administration, could not have made that kind of money.

And

you don't really...

Everything about it was,

you know, when I read the letter, you know, when he said that he's

pardoning his son because of all of the treatment against him, and then nobody ever is held, is put in jail because of a gun violation.

Nobody's put in jail because of a dispute with the IRS that is drug-addled.

And I tweeted about that and I thought, no, they do that all the time.

If you don't report, if you try to make a million to two million a year for three years in a row and don't report it, you go into the Fresno IRS, which is a district headquarters, and you tell them that you were smoking too much crack cocaine, so you forgot to pay them.

And they're not going to let that off.

They're going to say to you a simple thing, Mr.

Biden, so you're trying to convince me.

that you could fly all over the world and you could conduct business with some of the most sophisticated, tough people in the world.

And for some such reason, they would send you up to $2 million a year, but you were too drug-addled the whole time this was occurring because you forgot to pay your taxes?

I don't think so.

And they'd already, remember they had already given him an

amnesty that Merrick Garland had for prior years where he probably did not pay taxes prior to the years in question that he was being formally charged with.

So he already had basically a de facto pardon from the government.

Right.

And now he's basically saying all of us, as soon as we become private citizens, we're all subject to

examination because we all know we did stuff that was wrong.

And Mr.

Big Guy and Mr.

10%,

you would be very funny.

And as I said to Sammy, there's enough indications that

Hunter Biden is one relapse away from bringing down Samson like the whole rotten temple of the Biden consortia.

Because if you think about it, you know, what was all that about threatening to bring lawyers, his lawyers, threatening to bring Biden in to testify?

I talked about that with Sammy and also

the whole...

What was the idea about put the paintbrush in your nose or blow the straw?

Is that what it's straw?

Take the straw and

put the paintbrush in your mouth and then blow.

Is that to tell tell everybody in the Biden family, hey everybody, look at this.

You know, I'll just give an excursion here.

We had 12 first cousins

of my kids among them on this ranch.

And I had a very good

sister dash, I would call her sister, first cousin, and they would volunteer to take kids, all the whole brood in a van, you know, up to the mountain.

And one occasion, they were severely disciplined because some of the children were out in a boat and it was time to go and they were late and they had to get all 12 of them in the van and they'd say, can't hear you, can't hear you, sorry.

And they were 20 feet off and they were rowing around and they'd say, get in there.

Is it too deep to come and get us?

Well, that's what Hunter was doing.

He was saying,

Is there anything wrong with me reminding people that I used to blow through my nose?

Well, maybe I should do that for the world to see my paint.

So I'm going to put all the paint on the canvas and just like I did crack cocaine or snort, I'm going to blow out of my nose.

And then I'm going to get every grifter who wants access to the West Wing and they're going to buy my paintings and I'll get some creepy guy who owns a

studio.

or an art gallery in New York to claim that I won't know who the grifters are.

Oh,

dad, does that put you in danger?

Maybe you better be very careful about what I say, and maybe you better start thinking of amnesty.

That's what you know.

We've discussed, and many others have made the Biden-Corleone comparisons, but I was watching The Godfather again last week, and, you know,

it's such a great movie.

It's such an anti-American movie, though.

The Corleons have great contempt for America, but they have great use for America.

There's a cynicism that everybody's up for sale.

Well, yeah, or, you know, even the son Michael, who was allegedly not part of the scheme, he was going to be, what, Senator Corleone, President Corleone, who was going to pull the strings.

You've just thought of that great thing where Kay says to him, your family assumed is their only crop.

These politicians don't kill people.

She says,

you better think twice about saying that.

Yeah, yeah.

Now, America is a thing to be exploited by the Corleons, and it's proven to be a thing to be exploited by the Bidens.

I think

I have to reflect more deeply on the movie and the comparisons to this great movie.

Do you think he's Fredo?

Is that your point?

No, well, I think they're all kind of Fredos in one way.

There's no, certainly, no one is comparable to Vito Corleone.

Although Vito Corleone as a kid was

kind of a

mute, right?

I mean, when he escaped from situations.

I did the other day, though,

I was.

I woke up really early in the morning and just the thought hit me because I'd seen younger Joe Biden in his 50s, 40s, 30s.

And he was very tan looking and he had those hair implants and he had a head of hair.

And he was, I'm not saying that he was rhetorically adept or mellifilous, but he could speak well.

But here's my point.

He had the worst attitude and snarky and made fun of people and cruel and

attacked people.

He was always that way.

And then, you know, the plagiarizing of Neil Kinnock's speech, the lying,

that famous scene where he's with those reporters, I was that first, I was at the top of my local cost.

I had three scholarships.

It was all a lie.

And I saw the other clip you've talked about, you wrote about it, where he,

I shouldn't say disparaged, disparaged, he smeared, slandered, and ruined the reputation of a truck driver who tried to avoid his first wife, who was probably culpable at that crossroads.

But he's capable of anything.

And so there is a force in the world.

I don't know, the Greeks call it nemesis,

the Indians call it karma,

we call it divine intervention.

But there is a leveling force in the universe.

All of that career that he was so vain, He was always getting a tan.

He had to have Botox.

He had to have hair implants.

He always had to make fun of people.

He always had to skirt by by lying.

He had to invent this false pseudo-personality of old Joe Biden from Scranton.

I think he moved when he was in his preteen years.

And now

it's all written on his face.

It's all that sins collectively is life.

You can see them.

Well,

maybe we were just in the first inning of the Justice for the Bidens.

We'll see.

I think they have a counting.

It's kind of like...

I'll just finish this Biden interlude, which we hadn't talked about doing.

Did you see James Carville, his epitaph of the Biden career, when he said he's a tragic figure?

I did.

I thought we could maybe talk about that, but go ahead.

Yeah, absolutely.

There was nothing tragic.

It was all predetermined.

It was scripted.

And he said, well, if he had just stepped down, he was never going to step down.

Jill and he had no intention of stepping down.

We know that because they had no intention of saying no when they stepped up.

They knew he was demented.

The Democratic Party knew he was demented.

That was the point, that he wasn't Pete Buttigig, he wasn't Spartacus, he wasn't Bernie Sanders.

He was a demented old Democratic hack that could pass himself off under the guise of COVID and be secluded in the basement and play act that he was this conservative from Pennsylvania and Delaware.

That was the point.

And they could put through the most left-wing agenda in history, and it all worked fine.

And the only reason that he's tragic is because he couldn't finish the script.

And he just imploded.

And so Caribbean goes, well, if he had just stepped down, and God just stepped down, if he just stepped down,

his name would be on a building.

No,

it wouldn't.

He didn't, what?

Joe Biden let in 12 million illegal aliens.

He destroyed the border.

Joe Biden invited,

he destroyed deterrence from, he let a Chinese balloon go across the United States.

He offered his assessment was Vladimir Putin's on the verge of war.

He said, it depends on it's a minor or major invasion, whether we'll orient.

I can go on.

I don't want to get into it.

But he's not a tragic figure.

And James Barbara.

I mean, there's something weird about that guy.

I was watching his,

I'm speaking on a laptop now, but did you see the angle of that laptop he was on?

Yes.

They have angle problems with even Biden from above.

I know that.

Biden is, when you saw Biden and she was giving that keynote campaign address, and he kind of snuck into the White House and he looked around and he thought, oh, no AIDS, no texts.

I'll just flip a home,

and I'll have this weird angle like I'm crazy, and I'll call half of America garbage and ruin her speech and occasion.

And he did that.

Carville's the same way.

I was watching him, and

the angle was,

you know what I mean?

It was like he was on some kind of

ski slope, and then he had the sun coming behind him.

I don't know if that was, he opened the window deliberately so he could have sort of a,

you know, those

stock scripted halos and Renaissance Renaissance

Catholic and Byzantine picture.

We have the rays coming out.

But it was almost over his head.

It was just bizarre.

Then he uses the F-word, almost every other word.

Well, I think he thinks that part of the tragedy for Biden, and this is how Washington thinks, right, is that, well, he could have had the

Biden Presidential Museum, et cetera.

That would have been their honors and laws.

Somebody said they're not even going to buy them a bookmobile.

Well, we promised Victor to get your thoughts on the

Trump's first hundred days, and we're going to get to that.

Maybe we will also get to some military history when we come back from these final important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording again on December 7th, 2024.

Victor

Stephen Miller was on

I don't know if he was on Laura Ingram, one of the Fox shows, and he gave, as he does, a boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Oh, yeah.

Really, really.

I'm a fan of Stephen Miller.

I'm especially a fan because he has some unique ability to drive the left absolutely insane.

Oh, yeah.

I think people are.

He knows it to be a lot of people.

He knows how to push every one of their buttons.

Yeah.

And he does.

He's completely,

he's got mastery of detail with that staccato.

It was like a machine gun burst.

And it seemed, it comes off like, this is, it's credible.

Here's what he said.

Energy boom.

Return, getting rid of the illegals, peace in the Middle East, tax cuts, swamp drainage going on all within the first hundred days.

And I'm thinking,

I believe this.

At least it's going to start.

He has to in the first hundred days.

He's a lamp duck president, and he has to keep his enemies off guard and off balance and get it through.

And

he's got a lot of non-traditional

messengers.

So RFK, Tulsi Gabber,

along with Vivek, Vivek, and Elon, they've all this weird crew has kind of startled his opponents.

And they can't quite figure out what's going on.

So they've got to move, move, move, move.

And

here in California, I filled up, I drove down to Pepperdine, and it was 540

in the L.A.

area.

And so my point is that

Captain Newsom's grooming himself to run, so he's going to say, I promise you that if I'm president, I will make sure that I restrict enough energy to get that price steady at $6.

Is that what he wants to do?

So he's going to run against that is what I'm saying.

Donald Trump said he wants to get gas down to $3 a gallon.

I'm sorry to make you the news reporter here, but again, we're on December 7th, Gavin Newsom's special session.

to Trump-proof the state started a few days ago.

I searched for it.

Like, what's happened?

I think I don't get any sense that there's been anything dramatic yet.

Have you seen any?

No, he's running for office and he wants to claim the territory on the left that he is the

largest off the most important officer holder that is anti-Trump.

But given that we have the largest exodus of any state, people leaving this country, we have the highest basket of sales, gas, income tax, we have the highest continental gas price price and energy price.

We're right down in the bottom five or six as far as test scores.

27% of the state was not born in the United States.

We have the largest number of illegal aliens of any state.

The largest number

of homeless.

We have one out of three people on public assistance.

21% of the state lives below

the poverty line.

And this is the key point under Gavin.

We have the highest ratio of wealth disparity between the upper, upper class and the lower, lower with a vanishing middle class.

He gets in, as I said, his Abercrombie and fish

felt best, and he

slicks his hair back, and then he tries to use his hands like he's Cicero, and he screams and yells, and tough guy.

And he's ruined the state.

So he wants to spend $25 million on legal fees to attack Trump and to help illegal aliens avoid deportation, why he has a $75 billion budget deficit, while he has a 13.3 income tax rate.

You tell me how you do that.

But he did it.

And so I just don't think that the campaign slogan from him, I'm going to do for the United States what I did for California, is going to work.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, putting on your military historian

hat, cap, helmet, whatever.

I am fascinated.

By the way, your book, The Second World Wars, I want to recommend to folks to read it, to get it.

Again, make a little Christmas gift.

So if there's somebody in your family that is a military history buff, I think it's a

terrific gift idea.

You've sold

over 100,000 copies of that have sold.

Yeah.

Just a fascinating book.

Victor, December 7th was a few days already into Japan's movements to not only attack Pearl Harbor, but a number of other places, the Philippines and

Thailand and other

Malaysia.

Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of fascinated that that country, not a tiny country, right?

It was half, but still half,

relatively at the time, half the population of America, that it had such broad

plans that succeeded at the get-go, anyway.

Could you talk about the scale and scope of what they

once they were opened up by Admiral Perry to the West, they became hyper-Western.

So they had sent

in the early 20th century a quarter million nautical engineers to British universities right during the dreadnought phase and had mastered Western technology and

brought to it it Japanese technology and ingenuity.

And it started out as emulative and people kind of were condescending, especially Japan's role in World War I.

They patrolled the Mediterranean for the Allies.

But by the 1930s, they were...

hyper-industrializing and with greater discipline as other countries were going through the Depression.

And they looked out and said, you know what?

We don't have any natural resources and we are 70 million people in a very small territory about the size of California.

And this is just not going to work.

So the militarists took over, dissolved the parliament in a series of coups, and they looked at the strategic map and they said, let's go into China.

First they went into Manchuria, successfully so.

and if I could use that term, raped that colony.

And then they went in in 1937 and invaded China.

People forget that by the time the war war broke out with us, they controlled about 40% of China and they controlled the two greatest cities, Beijing and

Shanghai.

And they had Shang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong fighting among each other.

And their whole plan was to annex the western part of China.

They also controlled all of Korea.

north and south.

And by the way, North Korea was far more industrially developed than the South was.

So forget this myth that North Korea and the communists, I mean, they suffered a lot of damage in the Korean War, but that was always where the hydroelectric plants were and the heavy industry.

And then they had a decision to make.

And so the decision was this.

They had three alternatives.

Four alternatives.

That's right around November, October, and they're negotiating and giving this façade to the United States.

They're not going to attack.

I'll go back a little earlier, March of 1941.

And they have a war council.

and some say, you know what?

Hitler's going to invade Russia at some point.

So he invades, and they discuss, should we go into Russia?

On December 7th,

according to Nazi lore, they can see the Kremlin spires are at the first subway station.

Army Group Center is going to take Moscow.

So they thought they were going to take them any day.

Vladistovak is, what, 200 or 300 miles across

the Russian-Japanese sea.

So they thought, a good people said, we'll go to Vladistovak and we'll get in late and we'll clean up Western Russia.

We'll meet the Nazis.

They had,

and some said, well, wait a minute, they screwed us over on the Molotov Ribbon tract.

They made a private deal with Russia.

Now they've broken it.

But at the time, we were fighting Zhukov along the Mongolian border.

So we should...

We should not break our non-aggression.

They had signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in April of 1941.

So anyway, the point is some people said we should go into Russia because, and then the other people said, no, we have a non-aggression pact, and I'm not sure the Nazis are telling us the truth, that they've knocked Russia out of the war.

The second group said, we've got two and a half million people fighting in China.

It's still 650 million people.

And we,

you know, no offense to the Army, but when you look at Japanese aeronautical aeronautical technology and naval technology,

we have parity with Western power.

We do not have parity in terms of heavy artillery,

machine guns,

mines, mortar.

They had a good mortar, and tanks.

So that's the weakest of our arm, of the triad.

And yet we're bogged down in China.

So we got to just

keep cool and finish the Chinese problem.

And then a third said, no, wait a minute, I got a better idea.

The Dutch East Indies doesn't exist.

It's not Dutch.

Holland fell.

They fell in May of 1940.

For a year and a half, there's nobody in charge.

And there is no

French Indo-China.

They're a bunch of Vichy fascists.

We'll just go in there and take the Mekong Delta and get all the rice in Asia.

And they won't say a word.

They're on our side.

If they do, they're scared.

And then they said, and then there's the rubber in Malaysia.

We'll get that, we'll get the biggest.

Britain is almost inert.

We'll take Malaysia from them.

We'll take Burma from them.

But there's one thing we will not do.

We'll tiptoe around Pearl Harbor, and we will tiptoe around the Mariana Islands, and we will tiptoe around the Philippines.

And the United States will not get in because they didn't get in and help Britain during the European.

And that was the big fight.

And then Yamamoto, who everybody in the States idealizes still and says, oh, he was a poet.

He had haiku.

He was an artist.

He said, I can give, I can raise hell for six months, and then I can't guarantee, oh, I'm a tragic hero.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

His idea was the fourth view.

We've got to attack the United States, and we will destroy the Seventh Fleet, and we will give them such a humiliating blow, given that they will be confronted with a two-front war, because Hitler will probably declare war on them, and they're just about ready to go to Caput.

In six months, they will sue for peace.

We have eight carriers in the Pacific.

They have two or three.

Their battleships are old.

We have the two largest battleships in the world, the Yamato and the Mushasi, much bigger and better than anything the Americans have.

That was their attitude, Yamamoto.

So they chose the fourth option.

attack Pearl Harbor, and they did something that no one thought was possible.

Admiral Short said, Richardson,

Short, and Kimmel, they all said it's impossible for a Japanese fleet to sail, steam, I should say, 3,500 miles under radio silence.

There's no way that that huge armada would ever get close to Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, without us knowing.

And they did just that.

And then they attacked, and they only had two sorties, and they sank or disabled eight

20 to 30-year-old battleships.

Had the battleships known they were coming, Jack, and went out of Pearl Harbor and met them on the high seas, that eight carrier group, they would have all been sunk in 30 minutes.

So it was kind of a gift that we only lost 2,400 soldiers, sailors, because they were in port.

And some of the ships, I think six of them, five of them, were refloated and actually did some yeoman duty on all of the marine

invasions of the Pacific Islands.

islands they were very valuable because of their 16-inch 14 guns for naval support bombing the the japanese but they didn't take out the oil depots they didn't take out the engineering works the uh machine shops they didn't do any of that they could have stayed off off the they lost about 35 40 planes but they they could have stayed there for another day and really done wreck havoc.

And then the carriers weren't there.

The Saratoga wasn't there.

the Lexington wasn't there, and the

Enterprise wasn't there, and the Wasp and the Hornet weren't there yet in the Pacific.

So they didn't take out any of our carriers, and just six months later at Midway, they would lose four carriers, and that was the turning point.

That group of Americans was what E.B.

Sledge called the old breed.

That was still before the big draft.

They were just starting to draft people, but the core of the Marine Corps were the people who were lifers, and they were training a new young group of people in 1941.

And the same thing was true of the Navy.

So it was a very small group of professional soldiers, and they were trying to, as fast as possible, train the new draftees.

But they were amazing people.

They really were, too.

In six months before the

they had told Yama Yamamoto they are building something called the Essex Carrier and they're going to build 20 or 30 of them and every one of them is going to be the best carrier in the world.

And they're going to come in sometime in late 42 or mid-42.

And that's when he coined the idea I can raise hell for six months.

Did Yamamoto's family?

I don't think he really said that, but that's what was attributed to him.

Didn't he serve in America for

a while?

He's a naval attaché at Harvard.

Another thing to remember, though,

all the Japanese people in the military who visited the United States in the 20s, 30s, and 40s did not come across with the idea that we were a formidable military power.

Economic, yes.

So Yamamoto

thought that the people who wore spats and jiggerbugged and did the Charleston in the 1920s were pretty soft people.

Tojo, on his way to Europe, took a train across the United States.

He came to the same conclusion as did the foreign minister, Mitsuka.

He had been, as I said, a foreign exchange student in an Oregon high school.

He was fluent in English.

He was one of the most militant anti-Americans.

So I think we have to disabuse ourselves that

everybody in the world looks at us and wants to emulate us.

And no, they think that we are pampered, privileged,

unserious people.

I don't agree with that, but they have that misconstruction.

Yeah.

Well, remember, like the Islamic Brotherhood, didn't they?

The Muslim Brotherhood?

Wasn't that?

That has something to do with a guy going to a dance in Colorado?

Yeah, they were mean to him, he thought.

That was more than just decadence.

He thought that they were condescending and American girls, he thought, were prostitutes, but mostly because they didn't want to dance with him, I guess.

He was killed.

They executed him.

I don't know if it was Nasser, who, but the Egyptian government executed him.

But you know, another thing is that

I think it's important that we have this, because of the atomic bombs that Sammy and I talked about

on our last podcast, we have this very rosy view of Japan now as a, it is a good ally, and they're a very impressive country.

But this idea that we did something wrong to earn Pearl Harbor or we were imperialist or

No, they were butchering.

They ended up butchering 16 million people in China.

They had a Holocaust in China.

Did you say they killed more citizens

than the Nazis did?

Yeah.

They did.

And they tried, they used biological, chemical warfare.

They experimented on American

prisoners before they even had any experience of us.

As soon as they took the Philippines, they were shooting American prisoners and beheading them.

They beheaded sailors that they swept up on rafts at the Battle of Midway from the sunken American ships.

And in a kill ratio, we said, well, we bombed them.

Yes, we did bomb them, but you couldn't reason with that government.

They were not going to surrender.

They were not going to surrender.

You could burn their industrial quarters, you could mine their harbors, you could drop.

one atomic, they were not going to surrender until we dropped a second one.

And so it's a lot of mythology that they were reluctant.

They were pushed in it because we were unfair to them.

Then they fought.

They were desperate people.

All they wanted was rice and oil and a chance to have a seat at the world table.

No, it was a very Nazi-like, they were comparable to the Nazis.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I'm glad you're here today to have discussed all these things.

But you almost weren't here today, right?

I mean, you had, could you tell us about your car?

Oh, I went down to, yes, I had to give a final.

I was giving a final down south, so I took the most dangerous highway in the United States per mile driven, the 99.

And as all you 99 veterans know, there's two things that you shouldn't be on the 99.

One is 6:30, 7 in the morning, 7:30,

8, 9

in the winter because there's zero visibility with Thule Fog.

And I happen to be near

Thule-era, Tulare.

And so I was driving with, I have not seen that type of

fog in a long, long time.

That was like I used to see in high school.

But I counted two white lines maximum.

And I was driving in the left lane behind a truck.

And that truck passed me, had passed me.

In the right lane and cut back in front of me.

He couldn't have seen if he wanted to.

He was going about 55,

I was going about 40, but I was behind him thinking it was safe.

Well, he hit something right ahead of me

and I slammed on the brakes and slammed just barely.

If I had been in my truck, I would have hit him.

And I hit the, there was one car ahead of me and we went into the shoulder.

And then

I quickly

realized that he was jackknife almost across the whole and this was one of of gavin newsom's neglected projects where there is a 40 mile corridor roughly from tulare to delano where there is no six lanes it goes down to two lanes right and it's the oldest part of the 99 from my childhood and so i quickly kind of went off to the right

and

I noticed something very quickly.

You couldn't stop it from happening, right?

It was going to happen and happen because nobody could see anything and these trucks were going very fast.

Some cars were too.

And I didn't think anything over 40 miles an hour was safe.

They were going 55.

And bam, bam, bam.

I'm just sitting there.

And then I, you know, I thought, well, I'm not going to make the final.

I'm screwed.

I almost got killed, slammed on the brake.

If I hadn't have been in my car,

it's a newer car, it's two years old, but I literally got up in my seat and put all my weight on the brake.

And I could feel like almost like the back wheels were coming.

It and it was

and swerving and had anti-lock brake it's a wonderful car and i just missed the truck and then i swerved over into the left and then out to the right and

i was standing there and i just missed something on the left that i couldn't see it was the guardrail and then when i swerved like a semicircle on the right there was a sign that I almost hit.

And then I thought, what do you do now?

Yeah.

Because you can't stop it.

So there were four or five chain reactions going on.

And then I realized that the car ahead of me, who had suffered a little damage, I think, he kind of went around.

But you couldn't really go around this jackknife, all this mess, because you didn't know what was on

the right part of the right lane in the shoulder.

But anyway, the long story is, we went around it, and then a few cars got around it before the pileup stopped everything.

And then

I went, I think, 30 miles an hour all the way.

You were heading down to Pepperdown, yes?

Yes, yes.

But it took me almost five hours, usually three hours.

But I just, I got really angry thinking: number one,

here it is 2024, and Gavin Newson really thinks he's running for president.

And the two north-south laterals in California have the most traffic are the 99.

And there is a 40-mile swath, 30-mile swath outside of Sacramento that's two lanes in each direction.

There's one

between

Madera and Merced.

There's this huge one south of Tulare.

And

for a fraction, Jack, of the high-speed Stonehenge mess, he could have had six lanes from Bakersfield all the way to the Oregon border, and he could have taken I-5

basically from the Bakersfield area all the way up

to Northern California.

He could have had six lanes.

The land is there.

There's plenty of room to expand, and he won't do it, either because he thinks that he wants to put everybody in a unionized mass transit, or he's got other things that are more important, like giving $500 million for health care for illegal aliens, or expanding the port of entrance from Mexico and the San Diego border.

But it just gets you really angry when you almost get killed on the 99 in this stretch of

death row.

And then you think, oh, the other thing that's really dangerous is, and I like truck drivers a lot, but there is something gone very wrong with the trucking industry.

And I know that when I wrote about the 99 before, one of the officers of the American Trucking Association wrote me and said, Victor, we're way ahead of you.

Most carriers tell their people to avoid the 99.

It's too dangerous.

But apparently not, because I see more trucks.

But here's what I'm getting at.

Have you noticed this in your part of the world?

If you have three lanes now, there are truckers who just get in the middle lane and they say, you know what?

I don't believe 55 miles.

I've got radar detectors.

I'm going to go 65 and I'm going to take over the whole middle lane even if there's nobody in the right lane.

It's mine.

And then on the

Every once in a while when there are people,

an automatic ticket in California, if you go in the left lane, the left lane.

They do that.

They go around once in a while when there's two lanes.

They get in the left lane to pass a slower truck in the middle lane.

This really came to me on the way.

So I had to, you know, I had to give some lecture, a lecture for Pepperdine at final, and then I went over to Michael Finch's Horowitz Freedom Center, which was really great.

I spoke near the Getty, and I had to go home before the fog.

And you know what?

The grapevine was like Roadboard, the main transit over the mountains into the Los Angeles basin.

It's five lanes, and here was the truck going uphill, far right.

Second lane was there, and three lanes are reserved for heavy traffic.

You know, it was four o'clock in the afternoon on a Friday, as you can imagine what it was like coming out of Los Angeles.

Here the truckers are, Jack.

They take the middle lane, the third lane.

So you're looking, as you look in a distance, there's a truck in the right lane, there's a truck in the middle lane, there's a truck in the

left middle lane, and then there's only two lanes for the vast majority of vehicles.

And I don't know what the ethos is of the new trucking generation, but it's basically

I've got a 15, 20 ton rig and I can do whatever I want because I'm going to take over the right and left on a two-lane road.

Because in the fog, there were more trucks in the left lane where I was than there were cars.

And you had this weird sensation, and I only got in the right lane because I almost hit a car that was almost, it was some person who was panicking.

I was in the right lane and this person, I think, had a meltdown where they were going about four miles an hour.

Couldn't handle it.

And so I went right into the left lane and then I was behind this truck caravan that were going so fast I couldn't, I thought to myself, If there's anything up there, they cannot stop those.

And of course, as soon as I thought that, they jackknife.

And I.

I don't know what it is.

I think part of it is, this will be very controversial, but when you have 27% of your population that was not born in the United States, you have an enormous challenge to educate people in traffic law, customs, and traditions, and vehicle safety.

Because there were so many people on the side of the road that

You know, that a lot of the truck drivers who were stopped were Sikhs

from India.

And I'm not trying to stereotype somebody, but there's something wrong.

I don't know what it is, but somebody in our culture is not educating our immigrants to say, or other people, all of them, force multipliers.

I'm not blaming immigrants.

I'm just saying that that's a force multiplier.

You're not taught.

We have so many people here that do not have driver's license.

in California.

They do not have, I was talking to an insurance person, I spoke to an insurance group.

She said the number of people, given the exorbitant rates of California car insurance, who don't drive against the law without insurance is phenomenal now.

You've got a lot of uninsured drivers, a lot of people who are driving, who are illegally here without licenses.

You read the road signs.

A lot of people coming from Asia, Africa, Latin America, who do not know California or the American traffic safety rules or laws or customs and have not been trained.

And you put that all together on a decrepit road system that

the leadership is completely neglected as considered, you know, fossil fuel empowerment.

That's what a highway is for them.

You've got

a prescription for a catastrophe, and then you add any little

rain,

fog,

anything into that mixture, you're going to get a lot of people killed, and that's what's happening.

And the California drivers are just, they're not like they used to be.

They're insane.

I was watching, every once in a while, I would see somebody

in my rearview mirror when we broke out of the sun for a few, near Bakersfield, it started to get sunny.

Then they would come up about 90 miles an hour out of nowhere.

They were like fugitives fleeing a cloud.

You'd look in your rearview mirror and bam, one of them would show up and it would just zigzag between traffic.

And you'll be noticing everything, I don't know in your state, but I thought there were rules that you couldn't have completely blacked out front windows.

Can you do that in New York?

In Connecticut?

No, you're not.

I don't know if they're doing it.

It's legal, but almost every car, you couldn't even see the person in it.

The back window is black and the side window is black.

So you have these anonymous people and these bullets that are just zooming around.

Then you have these truckers all over the road map.

And they don't, they're not like the old truckers, you know, that would blink their lights and let you in.

This is something, these are younger people.

They're off.

I understand it's tough to make a living, but they are going.

I didn't see in my, I did 11 hours of drive.

I was in the car

11 hours.

I had to drive over from Pepperdine to the 405 and then

We drove up to on the other side of the 101 for a lecture and then I drove five, as I said, five hours up and almost four and a half back.

And the point I'm making is I didn't see one truck, not one that was going 55 miles an hour.

Not one.

And I've talked to

highway patrolmen and they've said to me that

if they were to ticket every

driver that was going over five miles an hour or ten miles, they couldn't do it.

It would be everybody.

I think it would be probably be 90% of the people on the road.

Hey, Victor,

I'm glad you did not get caught up in the jackknife thing.

I felt like, Jack, you remember Das Boot when Jürgen Proctow, the commander of the submarine at the bottom in the Mediterranean, they think they're all going to die, and then that brilliant engineer figures out how to

redo the electric mortars.

And they pump the water, and they start to pop up.

And they open up and they start, is it long-waited temporary?

They they play, and they get the fresh air, and he says, not yet, not yet.

And that's what I felt like.

I screamed out to myself, not yet.

You're not going to get there not yet.

You're going to get me yet.

I've always said you're indestructible.

So,

Victor, you've been.

I felt like I did when I woke up.

And I was in a black room in Libya at the Red Crescent Clinic.

Very brilliant, I don't know if he's brilliant, but he was such a wonderful guy to save me.

I had a ruptured appendix, and he operated, I think I told you, with ether.

And he looked over me, and I thought I was in hell.

It was dark.

And I said,

I was, you know, I had,

are you a devil?

No, no, I'm not a devil, but I think the devil almost got you with this problem you had.

I'm here to save you.

You're well.

And he hold up and said, look, Mr.

Hansen.

And he had an appendix in a plastic bag and alcohol.

Take it home.

See if you can get it through customs.

Yeah, and I say, well, what is that?

He said, the devil didn't do it.

That's called gangrene, not the devil.

Well, Victor,

you've been terrific.

Again, I'm happy you've survived this.

You've got more lives than a cat.

I'd like to thank our listeners for doing just that, listening, especially our new listeners.

I want to thank those who

check out.

Yeah, thank everybody for listening.

Well, I want to thank those who subscribe to Civil Thoughts, which I do for the Center for Civil Society.

Every week, every Friday, the email comes with 14 recommended readings.

If you want to get it, go to civilthoughts.com and sign up.

Victor,

we've been doing very well.

Listeners, thank you.

The show's been very highly rated.

Some folks on Apple can leave comments and rate the show zero to five stars.

Practically everyone gives Victor five, and some people leave comments.

And here's, I'm just going to be two, two.

One, I'm going to do it in, I think, the tone of the person who wrote it.

For the love of God, Jack, get to your point and then stifle your mouth.

This is from Chipso Tool One, who's titled it, Jack Talks Too Much.

Thank you, Chipso Tool.

And then the great VDH.

I always learn from listening to Victor speak.

It's amazing knowledge that he has and how he communicates it to the listeners.

And that's from JFlotex82.

Thank you.

Feel better.

I spoke to, I don't know, maybe 150, 170.

I don't know.

I didn't count them yesterday.

And

they all said,

they didn't say we listened to you on Fox.

They didn't say we read your columns.

They all said they listened to our podcast.

And they all had very nice things to say about Sammy.

Jack, Jack, and Sammy.

The great Sammy.

They were

and some of them suggested that

they said something about,

I was, they said, you're changed because of the election.

You're livelier.

Yeah.

And I confess.

Where's Eeyore?

We miss Eeyore.

I feel that way.

Anyway.

All right.

You've been terrific.

Thanks, everybody.

Hey, we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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