Israel, Mexico, Europe and Giving Thanks in America

When empires debase their currency, citizens who hold gold survive the transition.

That's not opinion, it's documented fact.

Trump's economic warning isn't speculation, it's pattern recognition.

The same signals that preceded every major currency crisis are flashing now.

Unsustainable debt, foreign nations dumping our bonds, and central banks hoarding gold.

But Trump's also revealing the solution.

The IRS strategy he's used for decades is available to every American.

It's how the wealthy preserve their fortunes when paper currencies fail.

American Alternative Assets has documented this strategy in their free 2025 wealth protection guide.

It shows exactly how to position yourself before the turbulence Trump's warning about arrives.

Call 888-615-8047 for your free guide.

That's 888-615-8047 or visit victorlovesgold.com.

The patterns are clear.

Make sure you're on the right side of them.

Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

I'm thankful to be host, lucky to be host, of this show with the great man, 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.

He has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

VictorHanson.com is the address.

Later on in the show, I'll tell you why I think you should be subscribing to it.

We are recording on Saturday, the 23rd of November, and this particular episode is out on Thursday, the 28th.

I think it's the 28th.

That's Thanksgiving Day.

And

I'm going to, when we get to the end of this episode, I am going to ask Victor about his favorite kind of turkey stuffing.

But before we do that, before we do that, we've got some serious topics to talk about, including one really serious and very troubling.

Victor, let's begin the show with that, the International Criminal Court's arrest orders for Benjamin Netanyahu and others.

So let's do that when we come back from these important messages.

Like you, when I bought my last pair of shoes, I looked for stylish comfort and beautiful engineering.

And that might make you think Italian, but if you're buying sheets, it should make you think bowl and branch.

The colors, the fabric, the design.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with long-lasting quality, offering extraordinary softness to start and getting softer and softer for years to come.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with the finest, 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave.

Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become even softer with every wash.

Plus, Bowl and Branch comes with a 30-night worry-free guarantee.

I've been sleeping like a baby in my bowl and Branch sheets, which keep me cool on those hot summer nights, and they're the perfect place for sunrise and morning coffee.

So, join me.

Feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with Bowl and Branch.

Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bowlandbranch.com/slash Victor.

That's Bowl and Branch.

B-O-L-L-A-N-D-B-R-A-N-C-H dot com slash Victor to save 15% off and unlock free shipping.

Exclusions may apply, and we'd like to thank Bowling Branch for sponsoring the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Cooler temperatures are rolling in, and as always, Quince is where I turn for false staples that actually last.

From cashmere to denim to boots, the quality holds up and the price still blows me away.

Quince has the kind of false staples you'll wear non-stop, like super soft 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at just $60.

Their denim is durable and fits right, and their real leather jackets bring that clean classic edge without the elevated price tag.

What makes Quince different?

They partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen.

So you get top-tier fabrics and craftsmanship craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands.

When the weather cools down, my Quint sweaters are a go-to.

My cashmere short sleeve that works under any jacket, formal or casual, or my thick, long-sleeve, go-everywhere, do-everything sweater that pairs with any pant or jogger.

Quint products are my favorites, which is why I went to Quince to buy my recent very beautiful purse that leaves the house every time I do.

Keep it classic and cool this fall with long-lasting staples from Quince.

Go to quince.com slash Victor for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns.

That's q-u-in-ce.com slash victor for free shipping and 365-day returns.

Quince.com slash victor and we'd like to thank Quince for sponsoring the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

We are back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor, the International Criminal Court, The Hague, which the United States I believe is not part of,

it has issued arrest warrants for war crimes for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant.

And I guess if the head of the country of Israel goes to France or Spain or one of these EU countries, he might very well be arrested and attempt to prosecute him.

I was just

freaking nuts.

Your thoughts?

Well, all of these things had two

cycles of birth.

The first was the Versailles Treaty.

And I can tell you that

that thing was flawed from the beginning, but anytime you have an army that is inside the country that it invaded, as the German Imperial Army was in 1918 on the 11th day of the 11th month in the 11th hour, and it does not concede defeat, and then the peace treaty takes place

months later.

They don't arrive till January.

They take six months.

You've got problems.

So they were the utopians at Versailles, and they came up with this idea of an international criminal court.

The United States had no part of it.

Remember, we were not.

Woodrow Wilson got a stroke trying to convince people to sign on to the League of Nations and the Versailles Treaty.

But we had some pretty wise people back there.

The second iteration was what to do with the Nazis after

World War II, the Nazi criminals and the Japanese criminals.

So there were international criminal courts at Nuremberg.

The problem was the same thing as we learned with the original court at The Hague.

If you don't have legitimate judges or people from constitutional societies, then it's just

a farce.

So you can't have people in the Soviet Union from a government that had murdered 20 million of its own under the Great Terror and liquidated during the show trials and the military tribunal trials in the Soviet Union in the 30s another 100,000, then condemning and had butchered 20,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest.

You can't have those people judging Nazi war criminals, and they did.

So it has a distributable record.

And

if you have the UN, it's kind of an offshoot of the UN Commission on Human Rights.

And when you have people like Venezuela or Somalia or Colombia or Bolivia, all illiberal regimes on these human rights commissions or on

members of these international, you get what you see today.

And, you know, I think it was by 1980, half of all UN resolutions, half of them in the period of, you know, Ol Pot,

Mao Zedong's 60, 70, were against Israel.

So now what's very funny is that the EU has pledged to honor the European Criminal Court, largely because it never has to do anything to defend itself.

And by that I mean NATO is a euphemism for the United States.

So it was very easy to say that U.S.

officers in Iraq and Afghanistan should be subject to international criminal court sanctions.

And of course, George W.

Bush stopped that.

Said, there's no way you're going to indict an officer for ordering an artillery strike against terrorists.

And if you do, this is what's going to happen.

So they backed off us, but they go after Israel.

And

I think

they're going after it because it's the operations in Gaza.

There was a lot written this week that NATO, NATO military high commanders have told the IDF that they are a lot more careful in their anti-terrorism raids and operations than NATO troops were, say, in the Balkans.

And so

it's just another sign that Israel is small, 11 million people, it's always vulnerable, it's Jewish, and the world applies a standard.

So now we're to believe that Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal,

but Vladimir Putin is not, I guess.

And the people who are committing the atrocities in Sudan are not, I guess.

Or the Chinese that got a million people in a forced labor camp are not, I guess, or North Korea that's starving its people is not, I guess, or Iran that sent 500 missiles at civilian targets in Israel is not, I guess, it's completely illegitimate.

It has no

credibility.

We should not honor it.

In fact, we should go farther.

We should say that any country that tries to arrest the head of state of Israel, we will cut all aid off.

I'm not going to tell Mr.

Trudeau to stop his virtue signaling.

By the way, he's

everything, the world isn't topsy-turvy.

He's panicky now because of all this things he said about Trump in the wilderness years of the last four years of Trump's.

And now, did you see what he said the other day that he wants a new Canadian-American North American trade pact with one provisio that he, Mr.

Liberal, is going to kick out Mexico.

He does not want Mexico in this trade pact.

Largely.

Why?

Well, because Mexico has made a satanic bargain with China.

So China is to get around sanctions and tariffs is sending products to Mexico, having them reassembled or sneaking them in the United States as if they're Mexican.

Right.

So the Mexican government exists

out of

three things make it exist.

Number one, it's getting $60 billion in remittances from its expatriates, and the vast majority of them are A, getting some kind of public support

and two, they're illegally here.

That's the 30 million people here.

And they don't want to stop that.

So that's why they're opening the border.

Number two, they're basically run by the cartels who are poisoning Americans, killing them with fentanyl and trafficking in children.

And then three, they are a conduit or a retail store for Chinese products to avoid sanctions and tariffs.

And so they're really,

if you think about the death to fentanyl, they've killed more people than anybody else each year.

And so Donald Trump's going to settle up with the Mexican government, and they're going to be

They're going to lose their revolutionary credentials because what he's going to do is he's not going to send these criminals and all of these people who came in under Biden back to Venezuela or back to Colombia or back to Guatemala.

He's going to send them through Mexico.

And then Mexico is going to have to do that unless they want to keep them.

Well, they let them come through.

Yeah, they let them come through, so they're theirs.

And then we'll see how Mexico's revolutionary fervor stands up when it's exporting, deporting people or repatriating people back to other Latin American countries.

Victor, I want to,

this is really interesting that you brought up Mexico here.

But first, I want to come back to it, maybe talk about some success stories south of the border.

But first, I just want to take a moment for our sponsor, Field of Greens, and the biggest sale of the year at Brickhouse Nutrition.

It's on now.

And this is your chance to save a ton on all their doctor-formulated products.

One of my favorites is Field of Greens.

Right now, you'll save 30% on their best-selling fruit and vegetable super drink that promises your doctor will notice your improved health or your money back.

Visit fieldofgreens.com and use the code SAILE, S-A-L-E.

That's the promo code SAILE at fieldofgreens.com.

Last time, don't forget, that's the promo code SAILE at fieldofgreens.com.

And we thank the good people at Field of Greens and brickhouse nutrition for sponsoring the victor davis hansen show and especially on a thanksgiving day

uh podcast we should be a little thoughtful of our of our gut um i do want to also get back victor to um

to um

the uh um icc

and europe and and jews not only israel but jews but it's interesting uh

javier millai Millai, the president of Argentina,

he's broken inflation.

He is transforming that country.

I don't remember the name now, the president of El Salvador.

El Salvador was the most violent, murderous country on earth.

Okay, it's a very tiny country.

But

that guy, I should look him up.

That country has been transformed.

He was that

he was from the Middle East originally.

Bukale, I think his name was.

Nayab, Nayab, I think this is.

But he did have a Mexican name, not a Mexican, a Spanish surname after it was Bukale Ortiz or something.

But it's possible, right?

It's possible for

our own country.

You know, maybe we're turning this around, but I don't know.

Mexico seems like a permanent basket case.

It's because it has no,

it's a permanent basket case because it will not address corruption and fair treatment of its indigenous people.

And it won't because it has a safety valve.

So when you have over the last 30 years, 40 years, 30 million people who would have marched on Mexico City to demand a transparent, fair, and just society, when the Mexican government says go over to the United States,

And that's their Frederick Jackson Turner frontier thesis.

That the United States is the frontier.

If you have social tensions at home, you go west.

And now it's not Horace Greeley saying, go west, young man.

It's go north, young man.

And then they come here.

And then the Mexican government says they're victims of oppression.

They're all of these things.

They open up 50 consulates.

But the key thing is send back money so we don't have to support your families because they're indigenous people.

Send back your money.

And the United States government has an obligation to gal for parity so it can shed its racist credentials.

So they say, you know, United States, you have to give health, welfare, housing, education, food subsidies to illegal immigrants.

That frees up cash.

They send back $200 or $300 a week to Mexico.

It's the largest source of foreign exchange in Mexico.

And along with cartel money, the economy is kind of booming.

And now they're outsourcing.

Corporations are having things assembled in Mexico because there's no tariff.

It's not sustainable.

And Donald Trump knows that.

He doesn't care.

He knows what Mexico do.

He knows what Obador did.

Obador was trashing him and trying to

let people through.

And now, of course, Biden has opened up the border again just out of spite, spite for, not spite for Trump so much, spite for us, everybody listening.

And an ISAP.

You didn't vote for me.

You didn't want, you weren't going to vote for me, and I had to step down.

Then you didn't vote for Harris.

Well, here, how do you like another million people before I leave?

Right.

So

I think Donald Trump will.

I don't see him doing anything with Trudeau, though.

Trudeau is.

Yeah,

he may not be around all that much longer.

Victor, you mentioned 50 consulates.

I wonder, is that that

must be part of the problem that there are that many consulates?

It's a deliberate,

it's a

deliberate strategy of the Mexican government to export human capital.

Yeah.

They do it intentionally, and

it's a safety.

Do we have to allow them, don't we?

Do we have to allow?

Can America say that?

Because

we don't want to be called racist.

Yeah, well, I don't know.

I think there's more than at one time I wrote an article.

I'm saying 50, but that was, I don't know, 10 years ago.

I think there's probably closer to 55 or 60.

Wow.

Wow.

The point is, the policy of the Mexican government is to avoid social tensions from a one party.

Well, now they have two parties, but corrupt government, corrupt judicial system,

racist society, they export people who would be otherwise dissidents and demand social and economic change.

And they come here

and the left wants them to change the demography.

So you have a poor, dependent class that needs left-wing big government, and the right corporate interest wants cheap labor.

And the Mexican government facilitates that on the condition that they send back $60 billion,

which is larger than oil oil sales.

It's their largest source of foreign exchange.

That's besides the $60 billion that goes into Latin America.

So if Donald Trump did one of two things, if he finishes the wall, and by the way, Tom Horman has already said

in one of his many lectures that very few people come across where there's the wall.

It's very hard to get over, contrary to what everybody says.

It's kind of like Barbara Streisand's compound in Malbur, her old compound, or Shares, or all those people.

When I go down to Pepperdine T, they all have walls.

These are the people who say that walls don't work, but apparently they think they work.

So anyway, my point is if he finishes the wall and he stops catch and release and he makes people

apply for refugee status in their home country and he starts to deport and he emphasizes that it's a federal law that if you are deported, you cannot apply for legal citizenship or residency for at least 10 years.

And he announces to everybody, I would go back.

So if you want to come back legally, you can apply for it.

But if we have to deport you, you're never going to come back for 10 years.

Right.

If he does all that, then Mexico is going to

have a lot less foreign income.

And we know another thing from research that the longer a person stays in the United States, of whatever status,

the less money comes back.

That is, his relationships with family members become more tenuous.

So he's less likely to send the same amount of money.

So Mexico needs a fresh cohort every day to come in here to work and send them money back.

And

I didn't know that.

And then that's also, I wrote about 20 years ago that delayed my appointment to the Hoover Institution.

The director who was a saint, John Racian, said, I think we're going to have to hold off for six months.

I said, why?

And he said, you wrote a a book called Mexifornia,

and we have some free market, libertarian, open borders economists that don't like it.

And I said, okay.

And

do you troublemaker?

Yeah.

And

if you read that book, I kind of predicted what was going to happen.

But in any case, That's what Mexico, it's a try.

They get all these good things, I think.

We get rid of dissonance.

We get money.

We shame the United States.

we make the people who, the longer they're away from Mexico and the further away from the Mexico, the more they romanticize it.

And that means we have a powerful lobbying, kind of like the old Greek lobby or the Turkish lobby or the Armenian lobby.

We have the Mexican lobby.

And they're very intent on.

doing that.

And then when you try to call them on, they call you a racist or xenophobic or going to go back.

This was America.

You know, this was your America was Mexico.

And then they had this schizophrenic, the Pew Poll.

I think I wrote about it in Mexico.

They had these bizarre polls.

They would say,

how many of you think that the American Southwest should belong to Mexico?

58%?

60%?

How many of you would, if you had a chance, would go to the United States today?

70%.

So think about that.

We want this land back so it'll look like Mexico.

Mexico.

We want Texas, Arizona, New Mexico back so it will look like Mexico, but we want to leave what looks like Mexico

to go back.

Doesn't make it, it's all

sort of basket casery.

Hey, Victor, if we could,

before we head off to a break, one last thing going back to the International Criminal Court.

I want to, I think I've mentioned this before.

Tuvia Tenenbaum is a writer.

He's

Jewish,

German.

He's a columnist for a German newspaper, very funny guy, Roly Poly.

And he's a bit of a clown.

And I don't mean that in an insulting way.

It's clownish.

And the German papers asked him to write a travelogue of America because he was based in America.

So he was writing this column.

They wanted him to go back to Germany and do a travelogue.

And he did.

And he started, he found it very quickly, whenever he was having a conversation with anyone,

very quickly, the subject of Palestine, Zionism, etc., came up.

It was like scratch a European, scratch a German, and they're going to be talking about Jews in an annosecond.

They didn't necessarily know he was a Jew.

He'd masquerade as an Arab in his way.

And he wrote two books on this.

Catch the Jew is one of them.

And I slept in Hitler's bedroom.

And I read them.

I wrote about them for a national review, reviewed them.

And

that is

a discouraging

thing here.

It's not related to, it is related to the ICC.

That Europe really,

the

The anti, there is anti-Semitism there.

Yeah, there is.

And it's left-wing anti-Semitism.

Yeah, but but it's always,

they use the mask of we're really against Zionism and we're really, you know, but there's hatred of Jews there.

No, it is.

It's a worldwide left-wing phenomenon.

The old Democrat, Joe Klein,

he just wrote a column, I think, yesterday, saying he's no longer a Democrat of all people.

He was the anonymous person, remember?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, he wrote and said, the party left me.

And David Mamet used to be a man of the left.

Yes.

And Joel Kotkin, who's a man of the left.

They all have renounced the Democratic Party a long time ago, but Joe Klein is recent.

And one of the reasons is, is they understand that it's an anti-Semitic, it's been taken over by anti-Semites.

And all of Europe is anti-Semitic.

I should make a very careful distinction.

All of Western Europe.

Everybody says that Victor Orban and Hungary is this illiberal society.

Victor Orban in Hungary said that Benjamin Netanyahu can come to their country any time and he will face no coercion and he will be welcome.

In other words, even Italy under Maloney didn't say that.

They said they would arrest him.

Canada will arrest him.

Every country, but the Eastern Europeans, they have not said that.

Now, that doesn't make sense, does it?

Because we're told that Eastern Europe, given its long history of the bulwark against the Ottomans and World War I, World War II, everything, that they are the

right-wing, less sophisticated, less developed countries.

But morally, they're light years ahead of the decadent Western Europeans, and they don't suffer to the same degree from anti-Semitism.

They really don't.

And

Europe is in bad shape.

I mean, gosh,

I guess yesterday the dollar was 106

to the Euro.

It's going to get down to one to one.

If Trump is president, you'll see the Euro at 90 cents.

The European economy, the EU economy and America were almost neck and neck about 10, 12 years ago, and they're just stagnant.

They haven't.

I just remember I did,

I had a company with the

brilliant Al Phillip, my partner, who still has it.

And I would urge everybody to check.

my website soon.

I have an ad for his trip to Budapest and Eastern Europe.

He's a genius.

And for 20 years, we cooperated on military history trips, but I can remember that one year

I think we lost money because it was 144.

You know,

and

the Euro to the dollar.

And that was right during the end of the Bush, beginning of the Obama, and people were forecasting it was going to go to 150,

and the United States was done for.

If Donald Trump can do three things,

if he can reform the Defense Department so it's got plenty plenty of shells

and bombs and munition stops, and it welcomes back all the people they alienated, the 50 or 60,000 people who traditionally go into combat units, and he can stop the revolving door procurement abuses.

And

he has a lean, tough Defense Department that the world is scared of.

And if he can cut taxes and regulations, but at the same time grow the economy so he has more revenue, but here's the key thing.

If the key missing tesser of this mosaic, he's got to have Vivek

and Elon cut a trillion and a half.

We're running $1.8 trillion deficit.

We've got to cut that on a trajectory.

So within four years, we're at a balanced budget.

And everybody said that's impossible.

Larry Summer started laughing and said, that's impossible.

But there is enough money and waste that it's not impossible if you're willing to do it.

But if you could have a near balance and budget with a huge economy growing that was paying down the debt with a lean, tough, deterrent defense policy, it would just change everything vis-a-vis China.

And did you see this world climate as an Azerbaijan where they're

I guess our representative is John Podesta, and we're supposed to give all of these developing countries, you know, under the European Biden administration

blood money that we polluted the planet and heated it up so they're making these claims for trillions of dollars of transfers you didn't say blood money because it was John Podesta did you you know he's his affinity for blood

but

I was thinking about that.

I mean, Trump said no last time and he will stop it.

Right.

But it's so simplistic.

You guys have more pollution all during the last century.

And you would say to them then, well, then send us a bill.

We're going to send you a bill for cell phones and cars and engines because your country had none of that and somebody had to produce it.

And we produced it.

And when we gave it to you, you bought it from us.

But the people who are producing it obviously have to use more energy.

So if you want us to give you money, why don't you just say we don't want any of your products because they're polluting?

He's going to stop that.

He's going to get back out of the climate accord again,

and he's not going to let China shake us down.

He's going to have better relations with India.

He's going to break up this Russia-India-China axis that was a result of this non-ending Ukraine war.

I think it's going to be, if he can do all of this,

this country will actually be united because the middle class's wages, which stagnated for 12 years

under Obama, the last years of Bush, until 2017.

And then they stagnated again under Biden.

If they continue to increase, you'll have a united, powerful country again.

Victor, it sounds like

it'll be unstoppable.

Yeah, it sounds like you're making the case for Trump, which sounds like a book title, which maybe we should talk about.

I think I'm going to write another book.

I just thought of it.

I'll call it Return.

Rebound, Resurrection,

the Rebirth of The Survival of Donald Trump, the return of Donald Trump and the MAGA agenda.

We'll see.

Let's go.

The reason I'm confident is that there are a lot of landmines waiting for Donald Trump, and they're going to be the next generation of Comeys

and Muellers

and Adam Schiffs

and

Letita James and Jack Smith.

They're all buried there waiting for Trump.

But this time it's different.

He knows they're there, and he knows they're going to go off, and he knows what they're going to do.

Last time,

contrary to the vilification that he was vengeful or he's mean, or he wasn't.

He didn't weaponize anything.

Not that he's going to weaponize it now, but he knows what he has to do and he knows who's going to try to destroy him.

And that's why these pics are so different than the first administration.

Yeah.

Well,

let's talk about the case for Trump

when we come back from these important messages.

If you're like me, you have a lot of product on your bathroom counter.

Well, I have found the secret serum.

And it's vibrant Super C Serum.

The ingredients in this one bottle can replace your day creams, eye creams, night creams, neck creams, wrinkle creams, and even dark spot reducers.

Made in the USA with the highest quality ingredients, including vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, vitamin B5, and vitamin E, Super C Serum delivers noticeable results.

Simplify your skincare routine, get a healthier complexion, and minimize wrinkles and age spots with Vibrance.

I just began using Super C Serum last week, and I love it.

My skin feels so much better, soft, moist, and fresh.

And by the way, it smells beautiful like the orange blossoms outside my kitchen door.

Give it a try, and you'll love it too.

And if you don't find it better than your current skincare routine, you'll get a full refund.

Go to vibrance.com slash Victor to save up to 37% off and free shipping.

That's Vibrance.

V-I-B-R-I-A-N-C-E.

Vibrance.com slash Victor.

And we'd like to thank Vibrance for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

If you're a homeowner, you need to listen to this.

In today's AI and cyber world, scammers are stealing your home titles and your equity is the target.

Here's how it works.

Criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee with your county, and just like that, your home title has been transferred out of your name.

Then they take out loans using your equity and even sell your property and you won't even know what's happened until you get a collection or foreclosure notice.

So, when was the last time you checked on your home title?

If your answer is never, you need to do something about it right now.

And that's why we've partnered with Home Title Lock so you can find out today if you're already a victim.

Go to home titlelock.com/slash victor to get a free title history report and a free trial of their million-dollar triple lock protection.

That's 24/7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes, and if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it.

Please, please, don't be a victim.

Protect your equity today.

That's home, Titalock.com/slash Victor.

We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor and I are recording on the 23rd of November, which is a Saturday, but this episode is up on the 28th.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Victor, just take, you know, we've never, I've never, I should have done this right after the election.

I think you deserved a chance to take a victory lap.

Not that you're a victory lapper, but uh, you, you know, the case for Trump is

an important book, was an important book, I think, remains an important book.

Do you have anything you want to say about it in hindsight of the election?

Uh, well, I have a 20,000-word update for the new paperback.

But when I wrote that, uh, I was asked to write it, and

I submitted the

title, How Trump Won.

My editors convinced me the case for Trump.

I thought, well, that'll sound like I'm a partisan and fanatic.

It was really a disinterested view about why he won and

how he won and why

his administration would be successful.

And one of the things that I pointed, the theme of the case for Trump was he was a tragic hero, that we had become so deadlocked and so lethargic and so overwhelmed with the conventionality that you needed a disruptor.

But the problem with disruptors are whether, and I looked at the plays of Sophocles, Ajax, Philoctides, Oedipus, Antigone,

and then I looked at the John Ford movies,

especially Ethan Edwards, as you mentioned the other day in The Searchers.

And I also talked about the

genre in general, whether it was George Stevens, Shane, or Sturgis' Magnificent Seven, there was a theme that the disruptor comes in and he has a set of skills that can solve the problem.

But when he solves the problem, then people have the luxury of saying, oh, he tweeted too much.

Oh, he's too, he's, he's, and then he doesn't end up well.

And

that sort of was what I said, the Trump administration, that he would have a stellar record, but they would demonize him and he wouldn't end up well.

And that happened after January 6th.

But

this is what I really admire him.

99.9%,

including Victor Davis Hanson, that would be the first person, could not do what he did.

Had I gone through,

if I was impeached twice and put on trial as a private citizen, And I had some of my closest associates calling me a traitor, an an insurrectionist.

And then I went out into the political wilderness.

And the FBI came out here and raided my home armed.

And then the next thing I knew,

the full powers of the U.S.

government, the DOJ, the CIA,

they were all against me.

And I had a crazy woman, Eugene Carroll, going after me to bankrupt me and make me pay $73 million

for an incident that came right out of a TV plot that she copied.

Or I had Jack Smith who had a pathological hatred of me and was going to prosecute me for what Joe Biden was considered exempt from.

And then he was going to call this buffoonish riot and insurrections by which in which I said, assemble peacefully and patriotically, quite differently than Camilla Harris, who was canonized, even though she said in the midst of rioting and violence and death, this won't stop, this shouldn't stop, this is a movement, this is going.

And when I had all that asymmetry,

and then I had this crazy nut Fannie Willis and her boyfriend, Nathan, about a phone call, find me 10,000, find the 10,000 votes, and suddenly I'm a criminal.

If I had all of that, and then that was going to run again, and I have to go through a primary, and then they take my name off the ballot and say, I got to fight that.

And then somebody, I I just turned my head just a millisecond and just two inches or I would have had my head blown off.

And in the next seconds, I'd put my hand up, fight, fight, fight.

And then just a few weeks later, there's somebody waiting at the next hole to shoot me.

And it just a fluke that somebody happened to see him.

And then when all this is happening, I start to study the Secret Service and I see the laxity and the incompetence was such among the Secret Service that I'm in real danger.

I don't know.

There's no way I could do that.

And when he does that,

and then when I,

my reaction to all of this is then when I hear RFK, he's going to get RFK.

I thought, you know, RFK, wow, I remember RFK said this and this and that.

Tulsi Gabbert, I really like her, but she said this and that.

Joe Rogan, I really like him, but he said this and that.

That was my first response.

My second response was, wait a minute, take a deep breath, Victor.

You're not a never-Trumper.

There is a logic to this.

And then I started, what would be the logic?

And I can see it.

And he was building an ecumenical movement that would disarm his criticism.

It's going to be very hard for people on the left to go after RFK on the idea that he wants to make food safer.

And it's going to be very hard to go after Tulsi Gabbert when she was a member of the left.

And she's warning about the Frank Church-like

warnings earlier that the CIA and

the

FBI have a tendency to rob your civil liberties.

It's going to be very, very hard, in other words, to go after a lot of these people.

And that was by intent.

So

I don't know how the next administration is going to work out.

He's 78 years old,

and he's got a lot of problems.

And Joe Biden left a complete train wreck for him abroad and at home.

He's got a border that's a mass foreign policy.

But I have a great deal of admiration for him.

And I like, and he completely revolutionized the Republican Party.

First person to win a popular vote since George, the party since 2004.

And another thing that gets me really angry, and we mentioned mandates, and this is the new, as the California,

Illinois, New York votes trail in the blue states, his lead that was once 51% is getting down to 50, around 50%.

So they're saying, see, it's not a landslide.

No, as I said earlier in the podcast,

every issue was landslide polling, border, crime, economy, foreign policy.

And Trump embraced those and was the messenger for overwhelming, overwhelming change.

But more importantly, Trump himself was running not just as a candidate, embracing overwhelming mandates.

He was running as a candidate that they had tried to put in jail, that some people had tried to kill.

Some people tried to get him off the ballot.

And he was the object of 90%,

90%

negative media coverage by NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, PBS.

And he was outspent.

If you count the money in the Harris.Biden campaign coffers and and the political action committees, he raised in total about a billion.

They raised with Biden about a billion point eight.

And yet he won.

How can a person go over all of those?

He had academia against him.

He had pollsters against him.

He had athletes against him.

He had entertainers against him, celebrities against him, foundations against him, traditional media, silicon.

And he won.

It's just astounding.

To me, it is.

And I don't think we appreciate that sometime.

Well, I'm worried about the appreciation.

We'll get to that

in a little bit, but it's interesting.

You just mentioned MSNBC.

So maybe it'd be a good point right here to get your thoughts, Victor, on the news.

Now, from when, dear listeners, you're hearing this about a week ago

of Comcast, which owns NBC, wanting to,

I don't know, sell, get rid of maybe a variety of their cable channels, including MSNBC, and they have a CNBC, Oxygen, some others.

I think the history channel, maybe.

I'm not positive about that.

But anyway,

MSNBC is going to be on the auction block or sale block.

Should we give a care anymore?

Does it really matter?

what these lunatics are saying?

I think the only chance for it is Elon buys it.

But what's happening is

MSNBC is not sustainable.

There's only one person that they feel can get an audience, and she's spoiled rotten.

And we know who that is.

Don't we?

Well,

is it a certain lady that likes to show her neckline all the time?

And she has a haircut of a man.

That one?

Yes.

Okay.

And

anyway,

not Joy Reed.

No.

Well, Joy Reed

is, I think she's expendable.

And

well, I don't want to.

Troy Reed is a person who has told us that anyone who wore cornrows who was not black was was culturally appropriating and she's dyed her hair blonde.

Joy Reed says that we've got to stop racism and cannot

open her mouth without

racializing every topic she is.

Nobody wants to turn in

to a station, tune into a station when she

constantly is obsessed by race.

And every, so my point is they're in a...

They're in a doom loop because

they have this small, loyal audience that likes to be told they're brilliant and the world around them is stupid and

small

and it's shrinking because a lot of people want to be with the winner, just like the

49ers out here.

When they're 10 and 0, everybody wants to be a fan.

When they're 0 and 10, you can't find a fan.

And so that's

just the truth.

So it's a mega victory.

They're on the wrong side.

20 or 30% of their audience wants to feel an uplifting message, and they feel the country is changing.

So they're leaving MSNBC.

So then they're in a dilemma.

They have this small audience of 800,000.

The other 500 or 600,000 wants to be spoon-fed every night hatred against the right and Trump.

And it's not, doesn't have the revenue.

You put an ad on that people are not numerous enough to go out and buy that product

to ensure a rate that they can charge that MSNBC.

So what do they do?

If they expand the audience, they have to fire the whole cadre.

If they fire the whole cadre, at least in the short term, they're going to lose that six or seven

hundred thousand.

audience.

And so they don't know what to do.

And so some of of the solutions, like

we said, Joe Scarborough is,

we'll go over

and we will

make a deal with Satan.

And then we'll tell everybody that we're balanced and maybe we'll get more people join us than we will lose that want to hear hatred.

And that's what they're trying to decide right now.

Each of them are trying to say, which is which is the wiser course to take a little hit now

from our minuscule audience and expand it and go back to the old CNN of years ago?

Or do we just double down?

And

when you have Rachel Maddow,

can I say the name now?

I get really angry about her.

She's poor.

Well, you should be able to feel better.

$35 million a year for one night.

a week.

Now she's taking a, I thought she was only getting 20 million.

She went down to 15, but I just read that she was getting 30 or 35.

She's getting 30.

So she's down to 25 million.

So there's 52

in theory, she doesn't do 52 because of experience.

It probably does 45.

But if she did do 50,

every time that woman goes on there, she's getting, what, $450,000, $500,000 for that hour.

And then all the, and the company, and it's going broke.

It's not a sustainable enterprise is what I'm trying to say.

Absolutely.

So that's going to have to be, it's going to have to be changing.

And

if you go look, it's happening everywhere.

The Egan, Egan, I think his name was, E.G.G.

The editor of the Washington Post was just fired.

Bezos said, you know what?

I don't want to hear all these echo chamber hatred anymore.

He's a political editor, right?

Yes, political editor.

I do not want.

to spend $100 million of my money so that you can be self-righteous, sanctimonious, and scream and yell to a shrinking audience.

Break even, I'll do it, but not this.

And I think his name is Ben Pershing at the Wall Street Journal.

He was a political, he came from the Washington Post.

That was in the wilderness years of Donald Trump when the Wall Street Journal, and I want to preface it by I have the utmost

respect for five or six of the Washington, I mean, the Wall Street Journal, I'll bed right.

Kimberly Strauss, I really like her.

I think she's wonderful.

Dan Henninger, I agree with.

Bill McGurry.

But

I got so that I just, I can write Peggy Noonan's column in advance.

You just tell me what the political climate is this week, and I will write a column word for word.

It'll be almost what she says.

It's predictable.

And when you look at the coverage at the Wall Street Journal, their political essays, and you look at the bylines, the news division, most of those reporters are coming from left-wing venues, and most of those news accounts are anti-Trump.

You can detect it.

And

that was starting to bleed into the politics of the op-eds.

And they fired him.

I guess he either fired him or he left.

Pershing left.

So something's going on where

people are saying to themselves, let's get back to the news.

And this hate Trump or hate the right

is not where the people are.

They want a closed border.

They want to afford

to buy a steak once a week.

They want to be able to fill their tank up.

They want to have a natural gas stove.

They want the country to be safe and respected abroad.

They want criminals to be put in jail.

They do not want San Francisco homelessness everywhere.

They don't want looting.

They don't want you to target.

They don't want this

Duncan

Malvaney or whatever his name was type of ads on television.

We're just tired of it.

Just stop it.

Stop it.

You people are a very small vocal group, but you're not even close to a majority.

They market in identity politics, and the elections show one thing.

Identity politics are being significantly rejected.

And they're overpaid.

They're all overpaid.

They think they have this talent.

Joy Reed doesn't understand.

I wish I could talk to her.

I'd say, Joy, I have no animus toward you, but given your talents, I don't think you're the author of an engaging book.

I haven't read a book that you've written or two.

I don't think you're an effective columnist.

I don't think you write influential essays.

Do you have a podcast?

Maybe.

But

what you're saying on the air is infantile.

And it's just calling people names and racial names.

And when they fire you, and they will fire you, you're going to have no market value.

No one's going to want to hire you.

So you should stop that and try to be educated and erudite and analytical.

You can beat on the left, but not that way.

And so all of these things are not sustainable.

Right.

And it's kind of like the end of the Biden administration right now.

It's like,

you know,

the world caught up to you guys and us,

the Chinese balloon going over the United States, the Afghan skedaddle, the screaming and yelling at Israel,

China just telling China that they're not a rival, letting them take us to the cleaners.

It just doesn't work.

And it's a mess.

And everybody knows it's a mess, and everybody knows we need to change.

So I think it's the jig is up.

And I'm glad it is.

But it's, again, I don't want to be too upbeat, but it's very exciting to watch this stuff.

Yeah.

I can see it at Stanford University, believe it or not.

When Donald Trump won in 2016, there was lamentation tables.

There is not.

There was not milk and cookies and furry animals to pet for these child students.

There was not.

And the banners are coming down on all of the buildings of, you know, BLM, Antiva lives forever, all that stuff.

They're coming down.

And

there's no encampments.

I haven't seen an encampment.

Four months we had the Hamas get in your face as you walk by and scream at you.

I don't, something's changed.

I don't think it's willing change.

I don't think it's sincere change.

I think it's based on fear.

I think if you're an average student from Jordan or the West Bank and you think you can come over to someone else's country and scream and chase Jews into the library and somebody says you're breaking the rules, and if you break the rules, you'll be suspended.

And if you're suspended, we're going to have to do, by statute, tell

the Immigration and Naturalization Service, ICE,

Customs Service, that your student visa is no longer valid.

You'll get your wish.

You get to go back to your beloved home, but you'll have to leave the United States that you hate so much.

That apparently was a deterrent.

Well, Victor,

you mentioned before Ethan Edwards, and you, of course, have written about that.

He's the character from the searchers and doing the dirty work that needs to be done.

And I referenced it in an article I wrote for Real Clear.

politics this past week.

First, I want to say I woke up and I looked at Powerline blog,

our great friends there.

And Scott, I saw Scott Johnson a couple of weeks ago at the City Journal dinner.

Scott's just, he's the best.

And I've always liked Scott and John, and I like Steve Hayward a lot.

Oh, Steve's a great guy.

Yeah.

I've never met John, but Scott's a sweet, sweet man.

But as you know, they have an aggregator up top and six articles.

And one was you, and one was our dear friend Dan Mahoney, and another was my piece from Real Clear.

And I just made my day that it was to be in that company.

But

today is when we're recording is again, the 23rd

in real time,

tomorrow would be the 24th, and that's the anniversary of the birth of William F.

Buckley, Jr.

He would have been 99 if he was still alive.

Bill died in 2008.

But Bill's the founder of the conservative movement.

And my piece was, what would Bill say if he was alive?

today about what's become of conservatism.

And of course, you know, there are many people who would say, if Bill was around today, he'd say Donald, he'd be a never-Trumper, that kind of crap.

And that was the point of my piece to say, you know, there's some very clear dots that connect between Bill Buckley and Donald Trump.

I don't want to give an, you know, we can't talk about

rightly, if somebody was alive, what they would actually say.

We don't know that.

But there are some real interesting connections.

One is, if I may, just for a minute or two and get your thoughts.

You know, Bill ran for mayor in New York City, 1965.

And

the people, the voters for Bill Buckley, there's no question they were the Reagan Democrats eventually, and then eventually the people voting for Donald Trump.

No question about that.

And if you look at the

inaugural issue of National Review in 1955,

the issues that...

Bill said were the priority for our movement are still the issues today.

And they are really like a MAGA set of issues.

And Bill addressed them in very,

I think, strong, non-academic, strong language, but in Bill's rhetoric that

really parallel what Donald Trump says.

There's some other similarities.

Well, everybody has.

It's worth making.

Yeah.

So Bill Buckley, I only met him twice.

I won an award once at the Wriston dinner from News Corps.

No, it wasn't News Corps.

That's Manhattan Institute.

Manhattan Institute.

News Corporation was

anyway.

I sat next to him for the evening and had a nice talk with him.

Everybody has differing opinions on what somebody who's passed would say.

I know in families,

what would your mother say about that?

And siblings will argue whether, would your father have still voted the way he did?

I'm the inheritor of your, I know I am, that kind of stuff.

Right.

And in the case of Bill Buckley, as you know, when Trump came on the scene,

there were two views.

There were your view, which I share, so I'm a little prejudicial, that

there was a consistent distrust of doctrinaire republicanism.

And he waded in, as you said, to the Queens and the Bronx and Rand.

And he said that that famous thing that you just quoted, that he'd rather trust the first 2,000 names in the phone book than, you know, the credentials.

Faculty of Harvard, Harvard.

Yeah,

than the faculty of Harvard if they were running the code.

But then there was the other counter-argument, and that was

contingent on a false analogy.

But he was the one who

excised,

expelled the anti-Semites and paleocon racists who did not get on board with the civil rights movement, even though

he complaints about the way civil rights was implemented rather than just,

I think he was kind of a libertarian.

He'd say,

if you have a restaurant and you don't like somebody, you have a right to do that or something.

But anyway, the point I'm making is there was this struggle for his legacy, and the never-Trumpers were very adamant about that.

And they say, well, you know, Bill Buckley was alive, he would be shocked at what Trump's done to the Republican Party.

And therefore, this is key, it's our job to cleanse the Republican Party of Donald Trump.

Right.

And just as way he got rid of

anti-Semites and racists.

Of course, that was contingent on the idea that Donald Trump was an anti-Semite

for the comparison to be valid.

And he wasn't.

He was the best friend that Israel ever had.

His daughter is a converted Jew, his son-in-law is Jewish, etc.

And

he got more

black and Hispanic votes than any other Republican of the modern age.

So I don't think that analogy worked.

But

that was a key point for me because I had started writing for National Review, I think I've mentioned that, 2002.

I was hired, if you remember, the day 9-11.

9-11, right.

And Rich Lowry, whom I did not know, I was flying to Hillsdale to talk on George Patton.

The plane turned around halfway, came back to the Fresno airport.

I was locked down, I think, for four hours.

And Rich Lowry called me, Hello, I'm Rich Lowry.

I liked your book, The Soul of Battle.

Would you consider writing for a while?

Why?

Well, we had to let go Ann Coulter.

I think she'd said, didn't she wanted a new Mecca or something?

And to convert everyone who survived, converted to Christianity.

So she was let go.

I didn't feel like I was parasitical taking her job because you weren't.

So anyway, they said, we'll see how it goes twice a week.

And

I never stopped until 2020.

You did not miss a single

I didn't miss

whether it was the death of my daughter or whether it was a ruptured appendix in Libya or you name it, being embedded in Iraq twice.

I did it.

I haven't missed an American greatness since I was hired.

I've written, I think it's now been four years.

I've written over 2,000 columns without missing one.

But anyway, the point is I was very loyal to Nashville U, but then this Never Trump thing started.

And forget about the people I was very close to, I thought were friends that were now attacking me.

And that's true.

There were five or six of them who mentioned be my name.

I thought that was kind of a rule that people didn't attack each other within the confines of the magazine.

But nevertheless, I couldn't see how it was sustainable.

In other words, I said to myself,

Don't, whatever you think about him, he is the nominee in 2016, 2018.

Whatever you think about him, it's a successful agenda.

Inflation is is low.

Defense is strong.

The world is without war.

He's trying to get the border closed.

But the more successful he was, the more outrage there was expressed.

And so finally, I looked one day and I said,

my gosh, subscribers are bleeding.

Readership is down.

This wonderful Bill Buckley legacy is eroding before your very eyes.

Stop it, stop it, stop it.

Whatever you think, do not attack the Republican president who embodies 85% of everything you fought for, because if you continue to do this, people are going to say, hey, national review, you must have never really...

You must have never really wanted conservative justice because Trump gave them to you in spades.

Hey, you must have never wanted the border closed.

Hey, you must have never wanted low taxes and deregulation.

Because he's done all of this, and yet you're saying he's awful.

It's whatever, whether that was the correct exegesis or not, it didn't matter.

It's not sustainable.

And so it wasn't sustainable.

And I had to leave and you left and it's not sustainable.

And

I don't think the Washington Post to take the direct diameter is sustainable.

And MSNC is not sustainable.

And the Camilla Harris

campaign was not sustainable.

And what do they all have in common?

You do not

insult the intelligence of your reader or your voter.

You don't say to your voter, you don't really know what you're voting, I know more than you.

You are ill-informed and undereducated.

That's why you don't appreciate my genius.

Or I have flipped and completely renounced my entire political philosophy, but you're too stupid to figure it out.

Or I will not do an interview.

I won't do a press conference.

I won't be at, but you're too stupid to know why I won't do that.

And the same token is, yes,

deregulation was good and now it's bad because of the orange man's fingerprints.

Yes, abortion on demand was bad, but now it's good because of the orange man's fingerprints.

Yes.

Closing the border was good, but now it's bad because of his fingerprints on that pause.

That's just insulting the readers.

And these are things everybody, I think, has the same experience in their own life with whatever profession they're engaged in.

If you're listening, you're home, clean your home, or

you're a salesman, you're on the road.

Each person has to perform that task that particular day.

You have a little bit of marginal error if you've had a distinguished record to coast.

But when you write a column in our business or you go on television, you're judged at that moment, that second on the quality vis-a-vis other persons.

And you have to understand that and appreciate that.

You don't get a relaxation.

So if you tell somebody something in a column and it shows your personal hatred or it is sloppy or it is contradictory to what you said before or it makes no logical sense from the conservative point of view, then you're not going to have people follow you, no matter what your name is.

And I think people forgot that.

I think somebody like George Will, who was a very good writer, very insane, he didn't understand that.

He really did.

All these never-Trumpers, Bill Kristol, they thought that they had been so successful that they had captured the hearts and minds of a loyal constituency audience that would stick with them, the person, rather than them, the successful persuader.

forever.

And that just doesn't happen.

I always quote my parents about my mom.

One day,

she was the first appellate court judge, second appellate court judge in California was female, first

one of the, she was second superior court judge, first juvenile court judge that was a woman.

And

I think she was one of the fourth or fifth Stanford students to be a woman at law school.

But she was very successful, but

right before her brain tumor, She was selling fruit every weekend after the agricultural collapse in Santa Cruz.

And so we would load up this old used telephone van, and I'd meet my mom and dad.

She was a justice, and she was out there with Levi's and, you know, a t-shirt, 64 years old, selling plums, peaches on the table next to myself and my little kids.

And then one time she saw a very wealthy

lawyer.

And the lawyer said, Pauline, what are you doing here?

You're selling fruit like a peddler.

And she says, I am a peddler.

We have a farm and we have to keep it going.

And you have to,

and you can't ever think you're better than anybody else.

And the person left, and she said to me, remember one thing.

Even if you don't believe that,

and she did believe that, even if you're not just like people and you want more experiences of all different classes, everybody goes up and everybody goes down.

And the people you meet going up are not necessarily the people you will stick with you when you go down.

Those are the people that are with you from the beginning.

So what she was trying to tell me is these farmers at the farmer's market, the people like that,

those are the constituency.

And you never, never forget that.

Yeah, when I go somewhere and, you know, I'm ready to get on a plane and I'm running and I'm in line and somebody comes up and sticks a book in my face and says, I saw you.

I'd like to, I stop and and sign it because that's your constituency, besides the fact that they're sincere and they want to talk and give you your ideas.

But I won't mention one person.

He was a Trump official, a never Trumper,

but I was with at a book signing and he was

insulting, get away, da, da, da.

And he went down.

And I can tell you that he does not have any friends on the way down because he, you know, it's not the same as you're, there's sometimes people like you on the way up, but when you go on the way down, they don't like you anymore because they never liked you.

They just liked your success to hone in on.

But the people who were with you from the beginning will be there at the end if you treat them with respect.

Yeah.

Well, you can't, as writers call people carnival barkers and chumps and cletuses and not expect

the people to sour.

You can't.

No conservative wants to read a magazine when they refer to the former conservative head of the United States as an ape in a helicopter.

They just don't want to read it.

The purpose of me writing this, and we'll move on from this, was not so much to

focus on my former place where I'm still a contributing editor and write on occasion, was to note as the centenary of Bill Buckley comes up that

it will be used as a grounds for contemplating the state of the conservative movement and who's its leadership.

I think folks should realize that Bill Buckley,

as you mentioned, the 2,000 names and the telephone directory and his race for mayor and other

the political Reagan Democrat trend, he said that Bill Buckley, despite his the way people impersonated him and his accent, etc., had a great

affection for and connection to an understanding of quote-unquote populism.

And I think he would,

I don't think he'd be a never Trumper and I'll leave it at that.

Victor, we've got to take one more little break here and then we come back.

Since it's Thanksgiving, I might ask you a Thanksgiving-related question right after these important messages.

So you just got back from summer vacation.

Maybe you might have even had to book two rooms because of your snoring.

Some vacation, huh?

Snoring can be an underlying cause of high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and even memory loss.

Here is my advice.

If you want every night to be a true vacation, you need to get yourself Zipa.

That's happy Z, spelled backwards.

Zipa is a doctor-designed mouthpiece that not only moves your jaw forward, but is also the only device with a patented tongue seat belt to keep your airways open and the snoring away.

The snoring can stop as soon as the first night.

Zipa was proven in a 600-patient clinical trial and sold over half a million units.

From now until the end of October, show your family you actually care by purchasing a limited edition Pink Zipa.

Not only will you save $10,

but Zipa is on a mission to raise $50,000 for breast cancer research and they will donate another $10,000 to the Susan G.

Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Go to zyppah.com and use the code PINK or text Victor to 511-511.

Put your snoring on a permanent vacation and help a worthy cause with the snoring device we trust by visiting zyppah.com and use the code pink or text Victor to 511-511.

Remember, Zipa is happy Z spelled backwards.

Text fees may apply and we'd like to thank Zipa for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Geez, since it's Thanksgiving, that means it's almost Christmas, right?

Well, folks, you should go to Victor's website, the bladeofperseus, victorhanson.com,

and give yourself a Christmas present or treat somebody else to a subscription there.

Why?

Because if you're a fan of Victor, not only what he says on these podcasts, but what he writes, you will realize going to the website that he writes these ultra articles.

three times a week.

They're exclusive to the website.

You'll want to read them, but you can't.

If you're not subscribing, five bucks a month, $50 discounted for the full year.

Go ahead and treat yourself to that.

You'll also find archives for these podcasts.

So if you're a new listener to the Victor Davis Hanson show,

you can go back in time and

really,

I can't think of the word now that when you binge, you can binge.

Yeah.

And then links to Victor's books, et cetera.

So that's Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

Victor, it's Thanksgiving.

Today, when this is airing, I just am going to stick to a very simple question.

You talk whatever you want, talk about whatever you want.

It's your show, Victor.

But what kind of stuffing do you like?

Will you tell us?

Well, people who know me, Jack, know that I have zero taste in foods as far as culinary excellence.

Isn't that too bad?

Because Mrs.

Hansen is like an office.

I know.

I love her turkey.

I love turkey.

I love brown meat turkey.

I love mashed potatoes.

I love cranberry sauce.

I love everything, pumpkin pie.

I like everything about Thanksgiving.

And I have no idea what's in the stuffing, but I like it and I eat it.

And I'm going to.

Do you prepare anything yourself or you just leave it to the person?

It's very sad because my father was a wonderful chef.

He could cook.

He had recipe.

He was really good.

And I have zero talent.

I can cook a steak.

I can bake a potato.

But

part of the thing is, I don't want to be a whiner, but I found out as I got older, I'm doing three ultras.

That's $2,100 a week and two columns,

five hours of podcasts.

I have a full-time job that's 200 miles away, which is a 400-mile commute.

And I've got.

I'm always working on a book.

I'm writer in residence for Roger Kimball.

We live in a 150-year-old house, so I don't have any time.

How many favor requests do you get by email every day, Victor?

Today, Saturday, I got four, but I would say I get 25, 30 a week.

And they are,

dear Professor Hansen, remember me, we were talking, would you please look at this following manuscript, 400 pages enclosed?

Any way you could blurb in the next two weeks, Prof Prohanser Hansen, we talked, I called you once, I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm up for a professorship tenure.

Could you please read read my file and write a recommendation?

Third one.

This is all Friday.

Third one.

Dear Professor Hansen,

here's some poems I wrote.

I know that you like things about ag.

Is there any way that you could call an agent and see if you can get my farm poems published?

Dear Professor Hansen, I don't want to bother you, but I just thought I might say that I will be driving through the San Joaquin Valley.

Is there any way that you could meet me for dinner in Fresno?

I had five of those yesterday.

I know you're not mocking.

It's just the I'm not mocking it.

No, I'm not mocking it.

I'm not mocking it at all because

I'm depressed because I'd like to be

what really hurts my feelings is when

like I have to drive one day or I went to Palo Alto this week and I forgot my weekly trip.

I forgot my computer.

So if I don't keep up with it and often I'm so far behind, then the person writes and says, well, I wrote you three weeks ago and I I sent my manuscript.

I hid in here.

I guess you're just too busy for people who don't aren't in the news.

They'll write stuff like that.

Then you feel really bad, you know.

So I feel

I'm not making fun of them because I've been in that situation myself, but

I get too many of them.

And I have a full-time person that does the mail at full-time, that things are mailed to us.

And he does that and answers all of them.

I have another full-time that handles all the gifts that are in my name for our military history program in Hoover.

You wouldn't believe how many people try to help a conservative voice at the Hoover Institution by sending a donation to the Victor's Military History Group.

Sometimes it's $10.

It doesn't matter.

But they all deserve to be recognized and replied to, and we do that.

And then

we have a website, which I do.

I do the Angry Reader.

We have a person that reads all that and gives it to me.

But then I have my own personal emails, and I'm teaching a class as well to what I'm doing, teaching a class on World War II at Pepperdine.

So I have students to

papers to grade.

Yes, and I have

other obligations with Hillsdale College of my affiliation.

So I take it all pretty serious, but it just means that you worry as you get older and you don't have the same level of

no time to learn how to cook.

No, no time to learn how to

all right i'm very lucky my wife cooks wonderfully and cooks for me does the dishes and then i try to make up for

her one-sided efforts by me doing the little mechanical things around the farm well yesterday uh two days ago i took an old a knob off um

doorknob off, replaced it.

The latch broke closet.

I fixed that.

There were four grip hoses that were eaten into.

I have been putting security cameras.

I think I'm on number nine around the farm.

So

I try to do that, but I don't have much time.

When I was in my 50s, it wasn't like this.

If a high school student, once when I wrote Fields Without Dream, a high school teacher called me up and said, I loved your book.

Every person wrote a book review of your book.

And I said, that's very nice.

She called back and said, there's 47 of them, and they really expect a personal note for from you.

Each one.

Oh,

I wrote 47 personal notes.

Wow.

So it's stuff like that.

But I don't have the time to do that anymore.

Well, Victor, I'm not a mind reader, but

today,

again, this is out on Thanksgiving.

So let's just assume this is Thanksgiving Day.

I'm going to assume you're thankful for what happened a couple of weeks ago at our elections, giving the alternatives.

Right.

And I myself am thankful for that and still, still a little on a high over it.

I am too.

I feel like

a divine providence that somebody, you know, they always said the United States, Bismarck said it's what, safe from drunks and other people.

Yeah.

That was a very,

the United States enjoys divine providence.

Yeah.

But

something

saved us

and I'm thankful for that.

I'm thankful.

I have two wonderful children.

I have a wonderful son and daughter.

And

I have a lot of,

I was, I always think of my parents.

I had wonderful mother and father.

Just I worship them like deities.

Wonderful wife.

I've been very well lucky.

And, you know, one thing I just want to, I think we should all be very thankful that we're alive.

I think when you get older,

it's not that you're afraid of death.

You just don't like death when you start to notice it.

So when I look at the Ukraine war and I read 1.6

million dead, wounded Ukrainians and Russians, and then I see this stuff.

I was for the Iraq war, so I'm not going to be ⁇ I was probably culpable

because I thought that it was necessary for our security and he was an evil person.

But now when you look at that and you think, who are these people saying they want to, that we have to win to the last Ukrainian?

You know what I mean?

They want to hit Russia,

and this is so good.

I saw a person on television about two months ago that said something to the effect, well, this is very good.

What we're doing to Russia is in our interest.

They've lost over a million casualties.

But they're just 18-year-old nights that he forces to go in there.

And it's not that you're a pacifist.

It's just a death.

It's very hard to take when you see.

And also, you see people.

I'm on a group of high school, my friends in high school, they text you a text chat group.

And when you see people your age that you knew and really like dying,

death, death, death, death.

You know, and that wars.

It makes you thankful that you're alive.

There's a guy posts on X, Remember the Fall.

And

I started following it a few years ago.

And every day

he marks the birthday of somebody who died in in Vietnam and if there's a a metal citation for that person he posts it but you know the day after day like oh my gosh this was a 19 year old kid from Alabama and he was

small ground fire and he did something heroic and the next day is another one and next day and it's just like this drip drip drip and you're thinking

why why did why did they die you know I know it I this week it's funny because it was Thanksgiving I went upstairs I don't go up into this desk.

I opened the desk and here were the letters from Victor Hansen, who I was named after, died in Okinawa.

And I was reading him writing to my great-grandparents

and who were Swedish.

And he was in Guadalcanal training for 6th Marine Division to go into Okinawa.

And it was...

Well, we don't know where we're going to go, but whatever it is,

we're going to do a top-know job.

Now that we talked in that era, don't worry about me.

This is a great country.

We're going to win.

And then he got killed.

And then I was also cleaning out.

We have an old shed.

And when my daughter died, I put everything there in it and under plastic.

I haven't read it since.

And I opened it to move it.

And I saw one of her letters.

And

she said, I had had a catastrophic bike accident.

And she was writing

on, she just wrote me me a note and said, oh,

you look really bad.

Don't worry.

You're going to be upbeat back to normal, dad, just like normal.

And then she passed away

six months later.

How does anybody who's 26 pass away in perfect health?

You know, I don't understand it.

But these things happen.

So we have on Thanksgiving to think about

A, memory to all these wonderful people that died and led wonderful lives.

And then to think how lucky we have one more day,

one more day is what it's

Victor for,

if I may, the family, my wife, my children, sooner or later, I hope I have grandchildren if they get active and then

rightly active, I should say.

And I do want to not blow smoke at you, but I am very, very well aware that there are.

many, many people who would want to be doing what I'm doing here with you and do it better.

And I'm really thankful to be able to.

Well, I appreciate that because I'm around a lot of people who wouldn't want to be you

and who make that pretty clear to me where I work, I think.

But that's another story.

I have wonderful grandchildren.

I have five grandchildren

and I love them all.

They're really wonderful kids.

So I was very lucky there.

Get back, you look back at your life and you think all these choices were very, I had very good students at Cal State Fresno.

I'm very close to a lot of them.

Right.

Wonderful,

some brilliant kids.

And

it's just wonderful.

I had a lot of good friends.

I was talking to Mahoney about that.

There's a professor and that you can really engage with some students and actually play a role in their life, setting them down a path and helping them really flourish in the way they wouldn't have without your engagement.

And that's not being, you know.

We had a couple of students over election night, and

one went to Yale after Fresno, and one went to Brown, and they married.

And now they're classics, Curtis Easton and his wife, Christy, they were brilliant students.

And it's good to see them.

And I get,

I,

I had a lot of really brilliant students.

It's funny about a place like Cal State Fresno, you think, well, you taught at the Naval Academy.

I had some two really brilliant students at the Naval Academy, Alex Martin and Tim Schneider.

And I had a lot of good students at Stanford when I taught there.

And at Pepperdine, I do.

But there was something about Cal State, because they were from maybe the middle or lower middle classes with a lot of

money problems,

work trying to work.

And boy, some of them, that discovery of that natural talent

where people wouldn't expect it.

I mean, the university, you know,

if I said that the brightest students I ever had in 20 years came from Cal State Fresno, they wouldn't believe you, but they were there and they're there now.

Wow.

And that's really.

You're not taking a bow, but

you helped make that happen.

And that's got to be

rewarding because why else are you teaching?

Not to see that kind of end result.

So, hey, Victor, we are out of time, everybody.

Thank you very much for hanging in there today.

Thank you, folks.

And thank you, Victor, for everything.

And folks, we will be, I wish I could speak English, Victor.

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

Happy Thanksgiving.

Bye-bye.

Happy Thanksgiving.