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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the man lucky enough to be the host, but you are here to listen to and get wisdom from and analysis from Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha-Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, best-selling author, classicist, military historian, farmer.

Victor's everything, right, Victor?

Am I correct on that?

Oh, great American, also.

Yeah.

We'll take it off for you guys.

I didn't say duh.

I said ah.

I know.

Doctor of our patient.

Hey, we are recording on Saturday the 16th of November.

This particular episode will be out on Tuesday the 19th.

Tons of stuff to get Victor's wisdom on.

Many of that will be the Trump appointments to various cabinet positions and leadership positions.

But I think first, there's

a topic we have put off for the last couple of episodes talking about, and that has to do with North Korean troops involved in the Ukraine war.

So we'll get Victor's take on that, and then we'll move on to some of these other more domestic and political topics.

And we'll do all that when we come back from these very important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

By the way, Victor's got a website, the blade of Perseus.

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You should be subscribing.

Victor, for a few weeks now, North Korean troops have been fighting alongside the Russians in the war against Ukraine.

I am no military

expert, nor not even someone that can speak English clearly.

I've read a thing or two here or there.

One guy is talking about how this is North Korea sticking it to China.

Someone else is saying how this is China using

North Korea in a way to control Russia.

I just think it's bad news, regardless.

What's your take on it?

And

who's pulling the strings here, if anyone?

Well, I mean, it reflects a lot of things.

As I understand it, they're going to be going into occupied Russia.

So maybe

the 500 square miles or so that Ukraine took, remember, a few months ago with almost no opposition because the Russians were mounting themselves an offensive inside Ukraine.

So Ukraine thought, well, we'll mount one inside

Russia.

I never understood that, though.

It was sort of what the German army did in 1942.

They tried to go on the offensive in 1943 at Kursk, but even earlier after Stalingrad, they had some success, but they didn't have

enough manpower, and they were losing the manpower war every month, as is Ukraine.

And yet, you don't, if you're going to go on an offensive, you would think that they would have timed it to go into the rear of the Russians, cut their supply lines, and then maybe envelop them, but they didn't.

It was very distant from the heavy point of action of the Ukrainians.

So

I imagine what they're doing is they're going to send the North Koreans.

I don't know if they're going to send them in Ukraine.

That might be,

they might have for

the the russians a little strategic worries that if they have a

it's not a civil war but they are fighting to get fighting with russian speakers in that area along the border ukrainians and you bring in foreign troops and invade

that i don't think that would be a good morale thing the other thing is they're kind of mercenaries aren't they they're obviously getting the government who's short foreign exchange has been sanctioned by the u.s

it's either payment for russian missiles or russian defense systems that russia's been sending them.

They don't have any foreign exchange currency or they're getting cash.

But you get the impression that this 10,000,

I mean, some of the reports are saying they could get, what, 10,000 or 15,000 a month that they're willing to put in 50,000, 60,000 of them.

And

we don't know how they're going to fight.

They're probably much more orderly.

They look better than the Russian troops.

But if you were North Korean, if you think about it,

and you were sick of North Korea and you were put in a distant theater

and you were fighting a Western Ukraine country, and that they had, what,

propaganda that said, hey, all you have to do is give up, and you will be given freedom and sanctuary in Europe or the United States or something.

That might be a successful way to undermine them.

Who knows?

But I imagine they'll fight pretty well.

They remind me of the Cubans.

Remember Remember that in the 70s when

there were all these blood, yeah, and Angola, all these anti-colonial wars against the Portuguese, especially.

The Cubans, they had a shock force of about 40 or 50,000, and they sent them everywhere.

They were,

you know, they were everywhere.

And

the United States was very worried about that for a while.

They were sort of like the French Foreign Legion for a while.

I suppose that maybe the North Koreans will show up in the Middle East or wherever and the dictatorship is fighting a westernized country.

Victor,

the

amount of casualties that the Russians are taking,

I'm reading a Newsweek article that just one day alone,

it says there were

1,770 Russian

soldiers had been killed or injured.

Well, I think that's over two days.

But in the month of October, you know, 40,000 casualties.

I mean, many of them are dead.

It's just this.

I read, you know, I think we've talked, I don't know if we talk about it.

I've been reading from some of these military blogs, 1.5, 1.6 million combined Russian and Ukrainian dead, wounded, and missing.

Yeah.

I mean, it's greater.

That's a greater figure than Verdun or First Psalm.

And nobody's really talking.

You know, I did a, it was supposed to be 40 minutes, but we ended up talking an hour and 20 minutes yesterday.

I did it with a European news

show on Ukraine.

And

I really was empathetic.

The guy that was interviewing me was pro-Ukrainian.

He's from Georgia, so he has experience, obviously, with Putin's invasions and aggressions.

But their basic argument made perfect strategic sense.

But I was trying to tell him that it's not about strategy alone.

His argument was,

well,

if you want to stop Putin, you have to arm us.

And you're arming us, as everybody knows, enough with the $200 billion not to lose, but not to win.

If you would arm us to win, you would deal Putin a blow.

And then you say to him, if we armed you to win, which you could do in theory, although I doubt it because they have four times the manpower, 30 times the territory, and 10 times the GDP, then

you would provoke a nuclear standoff, maybe, because you would be violating the rules of proxy wars as we understood them with the Soviet Union, that you don't use a third party in Vietnam or Korea or wherever to attack the homeland.

And when you tried to do that, as Nikita Khushif did in 1962, and used Cuba as a proxy power to attack the the homeland with missiles, we almost went to, I guess we did go to DEF CON too,

almost one.

So my point is I was trying to tell him that what is strategically sensible is not politically feasible.

And then he said, well, if Trump comes in,

I really liked him.

He was trying to go through, he was trying to game me on all the different scenarios.

Well, if you want, I said, we need to stop the killing.

And

I gave the old boilerplate that everybody's heard.

They get to have the Donbass they stole in 2014.

They get to have the Crimea they stole.

Neither Trump nor Obama earlier or Biden afterwards prior to February 24th of 2022 ever wanted to get those back by force.

Okay.

And then we don't put them in NATO.

And then we tell them that

In exchange for that, Putin tells the Russians, oh, I stopped them from being in NATO.

For the rest of our lives, forever, Crimea and and Donbass will be Russian.

Okay.

And then he has to go back to February 22nd.

Then he said, well, what will happen next year and the year after?

I said, well, you would integrate, maybe you can integrate it with the EU.

You can negotiate a DMZ like in North Korea.

Then you get armed to the teeth.

And then he said, well, what if that's not enough?

I said,

we're not an ally of yours.

You're right next to Europe.

Right.

Well, why not in NATO?

Because NATO is only as strong as its weakest league.

Do you really, really, really believe that people in Spain or having Cappuccino in Florence or on the river, the

river Rhone or maybe on a bank in Amsterdam or Rotterdam are going to go fight for you and Ukraine because you're attacked and you're going to invoke Article 5?

If you were in NATO right now, do you think Americans would be flying over there to fight Russians for you?

And

so I said, that's not going to happen.

And then he said, well, if you pull out, it'll be worse than Afghanistan.

That'll be a blot on Trump.

Yes, it will.

But Trump is a businessman.

So I don't think he's going to just give the country over to Putin.

And I said, basically,

he's going to try to

negotiate from a position of strength along the lines everybody knows as I just outlined.

And if you don't, I mean, if you don't like it, and I didn't mean that as a personal affront to him because I liked him a lot, then maybe the Europeans that have roughly the EU and its associated members have about the same GDP and population as we do.

Why don't they have a Marshall Plan and, you know,

rebuild the country and give them billions of dollars and, I don't know, buy natural gas from us and do all this stuff.

But they're not doing that.

They're an economic basket case collective.

Yeah, they're not doing that because they're socialists and they'll never be able to have that type of dynamic economy when everybody feels that, you know,

you're going to work four hours a day or you're waiting for your uncle's government job to open up in the Census Bureau so you can inherit it.

50 weeks of vacation a year.

Exactly.

It's never going to happen.

And then the same thing with Ukraine.

And I said, look at Israel.

And we compared them.

I said, we give Israel about four or five billion bucks.

And what do we get for that?

We get the destruction destruction of Hamas.

We get the destruction of Hezbollah, the people who killed our Marines and have tortured CIA people.

And we've got Iran in the most neutered condition since 1980.

And we haven't had one American involved in the war.

And it's a lot cheaper than the $200 billion you're giving you.

And so...

If you would, so he's, and I was not trying to be provocative.

I just said, if you guys would win, then we'll help winners.

But you can't win because you're outnumbered

and you've lost 12 million people, have left your country.

So you're only about 28 million people.

And I know you've done enormous damage to Putin, but

he's going to grind you down.

And so

you've got to, if you had negotiated a year ago

when everybody was talking about Russian morale, Proxin or whatever his name was, the coup and all that, then he would have negotiated, but he thinks he's in the driver's seat now.

So it's going to be very hard for Trump for all his rhetoric to cut a deal.

Trump's going to have to do something, either help the more to get less out, I mean, get us less committed by committing short-term war.

But the idea that we're going to surge weaponry as we surge troop in Iraq, I don't think permanently it's not going to happen politically.

He didn't run on that.

Trump did not run on, I'm going to do the Biden massive aid so they don't lose, but not enough so they can win.

And everybody criticized Biden, and I did too, but

giving enough aid for them to win, you don't defeat a nuclear neighbor in today's world.

It's a dictatorship unless you have overwhelming superiority.

You can do it with Iran because they're not quite nuclear.

He's not going to just say,

I'm defeated and you killed a million Russians and everything and I'm defeated and humiliated and I had to withdraw in shame and I gave up the Donbass and the Crimea that had been Russian for decades and in the case of Crimea centuries.

And okay, I'm done.

It's not going to happen.

I wish it would, but it's not.

But anyway, we had a good conversation about that, but it's, it's really depressing.

It just, I, I, then there's a left-wing attitude.

It's like, how dare you say you're not going to let them have hypersonic missiles and 50 F-16s.

This is Russian collusion all over again.

You know what I mean?

It's just,

I think I told you I was riding my bike maybe a year and a half ago.

And I go through the Stanford faculty, I say ghetto, but it's, you know, a little tract house is three or four million bucks.

And they had these signs out all during 2000.

2020, you know, this house doesn't stand racism or racism has no place here.

You know, those George Floyd.

And then they had the pride, homophobia.

They had those.

And then there was one, you know.

And then they had Ukraine.

For about a month, they had little Ukrainian kind of flag signs.

And so in their mind, Ukraine became, oh, Russian collusion didn't work.

Laptop disinformation, but the damn Ruskies are still there.

Now they are

Putin and they're MAGA people.

And that's that's what they thought.

They just transferred this domestic hatred of Trump onto anybody who

questioned their strategy in Ukraine.

Right.

And

that Russian smear card is, they think, is applicable to any situation.

Tulsi Gabbard.

Yeah,

they're already doing that.

They're already doing that.

They're calling her a Russian stooge, just like Clapper called Trump.

I think I wrote an article about that.

Trump kills more people than the Russians than during the entire Cold War.

I think 250 Wagner Group.

He gets out of the Russian asymmetrical that they don't like, missile deal.

He ups the sanctions.

He swamps them with cheap oil in the world market.

He sells

Obama-embargoed offensive weapons to Ukraine.

And then they say he's a

Russian puppet.

Yeah.

And then

Hillary does the reset and gives him everything he wants, and all of a sudden she's tough on Russia.

Made no sense.

One last thing here, Victor, back on Ukraine.

And by any standard, but who does, what European country does the American left hate?

And that's Hungary, but by any standard.

Everybody hates Hungary.

Everybody hates Hungary.

And Hungary says, what, five years ago when Germany, Merkel was saying, yes, we can, or what was the

German motto?

I think it translated to, we can do this.

We can do this.

We can let in a million radical Muslims from the most impoverished area in the world.

At the same time, we're destroying our economy by shutting down coal and nuclear energy and having wind and solar in a cold,

cloudy country.

We can do this and still support, you know, export Mercedes and BMW and Audis to all over the world for a competitive product.

No, you can't.

You can't.

And

anybody who goes to Berlin sees that the people who are Muslims, whether they're Kurds or Turks or wherever,

they're just in a separate apartheid existence.

Right.

And they do not like Germans and Germans don't like them.

And so they can't do it.

And it was a disaster.

And who was the one that warned them?

Victor Orban.

That was my point.

He said, this is not going to happen in Hungary.

And now everybody says, you know what?

We're going to do exactly what Hungary's doing.

Yes, it's a great country.

I mean, Budapest is like, wow, what a terrific, terrific.

It's beautiful.

You know, that's another thing.

In the last 10 years, I've had the pleasure of going to Prague or Budapest.

No offense, Western Europe, but those cities seem to me that they're functional in a way that

parts of German cities and French cities and especially

Brussels are not as far as the immigration and

cleanliness, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Where would you feel safe walking down the street at two in the morning in Budapest or in Stockholm, right?

I don't know.

Hey, Victor, we have lots of American political analysis to get from you on

Donald Trump's various nominations.

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

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We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'd like to remind you, dear listeners, of Victor's website.

You go there, Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

You can do a million things there.

Three, you can read Victor's articles from American Greatness.

He writes every week, big essay, his syndicated column.

You're new to this podcast?

Well, you can go back.

The archives are there.

Go back and listen.

Links to Victor's other appearances, other podcasts and videos.

But you're going to see these little articles with ultra on them, and you're not going to be able to read them unless you subscribe.

They're terrific articles.

Victor writes two or three a week.

They're all done, always done.

I haven't missed one yet since we started.

I do three three a week.

Yeah.

2,500 words.

I haven't missed one yet.

Well, I owe that to the readers that pay their monthly fees.

I'm going to do a series on the appointments.

Pros and cons of all the primp appointments.

Well, we're going to get into that in a second.

You just mentioned that

the subscription is five bucks a month, discounted $50.

for the full year, the blade of Perseus.

So, Victor, let's save the most controversial one for the end because it may require the most time.

But there were a few that you, I know you want to talk about.

Elise Stefanik for the UN and

not uncontroversial Bobby Kennedy for HHS.

And of course, Matt Goetz for

Department of Justice, the Attorney General.

Let's start off with Stefanik.

Your thoughts about that appointment or not appointment, that nomination.

Well that that appointment was

predicated

on

two or three things.

One of them was the disaster of Ambassador Greenfield.

Is that her name, Greenfield?

I think it is.

The current Biden ambassador.

There is a

as when this is aired, there's going to be another UN resolution.

Remember the one that when Obama left office, there was a UN resolution saying essentially that any land that Israel was on after the Green Line was established at the end of the 47, 48 war was illegally occupied.

Forget about they had been attacked, attacked, attacked from the Golden Heights or from Jerusalem, East Jerusalem.

But nevertheless,

Obama voted for that.

And then

this new one, if you look at it, it's got all sorts of provisions in it.

And

you get the impression that I don't think these are revocable, not that we ever abide by them, but the Europeans are really against us on this one coming up, condemning Israel about the settlements and the jurisdiction of the international criminal, all these issues.

Ann Biefsky, I think she runs something, is it called UN Watch?

Ann is one of the, yeah, she's an expert on the UN.

And she's the expert, and she has one on, she has an article on Fox.com today.

And

I think

Representative Stefanik should talk to her because, but anyway, she is picked there

to, I think, based on the performance, that brilliant inquisitor role that she played with those three, especially Claudine Gay, but the MIT, Pennsylvania president, and Harvard president, when she showed them to be either indifferent to anti-Semitism or anti-Semitic or just incompetent and destroyed them.

And she's been a very strong advocate

to,

I don't want to say man up, woman up, person up and stop the anti-Semitism on campus.

She's very pro-Israel.

She's probably going to be the most pro-Israeli UN ambassador since John Bolton, or probably more so than John Bolton.

I think she's very good.

I don't know whether her seat, you know, New York better than I do, but people tell me that there's a good chance they can keep her seat.

The problem with all these appointments, they're losing congressional seats.

Right.

And

they assure us that, you know, in Waltz's Florida district, that they can make them up with

Republicans, but they're going to be short for a while.

Anyway, she's going to be a good pick, and it's going to bring in a lot of

new issues that we haven't heard for four years.

You remember under Trump with HW, we got out of a WHO

and we were thinking about cutting the UN.

And I think there's going to be a lot of that type of talk, not just the UN is crazy, and we're going to vote against these nutty people,

but do we really want to give them

Is it 20 billion a year total for all the programs?

Something like, I don't know what it is, something like that.

Do we really want to keep doing that?

Do we really want to keep hosting these people

in New York?

Does anybody know a war they stopped?

Does anybody know the UN peacekeepers?

I mean,

they're on the Lebanese border and

their sanctuary cities basically are sanctuary zones for Hezbollah.

And we had people in the...

Trade workers participating on October 7th.

We had United Nations relief workers that were participating in the murder, rape, killing.

killing.

What do we want with these creepy people?

And

why do we do this?

This idea that we're going to be liberal internationals by putting all of these illiberal regimes on the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba.

So I think

it's going to be an excellent appointment.

And she's going to ask all these questions.

But the question is,

The main question I think a lot of people have, is there support, public support, to go beyond the gadfi role of what we've seen in the past with Nikki Haley and John Bolton?

But I would say that Nikki Haley didn't really replace

the Obama people.

They were working for her.

It wasn't like she came in and made a clean sweep and brought in MAGA people.

She really didn't.

She was good.

But I think Stefanik will fire all the people there

that were

Biden and Obama people and get a whole new group of people.

And I think Marco Rubio and the State Department will support her.

And then the question will be, well, do you really want to keep participating year after year in this charade?

And I don't know what you do, but I would cut, cut, cut.

If you're going to cut waste here at home, I would cut that budget by half and then really suggest to them, maybe you just, maybe.

All of you illiberal people who come over here and bring the Iranians over here and blast every year.

Yeah, racist, homophobic.

You're going to put your soldiers subject to the

International Criminal Court.

And after what we saw in George Floyd, the

Human Rights Commission is going to come in and look for systemic racism on the invitation of Secretary Blink.

And I don't think anybody wants to do that anymore.

People will see America's

own national security, having this dump in New York and

what it allows into our country, and then some of these nasty-ass nations, and they have these consulates that are filled with spies

using UN

alleged employment.

It's not as bad, though, Jack, because in the Giuliani Bloomberg Renaissance years,

we were all mad that these people are coming from these

hell holes and then squandering their corrupt government budget in New York, living it up at five-star hotels, going on New York media.

But now, you know what I mean?

New York's not such a good place.

So they're leaving Nairobi or something and coming over to something like it.

So it's kind of, I don't think they see

being in New York as such a great thing anymore.

But nevertheless,

I don't know what it helps the New York economy, but I think they should really put it in Caracas or Havana

or I don't know, maybe Kabul or something else.

Put it where the problem is.

Problem is not us.

And I wouldn't put it, don't put it in Europe.

We've had anybody looks at what's going on with the EU and Strasbourg or Brussels, know that it's just hopeless.

Maybe Mexico City, I don't know.

Lima, Peru, that would be good.

Then they get, all these liberal people would get to come over and say, I feel finally I don't have to be with those racist, sexist, homophobic, capitalist, running dog, imperialist anymore.

I get to be where I have solidarity and group faith and reinforcement of my ideological equity beliefs.

And I'm here in the third world where I love it.

Well, let's go to the middle of the nation, Victor.

I didn't mention Doug Bergham, but he is one of

President-elect Trump's nominees for Secretary of the Interior.

He's North Dakota governor.

You have some positive thoughts about him?

I've always liked it.

I think everybody likes him.

He had a software company.

I think he sold it to Microsoft for what, $500 or $600 million, maybe more.

He's self-made.

And I mean,

he's pro-energy.

I thought in the debates he conducted himself well.

I think he always wanted an either energy secretary or interior secretary.

He was very measured in his criticism of his rival Trump for the few weeks he was

in the primary.

So, yeah, I think

he's a good pick.

He'll get confirmed.

He'll get confirmed automatically.

Yeah, I would think so.

He, as I think you know, I think probably most of our listeners know, the Department of Interior oversees Indian affairs.

Yes.

And I saw, I read the other day, if someone told me.

Oh, I know what you're going to say.

We haven't talked about this, but I know what you're going to say.

Well, then go ahead.

Jack is going to tell everybody, and correct me if I'm wrong, because

we haven't talked about this, but

you're going to say that for all the Native American activism and all the left-wing pandering, pandering that Native American peoples voted 65% for Trump.

Correct.

Is that what you're going to say?

That was what I was going to say.

Yes, absolutely.

And why would they do that?

And because according to Obama, they're suffering from false consciousness.

And according to Marx, people, the opiate of the maxes, they're just eating pizza and watching TV all day.

And they're imbued with Fox propaganda.

And they need people to fly out from Martha's Vineyard and tell them what is really in their interest before he flies back.

That's what they think.

But no, they're,

you know, they're on wherever they are on whatever particular tribal set aside, they think, you know what?

My wolf is leaking.

I've got to go get some shingles.

Oh my God, the shingles are four times what they were.

Well, maybe Biden didn't mean that.

Oh, gasoline's a dollar higher?

Hmm.

Well, maybe we'll have some ribs and bar.

Oh my God, it's double.

And maybe they're worried about that.

And then they turn on the television and Camilla hears, I love Biden.

Almix, it's working.

It's so good.

And they're sick of it.

And then they think, well, surely somebody in Washington is worried about us.

And they think, you know what?

What's your pronouns?

What are your pronouns?

A-O-C?

She took her pronouns down, but she hadn't.

Yeah.

So that's what the Democratic Party is just a bunch of very wealthy people and the minority people, Native American, Asian, black, they have about the same relationship with the masses of their particular constituencies as the Stanford professor or the Harvard administrator have with you or me, Jack.

Yeah.

Or our listeners.

They were, at least in South Dakota.

I forget.

I forget.

Did Thun lose an election once running against Tom Daschell?

I remember the

Indian vote was very suspect and very much a tool of the Democrats.

Oh, it always was.

That's what's really strange about what we're watching.

I think everybody should take a deep breath.

I'm doing it right now.

This is

the greatest cultural, political, social revolution of my lifetime because there was nothing like it in the 60s.

What we are watching is the slow disintegration of identity politics, racial tribalism, democratic demagoguery, and it's insidious, and they can't stop it.

The more that they double down after this election and the more...

the more that Scarborough or The View

or Nancy Pelosi starts to lecture people, or you see it everywhere on YouTube, all of these teacher meetings where, did you see that in California where that Mexican-American teacher, he went out and he started lecturing people

in his class.

You people want to be white.

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

You voted for all these Trump people, and it's because you...

And then the school board meeting, where they just people came and just blasted him.

We're sick of you.

We don't need to be told what you do.

We're intelligent people.

Don't mock us.

But they can't get it.

They're so used to mocking people and talking down to people.

And

they don't understand that they've lost the people.

They have MSNBC, they have the corporate boardroom, they have the Tides Foundation, they have the Sorreles Foundation, they have the owner of the NBA, but they do not have the people.

And the people are sick of them.

And they don't understand what's going on.

You're having a major realignment.

And the irony about all of this is it's Donald Trump lit the fuse.

And, you know, I was thinking the other day, they could have,

Jack, we, have we ever talked about how many people

tried to destroy him and he ruined their careers or he destroyed their brand?

It's just incredible.

I mean, look at the Cheneys.

The Cheneys were,

whether you agree with them or not, you could argue that in conservatives, they were the

gold standard, don't you think?

Oh, my gosh.

Lynn Cheney.

She was.

She was very good.

Yeah.

She was a great.

She was great at the NEA.

She was a National Endowment for Humanities.

My gosh.

And Dick Cheney, that's the month.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, Lynn.

That was the month.

Lynn, right.

And then there was Liz, and Liz was third highest in the house, safe seat in Wyoming.

All the people in Wyoming, I mean, she was rock solid.

They're gone.

Done.

Done.

He broke them.

He broke them.

And then you think of,

well, I like George W.

Bush, but he broke the Bushes.

He broke the brand.

He did.

And maybe it's not fair.

There were

third generation Bushes that were trying to be MAGA and conservative and, you know, make the necessary.

He broke them.

He destroyed the weekly standard.

It doesn't exist.

That was a marquee voice of foreign policy among neoconservatism, but also mainstream Republican.

I think he broke John.

Don't you think he broke John Bolton?

Yes.

I think at one time you would read reports of John Bolton's

political action committee with six, seven, eight million in one year.

And I think it's like down to 30,000 or something.

He broke him.

He broke

when

Donald Trump ran, you could say that George Will, whom I served on a board with, I liked him.

He was very erudite, famous.

Probably, I think it would be no

disservice to others to say that George Will, circa Jack, 2014, was the premier conservative pundit in the United States.

Other than Victor Davis Hanson.

No,

I had no, I never approximated his reach.

He was, he lorded over

Sunday Fox shows.

He had a, must have had 300 or 400 subscribers to his Washington Post column.

Wait, wait, wait.

With all due reference to Rush Limbaugh.

Oh, no, no, I'm not talking about populists.

I'm talking about establishment.

Right.

Okay.

Yeah, I would say that.

Yeah.

He was.

We got to get George Will to come speak at our dinner.

Exactly.

Along with Charles Krudheimer.

Krutheimer was smarter, wilier, or more astute, whichever term you want to use.

He didn't ever come out and say Trump was beyond the pale.

He said that he was interesting, there were problems with his candidacy, but he represented something that had not been addressed in the Republican Party.

Charles was a very brilliant guy.

I used to talk to him sometimes.

Nice man, awfully nice.

He's had a wonderful wife, very humble, very nice.

He was very courageous.

I liked him a lot.

But George Will, I mean, now he's, he's,

he,

it's just, he, he just, you know, this, he got a lot of people.

Yeah, and the obsession and I don't bandy, you know, derangement.

I don't want to say he's deranged, but he, he, uh reviewed Al Felsenberg's biography of Bill Buckley, and he was very close to Bill.

George Will worked at National Review, but he used it at the review to attack

Of all people, Whitaker Chambers, because Whitaker Chambers, he thought, was the kind of two generations ago source for the Trump.

I don't get it, but the hatred was like

he broke him.

And the same thing, Diak, I have to be very careful now.

Be pleased.

I don't make that.

I'm tiptoeing.

And he broke our former employers' national review.

He did.

And all of that array in 2014 or 13,

when they had that issue, the Never Trump issue, that was supposed to be the sentencing and the execution of the Trump candidacy.

And they doubled down.

Our former colleague and an esteemed friend, David French, would write column after column after column, along with Kevin Williamson and the others, that he is shortly done politically, Trump, and he will be done, and thy will be done.

And it never happened.

And they got obsessed.

And then

we could go over to some.

He broke the whole conservative punditry.

He broke the people in the Republican.

Remember, there was a time when the stalwarts were considered the sober and judicious Republicans in the Senate were?

John McCain, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker.

Remember those people?

These were the people who reached out over the aisle and helped get the Iran deal, maybe.

Not John McCain, but the other two.

And John McCain heroically came in and stopped Obamacare.

And he just broke them all.

Yeah.

Victor, can I add something here interestingly about National Review?

I went back to the first issue.

I'm trying to write a piece for somebody on like what would what would Bill Buckley, if Bill Buckley was alive today, what would he have to say about all of this?

I just think it's a worthwhile exercise.

And looking at the first issue,

and the magazine, what we, you know, stand athwart history yelling, stop.

It's not like sit on the sidelines, you know, quipping or

tweeting stuff.

Or

the first 2,000 in the Cambridge phone book?

Well, that was his, Bill was very much a populist in that regard.

Yeah, I'd rather be

judged by the, you know, government by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directly than by the faculty of Harvard.

But my point here is that the topics, the issues that NR at the first issue, 1955, laid out is like, this is why we have come to be.

This is the issues we fight for are still very current.

And they're all stuff that Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump is totally in line with.

So

except for

free markets,

there's obviously some.

some change there.

But

generally, Donald Trump is a strong conservative.

And

many,

I don't know, that keepers of conservatism

hate him for that.

You know,

that's what

everybody listening, not everybody, but because we have loyal followers on the left.

I know that because I get stuff from them and they're very astute people, some of them.

But I think the majority, it's safe to say, are center-right.

Yeah.

And

what they are astounded because I hear from you and I talk to you in public when I see you, they're astounded by this.

They understood that Donald Trump could be crude, his tweets were inconsiderate, they didn't always

approve of, you know, if you're going to make fun of Camilla Harris, they don't like saying she has a low IQ.

But whatever that is, they understood that A, the establishment kind of asked for it, and they needed somebody without any political baggage of the past, no political loyalties, who was going to be their ballistic missile to hit the target, the target being the administrative blob.

Right.

And that he

did that and tried to break through.

And my point is, they were wise enough that if they voted against him in the primary, they understood when they passions cooled, they went down the conservative checklist and they said, tax reduction, check.

Border security, check.

Reasonable reservations about abortion, check.

Foreign policy deterrence, check.

Strong defense, check.

Tough criminal policing, law enforcement, check.

Very good on energy production, America first energy, check.

Skepticism and rejection of this radical transgender agenda, check.

And so what did they, and then they said, what do I disagree with the MAGA people?

Or at that time, it was Trump.

There was no MAGA.

He was Trump.

Well, tariffs, but Reagan had tariffs and Bush had tariffs.

So my objection to Trump is his sloppiness and language.

When he says he's going to put tariffs everywhere, he didn't last time.

He had selective reciprocal tariffs.

Check.

Check.

That's what they did.

That's what Reagan did.

That's what Bush did.

And then they think,

well, what else did he do?

Appointments.

Judges.

Oh,

he appointed Harriet Myers?

No, he didn't.

He didn't.

David Souter?

David Souter?

No, he didn't.

So

the

go back to Reagan.

Yeah.

Justice Roberts.

No.

So

it was 90%.

And some of you are going to say, well, it was 90%.

What was so different?

Because it was his,

A, he kept his promises and he took on the left and he made conservative appointments as well.

And yes, he didn't, he was tricked and hoodwinked by a lot of people in that four-year period that were.

not loyal and tried to subvert him that he had appointed.

But the point was, he never gave any grounds for anybody to reject their entire lifelong, holistic, conservative mental landscape and belief.

And they did.

Bill Crystal did.

David Frum did.

Charles Sykes did.

I don't know if George Wills completely did, but a lot of them did.

He made them go crazy.

And they basically told all their readers, hey, Max Boot,

hey, you guys, everything I believed in, and I told you to believe in, and I hammered you to believe in, don't believe that now, because I hate that guy so much that I've rejected everything, and now I'm 2.0.

And you should still be persuaded.

Jennifer Rubin, she was hired by the, I remember she was in Commentary.

I think John Pothoritz made her.

And I remember talking, I won't mention the people at Commentary, and they said, you got to meet Jen Rubin.

She is brilliant.

And I remember saying, well, I read something.

I was not impressed.

I was underwhelmed.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.

She is the new conservative.

She is our conservative.

Yeah.

And so my point is that he broke all those people.

And he was, you know, who really saw that at the beginning?

And he's very underappreciated.

I know everybody say he can't be underappreciated.

He was the most popular conservative.

It was Josh Lembau.

I was going to say, El Rushbo.

He did, man.

He was a cruise supporter.

And

he voiced his reservations on Trump, not because he was bothered by Trump's attack on the establishment, but he felt that Trump had been a Democrat, that Trump was soft on abortion.

All those were legitimate.

Rush was right.

Rush saw exactly what Trump meant and the people who were supporting

Trump.

You know who else did?

I talked to him very early.

He had initial.

Dennis Prager did too.

Yeah.

And you know who else did?

Before he was pardoned, Conrad Black and Bill, Bill Bennett did too.

They did.

They did.

Oh, yeah.

They did very early.

Yeah.

There were a lot of people who you would not ever suspect that.

Gosh, I love Conrad.

He's such a, what a writer.

What a great guy.

Well,

he's got a beautiful vocabulary and method of oil and written expression.

I blurbed his history of the world, and it's very well.

It's 19th century-esque.

it's it's a very it's a wonderful achievement but i anyway getting back to that um this is a revolutionary time we're we're living all of a sudden we can say things we can say you know what

i don't want my that representative he didn't want his daughters and in with competing against biological males

yeah how dare you do that we're gonna get no i don't care go ahead i don't care and the same thing with the disney woman who's doing the snow white White.

What was it?

She's the actress.

She started lecturing everybody.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

I didn't mean it.

Disney has $800 million invested in the production of my movie.

And you might, what, Bud Lightme?

And so all these people, and even the view now is in terror, you know, that they're going to have to bring.

No, Barbara Walters was weird, but when she founded that, she had people with different viewpoints.

And it was just kamikaze during the George Floyd mania.

That's going to be looked at that period from May of 2020 to 2024 election as a period like the Great Terror.

Right.

It's going to be a period that's known as complete

insanity.

Can I just inject

comparing what some of the things you said earlier was

Drew Bledsoe.

Remember?

Drew Bledsoe?

Yes, I do.

He was that quarterback that some days he would be the best in the world and some days not so much.

Right.

But he was critical of

the tax on the cops, and then he folded so immediately and so grovelingly.

And to me, that was like that was

the mountain rush more of embarrassing things that happened in America.

But you're right, Victor.

That's not happening anymore.

And what he should have said at the time was up, you know, I don't care.

Anyway, those days are hopefully, the days of blood so groveling are hopefully over.

Yeah, and so, yeah, absolutely.

And

this is a, this is a

liberating time to be alive.

It really is.

And I didn't think it, I mean, I'm 71.

I never thought that

you could go around the Al Sharptons and the Barack Obamas and all of these race hustlers and grifters and just make the argument that we all have this common humanity and we all have more in common than not.

And our race,

our zip code, all of that is incidental to who we are.

And then one thing Alice Trump did is underappreciated.

He brought people in.

I know that a lot of them were crazy, but he didn't care what letters you.

He didn't care if you had a PhD, an MD, a JD.

I know that our credential system has benefits, but it was way overdone.

Fauci, MD,

chairman of the National Centre.

He was a.

I am science.

Yeah, I am the science.

And then he didn't care about the prior title.

So you can see that.

And

this will lead us to our next discussion: the revolution and what these appointments represent.

Well,

let's

get to them right after these final important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Hey, Victor, before

those really controversial appointments that I want to hear and I know our listeners want to hear about, about breaking things, and I know you were talking about Trump breaking conservatives.

He has

almost broken, I think, the Obamas.

They do indeed need to be totally broken.

There's a great piece in Tablet magazine.

It's a weekly Jewish publication.

I write about it a lot.

I refer to it in that civil thoughts.

And

Obama, as unique in history for hanging around Washington, other than Woodrow Wilson, who couldn't leave because he was stroke-ridden.

But Obama, this would have been, what, the fourth?

If Kamala Harris had won, it would have been the fourth Obama turn, effectively.

It was, essentially.

But

he needs to be totally crushed somehow or other.

We had talked about that, that this was

that Joe Biden was a puppet and it was Michelle and Barack and the people around them.

And I thought they would be more subtle about that.

But the moment he faltered and they were able to get him off, they just came out and just admitted it.

I mean, they just took over.

They put their people in charge of the Harris campaign.

They dumped Biden in a very cruel way.

And then they were very clever and very, very careful about how they handled that.

They gave mixed messages.

They kind of told one person, we want an open convention.

The other is that Camela should be, they didn't know who was going to win for 72 hours is what I'm getting at.

And they were trying and trying.

I think

Their heart said they wanted a black woman that they thought they could control in the same fashion they control a diminutive white male like Biden, but they weren't sure about that.

So they were going to have an open convention.

And when that was squashed and she beat that, she cut them off at the pass, then they came in full-hearted for her.

And then they thought, wow, you know.

And so

they were,

Michelle, you know, she was lecturing.

Finally, I think she told America, remember when I shut up?

And I became,

I had the garden and I talked about how I liked everybody.

And I wrote my memoirs about truth and beauty and mushy, mushy, mush, and you all like me again.

And I talked about women and everything and I'm on your side.

Well, that wasn't me.

I was never raised the bar on me.

And every time I try to make something, they raise the bar.

Or I've never been proud of my country before.

Or this is a damn right mean country.

That's who I am.

And if you forgot it, I'm going to come out and

lecture everybody that you're racist, hateful, dictator.

Yeah.

You don't know what you're doing.

And then Barack remember, oh, I've been playing golf.

You know, I just think I'm going to go play some golf.

That was the 2016.

He finally woke up and he thought, you know what?

People don't like me.

Yeah.

Because I lecture people.

I lost my party 1,400 seats, state, local, and national, during my tenure.

I didn't care about him because it was me I was worried about.

But, you know, I lectured him that Trayvon was the child I never had.

He looked just like me.

And I told that policeman in Cambridge that it was, that police were basically racist.

And oh, I had my little moments.

But I knew that people did not like Hillary, and I knew they didn't like Trump.

And I checked out my last year and I let them fight each other.

And then I waved to the crowd in my Bermuda shorts on the golf every day.

And I let John Brennan and

James Clapper and James Comey go to work on the Russian collusion which I fed to destroy Trump in the background and I like that and now you all like me and now you got to see me again I popped up again and now you hate my guts because I am an SOB so I lectured a bunch of very sincere African-American people that were very troubled when they attached themselves to the Harris campaign And I thought that they were undereducated.

They didn't have my sophistication.

They had never read Marx.

And so I had to school them.

I had to tell them they're suffering from false consciousness.

They are innately, you know, sexist and maybe they're even self-loathing racist because they did not appreciate the beauty, the intelligence, the dynamism of Camilla Harris and the great record she was supporting.

And that's what he did.

And everybody said, you know what?

You reminded me why I never liked you.

And I'm sick of you.

And then the more he went around the country and then he kept saying he thought, you know what?

I'm going to do I'm going to go to my Hopey and Changey and I'll just, we got a girlfriend, come on, I hope and change and we're going to do all this.

And everybody said, yeah, I remember that.

Ancient history.

I never liked it when I heard it the first time.

I just voted for you because you were the first black guy.

I don't like you.

I don't like what you're doing.

I don't like you stirring up people.

Bye.

Go away.

Go back to one of your mansions.

Yeah.

We don't care if you go to Chicago or Calorama Mansion or Martha's Vineyard with your 2,000-gallon propane tank and global warming is going to raise the ocean and lap over to your 40-acre estate or your what?

You built a home, a multi-million dollar home on the beach at Hawaii when you told us we couldn't drive because global warming was going to wash over all our coastlines.

Go back there.

We're done with you.

We're done.

All right.

So

that's oh my gosh.

He's he's the gift that keeps giving us this podcast.

Hey, Victor, we've, we've got to get three significant takes from you right now.

So

I think let's start off with your thoughts about the response, reactions to the nomination of Pete Hagseth, who I just want to say, I love Pete.

He's a friend.

I think he's a super guy.

And he is, and anyone thinks, oh, he's just, you know, I'm foxing friends and interviewing people in diners.

He is really, he is quite intellectual.

I've been with him, very steeped in Burke and the roots of conservatism.

Just a great guy.

Anyway, for me.

I liked him.

He came to Selma, California.

He came out here to my farm and spent the day with me.

Yeah.

And

he had to, he came out in a t-shirt, as I remember, and he pulled on his,

you know, dress shirt and tie.

We were filming a Fox Nation that he was directing on.

Remember that classical education?

Yeah.

And I was kind of a talking head in a few seconds.

But anyway, I spent a long time with him.

I noticed when he pulled his shirt off to get his dress shirt on, he had his

inkadinkadoo.

Yeah, his,

well, I don't know what would we call it.

It's the Crusader Cross, right?

Yes.

And it's, it was kind of a, and that's what people claim.

It's not a white white supremacist.

If anything, it's a Catholic monarchist, Jack, that you'll like.

Well, Pete's not Catholic, but he's not.

No, no, but I mean, it was not,

it was, and then

didn't he have Deus Wolt?

That's a famous, that was an early patristic, The God Wishes, and that was part of the Crusader motto, as I remember.

But anyway, the point is,

one way to look at Pete Hexeth is this.

I'm Senator Hansen, okay?

Just imagine me.

And he's sitting across the aisle right now.

Mr.

Hesse,

were you involved?

Did you plan?

Did you condone?

Did you ignore that catastrophic worst humiliation in history at Cabul?

No, I wasn't there.

Okay, next question.

Did you revolve from your perch in the Pentagon and go work for Raytheon?

And now, when you get done with your job, will you go back to Raytheon?

No, I've never worked for a defense contractor.

General Dynamics, Lockheed, Northrop?

No?

No.

You mean you never worked for a...

Well, what the hell's wrong with you?

Everybody does.

No, I don't.

Okay, next question.

And

you got rich on Wall Street.

No, I left Wall Street.

Well, where did you go?

Oh, I went for combat duty in Iraq.

So you didn't want to go to Afghanistan?

No, I went to Afghanistan too.

I went to Guantanamo.

You did?

Okay.

Well,

did you,

if you get defense person, you're going to get a private jet and fly to your home?

No, I'm not going to do that.

Well, Leon Panetta did.

Well, I'm not going to do that.

Okay.

Are you going to

design, were you in, were you...

Did you write in support of designing pregnant flight suits for women pilot?

No.

How about

what do you think about

starting

a study?

You've heard your distinguished predecessors, and they've all said that the Pentagon was suffering from systemic racism, white privilege, white rage, and white supremacy.

And they have a two-year study.

What do you think of it?

I don't think it exists.

So you don't want to insult the people that die at twice their numbers and the demographic in Iraq and Africa.

No.

So that's what it's going to to go like.

That's what it should go like.

In other words, what I'm trying to say, Jack, is that these people have destroyed all standards for performance at DOD.

And now they're going to tell somebody who has an Ivy League, which they value, an Ivy League Princeton and Harvard degree, and could have had a very lucrative career on Wall Street and volunteered to go into combat hell in two

combat theaters.

They're going to tell him that he is not qualified based on the standards of qualification set by the last five or six defense secretaries.

I guess that's what we're going to witness.

And

so remember, everybody, there is a theme, as we talked about with Sammy, to all of these appointments.

They have something in common.

I tweeted about it last night, Jack.

The person there is on a revenge ride.

Tulsi Gabbert was put on a terrorist watch list.

She's going to be director of national intelligence and have a lot of say who goes on that.

Robert Kennedy was considered a complete nut by HHS.

He may be.

We'll see how long he lasts if he's confirmed, but he's going to be running HHS if he's confirmed.

You could argue, you could argue that

you could make the argument, I'm not going to get, we're going to save a Matt Goetz, but the DOJ did go after him.

If he were to be confirmed, he's going to, whether it's good or bad, they are putting people in here who have legitimate grievances about the

agencies they're going to run, and they have been targets of those agencies.

The second thing to remember is we're not drawing people that have been in these positions the last 20 years.

So they don't have a lot of alphabet titles, JD or PhD after their name.

They don't have assistant.

I was the assistant secretary to that person.

I was the

associate director of that.

No, they don't.

And they're not coming from, you know, well, I was in the Biden administration, and then I came out of the Obama administration or the Bush, and I went over to Georgetown University in Taw.

Then I was at American Union.

No, they don't.

They're not.

And then I signed a 51, or I signed a 100-letter, you know, 100-name against.

Yeah,

and they're not from Wall Street.

I went there.

They're not coming back and forth from Silicon Valley.

And finally, they're not revolutionaries.

They're not trying.

They say, well, they're going to destroy.

No, they're just trying to say, what was the mission statement of the Pentagon originally?

What was it supposed to do?

What was the CIA supposed to do?

What was the FBI supposed to do?

What was HHS supposed to do?

What was CDC supposed to do?

What were all these EPA supposed to do?

And what are they doing now?

And they are acting in a fashion that the original creators never imagined.

The Pentagon today

bears no resemblance to what George Marshall and those people thought it would be like.

And the same thing with the EPA.

And so these people are not radicals.

They're just traditionalists.

And they're saying, we're going to either disband this division or this cabinet because it's so far gone or we're going to try to restore it to its original purpose.

That's very important.

Again, if I may, Bill Buckley, 1955, stand athwart history, yell, stop.

It has to stop.

It can't be accomplished.

They say, stand athwart history and accommodate.

And

these are the stoppers.

And that's what I meant.

You know, Elon Musk, they have gone, the government, whether the state of California or the federal, has gone out to destroy that guy.

When they try to get X, they try to get him.

They try to get him on his space.

They try to get him on Tesla.

And,

you know, he's now going to have a large hand in talking about what these people do.

They are the, he was policed and now he's the police.

And that is what is so frightening.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, what about Matt Getz?

You want to say

it's about time to finish, and we'll finish on Matt Goetz.

So

the traditional view, everyone,

and I'm not going to get partisan.

I'm just going to say if you're a, well, forget about the left.

I don't care what they think.

But if you're a MAGA supporter,

then you say, yes, Victor, I just heard what you said.

And Matt Gates was the subject of a lot of DOJ stuff to destroy him.

And they dropped the cane.

Now Now he's going to be back in the DOJ.

Who knows better than hand of the DOJ than an object than the other people say.

Well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

We have to be effective here.

Matt Gates is not a prosecutor.

This is the top prosecutor, prosecutorial job in the country.

He's never been a federal prosecutor.

He's never really been a lawyer to any great degree.

His family was in politics.

He went right into politics.

And

I don't think that he has the temperament to represent and protect the MAGA view of what needs to be done in the DOJ.

He doesn't have the skills or the experience or the age.

So those are the two views.

I'm not going to adjudicate them, but this is what

I think

is going to happen.

And I don't know if it's deliberate, Jack, or it's inadvertent.

Matt Gates resigned his house seat.

Matt Gates was the architect of the dethronement of

Kevin McCarthy.

Did you hear what Kevin McCarthy said?

No, I can't imagine.

Oh, they asked him, they said, what do you think about the Gates?

He started laughing.

He's very close to Trump.

He started laughing.

He said, he'll never be confirmed.

It's a joke.

And

he must know something.

I don't know if he'll get out of the...

So I think there were people in the Republican Party.

I'm not supporting it or I'm not opposing it.

I'm just trying to analyze it.

I think there were people in the Republican Party that knew that he had ingratiated himself to Trump, and he had Trump's ears.

And they thought that they could persuade him to be appointed under certain conditions.

So he

resigns from the House.

And they say, see, Matt, you got rid of the ethics investigation.

They were going after you.

But everybody sighs relief.

Johnson and everybody says, you know what?

We only had it.

By the time these appointments are over with, we're only going to have seven or eight seats.

And

we don't want somebody that's going to fire up Boebert and Mary.

Right.

Marjorie Taylor Greene and the mega bakes.

So he's gone now, check.

And then he's going to go in and they're going to go to the committee.

And he is going to embarrass the Republican senators because they're going to have to defend him.

And these people are going to hammer him.

They're going to ask him under oath,

how many cases have you ever tried as a prosecutor?

How many cases have you done as a defense person?

What do you think about this particular case?

What do you, can you name two prior

attorney generals that you think were good or bad?

That kind kind of stuff.

Right.

And they're going to try, and that may be true, that

they're not going to approve him.

And there's going to be senators.

And they're going to, even Ted Cruz, when they ask him, he was non-committal.

Yeah.

This is

kind of a good question.

Yeah.

So they're going to these guys and they say, now listen, you guys on the Judiciary Committee, do not put us in a position where we're going to have to vote against Trump.

So you kill this, strangle this appointment in the committee.

We'll see.

And that's going to be very tough because

you don't want to vote along with Schumer or somebody.

So anyway,

they're going to do this.

And then Trump is going to say, look,

you guys,

I

he's going to call in all the MAGA people and said, I got you the ultra, ultra MAGA appointment for the most important job in the country.

I tried my best and it didn't work.

It was beyond mine.

I couldn't control the senator, just like I couldn't get Scott appointed majority leader.

They have a mind of their own, and I accept that.

So I did my best to get Matt elevated, and he got stopped.

And he's going to go tell the Senate in general.

Now, listen, everybody,

you got it out of your system.

You vetted.

You destroyed my ultimate mind.

And I am really angry at you.

But do not, I warn you, do not do that with Tulsi Gabber or RFK or Pete Hexett.

Yeah.

I think he was a sacrificial lamb.

I really do.

Could be.

I am still scratching my head about it.

And we were long ago, Victor, when

we were talking about all of that.

No, don't remind me, Jack.

I got so many angry emails.

Some people, my friends and people,

your listeners that I so love, you wrote me and said, Victor,

you should be drawn and quartered.

No, Victor, I think you should be guillotined.

No, Victor, you should be burned alive.

No, Victor, you should be thrown on an island eaten by cannibals.

Yeah, I just don't get

the adoration of Getty.

All I said was at that time that I had known Kevin McCarthy.

I understood that he was not.

Albert Einstein.

I understood that he was not ultra MAGA or even MAGA maybe.

But I did think he, first of all, I was prejudiced because I like him.

And second, he was a very effective advocate for California agriculture and not just agribusiness, just everybody needing water.

And he fought like hell, excuse me, heck for that.

And

I could, I didn't think that, and then the second thing was he had only a seven or eight seat majority in the House.

He couldn't be, he had to compromise here and there.

He had no power.

He needed about 15 seats.

And so, right when they had

Kevin had made them take back the House in 2022, he went around the country.

He raised the money.

He picked the candidates that were going to win.

And he was trying to stop the madness of Biden.

And then to throw him out and have this internal revolution.

So that was why I just criticized Goetz for a minute.

And the next thing I knew, my email and my website was overwhelmed with,

you're a traitor.

Go get away.

Bad, Victor.

Bad.

Well, I'm sure we'll have more to talk about

these nominations and the nominations.

So I was careful right now.

I did not say that

he would do it.

I don't know what kind of job he would do.

I'll be the villain.

If someone has to be the villain here, Victor, I'm very happy to be.

Because frankly, I see him in a way of

a little bit like Biden.

I see,

I think there's a difference between a disruptor and an agent of chaos.

And Biden, look at Afghanistan.

This is chaos.

Yeah, you're absolutely.

I'll come out and say my view is to get the conservative, the most conservative message possible.

Right.

And not do just

orthodox compromising.

Don't compromise until you can't get anything.

But there was a point when

I thought if they stuck together and even with their seven-seat advantage, they could stop stuff.

And then to have blood on the floor and fight back and forth and have all those votes and humiliate the guy who kind of got them the majority and then put Trump in a bad position where he had to favor his ideological kindred spirit gates versus the practical kindred spirit that was trying to.

And Kevin had come out for Trump, and I just didn't see the purpose of it.

That's all I said.

And I think now that Trump is going to expend a lot of capital, but I do believe that there were people around Trump.

I'm not saying Trump engineered it.

I'm thinking there were people who convinced Gates to take it so that he would get out of the ethics problems if it was a problem.

But their ulterior motive was get him out of the house so he won't cause another insurrection with a small margin.

Plausible.

By the way, he stepped down from his current term, but he was re-elected, right?

Yes, he was.

You know, he could be sworn in again

on January 3rd.

That's what I was wondering about.

And then, or he could run again on the special election, right?

I quit.

I'm going to run to replace myself.

So, and then I thought, you know, as I said, there will be people in the Senate who will try to kill it in the committee so they don't put the senators on the spot.

And then

people around Trump.

I'm not saying Trump did it.

I don't know if I think he genuinely supported Gates and he sees him as a necessary disruptor.

But then they went and told Trump

this is something that they vetted about and you

vented, I should say, not vetted.

They vented, they got their outrage.

And you tell them now, you picked off one of my men and that's it.

We draw the line with the other appointments.

Yeah.

And we'll see.

Well, we've come to the just about the finish line.

A couple of things, business, Victor.

First, I just repeat that you have

the website, the Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

You mentioned that you wrote a piece on X yesterday.

And if you're on X, used to be Twitter.

Victor's handle there is at V D Hansen.

As for me, Jack Fowler, I write civil thoughts every week, free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society.

Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up, 14 recommended readings of great articles I've come across the previous week.

That's what you're going to get in Civil Thoughts.

And thanks for those of you who do get it.

And I get a lot of nice notes from you.

I have to man up here.

We were talking before about...

You talked about national reviews, the Never Trump issue.

Actually, it was the against Trump issue.

And the publisher National Review at the time was a guy named Jack Fowler.

And I was very much supportive of it.

And many of the initial things I had to say about Trump.

And your

defense of you.

Well, I'm just going to correct myself, but go ahead.

But correct me if I'm wrong.

Wasn't

Tom Sowell a contributor?

Tom Sowell was.

Michael Casey was.

And so was other people who.

And I read Tom Sowell's thing.

It was pretty logical.

And so was Larry Arns, right?

Was he a contributor?

I don't know if Larry was on that.

I don't think so.

He's a very sober, wise guy.

So my point was at that point, it wasn't so much they were against Trump.

They had felt that they wanted a more

established

conservative critic, and that most of them had defined that as Ted Cruz.

Ted Cruz, correct.

Yeah.

And that's what they were trying to say.

I eventually, in that election cycle, I've been a Trump donor, the last voter, but I was struck as Election Day approached in 2016.

It was actually folks from the right attacking Trump voters.

And I was aghast at that.

I'm one of the 2,000 names, you know, in the Boston Telephone Directory type.

I was kind of shocked by

the vitriol to

run-of-the-mill conservatives.

I had initial suspicions of them, but my support,

I have to confess, was initially generated by the negative things people said about him and in other words i looked at all these people i was skeptical about in the conservative movement and i said the fact they all uniformly hate this person is a recommendation that you should look very carefully because this guy is doing something right yeah that's how i came well he's the enemy of my enemy and he's my yeah he's my friend at the very least

yeah he was and i like the idea that he was appealing to the working class.

And

the weird thing was, just to finish and I'll shut up, is

people,

the unexpected happened in 2015 and 16 to me.

I would go in

to the hardware store, a local hardware store.

I'd go to a part store.

I'd go to Home Depot or something.

And I would see somebody who was a traditional Democratic, mostly Mexican-American, and they would come up to me and say they were voting Trump.

And then I would see people that I thought were logical people that I'd known for years, both at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford University, who were conservative.

And when I would talk to them, they were foaming at the mouth at the very thought of Trump.

And I said to myself, why is this person who is a working class, who has no advantages and no hope for upward upward mobility given the system that's against him

why is he for trump and sees a chance and why is this person has had every opportunity and is doing so well giving me all these arguments against trump and they're all based on style and the other person's arguments are based on substance yeah and i said i'm done style and class yeah no question doctor hey one last thing before we close uh we folks leave comments on Apple and on Victor's website.

And folks on Apple rate the show zero to five stars.

We thank those who take the time to do that.

And Victor's rating is of many thousands of folks who've done so, 4.9 plus.

And we read the comments that some people leave.

But today I'm going to read a comment that someone left on

a recent podcast, very powerful, most recent podcast you did, or maybe it was two ago with the great Sammy Wink, and you talked about

very, very powerfully about your daughter.

And here's what Mary Hupp writes, and this is from the blade of Perseus.

Professor Hansen, I'm so sorry for the loss of your daughter.

What a heartbreaking tragedy.

Thank you for sharing the story.

The insensitivity.

of the person who called to buy back the bench is astounding.

I'm sorry for that as well.

Thank you so much for your podcasts and interviews.

I've learned so much from you.

I love to hear you speak.

And I think, Mary, that last sentence there, as

people do.

Oh my gosh, Victor, I can't tell you how many people I come across the last week or two.

They just love to hear you.

Victor, you've been terrific.

Thanks, Mary, for your comment.

Thanks, everyone who's listened.

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

Bye-bye.

Thanks again, everybody, for listening.

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