Israel on Its Own and Our "Expert" Liars

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Hello, ladies, hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

You are here to listen to and gain wisdom from the star and namesake Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And he is the man behind the blade of Perseus.

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I'll tell you why later in the show.

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By the way, Victor is also the best-selling author of two books right now.

He's had many before,

The End of Everything and the

Case for Trump in the new

24 edition.

You'll find links to those at his website.

We're recording on September 22nd, Sunday.

Victor, I think it's already fall then.

I'm not sure.

Yes, it is.

I can feel it.

I can feel it in the crisp morning air.

All right.

As you're you're out for a walk and finding bathtubs and washers and drivers on your property.

I can tell by the dew on the abandoned car seats.

Okay.

Well, there's so much to talk about today.

We're going to get started with Victor's take on what has just happened in the last 24 hours.

Well, it's a continuation of Israel's bringing justice to the scumbags of Hezbollah.

And they bombed the crap out of them last night.

We'll get Victor's take on what's going on there.

President Jill Biden and many more things when we come back from these important messages.

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

Victor, Israel

has rendered some justice on Hezbollah.

Your thoughts on that and maybe your thoughts, Victor,

if you don't mind on the like.

I'm just going to say pissy because that's a bad word, but the response of people like, you know, the French government, who Hezbollah has slaughtered their soldiers in the past.

Was 55 on the Marine Barracks thing?

Yeah, yeah.

I remember

that famous picture at the envelope of all the coffins there.

Well,

Israel

has told the world it's not going to have anywhere from 60 to 80, 90,000 people permanently displaced.

Why Hezbollah sends in 8,000 rockets and the world just shrugs.

Macron didn't do anything when they were sending in these rockets.

Biden-Harris did nothing.

Blinken did nothing.

No one did anything.

And Israel was busy with Hamas and being criticized.

And then they came to a decision and they said, you know,

this is amazing.

Hezbollah says they have 150,000.

They've sent 8,000 rockets.

We've knocked almost 99% down.

They have this.

bully Iran that threatens us, and we've had an exchange, and our three rockets did more damage than their 320.

Then we have these crazy Houthis, and we're all told that we are doomed, that we're surrounded.

We're not doomed.

We're nuttier than you are.

That's the message they're sending.

If you want to do this, this is what we're going to do.

And so they had this plan with the Pagers and the Walkie Talkies, apparently, for years.

So they activated that.

The world cried crocodile tears.

This is so terrible.

But basically, psychologically,

it did a lot of things, as we've talked about.

It just showed people how many Hezbollah terrorists and who else would have an archaic, out-of-date, anachronistic pager these days.

They didn't do cell phones and they didn't do compute laptops.

They didn't do pads.

They did pagers because they knew Hezbollah and only Hezbollah communicated through those because they told them they were going to not use cell phones.

So anyway, now everybody knows who they are, that the Iranian ambassador to

Lebanon was a terrorist himself,

and they wiped out that command and control.

Then they took out the next cadre, 20 people.

So right now, Hezbollah has no leadership, none.

Nasrallah is the nominal head, but he's obviously in some embassy basement, Syrian embassy.

Who knows?

He won't come out.

Talks a great game.

And now they're systematically blowing up launchers every night.

And that one bomb they dropped on

Saturday night looked like a nuclear weapon.

I mean, my God, the whole horizon was lit up.

I guess that was because of the secondary explosions of a depot they hit.

But the point I'm making, Jack, is that

there's nothing off the table.

What are they going to lose?

Everybody thinks by continually haranguing Israel and threatening them, we're going to, Kamala Harris was just terrible what she did.

She bragged that she was

cutting off the bombs to Israel.

And then we had, as you mentioned, Macron, and we had that crazy EU guy from Spain, the socialist.

And so if you keep doing that to them, why they are losing people and they're being attacked, they don't have nothing to lose.

except their existence and they're not going to lose that.

So then they are telling Hezbollah, you wanted the war.

You claimed that you were going to destroy us.

Okay,

now we've taken out your entire terrorist architecture.

What do you want to do next?

Because we're going to start taking out systematically all of your launches.

If you have 150,000 launchers, that means 150,000 craters.

And that can be in farmland, that can be in villages, that can be in the entire Shia area of Beirut.

But we're going to take them out unless you want to call it quits.

It's up to you.

And it is up now to Hezbollah.

It's their decision.

And Iran

is looking at this and thinking, wow, this is what would happen if we got in a fight with Israel.

In other words,

we wouldn't be able to hit Israel, and they would be able to hit us

without nuclear weapons.

But they would be able to take out our grid, they would be able to take out our ports, probably take out our nuclear facilities and do it very effectively.

And we would be humiliated.

And in that part of the world,

the braggadachio is the most important thing.

Death to America, death to America, death to Israel, Satan, great Satan.

It's all verbiage.

And when you are humiliated, like the Pager incident or the walkie-talkies or this, then they either have to put up or shut up.

And I don't know what they're going to do, but I have a feeling they do not want a one-on-one war in a conventional sense with Israel.

And that's what they are.

They put their head in the guillotine and Israel pulled the string and it's the rope.

And now they don't know what to do.

And they're looking around for Russia, China, North Korea, UN, EU, Blinken.

Sullivan, Biden, whoever.

Then there's the final conjecture, calculation, and that is who in the heck is running the United States right now?

And they're thinking this.

They must be thinking this.

We have had it with Biden and Harris.

We're going to prompt a confrontation.

If this leads into a war, it's going to hurt Kamala-Harris.

It really is.

Because it shows you that the Biden-Harris tenure and administration is utterly incompetent and blew up the Middle East, like they blew up Afghanistan, like they blew up the Ukrainian border, like they blew up everything.

And that

reality is that we don't want them

because they hate us.

And we know that Iran wants them and Lebanon wants them and Syria wants them and the Houthis wants them and the Palestinians want them and the street in America wants them.

So if

we're just going to do this and if it hurts their electoral chances, that's their problem.

So there was a political calculation as well.

They're going to try to go to the very precipice.

And they expect Harris and Biden to quasi-secretly stealthy support them, Jack, because if they don't and the thing blows up, it's going to make Harris look really bad.

On the other hand,

Hezbollah does not want to reply.

Iran is telling them not to reply.

Everybody is telling them to take the hit because they want Harris to win and they do not want Donald Trump.

So they're thinking, let Israel just hit you and hit you and hit you and look like it's crazy and we can keep this narrative that

they're punishing innocence and collateral damage.

It's disproportionate.

And then Harris will be the peacemaker and

then they'll elect her and then we'll go to war.

So that's where we are politically.

All worth a few thousand votes in Michigan, I guess.

Victor, staying on this subject,

the ingratitude of

Americans or various administrations

for Israel

exacting retribution in its way.

That wasn't its motivation, but I mean,

we're not

we have the same, if maybe even better, capacities than Israel to do what Israel did.

Yet we didn't seek any retribution for these Hezbollah scumbags who murdered so many Americans over the years.

Maybe we hate, wait, wait, we might have paid the bounty $7 million.

Maybe we paid it to Netanyahu.

We certainly paid Iran a bounty of billions.

Billions.

I mean, $100 billion.

Yeah.

Pallets of cash being sent over there.

At night, that was Obama.

They love him.

Robert Maui was a prep school colleague of Anthony Bliggan.

They go way back.

Right.

And they have that other Iranian activist in the Pentagon, Taibi Todd Ikbal, or whatever her name is.

So they are deeply committed either to one of two principles, and they're not mutually exclusive, that if we appease, appease, appease, then the Iranian street will be empowered and they'll have a soft velvet revolution and Iran will be a socialist EU type of country and an ally or

we sympathize with the Shia-Persian underdog and we would like creative tension in the region and we're going to play this horrific dictatorship on morally equivalent terms against Israel and the Gulf monarchy.

I don't know which it is.

It doesn't matter because they are appeasing them.

And

nobody's calling for a war.

All they have to do is say you're not going to sell any oil until you stop feeding people who are blocking access to the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean and trying to destroy the Jewish state.

Just stop it and you get to sell your oil.

But otherwise, you're not going to sell it.

Sorry.

You're a terrorist organization.

Why Biden said that the Houthis were not terrorists?

I don't know.

He did that.

Why he restored...

money to Hamas and the West Bank, I don't know he did that.

Why he

lifted the sanctions and embargo on Iran.

I don't know he did that.

I could go on.

Why he begged them to get back in the Iran deal.

But anyway, it was a disaster.

Everything they touch turns a draw.

So they have the on-midas touch.

The only good thing is maybe there's no one in charge except Dr.

Jill.

So maybe that's a good thing.

Yeah.

Well, let's talk about that in a second.

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Yeah, Victor, you mentioned before who's in charge.

You just mentioned Jill Biden.

And I think most Americans must know now, even with general news blackouts by the major mainstream media, that

Jill Biden presided

on a cabinet meeting, the first cabinet meeting held in nearly a year, and even while Joe Biden was in the room.

And Mrs.

Wilson, the ghost of Mrs.

Wilson has reappeared.

Your thoughts?

Well, she's a doctor, so she has some expertise.

But

this was her moment.

This is what she's lived for, to be the most powerful woman in the United States, and by marrying Joe Biden.

And there she had it for one brief second.

She led a cabinet meeting of the most powerful country in the world, and people looked looked toward her toward guidance.

And

I don't know how you interpret this because

people who had said that this was going on and that he was non-composed mentes just three months ago, what was the term Corinne John Pierre?

Cheap fake?

Yes.

Yeah, these were cheap fakes.

These were cheap fakes, fit as a fiddle, sharp as a tack.

And it was all a lie.

How can anybody vote for these people when they had lied to us serially and then over a 48-hour period just said,

forget the narrative.

Here's the new narrative.

He is senile and he must go and he's selfish.

And he put us in this predicament because of his ego narcissistic.

egocentric traits.

And then they went into a third narrative,

you know, three weeks later when he quit.

He's George Washington.

He's selfless.

He stepped down for the good of humanity.

And then

Jill Biden Biden became,

she went from a pretentious wannabe with an EDD

community college, bragging that she was

the equivalent basically of a Harvard professor.

I'm not being snobbish, but that's her value system.

And making, insisting everybody, I don't think anybody's called me doctor in years.

You know, maybe some do, but it's not really good if you have a PhD to call a person doctor, given I don't operate on anybody.

I don't have any medical expertise.

And a PhD is,

you can just, if he's teaching, you call him professor.

You know what I mean?

And if you're emeritus, you can call him professor.

But

I don't end my emails with PhD.

And she's an EDD, which means she doesn't have to write a thesis.

She doesn't have to know foreign languages.

And yet she's

angry anytime people don't mention it.

Now she's running cabinet meetings and just tells us what the message is to everybody.

You were right.

We were lying.

What are you going to do about it?

That's it.

I have to believe her motivation for wanting to tough this through

to the election and a chance, slim chance that he

would win re-election was that she would be president essentially for four years.

Yeah.

That's why she cruelly, I want to accentuate, cruelly forced him to run again she was the one behind it because she knew he was not able and he was just going to show up and she was going to jet around in the world with a

zombie next to her if he could if he could even do that so we all knew what it was about she's history now she's very bitter They despise the Obamas.

They despise Camilla Harris.

They despise Pelosi and Schumer that created and prompted this coup.

And

you can see little Freudian slips like Joe putting on the MAGA hat and smiling, how's this?

Yeah.

And

she's

what I'm worried about is, I mean, it's September 22nd.

Right.

Still a long time.

Yeah, we've got October, November, December, January 20th.

We've got four full months.

Yeah.

And there's

nobody running the show.

Nobody.

Maybe that's good because they're pernicious people in their policies, but still.

Well, he's a man that's always thrilled to destructive things.

Yeah, he always was destructive.

Yeah, he always was destructive.

And

Donald Trump, again, he gave a great interview on Gutfield.

Anytime he's relaxed, self-deprecating,

gets off the ad hominem on cul-de-sacs, he's winning.

And you look at the polls, that little post,

the post-Biden abdication bounce is almost gone, and the post

debate bounce is gone, and she's dead even or within the margin of error with Trump.

And on the swing states, they're dead even, which I think think, given the inaccuracies one way of the last eight years polls suggests that he is now ahead and whether that margin is enough to countervene

this shift to early and mail and bowing.

And note, I didn't say cheating.

I just said this phenomenon that the Democrats have mastered, which Molly Ball so eloquently bragged as a cabal and a conspiracy in her 2021 Time Essay.

Whether that's enough, I don't know.

But we'll see.

Well, Victor, there's some more national security-related wisdom to gain from you.

And

let's get that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on Sunday the 22nd.

This particular episode should be up on Tuesday, September

24th.

Victor,

big

tweet was going around.

You've seen it.

I'll have to assume many of our listeners have seen it.

100-plus Republican, former national security, I want to put national security in quotes, officials endorse Vice President Kamala Harris.

Victor, let me quickly read out some of the names here.

Jim Glassman, Chuck Hagel, Michael Hayden, the former

general, Frank Lavin, Winston Lord, John Negroponte, Bill Paxton, the former congressman and member of the the Republican House leadership.

So was Mickey Edwards, former Congresswoman Barbara Comstock, Ken Edelman, Elliott Cohen, plus whatever, 90 more.

Endorsing Harris.

I don't want to vote for Trump.

It's endorsing somebody.

I'm sorry, but

what do all those people have in common?

They're all functionaries of the Washington, New York.

corridor.

They're probably mostly in Washington.

A third of them want to get back into the corridors of power.

A third of them probably have some type of contract or

financial interest, and the third are playing off their government service and translating it into money.

So I don't think that.

And then the rest of them that you didn't mention, I looked at that list.

I don't know one of them.

I haven't, I couldn't recognize one name, which brings up another point, Jack.

This genre

of getting hauling out during the election cycle the names of all these supposed experts and authorities.

These were the people they had a petition to say that it was absolutely crazy that the Wuhan lab, the Lancet people,

there was no Luhan lab, Wuhan lab origins of COVID.

These were the people, remember the letter from the public health authorities who said that it was in the mental interest to go out and protest during the lockdown when they told everybody else it was a felony.

I think it was in Minnesota or Illinois.

They all went out on the street and said they wanted to show solidarity for Antifa, BLM, and it was of the mental health benefit to people of color, and that outweighed their own violations of their own COVID lockdown.

Remember that group?

This was the same group.

There were other groups.

The worst was, as I recall,

the worst was in 2015, you remember all those experts and they told us that

the Iran deal, the so-called JAP-HOA, or whatever it was, the joint comprehensive plan of action, they all told us that it was wonderful and it would slow down the bomb and it was, and it was a treaty.

It was a treaty.

And they just circumvented Obama said, screw the Constitution.

We're not going to require two-thirds votes in the Senate.

And they just passed it on a partisan vote.

And they had a few naive rhinos that helped them.

And it was a disaster.

So they said, well, it'll slow them down.

It didn't.

They're closer now than they ever were.

And then Trump came in and 2018 got rid of it.

And then Biden came in, lifted the embargoes, sanctions, allowed them to do anything, begged them to get back in.

None of those people have ever apologized.

The worst,

I don't know if you remember those guys,

and I think there were 70 of those guys, but one of the worst was,

you remember in 2021, Jack, there were the

18 Nobel,

17 Nobel Prize winners who said the building back better and those associated inflation bills would not start inflation.

And they were critical for infrastructure and they would lower the cost because of efficiency and production.

And they told us, don't worry, anybody like Larry Summers, that's what the message was, who warned us, hey, people are coming out of COVID, not going into it.

They have A, pent up consumer demand.

B, there are still supply chains, eruption.

There's not enough stuff out there to buy.

C, interest rates are really, really low and people are borrowing like crazy.

D, do not pour free money to the tune of 4 trillion and that, or you're going to get hyperinflation.

No, no, no hyperinflation.

And that's what they did.

And then, as I recall, just recently, not 17, this time it was 16 Nobel Prize winners said, we have studied Donald Trump's proposed economic

agenda.

Should he win?

And we are very concerned.

It's hyperinflationary.

It could result in really high inflation.

Translated when they rounded us up as left-wing ideologue academics with all kinds of letters after our name and pretentious titles and awards.

And we said there was no threat of rampant spending, deficit spending, printing money causing inflation for our kindred Joe Biden.

But with Donald Trump, we've got to flip around and say there's a lot of danger.

The worst, however, was the 51 intelligence authorities.

Remember them, Jack?

James Clapper,

notorious for lying under oath to Congress once.

John Brennan, notorious for lying under oath twice.

Leon Panetta, another former CIA director.

Anthony Blinken.

was worried as a campaign flack for candidate Biden that the Russian laptop disinformation, whatever, this whole topic came up.

And there was a laptop and in it there was pornographic pictures of Hunter, there was evidence of drug use, but more importantly, there were text and email messages to various people who confirmed their end of those messages that money was going to the Bidens, who was variously called Mr.

10%,

the big guy, okay,

paid his utility, all of that stuff.

So Anthony Blinken came up with an idea.

If you want to know why the Middle East is blown up and Afghanistan's blown up and we were insulted in Anchorage,

our diplomatic team was, and a Chinese balloon went with impunity, and China's threatening Taiwan, just look at this guy.

So he rounded, he called his buddy Mike Morrow, interim CIA director at one time, and said, can you help us?

Basically, the message is, can you get a bunch of authorities,

retired authorities, get their titles after their names, get Brennan, get Clapper, they'll do anything, get Panetta, and claim that this has all.

Now, don't say it is Russian disinformation, because you know it's not, because the FBI has this, and they've already authenticated it.

That's what we hear.

So we got to come up with a weasel word.

How about all the hallmarks?

of Russian.

I think they use the word information, not disinformation.

In other words, when they expose it as a lie after the campaign, we can say, we just said it had the hallmarks.

We didn't say it was.

We said it had the hallmarks.

So they had the last debate.

Biden goes in.

Trump says, your whole family's crooked.

Look at the laptop.

There's evidence.

That is a lie.

How dare you?

51 intelligence authorities, the best people in the country who know a lot more about you, have sworn this is Russia disinformation.

And the crowd doesn't know what to think.

And then,

you know, we're supposed to think that Hunter's laptop exactly looks exactly like Hunter's laptop somewhere in a little, I don't know, Kremlin L V shory.

They fabricated it.

They fabricated the perfect porno pictures, the perfect text.

They got Tony Bobolinski exact emails.

They knew exactly, and they fabricated it.

And then they put it on a drone and dropped it into a computer repair shop.

I guess that's what they did.

And people believed it.

That was election interference.

Later, remember the later Republican poll or conservative poll said it affected the election.

Yeah.

That was 50.

None of them.

They've asked Leon Panetta on national TV, you want to apologize?

And so he left.

He laughed.

He laughed.

Yeah.

And then, you know, the worst was when you have these national authorities, these hundred.

again, I don't know who they are, but I looked at that letter and

they were supposedly retired national security figures.

And

none of them disclosed, as the 51 authorities did not, whether they had

whether they were really retired.

Remember the

House committee found out that a lot of them still, in the case of the authorities, had contractual agreements with the CIA.

But it was really weird that they said that one,

that

Donald Trump was unfit and he was too dangerous to run national security.

Well,

we had four years.

We've had four years of Trump, and we've had four years of Camilla Harris, who's border czar, space czar, vice president, last person in the room when the information was needed, her input to get out of Afghanistan.

So it's not even theoretical.

Vladimir Putin invaded his neighbors in three out of the last four administrations, but not Donald Trump's.

Jake Sullivan said he inherited the calmest portfolio in his vast portfolios, and that was the Middle East.

There was no Chinese balloon floating across the United States taking pictures of our installations under Trump.

Taiwan wasn't being threatened.

Crazy Kim Jong-un wasn't launching missiles anymore.

The border was completely secure.

And they blew it up.

All of that they blew up.

And yet, these hundred expert national security officials are trying to convince us that this chaos is preferable to the calm that we had before.

It doesn't make sense.

And

just recently, did you see this new new letter, Jack, about,

wasn't

Alberto Gonzalez in it?

The Trump, I mean, Bush's

Attorney General.

What was his name?

Oh,

I'll look it up.

I think it was Gonzalez.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it was.

And

he endorsed Harris.

And

what I liked about that other letter was, or these people, they said,

and I'm trying to remember, I wrote it down, they said,

Donald Trump is unfit to serve again as president or indeed in any office of public trust, while Camilla Harris, quote, is consistently championing the rule of law, democracy, and our constitutional principles.

Oh, my gosh.

I mean, think about that.

She has endorsed court packing,

the abolition of, like all Democrats, the Electoral College, the end of the filibuster.

She

destroyed, as we know it, federal immigration laws.

She violated her oath of office to faithfully execute the laws as a vice president, should the president not be able to, by completely destroying the border.

And yet these retired government officials are telling us that Trump is unfit and that she will restore constitutionality.

Yeah,

what is Gonzalez, and it is Alberto Gonzalez.

What do you think if in the next four years

Harris wins and Clarence Thomas retires or passes away?

I mean,

I think he's over 80 or at the cusp or elito, elderly.

I remember going to happen to our country with these, just those two things, possible.

You know, I don't want to disclose things, but

the national um

endowment for the humanities

it was in 2007 i think asked writers they had a writers project for veterans you remember that

and the idea was that all these people are returning shell-shocked and injured from iraq and afghanistan and would people writing and publishing go to a military base and conduct a session and see what they had to say and help them get published.

There was no compensation.

Nobody wanted any.

And so I said, I'll do it.

So it was a long drive.

I had a military officer, a really wonderful guy in the Navy who was from Lemour Naval Airport.

And he drove me all the way down there.

About six hours, we went to Camp Pendleton.

Right.

Huge Marine base.

And I did about a four-hour lecture.

And Alberto Gonzalez's wife was there because she had a high government job in security or something.

She came in.

I mean, I just drove, we just drove down in a car.

He drove in with a whole Calviquet, I mean, a whole entourage of Black Lincoln navigators and Secret Service and everybody.

And she was sort of in charge of this program.

Okay.

And I had a chance to talk to her briefly.

And it was about what they were doing to her husband.

You remember that?

Yeah.

They were, I mean, they hated him.

They were saying that he was basically affirmative action, that he was incompetent, that they were, and there were even rumors that Bush wanted to appoint him to the Supreme Court.

You remember that?

Yes.

And he was tampering with the inviolate laws that separate the Attorney General from the President.

Remember, Eric Colder said, I'm Obama's wingman.

My point is, it's just like Dick Cheney when he was Darth Vader.

And everybody should know something: that

when these people get in trouble with the left and they start calling them Hitler or Mussolini, in the case of Hayden, one of the people who signed these, he signed two of these letters, the 51 Intelligence Authority and then the former government.

He was the one that said that

Trump set up Auschwitz-like encampments at the border, like it was the Holocaust, which, by the way, Obama had set up.

But the point is, they have their flax call people or write you.

Could you please speak out against this injustice from the left?

And every once in a while, you don't, you know, you don't react specifically to a request, but you get sick of the Nazi, Nazi, Nazi

brown shirts, brown shirts.

That was Al Gore.

Garrison Keillor, same thing, all of these people.

So you write stuff.

And my point is this.

They have no shame because they tell all of us as voters and people who had supported them that there's key things that make this country worth fighting for.

The right not to terminate a viable baby.

the sanctity of a southern border, the superiority of a free market economy, the necessity of having a strong defense

force that will encourage deterrence, the difference between an equality of opportunity that ensures that no one shall be discriminated by race, religion, creed, ethnicity, et cetera, versus a

equality of result or what the left now fashions as equity.

They told, I could go on.

That's what they told us.

That's what Romney told us.

That's what McCain told us.

That's what George W.

Bush did.

That's what Gonzalez told us.

That's what Cheney told us.

That's what

Liz Cheney told us.

That's what George Will told us.

What Bill Crystal told.

So then you come along and here's an election.

And do they really believe that Donald Trump is weak on the border and supports illegal immigration and Caramela Harris doesn't?

Do they really believe that Donald Trump supports late-term abortion and Elizabeth, I mean, Kamala Harris doesn't?

Do they really believe that Donald Trump will weaken the defense budget and she will increase it after what we've seen the last four years?

Do they really believe that he will lower taxes and deregulate or she will?

And yet

you tell me why.

Does anybody believe right now that Dick Cheney would be endorsing Kamala Harris if his daughter didn't lose her third slot in the House Republican leadership?

Yeah, payback.

Payback.

Yeah, absolutely.

Partisan payback, this side of the aisle.

Yeah, yeah.

And does anybody believe, and I like George W.

Bush, I'm very careful, but do you ever believe that the Bush consortium

would

be for what they are now, supporting Harris?

I don't know if George W.

is, but the rest of them are.

He said he's not endorsing anyone.

No, I don't think he is.

All his flying monkeys are.

And do you think they would do it if Donald Trump crudely and crassly said to the leader and the biggest fundraiser and the supposed sure thing nominee in 2016 that you're low energy, Jeb, you're low energy, and destroyed his entire candidacy with a quip like that?

No.

So the point I'm making is, and every, and you think Liz Cheney, if she had been re-elected in Wyoming and got back her third

highest ranking and was soon to be Speaker of the House would be so bitter?

No.

And it's the same thing with all of them.

And it's the same thing with the pundits.

If all of these pundits right now did not have to get on their knees and crawl to these left-wing billionaires for subsidies, and

they were going,

dropping in at the White House during their sojourns in Washington, or they would walk across the street and have, you know, a coffee and espresso with the OMB, the DOD guy, or they were getting their $35,000 speaking fees, or they wouldn't be like this.

All of this furious hatred is personal.

And I say that for one reason, because they have rejected, rejected, disowned everything they wrote and spoke to us for 50 years in some cases, 50 years.

And nobody should ever believe those people again.

Never again.

Never again.

Well, Victor,

let's talk about one of them a little more.

That's

you just mentioned Liz Cheney.

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We thank the good people at Solair for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Two things, Victor.

All these, the 51 signers here, the 100 there, It reminds me of Captain Louie from Casablanca, you know, round up the usual suspects because

they just

seem to be now the usual suspects who are, as you just talked about, into more petty partisan politics.

How can you be a conservative and endorse

Kamala Harris to be president?

How can you want her to be president?

That's what an endorsement means, right?

You can just sit down, shut up, and not vote.

You know, I'm not voting for anybody.

That's legitimate, but to endorse someone who's

who, and then Liz Cheney.

So she's, she's, there's an article in the Hill.

She's talking about

conservatives may need a new party.

Like, who the hell are you?

You've abandoned conservatism.

You're supporting someone who wants to destroy the essence of this nation, and you're going to tell us that conservatives need a new party.

She's so freaking brazen.

And then the worst is, this is not Bill Clinton.

This isn't even Andrew Cuomo.

This isn't even Gavin Newsom.

This is Kamala Harris.

This isn't even Joe Biden.

This is the most left.

She was voted of 100 senators

by a reputable survey,

the most left-wing senator.

of 100, more left-wing than the admitted and about socialist Bernie Sander.

So she represents not just the left wing of the she is to the left or is the synonymous with the squad.

So you have all these people who are saying to half the country, screw you, excuse my language, we don't care about you, we don't care about what this economy has done to you.

We don't care about the status of the United States abroad.

We don't care about crime, and it did go up as we learned.

We don't care about any of that.

We don't care who you are.

We're fine.

We're exempt.

If Harris gets in and she raises taxes, if she has a wealth tax, if she has a tax on unrealized income, if she raises

the inheritance tax, if she

tanks the economy with wage and price controls, if she spends, spends, spends like she's going to do more even than Trump will do, if we get in more and more wars, we're going to be safe.

We're multi-millionaires.

We've been in government.

We've cashed in on government.

We've got fancy titles.

We've got appointments.

We've got investments.

We've got influence.

We've got contacts.

We network.

We're well off.

It can't hurt us.

But what can hurt us is our self-image and our further trajectories.

And if this guy continues, we will have zero, zero, zero influence.

We will have zero contacts.

We will have a closed door in our face.

He will, in one of his manic fits, make fun of us.

He will ridicule us.

And we cannot allow that to happen.

So we are going to disown everything that we had advocated to you, that you had to follow.

And that's what they're doing.

And I think they're making a big mistake.

I really do.

I think they're destroying their legacies and everything.

Victor,

quickly before we have to take another little break, what am I to tell you quickly?

But just that term national security, it now just seems,

I don't know, foolish, oxymoronic.

How can these people who care, allegedly care, but employ their whole life in this

field that implies securing our nation?

How can they endorse somebody

that

puts our nation at great risk, that puts the world on the cusp of

World War III,

unleashed this madness in the Middle East and

in

Eastern Europe?

I mean,

I don't remember what he means anymore.

I remember Dick Cheney in 2002

and early three, right before the invasion of Iraq.

I was a professor at the Naval Academy, and I remember him saying publicly and to a group of people

which I was in an audience that the people of the Middle East only understand strength.

And they interpret weakness as an invitation to attack and disrupt.

And therefore, after 9-11, we're going to make sure that we have the wherewithal and the will.

to stop this terror.

That's what he said.

What does he think now?

What does he think is going on in Gaza?

What does he think yesterday happened in Lebanon?

What does he think is going on with the 1 million casualties in Ukraine and Russia?

What does he think about almost the daily promises of China to take Taiwan?

What does he think of Mr.

Erdogan, who can't decide whether he wants to threaten Cyprus, Greece,

the Kurds, or Israel?

What does he think of all that?

And what would he say?

Wouldn't he say what he said before, that weakness invited all of this adventurism?

Yes.

And who would he say was weak?

I don't know.

He would have to contrast the record of Donald Trump and theirs and say, wars?

Yes, no.

Defense, stronger?

Yes, no.

He could go down the list.

So he knows that.

That's what is so infuriating.

And

the weird thing is, Jack, when Liz Cheney says that she wants to, let's just say that Trump loses, right?

I don't think he will, but let's say he loses.

And then Bill Crystal,

I think he's too far gone.

Let's say there's a summit, and there will be a summit.

There'll be Liz Cheney, maybe Elliot Cohen, George Will,

put in the names, you know, maybe Bill Barr, I don't know.

All these people.

The bulwark.

Yeah, the bulwark.

Yeah, all those people will get together at a very nice Washington hotel, and they're going to say,

this is the new Republican Conservative Party.

And what we really want to do is privatize Social Security, and we want

reduced capital gains, and we want to

try to democratize the Middle East, something like that.

And we don't want to get into any cultural issues.

So we don't, if you want to abort a baby, that's fine.

The border,

we need labor.

George W.

Bush said we can't rebuild.

Remember he said we can't rebuild after Katrina unless we have the illegal alien.

And we don't really care about wages.

And they think what's going to happen.

They think all of these MAGA people,

the 8 to 10 million that didn't show up for McCain, and they're going to go, you know what?

You're absolutely right.

I'm so glad.

We're inspired.

We're glad you tried to sabotage Trump and you contributed to his loss, and we're going to repay that kindness by joining you.

I don't think that's going to happen.

I think they're going to say, non hic porkus, not this pig.

They're not going to join.

And I don't know where they'll go.

I would never vote for any of those people, ever, ever.

None.

Yeah, none.

Well, there's great treachery and treason and how they've acted.

Victor,

we're going to take a break, but when we come back, we're going to get your thoughts on Kamala joking about shooting people.

And then we have a question from

a father of someone serving in the Navy, and we'll get to this right after these important messages.

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

I'd like to remind our listeners, many new listeners, that there is a website, the official website of Victor.

It's the Blade of Perseus.

Go to VictorHanson.com, check it out.

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If you're a fan of Victor's writing, and you ought to be,

do subscribe.

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You should check that out if you're on Facebook.

And also there's a very friendly, not unofficial, but friendly, the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club there, about 60,000 good people there.

So do

check it out.

Victor, Kamala Harris, talking to Oprah.

I think she said something also prior to that, like somebody comes into my house, I'm going to, you know, bang, bang.

And

part of this outreach, I think Tim Walls in his way has also been talking about me and my guns and hunting, I don't know, ducks or whatever the hell.

Um,

this outreach and appeal to, oh, we're pro-Second Amendment.

And then she took it back.

No, it was one of her, actually, she didn't take it back, but she doesn't speak all that much.

Well, one of her spokespeople said, no, that was, she was just joking.

Any thoughts about yeah, why don't they ask her, why didn't Opa said, well, what kind of gun do you carry?

You carry a Glock, a SIG Sauer,

U.S.

armory?

What is it?

Just tell us.

Or do you like a shotgun?

Beretta shotgun?

I don't know.

Remington?

What do you carry?

Do you like 10,

12, 20?

16 gauge?

What is it?

Or do you have a rifle?

Semi-assault weapon?

What is it?

Just tell us.

And she couldn't answer that.

She's not armed.

And then when she says, I shoot them,

Oprah said, should have said, well, according, you live in California and you know about the laws about shooting.

Somebody can come into your house unless you can prove they pose a physical existential threat to your survival, you can't really shoot them.

So it reminded me of Joe Biden.

Remember when this came up and he said he had a shotgun?

Just get your shotgun out and let off a few rounds.

Remember that?

It's so weird.

And they have this strange commercial,

White Dudes.

Have you seen the latest one?

I have not.

No.

Oh, you should see it.

It's,

we know that you guys think, well, we white dudes suck, but I'll tell you something.

And

it's about all us white dudes really secretly are better off with Camela and Waltz.

And he's, and then there's another commercial where he's fixing his car and we're supposed to think he's a mechanic and he takes off the air filter.

The key to a good maintenance is a clean air filter.

And

I think of all the things one, I used to work on cars.

I had about five wrecked cars.

And I can tell you, everybody knows listening,

screwing that little wing nut off

the air filter is not sophisticated mechanical.

Right.

So the lamest person in the way, that means me could do that.

Yes.

And the point is that this white dudes,

they had

the Hollywood white dudes, and then they thought, oh, that didn't work.

These guys are all multi-millionaires.

So we're going to get some guys with fake southern accents and working class, da-da-da-da, because they're very insecure, because they know they hate the middle class.

They hate the white working class, especially.

Their internal polls show that that's the one area they need to increase by three or four points to win the election.

So they start offering these cans.

I have a gun, I'll shoot them.

Hillary had the same problem.

Remember, she was bowling and then drinking Boyermakers and stuff.

It's all fake.

Everything about them is fake, false, pseudo, and it doesn't work.

That whole interview.

When they asked her about border security

and Opa said, what would you do?

It was kind of like a, here's the tea ball.

Here's the ball, plastic ball.

It's on the tea.

Here's the bat.

All you have to do is just touch it a little bit.

And she said, well, as attorney general, every answer to every question is about her bio, you know,

and she didn't answer it.

Then

basically Oprah answered it.

When it was all done, you should see Oprah's eyes like, what the?

I thought, hope this helped.

And then she did the thing with the black journalist.

And afterwards, she did the same thing.

She grew up as a middle-class girl, you know.

And

they used to call me Miss Attorney.

And the black journalists looked at each other.

And then when she left, she thought, oh my God, they told me not to do what I just did.

I cackled.

I was fake.

I didn't answer a question.

I dodged.

I ran out the clock.

I talked about me, me, me, me, me.

And so she kind of looked at them and stormed off the stage.

And they looked around and thought, wow,

you see their eyes?

They're like, we tried to help her.

We gave her the biggest softballs in the world.

And she got angry at us.

And then one of them was probably thinking, well, it's our fault.

Dana Bash had the right answer because when she did it, she gave her multiple choice answers.

Question, could it be A?

Could it be B?

Could it be C?

And we didn't do do that.

And now they're in a quandary.

I'm not saying Trump is a shoe-in, but

I'm saying this.

It's pretty scary that after having that Waltz Harris interview with Dana Bash, and then having that local Philadelphia reporter who is known to be a fireman to rescue leftist flailing candidates who want to win Pennsylvania, and then having the Association of Black Journalists

triad, and then having OPA, the net result of those four rare, rare occasions.

I think there's four of them.

Trump's done something like 75 interviews, town halls,

press conferences.

They were all disasters, every one of them.

She's authentically a phony is what Kaskamata is.

The only thing that's going for is

they don't have a big audience.

None of them did.

Maybe OPA will, she didn't even, I think there were only 10,000 streamer, live streaming people that watched it, but her name might.

But the point I'm making is,

I guess they were designed to say that she had four interviews and nobody watched them, and that was by intent as well.

Because now in the last 40-some days,

they're not going to let her do that.

They got to the point where if they sit her down and they put a ring of actors and prompters and policy people and say, no cackling, no fake accent, no hand gestures, no wink and nod, raise eyebrows, little girl flirtatious looks, none of that, no bio.

We don't want to hear about it middle class.

Just answer the questions.

Now here's what you do.

There's eight questions they're going to ask you.

Border, da, da, da, da.

Economy, da, da, da, da, da, da.

Foreign policy, fact, fact, fact.

She can't do it.

She cannot do it.

She will not do it.

And they know that now.

And she will not be out there.

And she's going to run out the clock.

And I think she's going to have another debate.

Trump is insane if he agrees to any debate other than on Fox.

He's got to say, listen, you guys

rigged that.

first debate by having it before either candidate was nominated or either convention was held.

That has never happened in the modern American political environment.

I did that, even though I knew it was a stress test to get rid of Joe Biden.

If I had not have done that, he would still be your candidate because you would have had no public excuse to decapitate his candidacy.

You wouldn't have.

You couldn't have.

And then you had this one with ABC, the ABC of George Stephanopoulos, John Carl that hates me, Disney.

And I agreed to it, and it was rigged.

And we're still getting these rumors, you know, from the anonymous guy who claims that they had a memo about,

I mean, it doesn't quite die.

I looked at the ABC denials, and they don't really categorically deny the accusations, and they should.

But nevertheless, two rigged debates.

All he has to do is say, I will debate you on Fox.

Not that Fox will be easy on it.

Right.

But Fox will, will say to her,

Why are you not responsible

for moving forward the last three and a half years?

And all of these proposals that you say will get us out of the enoe of these last four years.

And Waltz just said it the other day.

We can get through these last four years.

Why didn't you do it then?

And why don't you do it in the next four months?

And when she starts to say,

a middle-class girl in Oakland,

we had everybody in our neighborhood.

There were lawns and everything.

Answer the question.

Answer the question.

And they will do that.

But seriously, Vic, did he, it's not in his interest.

It's totally in her interest to have another debate.

It's not in his interest to have another debate.

Would that be

yes, because I think if you look at the betting,

we mentioned the betting that it goes back and forth between 5149,

52.48.

I don't know what today it is, but it's almost deadlocked.

And that tells me that the bettors who have something to lose think that

they don't know who's going to win.

And then when you look at the internal polling that they're doing, they wouldn't ask for a debate as soon as she did that debate.

They had internal polling that people are set in their ways.

This race is ossified.

Unless there's a big October surprise, I mean, they had one with the black candidate who was the North Carolina, you know,

porn obsessed or whatever his problem was.

I mean, that was an October surprise.

And then they had another October surprise that RFK had had supposed carnal relations with a New York author.

who was engaged with somebody else.

I don't know if that's true or not, but they dropped that to discredit RFK.

And they'll have about two or three more October surprises.

But unless there's a big war in the Middle East, I don't think there's going to be too many events that change it.

This whole election is going to boil down to two things.

Who can turn out the most people

in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia?

And to what degree will the count reflect the actual ballots cast?

Everything else is set in concrete.

There's not going to be a big sway.

Now there's people today, there was an article by an author who claimed that there's going to be a Trump landslide.

And he said, and he used anecdotal evidence.

Remember the, is it the CNN or MSNBC author who scouted out restaurants in Nevada to find

one

Harris motor?

She went from restaurant to restaurant to restaurant.

It was sort of like Diogenes going through Athens looking for one honest

man.

And she found one.

Or

when they came into the New York firehouse and they just were silent with Biden and Harris and they erupted in cheers.

Or the Teamsters,

that union leader being embarrassed that he didn't endorse Trump, although 60% of his membership was.

So he looks at all these anecdotes.

But you know what?

I did that in 2020.

I thought, wow, he's got 70,000 people and Biden got like an outdoor movie with cars honking.

But then I didn't realize what Molly Ball later bragged about, that

Mark Zuckerberg had put in, you know, $14,000, $419 million.

They'd absorbed the work of the registers.

They were working with the Chamber of Commerce.

They were modulating the rioters, BLM and Antifa.

They were changing the voting laws.

I didn't realize they'd done all of that.

So

who knows?

But

it's going to be about turnout and ballot integrity.

Well, Victor, we have one last thing to get your take on.

And this is a question from a listener, Dave.

I'm just going to call him Dave.

And Dave's got a son, Pete, who's 22, and he just joined the Navy.

And

Pete's grandfather, who's Dave's dad, had served in the Navy for eight years,

World War II through Korea.

Pete enters the Navy on, turns out, he'll do it on Election Day.

Dave writes, looking at the world situation and the current state of our military, Pete's mother, my wife, is unhappy about his decision to join.

I have my share of concerns too, but surely that's just natural and always has been for the parent of a child in the military.

When my wife told Pete,

you know, we're on the verge of World War III, right?

Our son replied, that's all the more reason for me to do this then, isn't it?

And Dave says, I could hear my father's voice in that.

On more than one occasion, I've heard VDH say that veterans from families whose service spans multiple generations are not encouraging their sons and daughters to join.

Recruitment numbers are way down.

Thousands of servicemen and women have quit over things like vaccine mandates and DEI initiatives.

Given all this, Victor, what advice would you have for Pete, as well as for his proud but worried parents?

Your words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated.

Victor?

Because I have not served in the military, I don't feel like I have the moral credibility to tell anybody that is going to or is in it what to do.

But I will say that the only way the military is going to change is within.

So if a recruit believes that the military should return to a non-partisan

empirical merocratic system, then you have to be in that military, even though you're going to take a big personal hit.

I can tell you as an academic or a professor or a think tank, I've taken a lot of hits.

But it only can change if people within the system, I mean you can get help from pundits, you can get help from congressional leaders.

But if you believe you want to be in the military, then I suggest you do it.

And

don't go in naively.

I mean, just this week, General, I guess his name is Brown.

He was the head of the Air Force Academy.

And he was the one that, remember that he issued, we talked about him once.

He issued all those PC woke initiatives that they were going to basically not hire or promote white candidates until they got proportional representation.

Well, he's the chairman of the joint chief.

And, you know,

isn't the Pentagon claiming that they didn't, but when they really did suggest that anti-abortion people were the types of people who commit terrorism?

Correct.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so it is a politicized machine, the Pentagon, and that's why people have not joined.

And as I say a thousand times, the people who are not joining demographically are the people who were double their demographics dying in the worst places in the world.

And they died, and then yet this administration doesn't seem to think that their sacrifice was worth keeping stability in Afghanistan in the sense of enhancing U.S.

interests by remaining either with an orderly withdrawal over a year or two or with keeping Baglam Air Force Base to monitor

Central Asia.

Same thing in Iraq.

So I don't know what to say, but I don't think you can enact change in the military.

We all love the military.

It's the most important, it is the most important

federal entity, and it's in dire straits.

And it's got so many things that need addressing.

And

we're seeing story after, and another topic, we're seeing story after story after account that

why is the United States, as it looks at the drone usage of the Houthis or what Ukraine is doing to Russia or vice versa, why are we buying just a few ships, a few planes, a few missiles that are highly sophisticated

and

they're produced by about

five companies, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed, Northrop, etc.

And the answer is that we have an incestuous relationship with revolving four-star admirals and generals who go into the Pentagon, they retire at a very, very

generous retirement, and then they go to work as board directors or lobbyists for these firms.

And they have thousands, if not hundreds, hundreds, if not thousands, of contacts that they've developed from a superior position in the military that were former subordinates that now have been promoted to positions of procurement influence.

And

we buy these weapon systems that

the world in chaos abroad shows us are not wise investments.

China is going to have more ships than we are.

I think they already do.

They have more rockets than we do.

The world, what we need is a drone platform with 5,000 drones on it, you know, and nobody, maybe two people.

We need a whole fleet, not of 10,000, 100,000, a million-dollar drones.

We need a million, 5,000 or $1,000 drones just to swarm the enemy, just like we did in World War II.

We swarmed them with everything.

Sherman tanks,

M1 rifles,

P-51, P-40.

sevens,

B-24s, one an hour at Willow Run.

We just out-produced everybody, and they were good enough.

Good enough.

Yeah, you see what a little explosive in a pager can do.

Yes.

Exactly.

What we're doing is a German model.

We're trying to create a few V1 and V2s that are very sophisticated beyond comprehension of our enemies, just like the V1 and V2 program.

Right.

Or just like the Tiger and King Tiger.

I think they made 600 King Tiger.

We made 50,000 50,000 Sherman.

Or,

I don't know, some of their crazy, the Mischerschmidt 262 jet fighter, brilliant fighter, but very hard to maintain, very limited range, and very few produced.

And my point is, what won World War II was our weapons that were very good, not always the best, but very good, and they were in superior numbers, and they were cheap to produce, and they were easy to maintain.

You could take a Sherman transmission out in a few hours.

In the case of a tiger, you had to send it back on a railroad, in many cases, to the factory.

So I don't know why we're doing this, but this gets back to the problems in the military, and they have to change.

And the Pentagon people are,

you should see, when I go out in public, or I'm on campus, or I get emails, people are infuriated when you criticize

They'll call you, they'll say things, how dare you even suggest the race of people who die?

That is sick.

We don't do that in the military.

Well, you do.

You examine the ethnic and racial profile of every

promotion and billet, but not the people who pay the ultimate sacrifice.

And if it was the other way around, if non-white people who comprise 30% of the population were dying at double their numbers, then you would call that a rich man's war and a poor man's sacrifice.

And so

you have to tell the truth.

Anyway.

Well,

I think Dave should, and Dave's wife should be proud of Pete.

I do too.

I do too.

I think they should be very proud of him.

It's very hard to be in the military.

under these conditions for certain demographics, but I think it's really noble that he's.

Yeah.

well victor we've we've come uh to the end i have a few things to read here um i'm going to be a little egotistical because two of them relate to me you know our listeners on chartable excuse me not on on on apple can rate the show zero to five stars and practically everybody gives it five stars praising victor's wisdom uh 4.9 plus

average over several thousand people who've done that we thank them a couple of people leave write comments and we read all of them and some people by the way leave comments on your website the blade of perseus i've got two quick comments about that says one is titled i shouldn't laugh it says

uh jack stop cursing thank you I try to have my grandsons listen to this program because I want them to hear what Victor is saying.

So I request again, Jack, stop cursing.

And this is

what push words have you been using?

I don't know.

Maybe I said, well, you know, the the usual,

there are some people think

the beyond the F word and the S word and whatever, that damn or other things are curses.

So anyway, I'll try to keep my mouth less potty if that is the case.

I apologize.

Another one, another comment is titled, I agree with Jack.

And this is in response to a couple of episodes ago, I praised your comedic work, Victor.

And this goes, Victor is not only brilliant, but he also has a fabulous sense of humor.

Thank you for all your hard work.

Bravo.

And that's signed by Mick0726.

I'm sure Mrs.

Hansen agrees with that.

Yeah, so I'm not Eeyore the I'm not the sourpus donkey.

And here's one last.

It's a very nice one here from the Blade of Perseus, from Dominic Cabello, who writes, thank you as always, VDH.

Very touching story at the end.

This is of a recent podcast about the gentleman, I think this was a cousin, who caught dengue fever in the Philippines.

My mother came across similar characters on the family farm in Wiltshire in England.

Some gassed, others with shell shock or brain damage.

One who had fought in the trenches in World War I would repeatedly ask,

What's the time, miss?

I doubt anywhere but small communities and family farms could have accommodated men living such reduced lives so humanely.

It's quite a beautiful it is.

It's very eloquent.

Yeah.

So thanks to all who

take the time to leave comments.

And thanks to all of you who listen.

Victor, thank you today for your wisdom.

Thank you to those who sign up for Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society.

And you can go to civilthoughts.com and do that and you'll see what it's all about.

I know you'll like it.

You've been great today, Victor.

Always are.

Thanks, folks.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening once more.

Very much appreciated.