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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is our Friday news roundup, and we have lots of news on the agenda.

We're going to talk a little bit about Kamala's flip-flopping, Zuckerberg's regrets, and then maybe a little bit about Israel's strategy and some arguments about their strategy.

strategy.

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

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshall Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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So Victor, there's been a lot of videos out on Kamala's flip-flopping on issues, people saying things to the extent that she's adopting all the policies of Trump, which she before had been more radical on.

And I was wondering this about those things.

Are they going to convince the independents that she really has changed instead of just flip-flopped And is her base, her radical base, going to believe that she's just faking it and that she'll really support them in policies when she gets in?

What are your thoughts?

I'm here in Hillsdale College giving lectures and meeting with people.

And so I'm in a swing state where I drove the other day just out in the country to see what southern Michigan was like and I counted 17 Trump signs And guess what?

Not one Harris sign.

Very different.

But this is southern Michigan, Hillsdale County, and it's very conservative.

And it's not reflective of the Ann Arbor, Detroit, Grand Rapids population centers.

But

she's, you know,

Quentin Tarantino had an interview with Bill Maher, and he summed up the Democratic position.

It was full of expletive, the F word, almost every word, poverty of vocabulary.

But

he just basically said, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank.

I don't care if she ever does blank, blank, blank, blank.

And the gist of it was she shouldn't do any

interviews.

She shouldn't talk to the American people.

She should deceive them.

Whatever it takes to win.

And that was explicit.

I have another colleague I won't mention at the Hoo Institution because we have rules of deference to colleagues.

But he tweeted out that he thought there was no need to do to give a press conference or an interview.

It's whatever is you to, if it's in her interest, that she should do it.

If it's not, she shouldn't.

So they're open about it because they're pushing back

that they know that she can't do it.

And here we are.

The promise, remember, was to give an interview at the end of August.

So we hear from Leaks that she was willing to do the interview,

but the first condition, she had to have Tim Waltz next to her.

I mean, sometimes you introduce your running mate

after the convention, and then you go your separate ways, and each covers more ground that way, but you don't do joint interviews.

And for a woman who's a self-declared feminist, and for all you feminists out there, why would a powerful black woman think that she had to have a nerdy white pathological provocative character at her side.

I mean, that isn't making sense.

I'm Camela Harris.

Call me Miss Attorney General.

I prosecute cases.

I'm a liberated, powerful woman.

But I can't talk to you unless this weirdo Wilt Waltz is next to me to blink his eyes or to help me get through this.

It doesn't make any sense.

And then when you add the leap that she wanted notes, that reminds me of that Senate race between Pete Wilson and Diane Feinstein when Pete Wilson accused her remember of writing on her back of her hand notes

because she couldn't remember.

And then

finally, we learned that

the agreement to honor the

CNN rules was tried to, they tried to overturn that because they think they can bait Trump.

You know, Trump's a felon, Trump's a felon, he's a criminal, he's a predator.

And then Trump would say, ah,

and that didn't work because it was a violation of the agreement.

And then

she wants it edited.

So it's not really an interview.

So if Camella Harris, let's just take an example.

If this interview takes place and Walt said, well, Camilla,

what's your favorite ice cream,

your favorite flavor?

And she says, ice cream.

is wonderful and the flavors are extraordinary.

Now, the thing about ice cream is it has flavors and some of them are wonderful.

And I happen to just be in favor of flavors and ice cream.

And what happens with that?

You think CNN won't edit that?

They will edit that.

And maybe they'll have to edit the whole thing down.

So it's very disappointing because these are the people who told us that candidates must be transparent.

They must connect.

They must be out in the arena.

You know, in 2008, Barack Obama could not get away.

When he saw saw a camera, it was like a magnet.

He went over there.

And I didn't vote for him, and I'm not fond of his politics, but

he talked as much as he could.

And he was not worried about, I don't know, extemporary speaking.

And the same thing with

Bill Clinton in 92 when he was running against George H.W.

Bush.

If he smelled a camera a mile away or a mic, he ran over there.

Let me just tell you about this thing, you know, and hope and change.

So

this is a, what it is, is a replication of the Biden formula.

Biden could not speak publicly, extemporaneously, ad hoc, interviews, so they kept him in the basement under the guise of COVID.

She has the same linguistic impairment for different reasons.

And so they're going to say, Joe Biden did it for over three and a half years.

She can run out the clock in 70 days.

And now you mentioned about her flip-flopping.

I guess the latest is

she's embracing a comprehensive, that's always a bad word to use, comprehensive, because it's really a euphemism for amnesty, that includes building the wall.

So, I mean, what mega position,

whether it's tough enforcement or refunding the military, which lapsed under her direction and Biden's, have they not embraced?

They embraced all the mega positions.

Nobody believes she's going to do that.

So

that's like Biden as well.

Biden came in and he said, I'm going to be a unifier and a centrist, just like she is.

And he wasn't.

He was the most far-left president we've seen since Franklin Roosevelt.

So what these democratic politicos and the donor billionaire class are doing are just simply insane.

Joe Biden faked it like he was a centrist.

Good old Joe from Scranton.

It's going to be good old Camilla from Oakland, not Berkeley.

She's going to be moderate just like Joe did.

Joe counted on 70% of the ballots not being cast under the new rules in most swing states on election day.

She's going to do the same thing.

Joe Biden counted on outspending Trump three to one.

We've got the Hollywood billionaires, the Silicon billionaires, the Wall Street billionaires all lined up.

Joe Biden avoided the press.

Now, we don't have COVID,

but

we've got enough media and we have very little time so we can run out the clock.

And

this flip-flopping is really strange because

think about it.

In 92, Clinton was running against whom?

George H.W.

Bush.

Remember,

he said, no new taxes.

Read my lips.

Well, I read his lips and he raised taxes.

And I'm going to put 100,000 police officers on the street.

And I'm going to have a school uniform.

And this is the worst recession we've had in the history of the United States.

It wasn't, but that's what he ran against, right?

And then he had Ross Perot ensure that he would be elected.

In 2008, what did Obama run?

Well, you know, I just hope it changed.

And George Bush, he

got us in the Iraq war.

And that surge is just bogus.

We're

mired in that war.

And then we had the 2008 financial, that's that's when all the wealthy rat cats took all the money and, you know, and they blew up the economy.

So he had an opposition to run against.

And Biden, Biden said,

January 5th,

January 6th was an armed insurrection.

And so they ran against their antitheses.

But she is an incumbent.

She owns, co-owns, excuse me, co-owns the last three and a half years.

So how can she against it?

What is she going to say?

I sort of kind of don't like Joe Biden anymore.

I mean, he's seething right now.

He's on his, what, 30th day of vacation?

And so it's ridiculous.

She has no COVID, no excuse not to come out like Biden did.

She is the incumbent.

Every criticism she makes of the status quo applies to herself.

And we haven't seen that from Clinton.

We didn't see it from Obama.

We didn't even see it from Biden.

So the whole thing is ridiculous.

It's an utter insult to the American people.

And now she's running, you know, if you go to a propaganda site, and I did today, because it's always a good filter of what the left is doing.

That's Matt Drudge, believe it or not.

I mean, he's gone completely wacky, hard left, and sensationalized, even more so

when he was conservative.

But they think that it's working.

And, you know, Kamala's lead goes arlington cemetery uh where trump went and of course

kamala harrison biden didn't show up he politicized it he's not supposed to do that one employee objected and so that's their campaign it's only the active trump is satan fans is lucifer and

They have no agenda on their website.

They have no positive thing to the degree they mention a position.

It's expropriated from MAGA.

It's the wall now.

It's stop catch and release.

It's enforcement of the border.

It's

let's make the Pentagon lethal.

I thought she was, I thought it was lethal.

I thought that's what they did.

They told us for three and a half years, Millie, Austin, all of them told us that

making the military woke was making, remember?

yes but you know what's going to make it more lethal yeah you know what she means her idea of making it more lethal is to dei it to death because somehow that's going to be more lethal

so when she says that that's a nothing statement because they've rounded a rep they've they've almost wrecked it yeah i know and we had the interview with H.R.

McMaster and he had guaranteed everybody that the military wasn't woke.

I think what he meant was that the sane people in the military are not woke, but they're not in control of it.

Lloyd Austin is in control of it.

Mark Milley was in control of it.

These are the people who are ordering, who ordered people or recommended to read bogus literature like Kendi that have,

or Surgeon General, you know, whatever his name is.

I mean, the admiral that is trans and this DI mandates and whether you like it or not doesn't matter.

The problem is if the Merchant Marine is short 30,000 troops

and

idling what 37 ships and the the army's short 40 military and generals short 45 000

army most of all why is that why don't they just tell us the truth so when she says she wants to make it the military more lethal well just do it You can do it.

You're the vice president.

There is no president now, right?

You're not only the vice president, but you're a vice president with more power than any vice president in history because there's no president.

He's completely unhinged.

He's demented.

He's non compos mentes.

He's just on the beach somewhere, either California or Delaware.

So I guess what I'm saying is it's so preposterous.

It's like a train.

You're watching a train and it's going over the cliff at full speed.

You think, this can't happen.

They're going to break.

Nobody would take a train, a locomotive with cars and go right over a cliff.

That is stupid.

And so we say to ourselves,

everybody knows she can't speak.

She won't have an interview.

She won't have a town hall.

She won't have, she's trying to weasel out of a debate.

She won't have an unscripted address.

She's hiding.

She's never entered a primary in her life.

She's never won one delegate.

She was anointed after they had this coup to get rid of.

Biden.

She's running as if she's a fresh face and she's in opposition to the status quo administration, which is herself.

This is so absurd.

No American person would vote for this.

And guess what?

She's ahead in the polls and many polls.

And they're all going to Quentin Tarantino it.

They're just going to vote for her just to vote for her.

And I think it shows she has complete contempt, I think, for the independents and anybody who considers themselves a moderate Democrat.

I'm not sure what that means now, but

it's just, she's got contempt one way or the other, and it's really disturbing.

Yeah, she has contempt.

It's like all we have to do is say that Trump is Satan and say that we're for democracy and we're not going to let democracy die in darkness as we kill democracy because it's killing democracy.

They've done it.

What I mean, everybody, is this is the second time they're doing it.

Everybody remember they did it with Biden.

They knew.

They knew that he was not cognitively able to serve the United States as president.

They also knew that if they they didn't intervene in March of 2020, they had a choice between Bernie Sanders, communist,

Pete Buttigig,

fanatic, I don't know what he is, socialist, and a socialist

Miss Warren, Pocahontas from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren.

So they said, this can't happen.

They're all going to lose.

Trump will get re-elected.

The lockdown, COVID, we've done everything, but he's going to get reelected.

So, Joe, you're going to be the nominee.

Now, you get out, you get out, and we'll give you certain exemptions of which we're not even sure today what they got.

Pete got a cabinet seat.

Elizabeth Warren and Sanders apparently got veto power over appointments and agendas.

So then we had this farce that this guy was nothing wrong.

And they were going to do it all the way.

Remember, they didn't care that he was not able to serve.

The only reason they had a coup

was that debate was so egregious and so bad, that stress test that they forced him to do, they couldn't hide it any longer.

And still, they would have done it.

They would not have removed him if the polls had not had him in some cases eight points down.

That's what got him out.

And so

they got him out.

And then there was...

Deer in the headlight.

What now?

Well, we'll have an open convention.

Maybe joe manchin wants to run maybe

gavin newsom gavin newsom said remember the other day this is what they told me to say it was an open convention saw that yes yes and then they just annoyed her and then they thought okay

but

we were saying to the the conservatives that we were biden was never never going to step down biden said that himself even if god came unless god came down and spoke to him apparently he did but

in the face of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama

and Nancy Pelosi.

So they removed him.

And then

they had told us, leaking, you can't remove Biden because she's worse.

That's Biden's Spiro Agnew insurance.

You can't get rid of Nixon because Spiro Agno.

And then they found a way to get rid of Spiro Agnew.

the left.

They got all these old charges and he had to get out.

And once he got out, they got good old Jerry Ford, which they thought was permissible and weak and would be easy to beat.

And they were right about that.

And that's what they did.

They just completely rebooted her.

She was no longer an incompetent left-wing radical from Berkeley who couldn't speak.

She was a Ciceroneian rhetorician that you didn't need to hear because she was so eloquent.

She grew up as a poor girl, poor black girl in Berkeley, and was the victim of systemic racism.

She'd, you know, don't mention her Marxist father PhD at Stanford or her mother at Berkeley PhD.

And they sold that and

they expropriated all of the conservative agendas that polled over 50%.

They just went through 10 or 20 positions.

They said, what does it pull?

What does it pull?

What does it pull?

And you know what was even weirder about it?

It was like a palimpsent.

I said that before.

They They did not reject those earlier position.

She has never said, I'm still for fracking, of course.

She has never said, I'm not a radical.

I'm not woke.

She still stands by, I'm woke.

Everybody should be woke, she said, and I'm a radical.

She has never said,

I oppose the wall, and I still oppose the wall, and I still oppose the wall.

I mean, she's never said, I'm for the wall.

Now,

that position is different from my opposite.

You see what I'm saying?

All of her left-wing positions that you just mentioned, they've just been superimposed like you glued something on top of them for 70 days.

And that's what's so weird.

She's for everything.

I'm for the wall.

I'm against the wall.

I want for open borders, but now I'm also for closed borders.

And

I think the interest rates are pretty good under Biden, but now I think they're pretty bad.

And I think Afghanistan, well, I was the last person in the room, it was a really great thing.

And now I think it's also pretty bad.

And, you know, I think that Keystone and Anwar and all these stuff, I don't think we need them, but I also think we need them.

And that's what her positions are.

They're not a rejection, a flip-flopping.

They're an incorporation, a padding.

And she expects all of these

media people to go through it.

And

they only have 70 days because it was so it was dumped on us in July so

yeah

so 70 days to see all those Quentin Tarantinos out there if they really actually wake up to what they're supporting I don't get them because I don't get them because if you said oh so you were want to avoid Donald Trump and anything he might do but his

his

years in office were so much better than what you've had they don't care.

They don't care.

They have enough money.

If they were a Mexican-American guy that was a painting contractor and was suddenly paying double for his car insurance, double for his business insurance, double for his fuel in California,

and couldn't raise prices to match that, they don't care about him.

They just, they go from one mansion to the next, and then they get with all their friends and they say, oh, I feel so bad about the

the

downtrodden and oh

i'd like to help them here at nartha's vineyard i gave them one of those pleated coats puff jackets wasn't that enough but can't we just bust them and i just you know see no evil just they get into a feel i don't want to deal with it i'm wealthy i'm enlightened and and it's kind of like wearing a communist party badge you know i have my i hate trump okay come to dinner.

And that's all you need.

You're one of us.

But they don't care about the country because they don't care.

Just as

just today, I'm reading that in Aurora, Colorado, a bunch of gang members from Venezuela took over a whole apartment building with guns.

I'm reading in California that a bunch of migrants tried to get on or maybe hijacked a school bus with kids on it, tried to demand to get into the bus.

I don't know what they want.

And then one of their apologists said, well, it was hot outside.

They needed transportation.

And so they don't care about the border.

They don't care about high interest rate.

They don't care about inflation.

They don't care about Afghanistan.

They don't care about the military.

They don't care about Israel.

They don't care about the war in Ukraine.

They don't care about anything.

All they want is somebody who's left-wing and they can say that they're left-wing and they're for equity and they're for inclusion and diversity diversity and they feel great about themselves and they want to hate somebody.

They want to hate somebody and they want to hate Trump and anybody that is for Trump.

And that's what this movement's about.

So we'll see.

It's 70 days.

We're right about at 70 days and

much quicker.

I think it's 20 days or something for the in some states for the early voting.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back.

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So, Victor, I wanted to ask you in connection with Camilla Hanson, Camilla, Camilla Hanson, Camilla,

Kamala, sorry, and

the campaign

about

Wisconsin and Michigan.

So RFK said he's not running anymore, but the Wisconsin and Michigan

election,

I don't know what you call them, right?

Those people who conduct the elections.

Yes, the election.

They won't take them off.

Yeah, the elections.

And

the judges have said they don't have to take them off.

Yeah, we're in a Orwellian time.

So here's the Democratics, Democratic Party position.

Cornell West has no right to run for president.

And we in Michigan and all this, we're going to get him off that ticket.

And Robert Kennedy snuck through, and now he's no longer a candidate.

But he's going to stay on that ticket because now it's a different story.

Sometimes removing somebody from the ballot is good.

And sometimes keeping the person's name on the ballot is bad.

and has nothing to do with the law and has nothing to do with justice.

It's just what's in our useful, it's in our, what's useful for us, in our interest.

And it's in our interest to get Cornell off the ballot.

But we now that Kennedy has shown who he's for

and he's wants to get off the ballot, then his votes will go to Trump.

But if we keep him on the ballot, some people will still think he's a third-party Maverick who is neither for Biden or Trump, and and he will take some votes away from Trump.

Keep him on the ballot, even if he doesn't want it.

They don't have any principles.

It's like the filibuster.

We're in the majority.

This is a racist relic.

Get rid of it.

We're in the minority.

I'm Barack Obama.

I've got a filibuster, Justice Alito.

Same thing about the electoral college.

We have the blue wall.

You know, before you even vote, we've got Illinois, and we've got New York, and we've got California.

You don't have a chance.

Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.

The blue wall crumbled.

Electoral college is also a racist rhetoric.

It's an adolescent mind.

It really is.

And it's really disturbing to see

the powers that they can array against normalcy, common sense, the truth.

I mean, gosh.

They've got this Mark Zuckerberg now.

He writes this letter

that he basically confesses that he's been what, a useful idiot or a tool for the FBI.

And so he deliberately suppressed especially the New York Post, but other news accounts that told the truth about the laptop, which since 2019 had been in FBI possession and was known to be authentic.

They even had his iCloud ID number.

So they've authenticated it.

And yet, Anthony Blinken called up 51

intelligence authorities who said they were retired and therefore disinterested.

Now we learn that almost half of them are still working as private contractors for the CIA, which shows you the CIA had a role in this,

if its employees and contractors are working.

And they lied.

They knew the FBI had told them.

They knew that, that it was authentic, and they lied.

And it affected that Technometrica

polling outfit found out that it did make a difference in people's votes to the degree that Trump probably would have won the Electoral College.

They don't care.

And

one of the people who signed the

51-person letter was, I think his name is Jeremy Bash.

He's Dana Bash's ex-husband.

So

you have the ex-husband who participates in a fraud

to warp an election, and then his ex-wife is now going to be interviewing Donald Trump or moderating Donald Trump and Camilla Harris at the next debate.

And she's refused to go on Fox.

And by the way, I want to have a little ex-cursus.

Did you see Leon Panetta's speech at the DNC?

No, I didn't watch that.

It was reprehensible.

I mean, he has a pretty good reputation, or he did have, but he went into the suckers lie, all the lies that Donald Trump said.

He'd say about suckers and he made fun of the military.

And he got up and it was just an ad hominem blast.

I watched that and I said,

you were Secretary of Defense.

You were CIA director.

You signed this letter.

that you knew was a lie to warp and throw an election.

And it did.

And you went on national TV and they showed you,

they basically showed you, demonstrated, they went through the steps the interviews did.

The FBI had it, Mr.

Panetta.

It was verified as Hunter Biden's.

This was known at the time that you signed the letter.

The letter may or may not have affected election.

Now, do you want to apologize?

You know what he said?

Nope.

No way.

It was just like Harry Reid.

When Harry Reid said that that Mitt Romney had never paid the income taxes, and when that was shown to be a lie, he said, it worked, didn't it?

He is really,

I mean, this idea that he's a wise man, a senior statesman, a George Kennedy, that is completely bogus.

All of those people,

they're so far removed from earlier generations of so-called bipartisan statespeople.

They're not at all.

They're all partisans, and they will lie, and they will distort for

any means necessary to get rid of Trump.

He doesn't understand that.

I saw him at that convention.

He was repeating these lies about Trump disparaging the military with epithets like suckers.

And he had an occasion just to say, you know what?

We have to have principal debate as a former cabinet officer, a very high-ranking official, but we can't stoop

to alleging unfounded rumors that were not true.

We can't do that.

We can't traffic in that.

And we surely can't traffic in

fake documents that are released as an October surprise right before the election.

Everybody should remember that we went through the Hollywood Access October surprise.

in 2016.

Then remember we had that BuzzFeed, Newsweek, last little tidbit about Russian collusion that the dossier was leaked, the Bruce Orr, Nelly Orr, all those people that were working, they leaked it.

And right before the election, we felt, I had somebody write me an email, how can you vote for a man who urinates on a bed in Moscow?

I didn't even know what it was.

They leaked all that stuff.

And then we came to 2020 and I thought, where's the October surprise?

Access Hollywood.

Remember that old tape they dumped right before the debate?

And sure enough, it was Russian disinformation.

Donald Trump and his buddy Vladimir Putin created a fake laptop.

They fake pictures and fake text messages and faked emails.

Then they planted it in a computer repair store.

And then they had that agent leak it.

That's what we were asked to believe.

And it was absurd.

That was, so there's going to be an October surprise, believe me.

Yeah.

I don't know what it will be, but it will be something.

Yeah.

If I could just turn back to ask about Mark Zuckerberg.

He, if it seems to me that he is not,

you called him a useful idiot.

I have a feeling that he is now saying, oh,

I was used.

And he, number one, wasn't used at all by the FBI.

He was more than happy to do it.

And number two, he sees this election coming up and he's trying to do it.

There, bingo, bingo, there you are.

There you are.

You remember when Trump was shot?

Who said that was

who said that when Trump raised his fist?

Man, that was macho.

That was great.

Mark Zuckerberg did.

Remember that?

He commented on that.

Oh, what a great president to do that.

He knows what he's been doing.

He knows he dumped $419 million

to absorb the work of registrars and swing states.

His money

hired people, quote unquote, to authenticate votes.

And since then, a lot of states have passed laws that private billionaires and outside money cannot go in and augment the workforce with private contractors who are partisan.

$419 million, that was the largest single gift of the entire campaign, went to the Biden effort from him.

He let his entire meta-apparat be used or collaborated with the FBI to suppress news that he thought

was unwelcome to the Biden campaign.

If you don't believe it, just go read again.

I know everybody said, Victor, you've mentioned that so many times.

Read Molly Ball's 2021 February Time essay, How We Saved the Election.

And it's basically, she uses the word cabal and conspiracy.

And she said, and we had private funders who gave money to stop disinformation and misinformation.

Censor it.

She was bragging about that.

Yeah.

So, yes, he knows that if Trump is elected,

Trump is elected, he's not going to be in good shape.

Maybe the ⁇ and he's afraid, not that Trump is going to do anything, but in his left-wing mind, he knows what he's been doing, right?

He's been using his private money basically to break the law, to work with the FBI, help the FBI break the the law.

And that is to censor news in violation of the First Amendment with the agency of an investigative agency like the FBI that has no

right to do any of that.

That's not their venue.

That's not where they are.

He knows that.

And he thinks, ah, Trump must be at least like me.

So if he's elected, He's going to tell everybody in the Commerce Department to go after me on antitrust.

He's He's going to tell everybody in the IRS to look at all my donations again and look at all my tax records.

He's going to talk to people in things like the Defense Department not to give us any contracts.

I'm screwed because I know Trump thinks like I do, and that is uses and warps government agencies for political purposes.

It's not that what Trump's going to do, it's what he thinks Trump would do if he were Trump.

And that's important to remember.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, before we go to break, I have just a question about whether should we be optimistic?

Because

Zuckerberg has said that he will take all those Zuckerbergs.

He's not going to spend his money in this campaign either way.

And then we have, of course, RFK's switch to supporting Trump and things like that that are going on.

Should we be optimistic about those things?

I am in this sense that

the three

best spokesmen for their cause on either side, on the Harris or Trump side, that is, what do I mean by that?

The willingness to go out and talk in public, the willingness to mix it up with people who misinform,

the willingness to speak to crowds without notes.

You know who they are?

They're J.D.

Vance, one.

Tulsi Gabbard, two, and RFK, three.

And that's an enormous advantage for Trump.

And if they are true to their word and they're out there every night on television and on weekend television and they are taking part in ads and they're speaking to people and they're giving interviews and they're quoted,

it's pretty effective.

Yeah.

And I think the idea that Kamala Harris is going to get a four or five point bump from that convention didn't happen.

I don't think so.

I'm looking at the polls on Real Clear Politics today.

I think it was 48.3

to 46.6.

And I looked at the Electoral College map and it was, I think it was 287 to 251

after all of that.

And they're almost dead even in Wisconsin.

They're dead even in Pennsylvania.

Trump is behind by two points in Michigan.

Trump is ahead, barely ahead, but ahead in Arizona.

He's ahead in Nevada.

He's on the aggregate poll he's headed in north carolina he's ahead in georgia not by a lot his lead has shrunk yeah oh so her campaigning in georgia has done some has helped her because she's been down there really that's her spot i guess she thinks she's going to take the other the other states or feels really confident about pennsylvania wisconsin and michigan and georgia was the state where they had the greatest complaints about the voting and so

look at it either way.

If you're cynical, she's going down to Georgia because it's going to be a close race.

And in 2020, there were a lot of questions raised about the authenticity of the voting, mail and ballots.

If you don't buy into that, then she's going down there because

Kemp has now endorsed Trump and promised to use his machinery of state governance and appointments to help the Republicans win the state.

And she's paranoid.

Either way,

she's afraid she's going to lose it.

And she thinks she can win it, whether it's by just majority of the vote or reliance on mailing balloting.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, oh, go ahead.

No,

it's all of this is, we mentioned the insult to the American people, but What's really strange is the people who knowingly admit what they're doing and they're proud of it.

And that gets back to that Molly Ball.

She wrote an article where she told people

that

they censored the news, that they modulated demonstrations, that they bundled all sorts of money to absorb the work of the registrars.

She bragged about it.

That's what's so stunning about it.

And

nobody was contrite.

Leon Pun, none of these people, not one of the 51 people who worked in election, who signed that letter, letter have apologized.

Not one.

Christopher Steele has never apologized.

Anthony Fauci has never said, you know what, I should not have hidden money and circulated it to the Wuhan lab through Echo Health.

And I'm sorry,

I know I said it was not gain of function, but it was.

No, they don't ever do that.

They're proud of who they are and what they do.

They feel, look at what I did.

I really hurt Trump and these crazy MAGA MAGA people.

Oh, you did?

How'd you do that?

Well, I lied.

Well, good.

That's the attitude they have.

And

that's going to be very hard in 70 days to break.

You have to have complete discipline.

And Trump needs people like Tulsi Gabbard and Kennedy, but they have to go out there.

And they have to hammer them.

They're very good hammering Harris.

They really are.

Kennedy's speech at that initial rally with Trump was very good.

And J.D.

Vance has been very good.

I don't think they're going to let him on anymore on the news shows because every time he goes on, he,

what's the metaphor, slaughters the

host.

He just exposes them as rank partisan.

Yeah, I know.

And they've been letting, and he's the one that's been charging on to the opponent's press station.

You know, press station.

So I ask all of you listening, I know that you have a left-wing relative or friend.

Just go over to them and say, can I ask you a question?

You believe

democracy thrives in light.

It has to be transparent.

So I know you hate Trump.

I know you want Harris, but do you find anything disturbing that Trump is giving interviews almost every, he gave, what, a two-hour interview with the Daily Mail yesterday?

He's out there every single day, vulnerable, exposed.

They could cross him up.

These journalists are not pro-Trump.

He's doing these rallies.

He goes off script.

He wants more debates.

Isn't that what democracy is about?

And aren't you worried that you're for someone who will not do an interview on her own without editing and are solitarily?

Aren't you worried that she won't have a town hall?

That she doesn't, she wants to limit the number of debates.

Aren't you worried about that?

See what they say.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back to talk about

Israeli strategy.

Stay with us.

We'll be back.

Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So, Victor, I just found.

Can I interrupt just a second?

I have to answer my own question.

I know the answer because i've asked that question before

you know what they're going to say to you when you ask your relative or friend

they're going to say well how about stormy daniels and look at he's a criminal and letita james they find him and ejene carroll in that clothing store so that's what they'll say yeah

yeah that is i don't know but it still doesn't reconcile the lack of policy on their side and that they can't see she she doesn't have policy and to the extent she has,

you can only believe her record, which is radical left.

Well, Victor,

the Middle Eastern Forum had an interview with Daniel Pipes, and he said this about the situation in Israel, that Israel's forces are tactically amazing, but that their strategy is compromised because they are not

consistent with the modern world, which by which he means that they don't understand that war is not about winning on the battlefield, but that given the nuclear age, the goal is to manage and control the situation and convince your opponent that he cannot attain his goal.

And I was wondering what you thought about that position.

Well, what he's saying is that

I think I'm going to interpret what he is saying or what he should say.

You can win a war in the nuclear age.

You can.

And it's happened.

I mean, you can argue that Russia won the war in 2014 and just took Donbas and Crimea and held on to it.

They won the war with Georgia in 2014.

You can argue that Turkey went into Aberbajan and just ethnically cleansed 150,000 Armenians that had been there for centuries.

They won that.

So you can win a war.

You can argue that Donald Trump crushed ISIS by bombing and it worked.

Okay.

You can argue you got rid of Qaddafi, that that was the game of the game.

But what he's saying is, can you turn, and I don't think they meant tactical, even a strategic victory into a permanent victory without inflicting a level of damage damage and humiliation on the enemy

that would be tolerable to the world community.

In other words, economic pressure, judicial pressure, International Criminal Court, UN.

So what he's saying is World War II, whatever civil war, the idea of war was to defeat the enemy by either killing a lot of them or taking their means of resources, their natural resources or their means of resistance.

And then, once they're defeated and humiliated and can no longer physically or materially continue the war, you dictate terms to them.

That's still possible because obviously nuclear

sides can agree not to use nuclear weapons.

And that happened all during the Cold War.

But what I think he's trying to say,

or he should say, is that Palestinian Hezbollah movement is different.

It's different.

And what do I mean by that?

Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974.

In a bloodthirsty effort, they ethnically cleansed people from northern Cyprus.

They killed thousands.

People are still missing.

They still find graves.

They were barbaric.

And the world condemned them.

No country recognizes northern Cyprus except Turkey.

But they pulled it off is what I'm saying.

You see what I mean?

Yeah.

And they pulled it off because the Cypriots were,

I'm not going to word,

they were civilized people, but they had a different attitude.

They knew that they were in the right and they had suffered and they were going to endure and they were going to make their case.

They didn't hate Turks in the sense they wanted to kill every single Turk because they didn't go around blowing them up.

There are not Turkish groups, excuse me, there's not Cypriot groups that sneak into Nicosia and blow up policemen, right?

Yeah.

And there's not kids on campus right now who are demonstrating on behalf of Cypriots that have been displaced.

Nobody says the Greek Cypriots are, they don't dangle their keys to their lost home.

They went on and they took the worst part of the island that had been more Turkish than Greek and they made it into paradise.

And the Turks have the northern part that was the nicest and they've turned it into purgatory.

So what I'm saying is that the Middle East is different.

This is the only war that I know where children are taught from the first grade to hate Jews and hate Israelis and to destroy them for their entire lives.

And if you don't believe that, look at the people who participated on October 7th.

Once they found out you could rape and kill and behead, people flocked in to follow them.

Nobody asked them to.

And when they brought back an Israeli woman near death, they all were screaming and blood-curdling yodels, and they wanted to rape and kill her and disfigure her corpse.

So there is a level of existential hatred in

the question about Israel.

Part of it's anti-Semitism.

Part of it is the Arab world's kind of orphaning.

of the Palestinians.

They're not Palestinians.

They're Jordanians that Jordan said during the Black September uprising.

I don't want these Jordanians anymore on the West Bank.

It's your problem.

You can call them Palestinians.

But there is no Palestinian language.

There's no Palestinian variant of Islam.

It's indistinguishable from Jordanian.

So my point is this, is that

Israel is in a unique situation that the Greek Cypriot-Turkish

fight is not like.

It's not

it's not even like Ukraine and Russia.

Ukrainians are not saying, I hate the Russians in every fashion, and I'm going to, and they're teaching kids to go kill them.

You know what I mean?

You don't see a Russian diplomat assassinated in the United States.

They're not out to kill.

I mean, Hollywood does its best to demonize Russians as kind of

missing tooth,

orthodox, tattooed, ball-headed

murderers.

Vicious killers.

Vicious killers, animal.

But my point is that

even that doesn't approximate the level of hatred and the world's hatred of Israel.

And so this is a unique situation.

I know what he's saying, but he's got to make a qualifier that this is different than the Chechen War.

So he says you can't win in the nuclear age.

Well, Putin won the third Chechnyan War.

He just leveled Chechnya, and then he put a puppet at here and end there and said, you build the rubble up, and here's some oil money, and you do it.

And there is no Chechnyan War now, and there is no independent Chechnya.

He won.

And

he did it by being ruthless and cynical.

He said, nobody will care about the Chechnyans.

There won't be protest at Harvard or Stanford on behalf of the Muslim Chechnya.

And you can argue that the Chinese won the Uyghur War.

There was a Uyghur independence Islamic movement for autonomy.

No, they just went in and crushed them and they put a million of them basically in a, I don't know,

I guess you could call that vast area where they live a concentration camp.

And they impress them to be forced workers and laborers.

They won that, even though it's a nuclear age.

And yet...

And yet the Uyghurs are not blowing up Chinese students or attacking them in the United States and Europe, are they?

They're not like people going into Germany the other day,

a

immigrant from Morocco, I think, and starts stabbing 11 people and kills three people for Palestine.

For Palestine.

You don't see Uyghurs doing that.

You don't see Cypriots.

You don't see Chechens doing it.

You don't see Germans saying, Prussia forever.

This is Argland.

Gdansk is Danzig.

We're going to go kill some Poles.

No, they don't do that.

Only the Palestinians do that.

So

Israel has a unique enemy, an existential enemy that will never recognize Israel.

Never.

And so

you have to.

Yeah, Netanyahu needs to do what needs to be done, which I think he will do.

And I think he will probably show Daniel Pipes that maybe he's a little wrong.

I think what he's trying to say is

we didn't want to do what we did in Gaza.

They had their people on their hospitals, mosques, schools.

The tunnels are full of weaponry.

But after October 7th, we realized that they want to kill every one of us, and they would have killed every one of us if we didn't stop them on October 7th.

And we're going to eliminate that ideology and threat.

Now, if you don't like Gaza, don't do it again.

And Hezbollah, you see Gaza.

Now, you keep telling us you're going to destroy us.

But I guarantee, this is what they're telling him.

It's not not Victor talking.

I guarantee you, this is what the Israeli government says.

If you continue this

and you think it's going to go on forever, it's not.

So we're going to make Beirut like it was in 2006.

And if you think that we're in a garrison state, you won't believe what we're going to do to Beirut.

And they're telling Iran,

we're done now.

You've already hit the Jewish state with missiles.

You've sent 328.

We only sent three to show you.

But apparently, you didn't get the message.

The next time we do this, we don't care about the United States or anything.

Next time you attack us or you use Hezbollah, we're going to do damage that you're going to find very hard to repair.

Because what else do they have to lose?

Nothing.

And that's why this week the Israeli Defense Force hit targets in the West Bank.

So they've turned to stop Iranian weapons from coming in.

They've destroyed the cargo docks at the Houthis.

And,

you know, at some point,

Daniel Pipes is right that this is more insidious than the 67 or 73-day war.

But each of those victories gave, and the 73

was almost catastrophic, but it was a huge victory at the end.

Each of those gave Israel some deterrence.

But if they lose deterrence and they lost it after October 7th, they've got to get, they've got to recover it or they won't be able to survive.

And I think that's what they're saying.

If you want to attack the Jewish state, we're warning you that there's not going to be a second Holocaust.

And if you think you're going to take us down, you have no idea the damage we're going to do you.

And if we had a government that understood that,

they would go to the Iranians and say, look,

We'll keep out of it and you keep out of it.

And Israel's going to deal with Hezbollah and it's going to deal with Hamas, but you're not going to give any weapons to Hezbollah or Hamas or the Houthis.

And you're not going to send any more missiles there.

And if you don't believe that, then hand them a list of targets and say, these are the targets, one, two, ten,

and see what they do.

Yeah.

And people should understand Israel is actually doing the world a favor because we had this week the Houthis hit a Greek oil tanker that's burning in the, I think, the Red Sea or the Sea of Oman, and they won't let anybody get there to put it out.

So they're just willing to have this

ecological disaster.

Oh, yeah.

And just everybody listen, what would happen if there was

just say an Iranian tanker that was chugging along the coast of Israel and Israel said, turn around, and they didn't do it.

And they blew it up.

And there's a huge oil slick off the coast of Lebanon.

What would the people on the campuses of America say?

Oh, those Jews are waging war against nature itself now.

That's why this whole thing is so bogus.

It's not about

anything but hatred of Israel.

That's all it is.

Hatred of Israel.

Hatred of Israel because it's Jewish, hatred of Israel because it's successful, hatred of Israel because it's right plopped right down in the middle of people who are not successful and they see this success.

and they're envious and they're jealous and they're angry and they can't move on.

And

they have a weird ability to appeal to the left-wing liberal mindset in the West and play on their guilt.

And they do, especially in Europe, and they do a wonderful job of that.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, with that, Victor, we're at the end of our podcast today.

Thank you very much for all of your reflections on the current news.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.