Obamas at the DNC and what's next for RFK Jr.

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

This is a Friday news roundup and we've got, of course, lots on the agenda from this week, especially on the convention.

We've just heard the Obamas give speeches last night, so we're going to talk a little bit about that.

And also,

oh, yes, and RFK Jr.

We don't seem to be able to figure out who he might support, but we do know that his campaign is closing its doors.

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

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Welcome back to the Victor Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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Victor is also the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Arshabuski, Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

So, Victor, lots going on at the DNC and really about Chicago in general.

And I was wondering your thoughts first, of course, on the Obama speeches.

Both Michelle and Barack gave a speech last night.

Well, Barack was just too long.

It was so self-indulgent.

It would have been good if you'd never heard him before, but I've heard him for eight years do that stuff, the Hope He and Changey stuff.

Yes.

And we're going to do this.

The funny thing was, it's a new chapter.

It's a new chapter, you said.

And I'm thinking, wait a minute.

She's been vice president of the United States for three and a half years.

So now all of a sudden they're saying she's got all these new initiatives.

Well, she's got, as I said before, she's got five months in her tenure.

If she loses, she can still be vice president for three more months after November.

Right?

So she's not a new chapter.

She's just doing, she's the last person in the room, she said, on the major decisions of the

Biden administration.

So it's incumbent upon Trump.

And he's, you know, he had a rally today and he did a very good job.

He kind of made fun of people like I think me and others who have said you got to stick to the issues and said don't go off.

But

he was self-deprecate, deprecate Corey, and he talked about with data and issues, and that's how he's going to win.

And he was really good.

And the more he, and he said, you know, here's my, I have a personality that's pretty good because that's that it it's it's unpredictable, it makes people

off guard abroad.

And anyway, the point is that Obama then does this.

He does something that the Greeks called praetoridio or apolepsis.

And that means you say something like the following.

Okay, now I'm Demosthenes, and I'm addressing the Athenian Assembly, I don't know, in 325 BC.

And I said, as far as my opponent Eschines, it would be terrible to mention, and I won't unless I'm forced to, but it would be terrible to mention that his mother conducted acts of prostitution in an outhouse in a cemetery.

But we're not going to go there.

Well, that's what he does.

We're not going to go down when they go, you know, highly

low, we go high, and we're not going to get into slavery.

And then it was just unrestrained, infective.

It was almost as bad as the old yeller speech.

Well, Biden, the night before.

I can't say Snaggle Puss because some of our listeners got upset because Snaggy was one of their favorite cartoon characters.

And there was one point guy pointed out, I said, Victor, Victor, what are you doing?

Besmirching Snaggle Puss.

He was a Fifth Avenue dandy.

I guess I got

confused with the idea of snarl puss.

But that's what

they are.

That Joe Biden is.

He was just the one thing it accomplished.

If their idea was to put him

at midnight and then get rid of him and no one would be there and he would get angry at the thought of it and he'd go full Adderall State of the Union, it worked.

Because after listening to that guy for five minutes, you found yourself saying, well, it was cool what they did, and it nullified and vitiated 14 million votes.

But if I were them, I would have done the same thing a lot earlier because that guy is just intolerable.

And he just confirmed their case.

Then Michelle got on, or excuse me, she came on before Barack.

You got both of them.

I was wondering which mansion they came out of.

Did they come out of the Calaroma at $11 million, the $20 million Martha's Vineyard, the new 21 on the Hawaiian

coast?

Or on the beach, which I think they've been fighting with because of the EPA and its drainage and everything.

or they might have gone back to the Chicago digs.

And they're worth somewhere between $150 and $300 million.

And she said, keep that in mind, she said, well, Donald Trump has always, he's made a career going after us because we're successful and we're dynamic, we're popular, and we're black.

Yeah, and we're black.

If he's doing that, then that must be very self-incriminatory because

let's look at the last candidates who ran for president.

Nick Romney never did,

and he got about 8% of the black vote.

John McCain never did, and he got about 9% of the black vote.

And according to them, Donald Trump did, and last time he got about 12%, 11% to 12%, and maybe he'll get 20%.

So she's saying the more that you go after her because she's black, the more black voters you get?

Yes.

I don't know.

But he's going to get more black voters than any other aristocratic white Republican.

And she says that he's made a career of going out.

No, she's gone, made a career of

never been proud of this country to your pick.

Downright mean country.

They always raise the bar.

We try so hard.

We get it.

And then there's braces.

Then there's dance classes.

Then there's a mortgage.

Then there's landscaping.

They always raise the bar on us.

Yeah, Michelle, they do on everybody, don't they?

And then you get a job.

He runs for senator.

And then all of a sudden you're hired for, what, $350,000 as a community relations person at the University of Chicago Hospital whose job is to tell poor black people, I don't think you really want to go here.

There's another hospital on the other side of town.

So, I mean, their whole existence is hypocritical.

And

it's getting really tired of hearing all of this, we don't go, we don't say invective, we don't do this, we don't do that.

And it reminds me that when Donald Trump talks about the issues, they get frightened.

So what they do is they've got in their little room and they said, you know, Donald Trump gave a rally

and he talked about the issues and he had data and he was self-critical and he was kind of relaxed.

So we got to go make fun of him and attack him, attack him, attack him so he'll come back and call us stupid and then we can just waste another six hours.

That's what they want.

And the thing is, when I said that Donald Trump should stick to the issues, what I meant, I should have been clearer, is

not that he has to bone up on it.

That's what he's good at.

He talks about the issues.

He has a good memory.

He can really rattle off data.

He did that in the second debate against Biden and beat him.

And when he did not do that in the first debate, so I don't understand why he would play to what they want him to play when he has this natural ability to be elevated and funny.

Remember that, I've said that before when they were talking about the tragic loss of his brother

from alcoholism-induced, I guess, liver failure.

And someone, the reporter, thought they were going to get him, and they said, and why didn't you drink?

And they wanted him to say, how dare you, like, like Joe Biden, how dare you talk about Bo, that kind of stuff.

What kind of man are you?

And instead, he said, you know, given

my temperament, can you imagine what would happen if I drank?

Everybody started laughing.

And that's what he's good at.

He should do it more because he's really a nice person, really, when you get to know him.

And everybody says that when they've talked to him.

And he can be really funny.

And if he gets funny and he gets,

if he mocks those people rather than get angry,

he should just go up there and say, and then Michelle is talking about what a victim she is, and we don't know which house she came out of.

She's got more houses than I do.

And that's what I was trying to get out.

Yeah, did you hear him?

He said he had to complain about billionaires because he's a millionaire now.

so when he said those troublesome rich people he said troublesome billionaires I was like okay

his

what drives Michelle and Barack's anger is this

deep

seated

materialistic

desire for elite

and

rified existence, material things, influence, reputation, snobbery, right?

And they feel that they can never quite get it.

They get Martha's Vineyard and somebody snubs them.

They make $200 million, then somebody doesn't look at them in the right way because they're black, because they're black.

So they always go back to that.

If they would just say,

I, Barack, have 99, 99, I have, I'm in the 99, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9,

99, 9, 9, 9% of the country doesn't have what I have.

I'm in the rarefied 0-0-0-1%.

Then he'd be fine.

But he never looks at that.

They always look not at how fortunate they are, but how someone else has something better and secretly looks down on them.

They're very insecure people, both of them.

Well, that's because their fortune was made by being the victim.

Well, they go back there like a horse always goes the same place for water, doesn't it?

Yeah.

And they know that when they play the race card and the victim card.

The worst she ever did was when she was talking about the woman that would ask her, short woman asked her to pick up a package in Target, remember, off a shelf?

Yeah.

She said that she was put upon, no, you're tall and she's short.

Big deal.

You know, it's

it's not about being black and secure.

The two most confident people I think I've ever met

were Shelby Steele and Tom Soule.

They had absolute confidence.

They had no, not a shred.

I mean, they thought they weren't arrogant.

They didn't have a superiority.

But they never talked about race as a psychological impediment or they never sounded envious.

They were just so bright and well-spoken that race became incidental to who they were.

After

two seconds, you had no idea what race they were.

I hope they thought the same about me when we'd go to lunch.

But the point I'm making is that when you're insecure like they are,

and then,

wow, I don't know why they're insecure.

They've been blessed with, does she really think that a racist country led her into Yale and Harvard?

I mean,

that was a pretty good thing.

And as Christopher Hitchens famously said of her thesis, it's written in some language other than English.

And so they've been given every benefit, and yet they keep going back to that.

The other thing is,

all of them, it wasn't just them, they all go to the personal.

My father, my mother.

I know it's sad, people pass away,

and we talk about it, but you have to talk, when you're a politician, you have to say, this is what I'm going to do, or this is what he's not going to do.

They didn't give any detail, did they?

They didn't say, the four years of Donald Trump, we were wracked by inflation.

No, we weren't.

There was crime exploding.

No, we weren't.

The world was erupting abroad.

No, we weren't.

The border was...

No, they weren't.

They couldn't.

They can't say that.

So what they do is they get into all of this other stuff.

And what Donald Trump needs to do is talk about it.

He had 1.2% inflation when he left.

It went up

4.7, then it went up to 8.5, then it went up to 4.4%.

And who knows what it'll be this year?

And the cumulative, it was 19%.

And then it goes down from...

4.5 to 4 or something.

They said inflation's over with.

It's gone down.

No, it's not.

Prices are still 19% higher, and on Staples, 30%.

And he needs to say that.

Well, Victor, let's go.

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Victor, so what I was wondering is

on the lackluster protesters outside the convention.

You predicted that, but I was wondering if you thought, is it because there's so many police there?

Because you look at the pictures and there are droves of them, or were they just simply bought off in some fashion?

Well, there was a lot of police because Mayor Johnson, who doesn't, who has defunded the police and castigated the police, suddenly wanted police.

Now, why was that?

And we didn't hear anything from Kamala yet, but these demonstrations are not going to stop.

Nor should they stop.

They're going to go on to Election Day.

Beware.

They're going to go

past.

This is a movement, Sammy.

This is a movement.

We didn't hear any of that.

We didn't hear her tweet, did we?

A little poster that these people should be bailed out?

No.

So my point is this.

Whether it's Mayor Johnson or the people in Washington, there's a general rule that will guide you about demonstrations turning, allowed to be turned violent.

So why, for example,

was there very little police

scrutiny on the January 6th, but there was a huge pushback and harsh sentencing like we've never seen before.

And the general rule is to a degree that it's not lax

or strict enforcement.

That's not the break.

That's not the pattern.

It's this.

To what degree does a demonstration help a liberal cause or agenda?

If that means it's laxly watched, then they'll be lax.

If it means they're going to be closely and sternly watched, that will be it.

So on January 6th,

when the Capitol Police were not called out in force, and Pelosi had that effort, they wanted those protesters to rampage.

They really did.

They didn't really control the area or the space like, if it had been like Chicago, there would have been no January 6th.

They didn't want that.

They deliberately allowed that to go on because they thought, and they were correct, it played into their narrative.

In May, June, July, August, September 2020,

they sympathized with not the homeowners, not the shopkeepers, not the merchants.

They sympathized with BLM and Antifa and the rioters.

So they let them go.

And then when they did arrest them, 14,000 arrested, most of them were released.

In Chicago, they have decided that it looks bad.

They do not want a 1968, and they're going to enforce the law in a way that they never did in January 6 or May, June, July, because they think it's in their interest to keep everything quiet and not show that the Democratic Party is in turmoil.

Now that doesn't mean it's going to be that way the next two nights, because

there's supposedly 150,000, which

begs your other question is, is it just on one side they're able to modulate, as Molly Wall said in her Time 2021 essay when she said they modulated the street protest.

The answer is, I don't know that answer.

I don't know if the heads of all of these Palestinian groups have talked to the DNC and have been promised future favorable legislation, appointments for their leaders, but I think they've done something to defuse it.

And that's how they operate, the Democratic.

I mean, we're talking about a donor class that just walked into the White House and said, you're not going to get any more money, and you're just about out of it.

We're not going to give you another dime unless you quit, Mr.

President.

And then the political class came in and said, according to Seymour Hirsch and the New York Times and Washington Post and New York Post,

you remember that 25th Amendment?

Maybe even Kamala will vote against you.

So would you want to be unceremoniously thrown out of office?

Or do you want to become George Washington who fell on the sword for the good of the country?

That's your choice.

And that's what they did.

And

anybody who does that, and is that ruthless, like Pelosi, Pelosi was denying it and denying it and denying it.

And then she put her little antenna up, her Pelosi antenna, and she said, wow, everybody says I've saved the Democratic Party, that making him, you know, commit Harry Kerry was really good.

So then she started out and said, well, you know, I did it for the children.

I had no choice.

I had to.

Now she's the heroine.

So

Joe Biden is going, what, to, I think he left.

He went to California for a vacation.

Yeah.

And he's flying back to Delaware for a second vacation.

I know.

Isn't he still president?

How does he have to?

I don't think he's president at all anymore.

I think he's just.

I think Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan are running with Kamala Harris, which means the Obamas.

David Fouf, whatever his name is, he's running the campaign for Kamala.

The Obama people have

been extricated out of the Biden orbit and being recalibrated into the Harris orbit.

So they're staffing all the main campaign positions.

They're already deeply embedded in the government.

So Barack is running the country, basically.

Yeah.

Which is bad news for Israel because he will favor Iran as he always has.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit more about the Democratic Party and the end of Joe Biden.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

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We're back.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

And Victor, I was wondering, because when you listen to his speech, he basically said, I chose to quit and it's for the good.

And he towed their line or

spoke

right in there with all of his

coup participants.

And I was thinking that, well, it wasn't probably just the stick that Pelosi gave him, but she must have given him some sort of incentive.

Like, we will get your son out of jail and we will pay.

There must have been some payoff because you seem to have to be able to do it.

He's never going to go to jail.

I don't think he's.

This Comer report that we discussed, you know, $27 million,

he earned it all up.

If you want to see why he's so bitter in that laptop, hey, everybody, you know, he tells his cousin or something, I've been paying power bill for dad, and I've given

Mr.

Big, Mr.

10%.

I've been carrying this family half my income.

It's because he did earn all that with his skull duggery.

He did.

Yes.

He did all the nasty, dirty, obsequious, round-nose, whatever you have to do to be that creepy type of lobbyist.

He did that.

And then he had to spread the wealth around.

And he's very bitter.

And

I think they still feel that if he's no longer president, president, he'll treat them like he did before.

He said to his dad, you want me to testify in this tax his lawyer said to Joe, you want me to testify in this tax thing?

Well, then you better get it off.

And so Biden then had the tech remember the statute of limitations ran out on most of them.

But Hunter's lawyer threatened his dad and said, you know, I'm going to have to t you're going to have to testify.

And so I think they're they think he's crazy and drug-addled and they're correct.

And I just think that he's going to get some type of pardon, you're right, from

Harris or himself.

So if Harris loses, I think he feels that he will pardon Hunter.

Maybe pardon his whole family.

Yeah.

Yeah, I bet.

I wonder if there was some financial incentive as well.

I think Trump, if he were to win, could do it in a professional manner where he just appointed a special counsel.

And he just said, you know, just get a, you should take Robert Hur again and just appoint him and say, go ahead and do whatever you want.

And this time,

whether you think he's culpable or not is going to determine whether he's tried or not, whether you can out-guess or out-psych the jury.

And we're not going to do that game again.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Well, let's turn to R.F.K.

Jr.,

who seems, well, from two different news outlets.

The Washington Post told us that

he might be getting a cabinet position with Kamala, and NBC News reported that RFK may be seriously entertaining endorsing Trump.

And we're going to find out Friday, but what were your thoughts?

I think five minutes ago, as I speak, he did endorse Trump.

Did he?

Five minutes ago?

And I think that

he gave an interview with Newsmax.

about four days ago when he just blasted the Democratic Party.

The problem he has is that he was cruising along at six to seven percent and he was gaining some traction and then all these leaks came out.

The New Yorker was going to write an article about him killing the bear, remember?

Yeah.

And so he had to preclude that by getting it and then there were some leaks that he had parasitical problems in his brain.

So what he was doing was every time he was given advance warning by one of these left-wing magazines or blogs or newspapers that they were going to come out with an old story about his infidelity or his brain problem,

his weird activity.

He had to go out and preclude that, you know what I mean, and talk about it.

And I think it won him.

And then they were trying to get him off.

They did.

They got him off most of the ballots.

So he was, you know, so he was in...

diminishing, and I think he's thought before he has no credibility or no currency.

I shouldn't say credibility, but currency.

He had to cut a deal, and they didn't want to cut a deal with him.

They wouldn't even give him Secret Service protection.

They didn't even give it to him after Trump was shot.

So I think he thought most of the polls show that in that 7%

that he takes,

4% come from Trump and 3%

actually come from Biden.

I don't know how that will be affected by Harris.

But I have a sneaking suspicion there's a lot of anti-vax people and libertarians that like him and would otherwise vote for Trump.

So it may be he may get a one.

When you're talking about one or two percent, you're talking 50,000, 60, 70,000 votes in these swing states.

I don't know what he wants.

You couldn't put him in the Secretary of Health,

but you could do something, give him,

I don't know.

We'll see.

We'll see.

Victor, I'd like to

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I'm going next week to Hillsdale for my annual sojourn and I'm going to do some videos on the end of everything.

Oh, nice.

And those will probably be included in these courses.

I don't know if they will or not.

They just said videos.

I don't know how many or what the format will be.

I hear from a lot of people that they're absolutely excellent.

Yours and other, you know, the 40.

There's a whole host of things you can learn.

Hillsdale is, you know, it's a it's more than a college, it's an it's a cultural force, you know.

You know, it's an oasis and a toll and a sea of madness.

Yeah.

So

they've had such a higher profile now because the collapse of the elite university has directed so many applicants to them.

I mean, they're in the most exclusive categories now of colleges.

Yeah.

I hear their trip took over a large percentage of the boat that they were on.

Yes, it did.

There was,

I don't know how many, over 400 or 500.

Over 700 people.

I feel bad because that was in the depths of long COVID.

I was not a very

lively.

I think some people remarked that I was, what would be the word, anemic?

Withdrawn.

Somebody said he's too shy.

But I tried to meet as many people as I could, but I don't think on that trip I slept more than three hours.

I had that long COVID

in your brain, you know.

and achy and fatigue.

Well, I'm much better now.

I'm getting almost over it.

That's awesome.

Well, Victor, Victor, I wanted to ask you before we go to a quick break, a message is, do you think that the Democrats are going to be taken down by their identity politics and the divide between the anti-Semitic Palestinian voters and the Jewish constituency?

Will that just never, that's a thing that's not going to be healed and what they're going to go one way or the other.

You know what I mean?

Like if they go with the anti-Semitics, then they're going to lose a large Jewish population and vice versa.

It depends a lot on what happens overseas and then the universities.

There's two known unknowns.

One is the university presidents know that their heads are all in the guillotine and they've been chopped off.

The most prestigious and supposedly Sakrosan.

Harvard, MIT, Penn,

Columbia, there's no one that's exempt.

if they coddle and appease this anti-Semitic crowd.

So they're going to come back to campus next week, right?

So what's going to happen?

Are they going to galvanize or are these young careerists going to say, oh, I can't do this because I have my engineering degree and I'm going to be on the fast track to make a lot of money on the coast?

I don't want to get a felony.

Are they going to be, I'm, you know what I mean, the genuine Jacobin revolutionary?

And are they going to be afraid that there's going to be consequences?

Where I am on the campus.

It's against the rules to camp overnight.

They broke that flagrantry again.

They were given deadlines, appeased, coddled, and they, but now there's a new president, and it's against the rules to do it.

Now, are they going to flop down the first week of school, these camps?

And if so, would they be arrested?

And if they were arrested, would they have

go to trial?

If they were going to go to trial, would they lose their student visas?

And if they lost their student visas, would they be happy to go back to Syria or Libya or Gaza or the West Bank?

I don't think so.

So, in the case, though, of this,

as I said earlier,

it's just a question of what the politics are behind it.

I mean, we've already seen that

the reason that Donald Trump is very close, given all the media disadvantages he suffers from, is that the colossal blunder of the 2024 campaign was passing on Josh Shapiro.

You don't pass on a governor who's got got 60%

approval rating in a swing state that has 19 electoral votes and he has a demonstrable ability to bring people with him and he's young and he's vetted and he's charismatic

and he's been he tries to square the circle with Israel in a very, I think, on a very

underhanded way.

And that is, well, if it wasn't for Netanyahu,

he criticized Netanyahu.

No, they don't get it.

It's not nothing to do with Netanyahu.

The country is anywhere to the right of Netyahoo.

They want him to go into Lebanon.

So they just use that excuse because he's a conservative.

But if there was a liberal Bennett or Baruch or whatever, they would hate Israel just as much, if not more.

But my point is this, is that that was a blunder because what did they get in return?

They got a guy from a state that

they were going to win anyway, and they got a guy who was completely unvetted.

Did you see today he lied about his wife's in vitro fertilization?

Yeah, I did.

It was a completely different procedure.

It was a different procedure entirely, and they just lied about it.

He lied about his drunk driving.

He said he had tinnitus and injuries.

He lied about his rank.

He lied about being in a combat zone.

He's lied about...

He went to China over 30 times.

Then he comes out on stage.

He has this kind of

roly-poly look, and he's got this hipster kind of outfit on, kind of tight suit, and he just

looked like Tom Arnold, you know what I mean?

He's just kind of doing like a Richard Nixon

V for Victory, pointing at people, hey, yeah, you're the man,

that kind of thing.

It was buffoonish.

And

he's not a plus.

And the more they find out about him, the more that he's a pathological dissimulator.

And he's never been vetted.

And

they blew it.

And why did they blew it?

Because they decided that the jewish vote and the jewish donor class was not important to their strategic calculus as losing michigan because of the arab american votes now what does that really get down to when you think about it it gets down to this

there's a contempt for jewish voters because their attitude is well they never break the rules they never riot they never threaten there's no terrorism there's nothing and they have generations of loyalty to the democratic party and we can always always bring them in here and talk to them and appeal and good old boy network.

And they will, in the end, they won't forsake the party of their grandparents and they'll vote Democratic.

But these guys,

I don't know what they might do.

They might not, they might sit home, they might

storm Harvard University, they might shut down again the Manhattan Bridge.

They'll do anything.

So we've got to appease them.

And that's what they do.

So

we don't know what's going to happen on the campus.

We don't know what the, but we do know that the Jewish vote does not mean as much to them as this much, much, much smaller Arab American vote.

And then the other thing is we don't know what's going to happen in the Middle East.

We're in a strategic hiatus right now.

Iran doesn't know what to do.

They don't know what to do.

They think, we're going to retaliate.

Yeah, well, go ahead and do it.

Because this time, nobody's going to restrain the Israelis.

And last time, even when they restrained it, those three missiles that got through destroyed you, as a token they destroyed your missile defense and you sent 320 and they didn't get in send 640 they might not get in either so if hezbollah is saying to iran well if we send in 10 000 missiles beirut's going to look like the rubble of 2006 or the gaza rubble are you going to come in with us and they said man well you know if they kill people right in tehran

they might kill khomei they might kill anybody and they they have the ability to take out our ports and our grid.

So they're just waiting right now.

And they have their finger in the wind.

They're looking at the United States and thinking, well, there's an election coming up.

Is the United States going to distance itself from Israel and cave?

Or is it going to say it is and then just let the military do what they always do and knock down missiles that are headed toward Israel?

And then give them intelligence, sophisticated surveillance, anything they want, so that they retaliate.

If I was Iran, I would not hit Israel in retaliation.

I would just say to my people,

we sent 320 and they sent three.

So we were ahead.

Then they killed one of our guys, but we killed 1,200 of theirs because we planned in accordance with

Hamas, the whole attack.

We funded it.

We knew all about it.

So it's just, let's just forget it.

But I don't think they can do that.

And I think they're going to really suffer.

I don't see Israel is what I'm trying to say.

I don't see them losing now.

I think they've almost destroyed Hamas.

Their only problem is what to do after Hamas is over.

Who wants that bubble?

And they'll have to go in there and get some

government.

I don't know who's going to run it.

They don't want to run it.

But they're already building a

free fire zone, a barrier between them and Gaza, you know, a half-mile

area where

they've recognized the wall didn't do any good, and they're going to fix that.

And now if they eliminate the Hamas, they had about 10,000, 15,000 rockets.

They don't have to worry about that now.

Now they turn their attention to Hezbollah.

And Hezbollah knows what they can do to them.

And now they turn their attention.

They've already taken out the dock work.

The Houthis have been kind of quiet.

It's almost like they said, oh, wait a minute.

We had a right to send rockets and hit your cities and wake up all the tankers going to Israel.

And then you cheated and you took out $100 million of dock work.

And now we can't get our Iranian arms from the cargo ships.

Why did you do that?

That's not nice.

So we better be quiet.

Yeah.

Because they can do it again.

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

And there's some recent news about the ceasefire, and we'll talk about that.

Stay with us, and we'll be back.

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We're back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor's latest book, his republished one,

or second edition, is The Case for Trump.

So please go buy it.

It's got a beautiful new introduction or preface.

Is it a preface or did you do an introduction?

I don't know what you call it.

It's a new introduction.

Introduction.

It traces

the comeback of Trump from his Nadir right January 6th and tries to explain how he came back.

And he had, it was a tripartite treatment.

Part one was

Joe Biden turned out to be an utter disaster.

And after Afghanistan and then Ukraine and Gaza, crime, border, people look back in comparison to the Trump years and they said, you know what?

we didn't fully appreciate them.

Number two,

the more that they tried to unleash these five indictments, or criminal and civil suits, the more they tried to take him off the ballot, the more they tried to destroy him psychologically, materially,

the more people empathized with him.

He became every man, fingerprinted, mugshot.

That gave him sympathy.

And then the primary candidates, with the exception of two or three of them, were not not dynamic.

And the ones that were, DeSantis and Haley, they had an existential problem, man.

They look at him and all the things they were doing to Trump, and

they had to be empathetic.

Look at those awful left-wing people.

It could be any of us.

Okay, now you're aiding the Trump cause.

And if you want to do the opposite and say, well, you know, Trump's got a big mouth.

They wouldn't go after me.

I don't do that.

You kind of asked for it.

And then you're siding with the lawfare people.

That was inadequate.

There was no way that they could get out of that dilemma.

That the left had gone in a very vicious, illegal, unprofessional way to destroy Donald Trump by distorting and warping the law.

And they had to condemn that, what they were doing to him.

And once they condemned it, they were in the cheerleading section for Trump to triumph.

That's just what happened.

And the polls reflect that they had either polls polls that were equal or in some cases a little bit higher than Trump before the legal morass.

If you had to be a betting man and say the odds, what do you think today are the odds that Trump wins the election?

I think

that's defined by the Electoral College.

I don't really care if he wins the popular vote or not, because it's going to be run up in California, Illinois, and New York.

But I think he's got a 55% chance of winning the Electoral College.

I think he's got, it's going to be decided,

I think it's going to be decided in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

I don't think he can win Michigan and Wisconsin, but he might.

I think he can win North Carolina.

I think he can win Georgia.

I think he can win Nevada.

But it's going to be very close in Arizona.

It's going to be very close in Pennsylvania.

And he's got to win those two states if he doesn't doesn't win the others.

Did you hear this week that the unemployment statistics basically for 23, but from April 23 to March of 24, were

not the unemployment, but the employment, the job creation, were overreported

by over 800,000?

800,000.

That's good.

And then you read the small print, and most of the jobs that were created were in three categories.

They were

part-time jobs.

They were

jobs that were already there and

re-sprouted after COVID.

They weren't newly created.

You know, they just brought people who were laid off.

And they went to illegal aliens.

So, bottom line, did that stop them?

No, Terry McAuliffe was talking to Hannity and Fox last night, bragging about all the jobs.

Every speech said, well, we bought all these jobs by $16 million.

That's what they do.

They bragged.

They had this weird economic theory that if you have hyperinflation and you raise over three years prices by all prices by 20% and staples by 30%,

and then

the rate of increase decreases, then they think they've stopped the inflation.

No, inflation's way down.

No, it's way down from its high point, but prices are way up.

Who cares about the rate of inflation?

It's the prices that matter, and that prices have not gone down.

They don't get that.

You'd have to have a negative inflation rate to get back to the 18 to 19 percent overall price increases we suffer.

But that's, you know, that takes a little.

Their problem, I mean, their strategy right now is just promise free stuff to as many people as want.

Free loans, $2,000, $5,000,

free home, you name it.

Yeah, and to tell the people they're going to bring them out of a dark age and back into some great thing with Kamala and never to contemplate, wait, your dark age is Biden.

Yeah, 12 out of the last 16 years, right?

Yep.

It's been four from Obama and four from Obama and four from Biden.

And all of a sudden, they're not responsible for all this.

And she's just can't, they act like she's just this person who just parachuted down.

It's Kamala.

She's a black woman.

She's a new chapter.

They're passing the torch to her.

No, she's a has-been that ran for president four years ago and didn't get one delegate and never entered a single primary.

And she was so off-putting and obnoxious and was so mean to her staff, her whole project blew up before the first primary.

And she wisely got out.

And then

she was headed back to the obscure, most left-wing billet in the Senate.

Had Joe Biden in the euphoria of, I'm going to out-virtue signal anybody else following the death of George Floyd.

I will say, I need a woman.

And then the black activist said, well, it should be a black woman.

And then he said, okay, a black woman.

He looked around and he thought, eh, Stacey Abram?

Come on.

So there wasn't a lot of black women.

He could, Michelle Obama, that's not going to happen.

And so he got her.

And then she was a dismal vice president.

Somebody wrote me a nasty letter about a column I wrote, and he said today,

well,

Michelle

Camilla talked a lot as vice president.

She met with all these people.

No, she had scripted things about space with children.

They used actors, actors.

And the czar thing,

it was a total disaster.

And she couldn't talk anywhere at any time.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, intelligently about anything.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

what do you make of,

I think it's John Fetterman.

I hope I have Fetterman's first name.

Yeah, John Fetterman, he didn't even go to the DNC.

And I thought that was very strange.

I mean, obviously, he should be.

Well, first of all, he has been really the only senator who has been unabashedly pro-Israel.

And he knew if he got there with the crowd outside and the squad people inside that people would boo him or they would,

you know, who knows what they would do.

That was one thing.

And then he was from Pennsylvania and he was the senator from Pennsylvania and they were considering the governor.

And

he was not vocal in supporting Shapiro.

And a lot of people thought that he should have been.

So he's an iconoclast and he hasn't found really a constituency within the Democratic Party.

And that means it would be very hard to be there because they have really trashed him a lot.

Another person I was wondering about, we just had

Phil Donahue just passed away and he was known for that hard-hitting, compassionate.

I don't know if he was hard-hitting.

Well, he was very compassionate.

Therapeutic.

Therapeutic.

He brought in, he introduced the therapeutic talk show host.

He felt everybody's pain.

But you know what about him?

I kind of liked him.

He didn't have a mean streak.

He'd been playing that interview with

a lot of prominent, Milton Friedman especially, but prominent conservatives that went on his show, and he welcomed them.

And Milton Friedman scolded him on

self-interest.

And he kept saying greed, greed.

And he said, who doesn't have greed?

The Soviet Union nomenclature are not greedy.

You're not greedy.

I'm not greedy.

Everybody has greed.

The point is not to try to change human nature, but how to direct that to the benefit of people.

And he just destroyed

Phil Donahue.

And what was the attitude of Phil Donahue?

He smiled.

He didn't lose his temper.

He said, that's why I'm the host.

I can go to a commercial.

And he knew he was being embarrassed.

I kind of liked him.

I really did.

But he did introduce the therapeutic style.

Yeah.

Well, I have a comment by one of your readers, or it's kind of an answer.

A question.

Yeah, it's a little bit snarky, but I was curious about it.

He basically says that your assessment of the Byzantine Empire in a thousand words missed one thing.

You preface the Theodosian walls as one of the reasons for why they lasted very long.

But you missed, according to him, Greek fire, and that that was very important in three battles, he says.

And I was wondering your terms.

In early battles, it was, but you could argue that, and nobody knows really what it was.

It It was some mixture of naphtha and maybe sulfur.

We don't know if there was saltpeter in it, and liquid petroleum, natural.

And they had air compressors that they could shoot at.

And they had it on the walls, the land versions, in 1453, and it was valuable.

But at the last century, the secret was out.

People had it on, I mean, there were

all sorts of foreign clients inside Constantinople, and there were mercenaries, so the technology was not any longer a monopoly.

And the great battles where it was used were in sea battles.

And

it wasn't used very effectively in land battles.

People have argued that it was present, but I'm very you know, technology sometimes makes a difference, but the reason that they survived as long as they did was they had a defensible geography.

The Emperor Theodosius made the most most impressive land wall in the history of fortifications.

And if you look at the barbarian demography across the Dardanelles versus the Danube and the Rhine, the Eastern European,

Central Asian barbarian diaspora was not as vigorous as came into

across the Danube and into Italy, northern Italy.

It just wasn't.

And then you could make the argument that there was something about the Greek Orthodoxy,

that strain of Christianity had far less schisms.

And

they very early on,

in a cultural and linguistic sense, saw themselves as antithetical to Western Latin-speaking Catholicism.

Orthodoxy did.

They were united, but they had these schisms.

But my point is

in the West,

especially if you read what Augustine was doing, I mean, they had Liberias, the Liberians, and they had the Manichaeans,

and they had all of these different heresies.

And they were fighting and fighting, and the Orthodoxy got more and more Orthodox and united.

Part of that was a neighborhood.

They were in Asia.

They were Europeans in Asia.

And they had a huge empire, and

they had a...

The thing that really hurt them the most was they were at the crossroads of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and they were on

a land route from Central Asia down to Egypt, and they were on the Weah Ignitia all the way from Rome across Greece through Thrace into Constantinople.

And the result was they were a nexus.

of trade and immigrants and moving populations and they were very vulnerable and that very congested cities at its height, the million people, that they suffered from two terrible plagues.

The Justinian plague that cost them 500,000 people.

And if they had not suffered that, they would have reclaimed the Western Empire.

That did more.

Edward Lewak has a good book on that, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire.

And then the second, the 13th and 14th century plague.

really made it hard to recover from the Fourth Crusade.

Their problem was demography.

But again, as I mentioned in the book, the weird thing about it was they were destroyed, the civilization vanished,

the Ottomans promised they wouldn't wipe out the enclaves in the Trevizoid and the Black Sea, and they did.

And then,

I think it was three years ago, Erdogan said he was going to commission a 23andMe

contract so they could go out and measure the DNA of Turks because people had argued that Turks were Seljuk Turk interlopers into what had been European Anatolia.

True.

This was the birthplace of Homer.

I mean, Homer was somewhere in the islands or on the mainland.

This is Haliconarsis, Herodotus.

This is Greek Ionia, the pre-Socratic philosophers, the lyric poets.

It was Greek.

It was the wealthiest and earliest part of the Greek Renaissance.

But the point is, he did this test, and guess what he found?

And he got really angry about it, that the majority DNA was Greek, Turks today.

And so it suggested that for all the raping and killing and scattering, that there had been so many Greeks.

And when the empire fell and they were so dispersed, they were intermarried with a much smaller Turkish population.

And there's another really fascinating study about the

Ottoman sultans because remember the Ottoman sultan's mother was from the harem

And the father then was a product of his father and a woman from the harem.

But by about

1550, there was a definite preference in the harem by the sultans for Circassians from southern Russia and Europeans from Dalmatia or the Balkans.

And the point of this essay, and I have it cited in the end of everything, was that

for all of this Ottoman chauvinism,

the sultan was half European or half Caucasian, Russian, from the Caucasus.

And

that continued, that Turkish line continued to be diluted because each generation then, not always, but married someone from the harem that they felt

that their aesthetics really favored that look in a woman of the harem.

And then the article tried to point out the mother's origin of a particular sultan and his foreign policy, because he was raised in the harem.

As soon as they picked one child, So the sultan said, I like, I have 500 kids.

I'm exaggerating, 100 kids by 20 different women.

I like that kid.

And usually they were scheming on their mothers.

The mothers knew that if that son was not, their sons were not picked, they were liquidated, and they were too, because they would form cabals.

And so, the queen mother was the most powerful woman in the harem.

She could give leniency or amnesty to other women whose children were not selected.

She could do almost anything running the harem.

But the point that this scholarly study shows, when you look at Ottoman foreign policy, it often seemed to be more lenient and less severe in areas where a queen mother had come from.

Yeah.

It's really fascinating.

Yeah, that is fascinating.

Well, Victor, you've been wonderful today, and we'd like to thank our listeners.

You guys are very important to us.

Everybody, thank you for listening.

Much appreciated.

It's going to really heat up with us.

We've got this convention winding down, and don't give up hope on the conservative side because

I think we'll be pleasantly surprised.

Yeah, and we will have more on the convention on Saturday, so join us on our Saturday episode.

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

Thank you very much.

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