Hostages, Harris and the Machiavellian Touch

Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

This is our weekend episode and we look at something a little bit cultural in our middle section, but we have some important news that has occurred in the last 24 hours and that is the prisoner swap and the prisoners coming out.

Israel also has

taken out some of the heads of Hamas, Hezbollah, and even in Iran their guard.

What was the name of that guard?

The Revolutionary Guard Corps.

So stay with us, and we'll talk about those things.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show, and Victor is the Martin and Ily Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

Come join us.

It's almost all of Victor's stuff there.

Maybe some independent

interviews might not make it on, but in general, and it's chock full of things, something new every day.

And you can join us with a subscription for the VDH Ultra material at $5 a month or $50 a year.

So we'd love to have you.

So, Victor,

there

has been a prisoner swap in the last 24 hours.

and I was wondering if you had some reflections on the bringing home of Evan Gershowitz and Paul Whelan.

Well, everybody's

happy about that.

I mean, they should have come home with Brittany Greer a long time ago.

The problem is, I think Robert O'Brien sort of pointed it out, so did Mike Pompeo, when

Biden said the other day

when he was asked about the criticism of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump purportedly said, well, we would have done the same deal, but without giving the concession.

He said, why didn't you get him home?

Well, he got over 50 prisoners home.

But as I recall, I don't think he ever let out a contract assassin.

The person in German custody had killed,

had assassinated a Chechnyan rebel or dissident, whichever term you believe.

right in sight of the chancellery, just executed him.

And he had a modus operandi of getting on a bicycle, driving up, and then shooting people in the head.

He may have been one of the snipers in the 2014 revolution in Ukraine that was picking off Ukrainian protesters.

So he was a kind of a day-of-a-jackal-like person, a well-known assassin, and he was facing a life sentence.

And it was very important, apparently, for Biden to tell his assassins that if you get caught overseas, they're not going to kill you, but I'm going to get you home.

And so I'm going to take prisoners on gratuitous charges and stockpile them, put them on the shelf, and then I will use them to meter them out to get you back.

So, as happy as we all are to bring those people back,

the price that we paid by forcing Germany to release them, we let three go ourselves, but they were,

I'm not saying white-collar criminals, but they were crooks and they were scammers, but there was no evidence that they killed people.

This guy was

a serial killer, and yet he's back now.

And so the question arises,

what is that message?

What's the precedent?

And the precedent now is Putin will just continue anybody who's stupid enough to go to Russia and is a journalist of any sort.

If I were going to go to Russia, if you, anybody goes there and who's ever done a podcast,

they will find a way to say you have marijuana or something, and they will put you in jail, and they will want all the Western press to come and interview you, and

you will become a cause celeb, and they will stockpile you, put you in the refrigerator, and then say, We'll bring him out when one of our contract assassins is arrested.

So that's where we are.

Yeah.

No American is safe abroad, it seems like.

Nope, not in Russia or the Russian Federation.

Well,

or even among our allies.

Yeah.

Israel has made it that leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are not safe either.

And I was wondering your reflections on Israel's current moves to take out the heads of Hezbollah after 12 Druze children are killed at a soccer stadium, by the way.

So you should always note this is in response to

a terrible attack on Israel itself.

But what are your reflections, Victor?

Well, Israel has a list of all the people who were directly or indirectly involved with October 7.

And there was Mohamed Dief, he was the militant,

there is no such thing as a militant wing of Hamas.

He was one of the people who planned October 7.

And there was this Hanya, the guy that is a Hezbollah

surrogate, and he was in Tehran.

And there was the guy

in Damascus.

And then there was one today, Jabari, and he was the munitions export for Hamas.

So they have this list, and they're going to go down and they're going to kill every one of them.

But they need, they just can't go kill them all because the world hates Israel, it looks like they're gratuitously doing it.

So as soon as Hezbollah killed those 12 children, they said, go down the list, and they will be seen in the context, at least for a while, of retaliation for that murder of 12.

But really, it's a larger issue.

They want to send two messages.

Anybody who was involved in October 7th massacres will die.

He's dead.

He's a dead man walking at the highest level and probably pretty low too.

I would imagine that when you see those civilians that were torturing that young woman in the back of the, they have their pictures and they're going to disappear too.

And then they want to say that no matter where you are, you can be in a tunnel in Gaza, you can be in Damascus, you can be in Beirut, you can be even in Tehran, and we will find a way to get you.

In this case, somebody delivered a package or there was a bomb put onto that bed a long time earlier, or

what it says to the world is

you can say you're at Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad or Hamas or Tehran, but there are people within your immediate circle that hate your guts.

And you'll never be able to trust anybody.

And there's no such thing as a safe house, and they're communicating with Nassau.

And we're going to get you, and we'll see if that has an influence on their behavior.

Yeah.

Because

it's a terrible thing to think.

Iran knows that, so Iran has been threatening, you know, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, anybody involved

supposedly with the Soleimani decision.

The other thing about it was this Hanya was responsible purportedly

for the killing almost 50 years ago of the 240-some Marines in the barracks in Lebanon.

And we had a $5 million bounty on him.

So

why would the administration say that they weren't contacted about this move when they should have said we're delighted because

you

killed a person with American blood on his hands?

And that was sort of the argument we used with getting Solemani.

He was the one that developed the strategy to have shaped charges in the Iraq war war and killed over 2,000 Americans because they went right through Humbees and rhinos and everything that had been up-armored.

So it's a message, and I don't see if I was in Hamas or Hezbollah and I was ordering attacks on Israel, I would just assume that I was going to be on a list and they're going to kill me.

And I would also assume that the efforts to do the same to Israel won't work for a couple of reasons because the people that are around Netanyahu or other generals or defense people, they're loyal and they're not going to give away their positions.

And

so

it's an escalation.

It was on the part they escalated and the message is each time that you escalate if you're Hezbollah and you send rockets to kill people, we're not going to screw around anymore with sending like kind back.

We're going to take out the people who make those orders and we're going to make those people pay.

It's a very good argument because it says we're not going to go after

people with collateral damage as much.

We're just going to go after the elite.

And kind of like the reaction to the Olympic massacres,

the Munich massacres, where they tried to go get off the list.

That movie by, I think it was Steven Spielberg, was very misleading.

It was as if they regretted what they did or it was ineffective.

No, they didn't regret what they did.

They got most of the people who did that.

Did you see see that Adidas advertisement that was celebrating the shoes from the 1972 Olympics?

And that young Palestinian model got caught up in that and she said, oh, I didn't realize what she probably knew.

She knew.

You think she knew?

The Olympics is,

it's got the worst publicity of any Olympics in my lifetime.

They start off with that.

disgraceful denunciation of the basically an attack on the Last Supper with these obese transgendered people.

If they were really courageous, they would have done it with Hinduism or Islam.

But they only attacked Christianity both because of the nature of the Sermon on the Mount, Turn the Other Cheek,

Blessed Are the Meek, and because

they know what any other religion would do to them

if they did that in an international form.

And then we had the male Algerian boxer claim that he was female, even though he had a male chromosome and testosterone.

Yes.

Hit that Italian woman in the face twice.

Anybody's ever been, I've hit, you know, I've had about three concussions, both in football and a bike accident.

And when you get hit,

that's not the end of it.

When I hit my head and got a concussion, I splattered like a watermelon.

The fork on a bike broke.

I was going, I just...

hit down my helmet cracked, but I hit my forehead, broke my nose, cheeks, all that.

I was not the same for a year.

And

everybody said, why did she quit?

Well, she quit because she got hit

with a level of force she's never experienced before because he was a male.

You should see his arms.

Yeah, and they're much longer.

Did you see them?

They were longer.

They were more muscular.

He had big shoulders.

He was about as female as, I don't want to say, but it's, and then there was that.

So we had the Last Supper, and then we had this incident.

And then we had, when the Israeli national flag was being played in the event, we had these Palestinians who stood up, gave the Hitler salute, and started screaming, Heil Hitler.

This should remind all of you in the audience, if you're one of these people who believe

there's a big difference between the Gaza and civilians, and there is Haman, there is not.

When you look at polls,

Jordanians, Palestine, I think is 60%.

Jordan is 60% Palestinian, West Bank polls, Gaza.

They are the only places in the Arab world when you have Pew International polls that they overwhelmingly support terrorism.

And when the call went out on October 7th that you could go rape, kill, loot Jews, they had hundreds of people that ragtagged and followed that army.

And

there's no difference.

They're there for it.

And the same thing is true of Middle Eastern students that come here.

I have not seen one Middle Eastern student group that has condemned October 7th or Hamas

or the illegal activity that's going on.

Not one group from the Middle East has said, we are here to study.

We are a guest of the United States government.

We are a guest of this particular university.

We do not burn the flag of our host.

We do not desecrate monuments.

We do not hit or drag police people.

We are guests and we don't want to be associated with that.

No, none of them did that.

And it's because this administration destroyed the idea of deterrence.

And if you're a radical, I just if you're a Middle Eastern student, you know that you can go out and disrupt the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the Oakland Bay Bridge, the Golden Gate, suspend traffic,

deface a cemetery and Veterans Cemetery in Los Angeles, shout death to the Jews, break every rule there is at Stanford University, desecrate these beautiful sandstone columns at the Stanford campus, mob and trash the president's office, chase Jews out of a library on a campus,

Cooper Union, and there will be no consequences.

And to encourage the others, to quote Voltaire, all you'd have to do is convict three or four of them of felonies, give them a five-year sentence, as they do to abortion protesters and the January 6th,

and then deport them when they get done with their sentence.

And don't let them ever come in the United States again, and that would stop it.

It's very funny about these Middle Eastern protesters.

They love the United States.

Their whole aim is to get out of Gaza or the West Bank or Jordan and come over here and then romanticize the very paradigm they don't want to live in anymore.

They want the freedom, they want the prosperity, they want the security of the United States.

And they want that to champion a paradigm that is antithetical antithetical to ours.

And

if you call them on it and say, you know what, you don't like us,

and you should go back to the country and the system that you like, if you really do like it, just go back.

The whole veneer, the whole camouflage would vanish.

And they'd say, please, please,

do not deport me.

Do not take away my visa.

Do not take away my student status.

Do not kick me out of Harvard.

Please, please.

But until that happens,

they'll kick somebody, they'll spit in a police person's face, they'll burn a flag, they'll chase a Jew down at Harvard or MIT.

And just human nature.

And they'll even struggle and fight with cops.

They did.

They were trying to drag that cop, and then one cop that was earlier trying to protect a flag, they were throwing things at him.

It was horrible.

These were guests.

And

I was at the American School of Classical Studies and I had lived in Greece almost three years and I was a guest of the Greek government.

And I saw, I won't mention the person's name, but he was a professor and I knew him.

He was a nice person.

He went to the Greek post office and the hours in the evening were six to nine as I remember after siesta.

And he had an important manuscript to mail back.

So he had gone earlier and they said, we will be here until nine o'clock.

It might have been eight, but I think it was nine because I'm recalling something 50 years ago, 45 years ago, 50 years ago.

So he couldn't get in.

It was kind of, nobody's around.

We'll just lock the office 30 minutes early.

And they were just in there smoking cigarettes.

And he said, let me in, let me in, let me in.

And he started yelling in Greek.

He was a fluent Greek speaker that it's 30 minutes till closing.

This was during the dictatorship.

And he punched

the glass and it shattered.

It didn't hurt him, but they called called the police, and I saw the police come by because I was on the street.

It was in my neighborhood.

And they grabbed him by the neck and they dragged him and they put him in a police car and they zoomed him and arrested him.

And then everybody had to come out, I think, at the embassy level and try to get him exempt.

And they did.

But he was in big trouble and he was not given a residency permit.

He had to go every two months out and then come back.

And so

he was a very sweet guy.

and he said, I broke a cardinal rule.

I worked for him for a little bit on a manuscript.

He said, You never, ever break the laws of your host.

And he did.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break, and then we'll come back and talk about Machiavelli.

And I know the most famous piece he has is The Prince, but there are other works by Machiavelli.

And then after that, we'll talk about Kamala Harris.

So stay with us.

We've got lots in this episode.

Welcome back.

So, Victor, the Machiavelli is

most famous for the prince, and we have a term to be Machiavellian.

And I was wondering, as you talk about Machiavelli and his work and the Renaissance, I was wondering if you could tell us or leave us with the impression what you think Machiavellian is and whether Machiavelli has created a

method of politics, military, you name it, leadership that is good or bad.

Well, he was part of the Florentine Renaissance.

Remember,

everybody should remember that somewhere around 1500

with the Medicis and Machiavelli and the art and literature, that was the heyday of the Florentine Republic.

And then I

the center of gravity moved a little bit to Venice.

But these Italian republics were Roman republics in spirit, and their idea of the Renaissance was to recreate the classical ideal.

So they were actually constitutional governments.

And

he was a student of classical literature.

So he wrote a number of his most famous, I think, is the Discourses on Livy, and he talks about particular biographies, ancient and modern, kind of like Plutarch.

He wrote a book, a treatise on military history that's kind of dry.

It's more or less

a discussion of tactical formations and strategy rather than

what you might think.

But his famous book is The Prince.

And it's kind of like a handbook.

Xenophon wrote handbooks similar.

That if you were a prince, meaning a leader of a state, status in Latin, this is the beginning when state state becomes a word.

How would you govern?

And he has a couple things that were very controversial.

It wasn't published in his lifetime.

It was circulated, but the church really went after him.

And his thesis, if you want to condense a short little handbook, is

if you're a scrapper and you had kind of like a Stalin or Hitler and you worked your way up, you're going to be a more successful prince than a Bourbon king, let's say, because you had to deal with reality in the street.

And so he has an odd respect for those people more than he does hereditary princes or aristocratic princes who buy their way in.

And he said these people tend to be more cutthroat, but they also are more realistic and they tend to have longer tenures.

The idea of Machiavelli is that it can be condensed is that once you have a goal or an end, any means necessary are permissible to achieve it, but if you read very carefully what he's saying,

he believes that the greater good for the subjects of a state or the citizenry of a republic is to have stability, no civil war, fair taxation, fair representation.

But to get that,

it doesn't work when you have a Jimmy Carter.

You need somebody who is a brawler with street smarts.

I'm not suggesting Trump, but what he's saying is that they do all sorts of bad things.

And they continue to do bad things to exist because they understand human nature.

And they use violence to intimidate or deter people.

But if they are good people, and he kind of defines good in this way,

that

They order people to take out their opponents or to I think the Game of Thrones, that red dinner when they all went in and they all were liquidated, that came out of Machiavelli.

He talks about a character who brings his people to dinner and then they liquidate them.

But in his weird way of thinking, if you do that and your ultimate aim is then to disown what you did as regrettable, or to blame it on somebody else, or to actually kill the people who did that, and then say that they acted without orders,

and your ultimate aim is tranquility and stability for the state, then then

it's permissible.

And this is contrary to the whole all of Christian theology and dogma, original sins, mortal sins,

and it's anti-enlightenment.

The Enlightenment stresses the means as much as they do the ends.

And he's a big fan.

I think the hero of the book is young Cesar Borgia, who died early and was kind of a cutthroat.

But

again, the term Machiavellian means crafty, duplicitous,

insidiously plotting.

That's all accurate as long as you see that the person's

purpose is to create a stable state.

And he has a very cynical, Thucydidean view of human nature.

that don't believe what the people say.

They're not interested in idealism.

They're not interested in principles.

They're only interested in stability and security and prosperity for themselves.

And if you can deliver that, then

they will like you.

But the only way to deliver that is to be ruthless.

And his morality, as he defines it in the Prince, is anybody who's not ruthless is not moral.

Because without ruthlessness,

you can't obtain anything for the greater good.

And if you're always giving concessions or providing amnesties, human nature being what it is,

these people will

thrive and they will come back and bite you and destroy your people.

It's a very cynical view of human nature, and that's why he had some problems later.

He died pretty young, and I think his late 50s.

I've tried to read discourses on Livy.

I think

the modern expert that I know is Paul Ray.

He wrote a lot about Machiavelli and Harvey Mansfield.

And

there were a lot of translations.

Michael Anton, I think, wrote about him.

But

I've taught it before.

It's very simple to read.

It's chock full of classical allusions to certain people.

He gives examples of the Tyrant Agathocles, who

brought in all of that was very famous in antiquity in Sicily, the Tyrant.

He brought in all of his

oligarchical supporters and talked to them and then had them all liquidated.

He said, I'm a tyrant.

And he objects to that, in a sense, it's not the way to do it, to create such hostility to you that people would be willing to die to kill you.

Much better would have had, if you believe they were plotting, you would have go to them, turn them against each other, find

supporting oligarchs, and then the ones that were weak, that were insistent, adamant that they were opposed to you, then you would have somebody take them out, and then you would take the person that took them out.

Kind of like Putin.

Sure, and appear as though you're the good guy in the end.

Yes.

He does have a segment that Czecha Borgia actually does that.

And you can see what he was appealing to.

If you stop with Hitler at 1939 or Mussolini in 1939,

there were a lot of people, not to mention the vast majority in Italy and Germany, but the vast majority of government officials in Europe, who, while they didn't like his means, because they were already Knight of the Long Knives and Kristallnach, they were saying that he did something for the greater good.

And the anti-Machiavelli people would say, once you do that, or once you desire to do that, or once you use those means, it's inevitable that you're going to kill people, and the ends are not worth it.

They're not justified.

But don't think that he's an anachronism of the 16th century.

He's very prescient, and he's saying that from now on, if you read this handbook, you probably won't like it, and you won't agree, you won't like the fact that I endorse certain extreme measures.

But what my point is that if you think that human nature will change,

and you think that people will be loyal and they will appreciate your magnanimity, they will interpret that as weakness, and they'll kill you and your family and everybody else.

So it's been kind of a handbook for dictators for the last 600 years.

What's your own evaluation of this?

Is it a great?

I'm kind of,

you know, I had a very strong Methodist grandmother who paid me to recite Christian poems.

And then when I was six and seven,

You can still remember.

Now I lay me down to sleep.

I pray my soul

to keep.

If I should die before I awake, I play my soul to cake.

If I should live for other days,

I pray God to guide my ways.

Oh, wow.

I'm not doing it quite right, but I memorize that for a dollar when I was five years old.

She would give me books with 10 cents, 20 cents.

And then I taught the New Testament for 20 years, and then I had a mother who

would call me and say, Are your taxes done?

And I said, Yes.

This is when I was making $6,000 or $7,000.

I don't want you to take any deduction that was not justified.

And I said,

well, I had some shingles for the barn, and I used the leftovers to fix a thing.

You cannot write that off.

$20.

So she was a stickler for legality and morality.

So would you hang your head in shame if somebody called you Machiavellian?

Yeah, I don't think I am Machiavellian.

I don't mean that to be egocentric, but I think that's a weakness in some ways.

I have been,

let me put it this way: I have, I won't mention any names, but I have people call me up and say, I need to get to speak.

Can you hire me to speak?

And then I've done that, or people have called me up and said,

Can you please, please, please blurb my book?

Or can you please write something for me?

And those same people have then written horrible things about me and attacked me.

And part of the reason, I think, is they thought that I wouldn't retaliate in kind.

Sometimes I do, but

I have this situation where

people will call up and say, You want to speak here?

You want to speak here?

You want to speak there?

You want to speak there?

And

I don't want to disappoint them.

I'll say yes.

And then I'll come back and I'll say, oh my god, I'm speaking 22 times with long COVID this month.

So I wish I could say, nope, not going to do it.

No way, no how.

And or be Machiavellian and say, yeah, I'll do it.

And then the day before say, no, sorry.

So you're trying to tell me that if a person is using Machiavellian methods, then it is because they essentially have a weakness in their own approach to leadership.

Yes, I think it's better.

Oh, what

webs.

Sir Walter Riley, who said, oh, what webs we weave when we choose to deceive.

It's always easier just to tell the truth,

not just because it's right, but because it's simple.

You can never, you start lying, you can never keep the lies straight.

So that's one thing.

And then

I had a daughter that we used to call her Susanna the

Empath from Empathos.

And we meant that because when

you got kind of tired of a chick,

a swallow spraying their wing.

A swallow,

she sprayed her wing.

Next thing, she was in a cardboard box in the living room.

Or

we had a situation where she would say, somebody needs help.

And then, hey, dad, this poor person, their mom didn't pick them up after band practice.

Could you just take her home?

38 miles out in the country, that kind of stuff?

So she was the empath, and

I always did what she wanted, but

she's the direct antithesis of Machiavelli, and is that what you're saying?

She was very open and

overt, and she would always,

oh, when she had friends or something, sometimes people would pick on her.

And she said, I was very nice to them.

Yeah, I did the extra work.

She was at a job.

And she said, and then

they all kneeled down and they started smiling at me and they backed backed me up and I fell over the people behind me.

It was a trick.

I said, okay, Susan, what's the point?

But she was very trusting.

And I had her work on our tours where she got motorized vehicles of people who were disabled.

And that was nice.

So

I think that

I'm not capable.

I'm not necessarily

opposed to certain people within limits that are Machiavellian.

I've seen administrators in the university that didn't lie.

Machiavelli says it's okay to lie, but were very effective by being tough.

And, you know, they'll say things like, I got a guy in here in my office who says that

you said something at him in a meeting.

I want you to get in here and we'll straighten it out.

And then you go in and they, you, you know, that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

Or I enjoy that rather than the Machiavellian behind the scenes.

So

I've been very confrontational, but I've always been, I think, pretty open about it.

My character flaw is I'm very mellow and mellow, then unpredictably, when I get to a certain point, if somebody pushes, pushes, pushes, pushes, then I get...

If I had a student and they come one minute late, two minutes late, and I said, no, no, no problem.

Turn in your paper maybe six hours late and then they keep doing it and I finally explode.

And that's not good.

You should have warned them that you're going to explode.

So, Machiavelli is sort of like, I don't say Henry Kissinger lied, but Kissinger,

you know, I'll give you a Machiavellian idea.

Nixon calls Kissinger in Bay.

I'm kind of ad-libbing from memory, but it's during the bombing and the effort to get a peace agreement.

And

Kissinger is told by Nixon, I'm crazy, you're sane, I'm the mad bomber, you're not,

and you can't reason with me.

It's all feign.

Actually, Nixon was probably more conservative in the use of force than Kissinger was.

And so then to the Vietnamese, Kissinger would say, you better cut a deal.

I can't control him.

He's nuts.

You get a little bit about Trump as well, that there were people around Trump that told foreign leaders, especially enemies, be careful with Trump.

We can't predict what he'll do.

So don't that kind of Machiavellian, and that's just diplomacy.

And then also telling someone something and then telling another person the opposite, and it all comes back to haunt you.

And the people he picks as models weren't too successful necessarily.

I mean, I can't think of a

Pericles was not, he was kind of Machiavellian, but not to the degree that Machiavelli would advise.

And I'm trying to think of the Medicis were.

And I guess he would say, I mean,

as I remember, he dedicates it to Lorenzo Medici.

And he's basically saying all the art and literature and the beautiful architecture of Florence was produced by this family who hijacked the papacy,

corrupted the church, made fortunes in dishonest, but kept a stable Florence and encouraged the arts.

He hates mercenaries because he feels they're too treacherous, and so he's for a levy and mass of the citizenry.

It's very Roman it's

the subtext of it is Roman civic virtue.

He keeps talking about the virtue, virtue, virtue.

And virtue is not Christian.

That's why the church virtue is defined in classical terms simply.

A virtuous person does all he can to harm his enemies and help his friends.

Period.

You don't turn the other cheek.

If you turn the other cheek, the person that you don't like or has hurt you will then pick on the weak.

And that's kind of a theme in Hollywood Westerns, too, you know, that every time

a gunslinger or a sheriff lets the bad guy go, he says, okay, I should shoot you, but I won't, that guy comes back and either kills him or

does something.

I was watching last night in my insomnia.

Return of Lonesome Dove.

It's not one of the authorized, but it was with John Boyd and it was pretty good.

Oliver Reed is very sinister.

But it had a good ⁇ Barbara Hershey

was good, too.

I mean, it lacked the

Robert Duvall dynamism and Tommy Lee Jones.

But anyway, the point is that there's

a villain, and he's the guy that does the insurance commercials for, I don't know

which company is, African American.

He's a great actor.

I think he's a retired actor, but he's called Indian Something.

Mutual Vomah.

Yeah, I can't remember.

Yeah.

But anyway, they catch him, and the Ranger has a gun at him, and he's gonna, he should shoot him.

But he has a code that you don't shoot a bad guy who's a murderer.

So he lets him go, and the guy turns right around and cuts this guy's head off.

That's a wonderful person.

And the point is, had he just taken him out and disguised what he did, then that other person would have lived.

But once you start playing,

this comes up in a Christian sense in Tokyo.

And people should remember that Tokyo was a far more, I mean, the right hates Tokyo, but he was a far more, I mean, that left hates the right for liking Tokyo.

They hate Tokyo.

But

when

they talk about killing Gollum and they have all these chances to kill him,

Gandalf, who is the voice of Christian reason, I think, says,

you can't take it upon yourself to play

the master of fate and to dish out punishments as you see fit, because you have no idea what a person's ultimate role is.

And the point is, if you had killed Gollum at all these junctures when you had the opportunity, in which he deserved to be killed, then

no one would have been there to bite off the ring of Frodo when he was on the crack of doom, and the whole mission would have failed.

But he had a role to play.

That's what he was trying to say.

And

the same thing about Wormtongue when he kind of

destroys Theoden's mind, you remember with Sauermann, and then he flees, and people say, why didn't you kill him?

Well, you don't know what the role he's going to play.

And then later he will, in the last pages of the novel, he will kill Sauroman.

Yeah.

So your evaluation of Machiavellian is that it goes to amoral and it leads to people thinking they're like God and so on.

Ultimately, the means that you employ within limits, I'm not saying you have to be goody two-shoes, but the means that you employ have to reflect the moral nature of your ends.

And when you don't do that, then

you can't really be a servant of the greater good.

You just can't do it.

I'm not suggesting you have to be completely idealistic.

You've got to be pragmatic.

It's a 51, 49% judgment, a lot.

But

his value, remember, his value is it's a treatise on human nature.

And he's trying to tell people in the Christian era, do not believe, he's not saying this overtly, but the Christian interpretation of human nature is flawed and it will get you killed.

So you have to understand how people react.

They react to force and they respect force and they look at weakness

disguised as magnanimity.

They look at it as something to be exploited, not reciprocated in kind.

And if you believe that's always true, then yes, you're a Machiavelli.

I don't believe it's always true, but you never know.

It's true with some people like Putin

or Chi,

but it's not true with maybe some of our allies.

I don't know.

But

it's always extreme.

You have to be, you don't want to go to either extreme, being a naive nor a cynic.

Well, Victor, thank you for that on Machiavelli.

It was fascinating.

Let's go to a break and then come back and talk a little bit about Kamala Harris.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You can find Victor at X.

V D Hansen is his handle, and he has Hansen's Morning Cup on Facebook.

And there's also a Victor Davis-Hansen fanbook page, which is not associated with this, but they have lots of material that Victor,

and we suggest you check them out as well.

So, Victor, I know you want to talk a little bit about Kamala Harris as the word salad or empty talk vessel and

her invisible campaign, which you've suggested in other shows.

And so, I was wondering your thoughts on Kamala's

progress, I guess.

There has been no progress as far as her, the candidate.

There has been progress in the packaging and the reformation of this non-existent Kamala Harris.

By that I mean

Kamala Harris had the most left-wing voting record, and that means that she was to the left of a socialist Bernie Sanders, which means by extension or syllogism, she's a socialist.

I saw her in California as city attorney of San Francisco, county of San Francisco, and statewide attorney general.

So when you're talking about why we don't frack anymore, or we don't do it very often, or we put

the fourth largest oil and gas reserves of the 50 states off the shelf, why we import 25 billion of oil from illiberal activists, people like her.

as Attorney General.

If you ask why we have a $50 billion debt and we still are giving billions of dollars to these entitlement programs or free health care illegal aliens.

She said that.

The thing about her is

she

has never,

full stop, never

spoken to a hostile audience, and she has never once given an interview to a journalist that will try to

call her attention to things that she said in the past.

Hold her to account.

And the result of that is the following.

When she says she's a radical, she says, yeah, I'm a radical.

When she says she wants to get rid of private health care, it's just get done.

Just start from scratch.

Get done with it.

So she's emphatic, emphatic, not just wishy-washy, because she's trying to play up to a left-wing audience.

And she was able to do that in her California left-wing races.

She was able to do that in her misadventure called a Democratic Candidacy in 2019.

Remember, she never made it into 2020.

She tried to out-left all those candidates in the summer of 2019.

So what I'm getting at is she's a hardcore leftist with a very visible record of being such.

And they're going to try to put her on ice.

Joe Biden was cognitively disabled.

She is disabled in the sense that she's not cognitively disabled, but she's disabled that she cannot string together a coherent paragraph.

She's only one time to my knowledge in the 13 days in which she was anointed as the nominee, even though it's not official, had to give an extemporaneous

rant.

Riff.

She was on the tarmac right after the hostages.

Joe Biden is looking at her.

A sympathetic reporter says, Vice President Harris, want to comment?

The art of diplomacy, the diplomacy is very important.

And this is why

we have practiced diplomacy, and this is why it's going to be very vital.

That's what she says.

And you look at Joe Biden, you think that he's completely non-complosmentes.

He looks at her, and he's like, what the F did she say?

I can't, I'm debilitating, I can't understand her.

So they're not going to have that, and they're just going to repeat, as I've said before, what they did in 2020.

She's not going to be available.

And they know that they only have 90 days, it's not two years, to uncover and expose the real Kamara Harris.

And Lee Outwater is dead.

I keep saying that.

But you need a guy like Lee Outwater.

You say to Lee Outwater, it's August 1st.

The caucus is 17 points ahead of George H.W.

Bush.

He's misleading the country.

He's telling everybody he's just a technocrat.

He's non-political.

He's not ideological.

And Lee Outwater said, I'll take the bark off that guy.

I know who he is.

I got some.

And he did.

He did it in a month.

And I don't know if they're going to do that or not.

The second thing is they're going to rely on 70% of the people not voting on Election Day in the swing states.

And third,

as I've written too much, I said this last night on Sean.

They're going to make her into a moderate, just like old Joe Biden from Scranton.

Did anybody ever think when he was running against Trump, when he said unity, unity, unity, no more chaos, he was going to open the border?

I did, but they didn't.

And the crime and getting out of Afghanistan the way we did, Chinese balloon, and, oh, Vladim wants to go in Ukraine.

Our reaction will depend on whether it's a major or minor offensive.

That stuff.

So I wrote this, and you know what?

I was looking at where it was published about the three ways that the Harris campaign will copy the 2020.

And I always look,

the American Greatness Now just publishes one or two letters they think are really good.

But there was one that was better than my article.

It was better written.

And I just like to read it because I just looked at it.

So I had written that Harris' campaign will emulate the three principles of the Biden campaign.

Keep him secluded so you don't see how inept he is.

Count on the balloting, not being cast on election day so there's

avenues to cheat.

And make sure that you disguise who he really is.

And this person says, Harris's mental insufficiencies effectively duplicate Biden's brain dysfunction, promising a continuation of his disastrous policies.

As a certifiable fool, she can't win a, quote, free and fair election.

Given the nation's need for

respite from the Biden disaster disaster capitalize,

it would be dangerous for Democrats to repeat what they did to the country in 2020.

But after the assassination attempt on Trump, it's fair to assume that this warning will go unheeded.

And that's pretty good.

They will replicate what they did in 20 years.

That's what she's going to do.

And

anybody who's listening, you know better than I do, she's going to say, I was never for reparations, when she said she was.

I was never for decriminalizing theft, which he did in California.

I was never, never

for abortion through the birth canal in the last moment a baby, it's the moment a baby comes into the world to kill that baby.

I was never for that.

I was never for the stopping the wall.

I was never for letting 10 million illegal aliens.

Never for open borders.

Never

against fracking.

Never against fracking.

Never against horizontal drilling.

Never for the new Green Deal.

Never for mandatory EV purchasing.

Never for forcing people with AR-15s to forcibly give up their guns to the government.

Never, never, never.

I was the last person in the room.

That's what she said about the Afghan decision.

Here's what she said.

I supported it in every way.

I never did that.

I was a critic of that.

Okay,

that's what she's going to do.

And then if she's elected, It's going to be 180 degrees back.

Let's get out.

Afghanistan's a model to get out.

I'm going to distance myself from Israel so much that they're going to be all alone.

I am pro-Iranian, pro-Iran deal.

There ain't going to be any fracking or horizontal drilling.

You're going to have to buy an EV.

Where's going to be no private health care?

If we win the Senate, we're going to try to have single-payer socialist health care.

And you people in California ain't going to have any water.

We're going to let it out to the ocean to save that smell and to restore 19th century rivers.

That's what she's going to do.

And she's being celebrated by journalists.

Didn't Peggy Noonan just have a, oh, these changes are so great?

I've got to be very careful of what I say because I have friends that write for the Wall Street Journal and I like it.

But under its new editorship, I think her name is Miss Tucker, British person,

if you look at the reporting,

the stories and the headlines,

there's not much difference between it and the New York Times.

And if you look at the editorial content, there is more and more, there's some four great writers, but they're becoming outnumbered.

And the editorials that they write together are less.

So

that is, there are no, I think everybody should remember that part of Donald Trump's problem in these 90 days to expose Kamala Harris.

He does not have the effective megaphones that the right used used to have to counter

the 25 million every night who listen to NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS,

CNN, MSNBC, CNNBC.

Okay, that's 25 million.

Good night, Fox might have 3 to 5 million.

So what do I mean by that?

There is no more Rush Limbaugh.

I'm not suggesting his successors are not good, but there's nobody like Rush that could articulate that and have that audience.

The weekly standard used to be somewhat good.

They completely went over to the other side.

They folded.

The Drudge Report used to be the go-to for the Fox News headlines.

If you go to it, it's not anti-Trump, it's not neutral, it is hard left.

And it's sensational.

It's even more

uncredible.

It has less credibility as a left-wing megaphone than it did as a right.

It just prints stuff that you wouldn't believe.

And

there is no more Tucker

at 8 o'clock Eastern 5.

So when you take away all of those venues and you don't even realize what's happened, you were getting Tucker, Rush, Conservative Magazines, and

the Drudge Report every day

getting your message out, and that doesn't exist anymore.

I know people say, well, there's podcasts.

Yes, there's podcasts.

And there's talk radio.

But you're going against the network news, the government news,

New York Times, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, Washington Post.

Much more money in

there's a lot more money in

left-wing blogs, the bulwark, stuff like that.

And you don't have a an apostate group.

There is no

never

Harris group.

If there is, they're quiet.

The Never Trump is always well funded by left-wing money.

And so it's going to be very difficult to redefine her.

I shouldn't say redefine her.

Define her about who she really is.

She really is a hard leftist.

The Orwellian ways that they go to disguise that, when you have that GovTrack or whatever that website was that rates the voting records, that was a badge of honor for them to conclude based on her voting record that she was the most left of 100 senators.

And they used to quote that.

And they used to quote that she was a border czar.

I went and looked.

You can get 400 references until about three weeks ago that she was border czar.

And now

that that reference to her rating is not even there anymore.

You can't find it.

You can only see secondary references to it.

And there's no suggestion that she was a border czar.

It's like saying Bill Bennett was never drug czar.

Because on his contract it said

William Bennett, drug czar of the United States.

Well, no, they don't use the word czar because it's not necessarily completely a positive term because it's an autocratic dictatorial term, but that's what she was called by the left.

And the funny thing is, Axios objected to that, and then they went up and dug out that Axios used to call her the drug czar.

So, I mean, the border czar.

So, my point is that

90 days,

you're going to lose a Democratic, that'll be a love fest, even if it's a 68 fiasco in the streets, but they won't report that as what they, that will be a love fest.

There'll be one or two debates that she will win in advance, they will say.

And

you've got the Olympics, and you may have a war in the Middle East.

And now they'll gin up the hostages.

Putin did that, by the way.

Why did Putin do that now?

Because he does not want Donald Trump to be elected.

It's just the opposite of what they say.

Collusion.

He wants him.

No, he does not.

He knows that he could not go into Ukraine during the Trump administration.

If you don't believe me, say, Victor, you're just spouting Trump propaganda.

No, just look at the record.

Look at 2008, he goes into Georgia and Ossatia.

2014, he goes into Donbass and Crimea.

2021, he goes, tries to take Kiev.

And what does he do between 2017 and 2020?

Nada.

Because he thinks Trump is insane or crazy or he doesn't know how he'll react.

And so

I don't know what to tell you, but it's going to be very, very hard for Trump to stay on message and drill that she is a socialist.

She will take her guns away.

She's for reparations.

She's woke.

She wants to stop fracking more so than Biden.

She wants to stop horizontal drilling.

She's for the Green New Deal.

She wants to defund the police.

She said that.

She wants to decriminalize it.

And she has some editorial gems.

You can't say Merry Christmas.

How dare you?

She kind of copied that.

That thing is circulating today.

You know, Biden always has that, how dare you say, how dare Trump?

So she thought, I'm going to be a very loyal Biden

mouthpiece.

So she said, how dare you say Merry Christmas when the poor illegal alien children can't celebrate Merry Christmas?

How dare you?

Well, if somebody said it was a Muslim holiday, she wouldn't say that.

So, of course, the fact-checkers say, she was just talking about children.

Then she bailed out those criminals, some of them were violent felons

in Minnesota.

And then the worst that she ever said,

and the worst that the fact-checkers lied about, was right after that June riot that they tried to get at Trump.

And right as she was going in and being mentioned, remember Biden said, I'm going to pick a woman, and my final four candidates are all black.

The fact-checker said, he didn't ever say, I'm going to pick a black woman.

No, he said there were going to be women, and there are only going to be four black women who he was going to consider.

So draw your own conclusions.

But she was running for that.

And she thought that Trump was very unpopular, and it was the summer of love, and they had just tried to get at him

on the White House grounds.

He was in the bunker.

The New York Times was making fun of him as if he's a coward.

So what did she say?

She goes on ABC and she says, CBS, excuse me, to Colbert.

And she says, these demonstrations are not going to stop.

And they shouldn't stop.

They're going to keep going.

And it's a movement, I.e.

BLM or Antifa is a movement.

It's a movement.

And it's not going to stop.

And it's going to go all the way to Election Day and it's going to go after election day, election day.

She was trying to show you that these were politically useful to discredit Donald Trump so he would not win on election day, that white people were voting on election day, these people were out in the street.

And she said, beware.

Listen to her.

It's a very combative street.

She's basically saying,

we're going to have 120 days of rioting and looting, and we're not going to care about it, but we're going to disrupt stuff and it's not going to stop.

And then the fact checkers go, well, technically she was referring to peaceful protests.

There were no peaceful protests.

Every single peaceful, it was like saying a mostly peaceful protest when you see those flames in the background of that MSNBC reporter.

They all had elements of violence.

There were 35 people killed.

There was 1,500 police officers

injured.

There was 2 billion in damage.

There were 14,000 arrests for violent acts.

And she says the fact-checkers say, well, she really meant, no, she didn't.

And so they should play that tape, ad nauseum,

with flames in the back.

You know what they should do?

They should show the MSNBC, or it was the MSNBC guy that says it's mostly a peaceful protest, and there's flames.

They should show that clip, and then they should show her saying they're not going to stop.

And then show all the flames and the destruction, and then maybe have a little fact-checker.

She didn't really mean that.

They need to do that non-stop.

Everything she did.

One week, Green Deal, EV, next week, take your guns, next week, abortion on demands, next week, no wall, open borders, next week, reparations,

next week, no drilling,

no

fracking, no new leases.

On and on and on.

And then just show that rating on GovTrack or whatever it is.

Just show her Bernie Sanders,

number two, Camilla Harris, printed out, number one, left-wing senator in the con.

But

it doesn't do any good.

I know Donald Trump was very brave to go in front of that hostile audience, the black journalist.

I know it was a set-up.

And she pulled out, supposed to be on Zoom.

And, quote-unquote, he had to wait 35 minutes.

So it was kind of humiliating for him.

And that was an ambush interview.

But once you start talking about race to people on the left, it's a losing bargain.

They're going to misquote you.

They're going to, so you don't want to talk.

All he had to say was, I'm not the one that talks about race.

She talks about race.

If she's worried about, you're worried about race, then you should ask her, as Tom Cotton pointed out, you said,

I would have said to that reporter,

You should ask Joe Biden and you should ask Camilla Harris.

How did she work for Joe Biden?

Because she said in one of the debates that Joe Biden had supported a segregation.

It's true, James

Eastland, Strong Thurman, etc.

Robert Byrd.

And

she also said that Joe Biden was a racist.

And then he should have said,

don't call me a racist.

Don't call me things.

I didn't say what Joe Biden did.

I didn't say to Charlemagne the God, you ain't black.

I didn't call a black journalist a junkie.

I didn't say put you all in chains.

I never made fun of Barack Obama and said, he's the first clean black that can be articulate.

I never did any of that.

I never called my African-American

high-ranking members of my administration, boy.

I got a boy down here.

I never say the word Negro.

If he would do that, He could have done that.

That's what he needs to do.

He can't get emotional.

He just has to say the record.

And for the debates, if if there's one or two, he can't just go in there thinking, I'm a natural debater, I'm a showman,

I'm a movie star, I'm a celebrity, I don't get hit.

It's all true.

But she will come in with canned line, da-da-da-da-da.

And he only has an hour and a half.

And he has to know every single quote and every single statistic.

And he has to remain calm.

So when she starts lying about the border, he said, sorry, Camilla, this is what you said.

You even said that that we can't say Merry Christmas because we'll offend the feelings of illegal aliens.

You were the one that stopped my wall.

You were the one that stopped catch and release.

You were the one who said that people could come here and then say they're refugees after I had stopped it.

Don't play that game with me and go through every issue.

And he will win.

He's got 90 days.

Lee Atwater did it.

George H.W.

Bush, who was not the politician that Donald Trump is, did it.

And by the way, it was much harder to hold Dukakis to account because he was a well-spoken, seasoned governor and he was a nice person.

She

is not nice to her subordinate.

She has what Isocrates said is the worst of both characteristics.

He said that in the De Pake about the Persians.

He said it is a characteristic of a Persian aristocrat to be obsequious to his superiors and haughty to his inferiors.

So she treats her staff like crap.

And they all quit.

And then she is a toady to people above her.

And she smiles.

That kind of giggling.

It doesn't even make any sense to even talk about her.

She will cackle.

She has cackle rea.

Cackle rhea.

She can't stop it.

But don't

say that.

Don't make fun of her person.

They didn't do that with Dukakis.

And that's why they got away with those tads.

And I wish that all your listeners would just go online and say, 1988, 1988 George H.W.

Bush ad, anti-Dukakis.

Look at that Boston Harbor ad.

That was eerie.

Look at that tank ad.

It was so sad because he was a nice guy, but his helmet just like a bobblehead, you know what I mean?

And he was trying to look like he was driving a tank.

And then they had this voice.

It was just authoritative.

It sounded like a senior FBI agent or something of the old school.

Yeah.

And then, of course, the Willie Horton.

I think they only ran that once where they show it's like the fairgrounds where you go in and it revolves, and they show them going in and out.

So, that's what they need to do.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of this show, and I just want what, and you and Jack can talk about the reasons why, but do you have any prediction on Kamala Harris's vice presidential candidate?

And you can leave us where you and Jack can talk about it on Tuesday.

But,

well,

the traditional calculus is

you have to balance the ticket and balance in the widest sense of the word.

So

you're from a state that is blue

and it's kind of like Trump from Florida.

Your state's not going to help you because whether you're on the ticket or not, it's going to vote left.

Same with Florida, likely.

So you have to balance that.

So you have, and I think in the case of Vance, it's iffy.

Ohio used to be the bellwether state, but it's like Iowa now.

It's pretty red.

But in her case, she's going to try to find an executive or a senator from a purple state.

And given the names, that would be Josh Shapiro from Pennsylvania or Mark Kelly from Arizona, you would think.

Maybe Gretchen Whitmer from Michigan.

And then in addition to that, you would try to balance your gender.

So she's going to say she's the first,

I guess she would say, I'm the the first Indian black.

She would have said black, but now she will say Indian black.

I think vice president in history, and I want to be the first Indian black president in history,

kind of lost its sheen because Obama was the first black person.

So she may emphasize in her obsessive fixation on race, she may emphasize the Indian element to a degree, but she has to be careful because Trump called her out on it.

So then she's going to need what

35% of the population are white males.

So maybe the opposite gender and a white guy.

And that is Josh Shapiro Mark Kelly.

And then she's going to need somebody who reinforces the idea that she genuinely has flip-flopped and is now a moderate.

And that can, if she picks a radical, it doesn't work.

So she's going to pick Mark Kelly or Josh Shapiro, I think.

Then the question is, which of the two?

On straight

issues

and charisma and record, you would go with the governor, not the senator, the person who is younger and charismatic and better speaking,

and Pennsylvania is more likely to be in play than Arizona.

And he's popular in Arizona in a way that Mark Kelly may not be as popular.

Mark Kelly has some baggage because if he is the vice president and they're going to run a lot of ads, I hope, showing that he had a company, a very lucrative company that had communist Chinese ties to it.

Okay.

But I don't think they're going to do this, Shapiro.

I hope they don't, but it'd be very problematic.

Michael Moore, you know, he came out and said that they really couldn't pick him because he's too

he's basically said he's he didn't say that, but what he was saying is we don't want anybody who's Jewish and pro-Israel.

So I don't know how they can have somebody who has a record of saying people who have been attacking Israel

among them are anti-Semites and pro-Hamas people.

He said stuff like that, which is accurate, but I don't think that party can stomach it.

Yeah, it might cost them Michigan, I believe, right?

It probably could, yeah.

Mark Kelly,

on the other hand, I don't know if he can win Arizona.

He's like Harris.

He's running.

I mean, you listen to him, and he's,

I help stop the border.

I'm no, no, no porous border, no illegal alien.

That's not true.

It's like Tesla in Montana.

That guy is completely.

That's who, by the way, Harris is emulating.

John Tesler is running against Tim Sheen.

And all he's doing is do it what he's always doing.

I have a flat top.

I'm a heavyweight guy.

I like to chow up and have a big fat steak.

I got a farm.

I have to go put up with that nonsense in my party.

And then you look at his voting records, 95% hard left.

But he does that during the election.

It's very hard to beat, especially when Montana is getting a lot of California refugees who are going to Montana not because

they're sick of left-wing California, but they're sick of taxes.

Anyway.

Yeah, well, and you and Jack can finish up that conversation.

We'd like to thank all of our listeners today, and thank you, Victor, for all of the information, especially on Machiavelli.

That was fascinating and a new way of looking at Machiavelli.

I hadn't really thought about many of those things.

So I'd like to thank you for that.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

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