Things That Are Not: from "Cheapfakes" to "War Crimes"

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

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

This is our Friday news roundup where we look at the stories of the day.

And we've got lots on a Trump gag order, which was upheld by the New York Court of Appeals, and Biden's border enforcement and his

executive order to

give citizenship to probably near a half million, at least say, people.

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

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

So, Victor, I like to start out with Donald Trump because I think the campaign is probably the most important thing going on.

And so,

he's recently had the Mershon gag order,

a case in the New York Court of Appeals, and they said that there was no substantial constitutional question directly involved and that Mershon had properly weighed concerns for the First Amendment and fair administration of justice.

So I was wondering if you had any thoughts on Donald's new predicament.

I think the key is to ask

everybody should ask to whom do these gag orders apply after the person has already been, what, convicted

in

the cases of appeal?

And from what I can tell, they don't apply to anybody but Donald Trump.

I mean, they don't apply to Mafiosa.

That was in the news.

John Gotti didn't get one.

And so

I think everybody thinks, well, Judge Murshan is the aboriginal.

He's the typical of that Manhattan, New York judicial system.

And there isn't, I mean, they're 99, 99% left-wing.

And that's, why is that?

Because Because the people who appoint the judges, the governor, is usually Democratic.

And the people who apply for the judgeships are Democratic.

I don't mean Democratic, I mean left-wing Democratic.

And so I don't know why

we do this in this country where we use a particular jurisdiction's

ideological bias to try more key people there.

What we do it in Washington, D.C.,

which is about 85% Democratic, if not more.

And the tool that's used is: don't screw around with the FBI,

don't screw around with the CIA, don't screw around with the left-wing apparatus, or you're going to end up being charged with a crime by a left-wing DOJ, and then you're going to be in Washington, D.C.

And no matter what

happened, look at Scooter Libby and the injustices that were done to him.

That was a case where

the aide to Colin Powell had told Colin Powell that

Scooter Libby was not the person who disclosed the so-called covert status of the CIA person, Valerie Plom's husband.

So they knew he didn't do it, and it didn't matter.

So the point I'm making is just the process of having to get a lawyer, spending millions of dollars to defend yourself, and then to have the jury nullify the evidence is what is

the prosecutors understand that in New York and Washington.

And I don't know how it stops unless the right says we're going to I mean, I don't think you can get a change of menu, but I'm I I guess you're going to have to have state courts and red states

that will be

convenient for people to be tried in, and then it'll stop.

This is gets back to this original issue we've talked about so many times, whether you need to create deterrence by treating them the way they treat other people, or you want to take the high ground and not descend the country into third world tit-for-tat status?

And I don't have an answer for that, but Donald Trump is going to spend probably a quarter of a billion dollars on the Gene Carroll, the Alvin Bragg, the Letita James.

He's not going to get justice.

He's not going to get justice.

He didn't in the Carroll trial.

He didn't in the Bragg trial.

He didn't in the James trial.

He will not get it at the Court of Appeal, and he will not get it at the state Supreme Court, or I think it's even called the Court of Appeal.

And that's just a fact.

And they know what they're doing.

And this gets to the larger question very quickly that, you know, when Rachel Maddow or the people in the View

or

AOC, the squad, when they promulgate this narrative that Donald Trump is going to come after them and put them on camps.

I wrote two columns about this projection.

They understand what they've been doing, and they understand that if they were Donald Trump and they'd suffered what he has from them, and they were in a position of power again,

then they would attack people like themselves who had done that to them.

And so they just assumed that the right or the Trump or the MAGA crowd will go after them in the way that they have gone after them and would do it again.

And that's where we are right now with all of these gag orders and everything.

It's lawfare.

He's already lost valuable, valuable time on the campaign trail.

It means a lot of these opinions are being formed as we speak.

And he was dead even today, when we're speaking on Thursday, the Fox poll had him down by a point from Joe Biden.

And why is that?

I think it reflects a week in the past, or two weeks in the past, when these opinions are formed.

I think it's from...

because of two reasons.

Can't be because Joe Biden has done spectacularly.

This is one of the worst months in his career as far as showing signs of

dementia.

It's because that he's raised millions of dollars, $50 million.

$30 million and then $50 million with these

celebrity fundraising.

And he's spent, excuse me, $30 million and then I think $20 million.

And then he's spent $50 million on campaign ads.

And they start out with the idea that he's Donald Trump is a convicted felon.

And some people thought, well, he wouldn't do that.

It's so obviously biased.

Why would he want to bring attention that his own DOJ

indicted and then Democratic courts that were in cahoots with him, i.e.

the DOJ's third top person helped Alvin Bragg or basically led the prosecution, or Nathan Wade was consulting with the Biden legal counsel.

He wouldn't want to bring that.

No, he doesn't care.

He just wants to be able to say, convicted felon.

Most people don't know the backstory.

So it worked.

Yeah.

And I think it's going to continue to work.

Finally, it brings up this existential question that we don't have an answer for that

night after night after night, you hear Democratic worry.

And I wrote a tweet about it.

Why are they going crazy?

And part of it is the projection that they would do, as I said, what they think Trump will do to them.

Part of it is they're losing their constituents.

the solid margins they had built up among young people, blacks, Asians, Latinos.

Part of it is

they're pandering, pandering, pandering.

Now, the latest was the amnesty, the tariff,

the Arab American vote in Michigan, draining the strategic petroleum reserve, working with Alvador to get a temporary cessation in border crossings, supposedly the new amnesty, all of that.

And that,

I don't, they're afraid that it's not working and it's getting more and more overt.

I don't know that.

But here's my point.

The more that we hear that they're pandering, the more they hear that they're paranoid, the more we hear that they're losing these constituencies, they're either equal or going ahead in the poll.

So it's a disconnect.

It's a disconnect.

Either the national polls do not reflect reality, and we should look at the state polls in Georgia, in Nevada, in Arizona, in North Carolina, in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in Wisconsin, maybe even in, I don't know, Minnesota.

And that shows you with Trump from a one to five point lead.

Or,

and by that I mean that's where the election is going to be decided.

So when he becomes a felon, he gets a negative reaction in where?

He gets a negative reaction in California with its 42 million people or New York.

And they build up an antithesis to him.

antagonism, but it doesn't really matter because they're Electoral College.

But somebody needs to address this is what I'm saying.

Because people are getting baffled.

I get emails.

Why, if Trump is doing so well, Mr.

Hansen, why is he even now behind Biden in the poll, in the national poll?

That's something that's, it is an outlier.

Yeah, it is interesting.

So I thought, given what he is doing, that perhaps this switched on his border policy away from just the complete open border to

offering amnesty and pretending like he's the one that's really trying to fix the problem and the Democrats aren't.

It was a targeted amnesty.

He gave it to people who had been here 10 years, who were married to a citizen.

The thing

that was bad about that is that, and I know a lot of people whose spouses are here illegally.

or they're not U.S.

citizens.

And it's a process that we have.

We have a constitutional legal process to go through to apply for citizenship if your spouse is

a citizen and maybe you can do this or that.

But what he does with this, and what he does with the student loans, what the Supreme Court has said is unconstitutional, this amnesty, is that he just destroys people's confidence in jurisprudence.

So why do you pay back a loan if he's going to give certain constituencies loan-free

amnesty?

And you know, when he gave the amnesty, just to take that example, there were people who were bragging.

I think there was a Democratic legislative aide that works now for the Biden.

Said, this is great, I got rid of my $8,000

loan.

And people pointed out over a 15-year period, the payment required from him,

interest and principal, was like $550.

So he's telling me and you and everybody, I can't pay the $550.

I'm a very well-paid federal employee, but you're going to pay for it.

But the Republicans can't get that message out that these are targeted to not necessarily needy people.

And why didn't he say if he was going to give amnesty to people

who were married to U.S.

citizens who had been here 10 years,

why didn't he say that if they make a certain income or something, or they're in need?

But for all we know, there's going to be a lot of really affluent people who are going to get these amnesties.

It's just,

I've never seen anything like this in my entire life, all of this pandering.

I mean,

okay, I get you hate oil, then why drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to burn more oil and get prices down, other than just cheap politics.

I understand you hate the border, but why just destroy it and let everybody in?

And I think everybody's asking themselves, what is the logic behind the madness?

Why is there no border?

Why did he destroy it?

Why did he let 10 million people in?

Why is he borrowing

a trillion dollars every 90 days?

Doesn't he know that we owe $36 trillion almost?

And doesn't he know that at 5.5%

that we're paying $900 billion

a year in interest greater than the defense budget?

Doesn't he know that all these states have these crime waves where people are being killed, these illegal immigrants?

I could go on, but So everybody, why is he doing this?

And I think the answer is he thinks he's going to be famous because

he's going to outshine Barack Obama, and he thinks it can never be corrected.

He says, okay, I'm unpopular.

I don't say Biden himself, the people who are pulling his strings think, yeah, you guys got rid of us after four years, but you'll never restore what we did.

We got 10 million people here, and they're going to vote either now or against you.

And we destroyed the border for four years.

And we we inculcated the idea that it was okay to destroy the border and we had Finton, we had all and you can't stop it.

And then the same with the debt.

Okay, yeah, you got sick of it.

Yeah, we ran up,

you know,

we ran up

$10 trillion or whatever, but it's at the point now where you're going to have to do something about it.

And you can talk all you want about cutting government.

You'll never cut government.

You're going to have to raise taxes.

And we engineered the greatest redistributive program in the country now we might not be on our watch to take the blame for it you will

but we promise you we ran up so much debt and gave it to away mostly of poor people that you're going to have to pay for it and that means you're going to tax the rich and that was the point

and the same thing about gasoline we created an example that the government could cut back on the availability of fuels and get gas up in some places to five and six dollars.

That's what Stephen Chu talked about, but he never did.

My point is, it's going to take years to undo if it's at all possible what Biden did.

And that was the point.

Yeah.

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And thank you, Solair, for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen So Victor, just a quick question on we've been hearing all week long about cheap fakes, which is the left's new term for any video that shows Biden in one of his moments of dementia or physical infirmity.

And I was wondering your thoughts as a philologist on this new word they have and

the phrase you mean?

Yeah, cheap fakes.

Cheap fakes.

I don't know

what is the adjective cheap supposed to mean, that it's tawdry or it's inexpensive or it's just easy to do.

Tawdry and inexpensive and easy to do.

And it's casual and insidious.

And then fakes are that they're suggesting that it didn't happen.

Yes.

Not that it was altered or something.

I mean,

it's just politics.

So when you see Joe Biden wander off at the G7 and be lost,

and there is supposedly a parachutist, which he really didn't talk to, he just stared at.

Then the administration gets a wide-angle lens and exaggerates that person's importance.

So you can say that that's what he was looking at, and his opposition

collapses the picture so you don't see him, so you just think he's doing.

But the point is, he is lost.

But the Italian president gave up the ghost by going over there and helping us.

She did.

So it's not fake.

And all she has to do is just

say exactly these things didn't happen.

He never said that his uncle was eaten by cannibals.

He never said that he was first person in his family to go to college.

He never told those corn pop stories.

He never fell on Air Force One.

That kind of stuff.

Then there's the second issue.

So I don't know what it means.

It's just a little corny word they dreamed up, and I think it's going to be neat, an internet young word.

Young people know, but I don't think it'll have much effect.

But

what did they do to Donald Trump?

I mean, they promulgated that idea that he was poisoning

fish, you know, with the Japanese prime minister when he did the same thing as the Japanese prime minister.

30-some people in the room, and they said that one journalist said that Donald Trump called the people who had died in American cemeteries in France suckers, but the other people never heard that.

So that's all they did.

They did.

The Washington Post had that column about the lies of Donald Trump, you know.

And remember when they said that Donald Trump was in the huge, I guess they call it the monster, the biggest SUV that's armored and everything, and he

tried to grab the wheel right after, you know, January.

Oh, yeah.

And that was one of his aides, I think Hutchinson said that.

And then the other people said, no,

he was a big lie, yes.

He didn't do it.

So

again,

it's this panic that

they don't say to themselves, we have a record, and it's popular on inflation, on crime, on the border, on foreign policy.

And

we're going to run on it.

They're going to run on January 6th, January 6th, Donald Trump, Donald Trump's a felon, Donald Trump's a felon.

They're destroying democracy.

They're abortionists.

I mean, they're going to stop your abortion.

They're going to kill you.

They're going to make you in the back.

That's all they're going to run on.

And then they're going to pander to these constituencies.

I'm not sure it won't work.

Yeah, there's very Machiavellian.

They seem to believe that it's appearance is everything and it doesn't matter what the reality is under that, just as long as you appear to be.

In 1980, I was 26

and

this has a lot of similarities to that Carter Reagan campaign.

Because Carter had a miserable record on the economy.

There was Iranian hostages.

The attempt to free them was a disaster.

The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan.

Everything about his

administration was a disaster.

And people didn't like him.

He did the same kind of, I don't know, whiny, moralizing.

You know, he got that little

cardigan sweater and said he's going to have to turn down the thermostat, not go drill oil.

But it was all, you Americans are soft, you're using too much energy, that kind of bantering.

And just like Biden, disaster everywhere.

And yet, when they ran against Reagan,

it was Reagan as too old.

And he's senile.

They implied that.

And he's dangerous.

He's a kook.

He's never held national office.

He's never been a federal

senator or vice president, and he's going to blow up the world.

Remember Amy said, he said in the debate, Amy and I discussed nuclear war and we're really worried.

And it was very close.

People keep forgetting, they think that that race was a blowout.

It was not.

In fact, they had a poll as late as late October, like 12 days before, that showed Carter ahead.

It might have been the Gallup poll.

And then he blew it away.

People just, when he got that one debate, he just said, there you go again.

And if Trump can just say, you know what,

why don't you just, Joe, why don't you just tell us what's so good about an open border?

What's so good about the Afghanistan withdrawal?

What's so good about all these prosecutors that you support?

What's so good about the inflation?

And not get into, you know, you're a crook and that and this.

He'll do fine because Reagan blew that thing up.

People just said, you know, when they got to the polls, they said, if I don't do something,

We're going to have four more years of this guy, this hectoring, sanctimonious scold who's incompetent and self-righteous.

And that's who the left is.

And so they just said, you know, I'm done with it.

And they were done with it for 12 years.

12 years.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break for some messages and come right back and talk a little bit about

what's on my dog.

Oh, Putin and North Korea.

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

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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a year.

And there's lots of material for subscribers on the website.

So Victor, what do you make of Putin going over to North Korea to sign on to a strategic partnership of mutual aid in the case of aggression?

Apparently, this.

He's telling us that there was rules during the Cold War about proxies.

That

in Vietnam, for for example, we back the South, they backed the North.

In Africa, we did the same thing.

But one of the rules was that you don't use your proxy to attack one of the major players.

And I'm not talking about whether it's logical or not, but he sees our support of sophisticated weapons to Ukraine as violating that rule, right?

That we are using a proxy

to hurt Russia.

And it doesn't help us any

when Joe Biden says that.

And people in the Congress say things like, oh, we've killed 500,000 wounded Russians for nothing.

So what he's saying is, okay, I'm going to use my own proxies.

And I'm going to get some of the scariest people, but unlike Ukraine,

they're going to be thugs and they're going to be nuclear.

And he's talking about Iran, which probably has the bomb or...

could do it tomorrow if it wanted and North Korea.

And he's basically telling them, go to it.

Get back and threaten the U.S.

mainland as you did before Trump came in and Iran.

Keep putting the pressure on Israel and start having Hezbollah and the Houthis hit U.S.

installations like you did over 100 times.

That's one thing.

Number two is he wouldn't do this if Trump were president.

He invaded, he's saying to the world,

Biden was vice president in 2014.

Obama was president when I went into Crimea and Donbass.

Obama was president in March 2012 when we had the little hot mic exchange with Medaved, when he basically said, tell Vladimir that I'll be flexible on missile defense if he'll give me space for my election.

They both kept the bargain.

Obama was re-elected, then he waited, and then he invaded.

So my point is that he thinks that either Biden is demented and won't do anything and he won't, or he thinks the people who are pulling Biden's strings are the Obamas and he's dealt with the Obamas before, so he's not afraid of that.

There's a third factor.

The U.S.

defense

reputation has suffered and it's suffered for a variety of reasons.

We're not spending 4 or 5% GDP on defense.

We're spending about three.

How we spend more when we're $35 trillion in debt, I don't know.

And we're running

a trillion-dollar deficit every 90 days.

But Biden has cut the defense budget one.

We're short 45,000 recruits.

Putin can read.

He knows that those recruits were the most fearsome people in the world that his proxies dealt with in the Middle East.

They dealt with them in the Balkans.

These are basically rural white males who die at double their numbers in the general population who are not joining the military.

combat troops.

And he knows that.

He knows that the Pentagon is DEI.

So a lot of that budget that we brag about that we spend more than the next 30 militaries in aggregate, it's spent on entitlements, housing,

pensions for retired officers and enlisted people, and DEI.

So he has no respect for our military.

He saw it in Afghanistan.

And he says to himself, when do they win a war?

Did they win the Libyan war?

Did they solve the Syrian problem?

Did they win the Iraq war?

The only time they ever won it, did anything, is when they killed Soleimani and they bombed the crap out of ISIS and killed Baghdadi and solved it.

But that guy's not here anymore.

And that Pentagon is not the same.

So that's another issue.

And then finally, don't ever forget the emotional.

Leaders are not just

people of granite and stone.

They have feelings, even evil people.

Remember, one of the reasons that Hitler went into Poland is he really wanted to take

Czechoslovakia in early, late 38, and he got really angry when they started lecturing him.

And so, when they appeased him and started talking to the world as if Hitler had backed down, he said, I want to stomp on that crazy chamber.

I want to break him in his stupid little umbrella.

What I think

Biden has done, about every six weeks he lets loose.

He calls Trump, I mean, he calls

Putin a thug, he calls him a murderer, he calls him a crazy SOB.

Okay, but if you want to insult somebody like that, then you better back it up.

But then when Putin sees the weakness, the twig,

and he's not, you know,

carry a club and be quiet, he's not speaks softly and carry a big stick, and he speaks loudly and carries a twig or a toothpick, then he thinks to himself, I'm really sick of that guy, guy, and I'm going to get back at him.

And that's what's that's another, a fourth reason that he's doing this.

And it's very dangerous what they're doing, this axis that's starting to emerge, because most states are amoral.

Nations have no moral conscience.

Over half of them are not democratic or consensual.

They just want to be on the side that's winning.

It's like going to the Raiders game when they're 10 and 0 and don't set foot, you know, when they're 0 and 10.

They look around the world and they see China and they see Russia.

and they see Iran, and they see North Korea, and they see Turkey, they see Venezuela, now they see India, and they said, well, they're SOBs, but maybe they're going to win.

And I'd rather join them than have to face them, especially when I look at the United States.

Look what they're doing to their ally, Israel.

They're cutting off Israel's 3,500 bombs right when Israel needs them the most to destroy Hamas.

They're defending Hamas.

They're on the side of Iran.

So that's the kind of ally you're going to get, and that's the kind of enemy you're going to get.

So it's a no-brainer, you guys.

That's what the message Putin's sending.

Yeah.

Well,

I have two stories next that are coming out.

There's some reports coming out, or I've read in two different places, that this said Gaza famine that they are using to accuse Netanyahu of unnecessarily killing a lot of people and calling him a war criminal, and AOC, of course,

has picked up on that.

But that Gaza famine is not manifesting itself because Israel is ensuring that food gets into Gaza so our new reports are that the famine doesn't exist but we still have AOC out there blasting Netanyahu as a quote-unquote war criminal I was wondering your thoughts on that situation

it's so absurd that here you have a war

And

assuming that it is radical Islam and its Arab-Islamic allies versus this tiny little Jewish state, and yet the only way that food can get in to Gaza is apparently its enemy that it brags that it wants to massacre, mass rape, mutilate, and decapitate again, and that's what the Hamas people just said, that they want to keep doing it.

And Israel has to go across the border and feed them.

And here is Islamic Arab Egypt, and they have a border with Gaza.

Why is it closed?

Why don't they just say to the Arab world, there's 500 million of us, let's just feed these people and rebuild it?

They don't.

They won't.

Because you know what they're thinking.

We don't want those people.

All they are is terrorists.

And if we let them in, and we let them in before, and they tried to overthrow our country and their Muslim brotherhood, and we don't want them.

We don't want them in Jordan.

We don't want them in Egypt.

And we're going to brag on them and brag on them and damn the Jews and damn the Israelis.

But we don't want them and we don't want to help them.

Otherwise, they'd open the borders.

They would.

Why doesn't Jordan say, we want to have a convoy?

And the Israelis would say, okay, you can just drive through our freeway to Gaza.

And why doesn't CC say, well, we're going to open the border and feed them?

And they won't do it.

So here we have this idea that the people who are saying that we're going to kill you, kill you, kill you, but until we kill you, would you please feed us?

And then you've got this embarrassment that

they kept taking these pictures.

I was watching all January, February, March, where they have all these open-air markets.

You know,

the purpose is not to show them, it's to show how awful the Israelis are.

But you can't help but see that there's food stalls, and it looks like any place else in the Middle East.

There's fresh vegetables and fruit, carcasses hanging up, the beef.

You know, it's just

another propaganda.

But then you've got to remember that there's ex-Al Jazeera people work for the Washington Post.

We've got a UC

Berkeley professor who is basically a pro-Hamas megaphone.

And I don't know what ever happened to the federal law that says it was a felony to openly advance the cause of a terrorist-designated organization, but nobody's ever enforcing that.

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Victor we need to go to a break and then we'll come back after some messages.

We're back.

So Victor I have two things in California that came up that were kind of interesting.

The San Francisco Mayor London breed shamed one of her competitors for not knowing drag queens and being able to name three drag queens.

And the Oakland city mayor, and these are very different things.

Shang Tao's house was raided by the FBI, and in some of the articles there was a suggestion, although there's no proof of quote-unquote influence peddling or something.

We don't know why the FBI were there.

Well, what's the old saying?

You get what you vote for.

So that's exactly what they represent.

They represent the people who voted.

And if they ran for re-election right now, would they win?

I think so.

I think London Greed will win.

And when you look at

her name in Oakland,

Pamela Price, that crazy DA, it's Soros DA that's letting everybody out in Oakland.

Yeah.

And then you look at the mayor and you look at the same thing in San Francisco.

The cities are just,

you know, I keep harking back, I watched Vertigo the other night and they have those actual scenes where they're not, you know, they're just cameo scenes, they're not scripted, and you see that city and it's beautiful.

And people are well-dressed, there's no carjacking, there's no smash and grail.

What's funny about all this is the arrogance of the left.

We did all of this, we got equality, we're progressive.

No, you destroyed everything.

You destroyed everything.

And,

you know,

if you look at what the classical critiques of democracy were as compared to a constitutional, constitutional, consensual republic that had a balance of power, it was always this.

Aristotle in the politics says, once a man feels he's equal to all other people

in politics, meaning he can do anything he wants, then he demands to be equal in every other aspect of his life, meaning he wants the same amount of money, the same house, the same everything given to him.

Because why not?

And, you know, and the Gorg is that famous line of Socrates when he says, well, it's kind of ironic or sarcastic.

Well, then

will the dogs and the donkeys vote?

Meaning, there is no end once you start in the radical, progressive, democratic, radical, democratic, as opposed everybody to a consensual government, where there's a Senate, a Supreme Court, and

a House, and an executive, not just

completely left-wing, but that's what we're getting to,

then the point is that they always devolve into this.

It's not fair, it's not fair, until they become, and Aristotle says they become dysfunctional.

Because who it is you to say you get to do this?

Who are you to say this?

And that's what's happening in these cities.

They're saying, well, how do you know that you wouldn't steal if you grew up like he did?

Why do you think it's against the law to steal sneakers?

Maybe it's because you don't steal sneakers.

If you didn't have a TV, maybe you'd go smash and grab them rather than your estate.

So we're not going to charge these people and we're going to restore social justice.

Or

why do you have to be a citizen?

Why can't you be an illegal alien to vote?

Who's the same?

Isn't a legal alien a human too?

Why can't a felon vote?

And that's the idea of this devolution.

And that's why it's democracy when it gets into its terminal stage.

It just becomes flat-out radical socialism.

That's where we are now.

I think that your listeners and I are worried a little bit about that they can't be turned around.

That's the worrisome part, really.

We want it to be turned around, but it's just...

You saw Mealy try it in Argentina, and you're seeing people on the right.

in Europe saying it can't go on like this with open borders and the prices and stuff.

And the problem is that what were you going to do with these millions of people who are not capable of working outside of state, local, or federal government?

And they have no means of support.

Because we've nursed them on.

I mean,

Bill Clinton won on the idea of work fair, right?

And 100,000 more police officers in school uniforms.

If a Democrat said that, they would be ostracized from the party.

That's how far we've gone.

And so I don't know how you would stop it.

Somebody on the Republican or conservative side would have to say, I'm going to be charismatic, I'm going to get elected, and then I'm going to go back to

Simpson Bowles and have a program to get a balanced budget in four years, and then a program to pay off the debt in 20.

And I'm going to be hated,

and I enjoy being hated.

And I'm going to build a wall, and I enjoy being even more hated for building a wall.

And I'm going to start a DOJ that goes with federal racketeering charges against Antifa, BLM, all these people who are causing,

going after justice for Palestine, all of these people who break our laws with impunity.

I'm going to be hated even more.

I'm going to follow the law, completely follow the law.

These people have not followed the law, but I don't know anybody could do that.

Reagan kind of did it.

He said he was going to do all these things, and he did it.

When he said he was going to cut income taxes to 25%,

people said he was insane.

George H.W.

Bush said that's voodoo economics, But he did.

And then he said he was going to increase

the defense budget.

He failed

in one key area.

He should have cut the entitlements to make sure we had a balanced budget, but he didn't.

And

so my point is,

it's what Livy said in the first book of his history, is that we got to a point now where the medicine is worse than the disease.

We can't bear our sins and we can't bear our cures.

Yeah.

And I don't know what we're going to do.

I just feel really,

maybe it's a long COVID speaking because I got some letters today about long COVID and some good advice, by the way.

It's just that I get generational.

I get really angry because the change in the country

reflects families that I know.

the devolution within that family.

So when I look at a grandfather, a father, and a person my age, and then a child, that four generational span, and I calibrate it to years in the United States, let's say of 1945

to 2024, that same, I'm not saying that we're not good things, civil rights and equality, women and all that, but when I see the stuff of life, the inability to afford the basics of life, food, shelter, fuel, without having two people work non-stop.

And then when I look at the fertility rate going going from 3 down to 1.67,

or I look at the crime, or I look at the rise in racial and tribal tensions, and I look at just how incompetent we are.

You know, when I look at Afghanistan and stuff, the D-Day generation to the flight from Kabul, or George Marshall,

Omar Bradley, George Patton, to General Milley.

And then I look around at people.

I don't want to speak about myself, but

my life has been,

I've worked very hard, but I don't think I went through what my father had to go through.

Flew 40 missions, grew up in the Depression, had nothing.

And then my grandfather, who was Swedish and got his lungs rotten, burned out with phosphine gas in France in World War I.

And then their father, Nels Hansen, that came with nothing to Kingsburg, California, and was very

until he dropped dead at 88 working.

I just look at that, and I look at my mother and father, and then I compare myself to them, and it's just shocking that the falloff.

I think a lot of us do that in this country now.

And it's generational.

I mean, it was one of the themes of Periclean Athens.

Remember that the first generation, the Themistoclean generation, the Aristides generation, the Miltides generation, the Aeschylus generation, sacrificed, and then they gave birth to the middle generation, the Sophoclean, the Periclean, who had all of the work ethic and tutelage from that first generation.

And yet they had the comfort and the luxury to do something, and then they spoiled the Alcibidean generation.

I'd look around farms, and I always see that tripartite generation.

I see an Armenian immigrant, I see a Basque immigrant, I see an immigrant from Holland, and they came, and when I was a little boy, they lived in a little tiny 900 square foot home and they built a big barn and a dairy or they kept buying land right and then when they died they left to their children several hundred acres or a big packing house or a successful dairy and the first thing that the second generation did is build a beautiful home right but they kept the work ethic and but the third generation they gave them cars sports cars they went out and borrowed money They didn't know how to do the business.

They didn't work.

They didn't even go to the coffee shop with their work clothes tucked into their boots.

They just, they were dandies and they went through the whole fortune in three generations.

Three generations.

And that's what we're doing in this country.

It's generational.

It really is.

And you can see on the national level,

Joe Biden's father was a better man than Joe Biden.

And for all

Joe Biden's faults, he's a better man than Hunter Biden.

And Hunter Biden's kids sound like they're even worse than Hunter Biden.

And so.

Is that possible?

I don't know.

I don't know.

That might be an exaggeration.

Well, Victor, I have a question from a viewer.

He says that, and this is from Apple Podcast, and it's FatFred24 is what it signed.

I've started reading VDH book on the Second World Wars and the European air war.

Goering is brought up, it seems that Goering was a holdover from World War I and a political animal, not a good military planner.

Then dressed flamboyantly and weird, using today's words, quote, not a serious person, unquote.

Is it safe to say that Goering is similar to today's DEI military leadership and some of the failures of the German war effort?

And explain some of that.

You haven't haven't apprised me of that question, so I'm going to answer off the top of my head.

Yes, I did not tell you.

Yes.

The thing about Goering was that he was one of the earliest Nazis.

I don't know his Nazi party number by memory, but he was a very early Nazi.

He might have been even earlier than Hitler, but close.

But he was a hero in World War I.

He flew combat.

And he was very successful.

He was injured.

And then as he matured and as one of the stalwarts, Hitler had a great deal of respect for him because he was a military hero.

But he became obese and he became a cocaine addict.

And then he sort of looked at his

Reichmarschall position as looting.

So he was the one that looted the art.

He looted all of the bank accounts of Jews.

And he had this kind of Viking medieval German hall, and he

married this woman that he had the Viking horns and the whole get-up, alpine

clothing and etc.

And then he kind of by 1940, 41, he was a buffoon.

But he had such esteem in Hitler's

mind that he let him stay at the head of the Luftwaffe.

If you're interested in him,

Albert

Galant Gallant, he wrote the first and the last.

He was a brilliant he lived beyond the war.

He's in actually The World of Wars, one of the interviews.

And he was a fighter pilot and head of the Luftwaffe, a lot of fighter wings in charge of protecting the homeland from bombers, etc.

So he lived through the whole period of Spanish Civil War, you know, when they sent the Luftwaffe for its first really overseas exposure to the very end.

And he has some very terrible things to say about Goering and how incompetent.

Goering was the one, remember,

it's controversial, but when the British were trapped at Gunkirk, 330,000 of them,

the panzers stopped for two days.

There's a big debate whether Guadarian, well, he was a minor, but

there's a debate whether the hierarchy of the German army, they thought that they were out of supplies, they needed to regroup, and they needed 48 to 72 hours before they hit that pocket.

But Goering precluded that.

when von Rundstedt may or may not have said, okay, you know, we're exhausted, we're out of fuel, we don't want to hit that nut right now, that hard shell around Dunker.

But Guring said that the Luftwaffe could do it, no problem.

And the problem that he didn't understand was that the Supermarine Spitfire and almost every classification, except maybe range, but in terms of turning, climb, armament, was as good or better.

than a BF-109 and the British pilots were as good or better than German pilots.

So they were,

they took a terrible toll on the Lupova, and the Lupwa did not bomb that pocket into oblivion.

And he was blamed for that.

And then after that, he receded the Cretan

operation, the airborne thing, didn't work out in Crete very well.

And

by the time they had gone into Germany, I don't know if it was Goern's fault, but if you count all of the

fighter planes and especially logistical aircraft, transport aircraft, that were lost in Poland in 1939, in France in 1940, and in 1941, in that year and a half before they went into Russia, that really hurt them.

They were down about 2,500 aircraft that they had lost, and they had not been made up.

And so Goering was in charge of all that.

Yeah, he was a buffoon.

The irony was that at the Nuremberg trials, when they arrested him as a war criminal, because he was

not an architect, but he knew about the final solution and approved of it, partly because he was getting a lot of money from confiscated Jewish fortunes.

But they put him on a diet, and he had no access to cocaine.

And he lost all this weight.

And for the first time in maybe five or six years, if you go back and look at the transcripts, he was actually clear and he was answering questions in a way he wouldn't have been able to Hitler.

And then, of course, he was going to be hanged, and

somebody smuggled into him.

There's all sorts of rumors, as I remember who it was, a guard or somebody, a lawyer,

cyanide, and he killed himself.

Yeah.

His daughter was

a prominent spokeswoman on his behalf.

A lot of the Nazis, second-generation people who are now dead, for the most part, they were unapologetic, defending their parents.

Well, the last thing is Willie Mays died this week, and I was wondering your thoughts on that great baseball player.

Say hey.

Say hey.

Say hey.

That was his name.

Say hey.

Didn't know

the thing about him, when he they came in 1959 from Brooklyn to San Francisco,

I think he was the greatest baseball player of all time.

But I'm prejudiced because when I was nine and ten years old, we had this old black

radio my dad had and every evening we would go in and sit around it and it was our two favorite announcers Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons and they almost had the same voice and they were wonderful and they loved Willie Mays

and Willie Mays

we listened to every single game and we those were the days of gosh it was Orlando Cepeda.

I mean, everybody talks about racial tension there was, you know, watts riots, but the Giants had all these black players, Orlando Cepeda, Bobby Bonds, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marischau, and everybody loved them.

And so we would listen to them every single night.

And then my parents would promise us to go up to Candlestick Park once a year.

I remember in 1962, we went, and of course, we had to have little

those artificial clip-on ties.

And she bought us three little corduroy coats.

He went to Fresno,

trying to remember the name of that

department store, but they had a corduroy coat for a kid.

Gotchaks?

No, it wasn't gotta chalks.

It was

it started with an R.

Oh.

I want to say Roscoe's.

No, it was something.

It was very well known.

And it was right when the mall started.

And she found a coat where if you bought one, you got two free.

So we all had the same corduroy coat and clip-on ties.

And we went up to San Francisco.

And my dad of course was a gourmet he was really proud so we had to carry on our little backs a kind of backpack each person was charged with strawberry shortcake you know ham sandwiches chips cokes and they they let you in in those days and then we all sat we bought box tickets we had a my mother knew a lawyer that gave us a discount on his box season tickets so we went in there and then we watched and that day I can remember 1962 Willie Mays hit two home run

And this is what I remember: we had quarterway coats in, and it was in July, and we froze to death at Candlestick.

It was so windy and cold, and whoever dreamed up that park could put it right on the most exposed part of the bay, had to be insane.

And it was huge.

And I've always thought, I think people have written about that, that Willie Mays,

even though I think he had a lifetime average of 300,

and he was maybe fifth or sixth in total home runs and he also stole baby he could do anything yeah didn't he

hit over 600 like 649 home runs no yeah he did he was number six yeah he beat Jimmy Fox and he was at one time they thought he was on a course to beat Roger Maris and he did but he didn't quite in single and maybe he could even beat Babe Ruth they thought but he got he got and he didn't have any steroids or anything like that but he did everything and then but he had to go I think think a year and a half, people are going to correct me, but I'm doing this by memory, but I think it was a year and a half he was in the Army that they drafted him.

And then he had to play in candlestick.

I can remember very famously he said when he was an older, he lost 10 home runs a year because the wind blew in from the bay.

So he'd hit these home run balls and they would just stay up there and blow back.

And then it was cold.

I think he said he had to.

I like the way he talked.

There was a commercial he did where he said, don't touch them about fireworks.

And it was very famous the way he did it, but it was casual.

It wasn't that he couldn't speak well.

He was just kind of say, hey, man, just don't touch those things.

And

he said at one point, I remember that he took, it was either olive oil or something, and

he had to smear it on his arms and legs and neck so he wouldn't get cold between innings.

It was so freezing there.

That hurt his career having to play there.

And then being in the Army, he had that famous polo grounds catch where he ran at full speed toward the wall, made a catch behind,

couldn't even see the ball.

You know, his back toward home plate.

Then he flipped around and threw it to second base and stopped the runner from advancing.

That was famous.

I liked him.

I just really worshiped as a kid.

My mother was always for the underdog.

So she said this, now boys, all you talk about is Willie Mays, Willie Mays, Willie Mays.

Now look at Willie McCovey.

He's just as good.

He doesn't get the attention.

He's tall.

He's a a little awkward.

But I want you now to talk about Willie McCovey.

So when he gets up, I want you to stand up and yell.

Come on, Willie.

You can say Willie, and they don't know which one it is.

But McCovey is, he really deserves your support.

I think he's underrated, and he's underappreciated.

That's the way my mom always talked to him.

She sounds like a good Democrat.

Yeah, she was.

She was an old-fashioned Harry Truman Democrat.

And then, of course, Orlando Cepeda might have been the most naturally gifted.

He got her injured, I think, in a car wreck.

And there was Juan Marischel.

We would always play baseball, and all of us would try to do that high kick, you know.

And one time

in freshman baseball, there was a kid that was trying to be like Marischal, and he did in a game, you know, kicked very high, and he fell over backwards.

Everybody, that was the hero.

If you were a kid in the 1960s, late 50s in Calif.

They came in 59, they moved from Brooklyn.

That was your hero.

Willie Mays, Willie Mays.

And then I was very sad when they traded him.

I think he was 38 or 39.

And then I was very happy, though.

He lived to be 93.

What a great life.

And

he was very intelligent.

People forget that.

I remember there was a couple of interviews when he was in his 70s or 80s.

And he said something I'll never forget.

They said to him, and I think I read it, quoted somewhere.

It was on Powerline.

Those guys in Powerline always have great stories, and they had two or three, as I recall, on Willie Mays when he died.

But he would deliberately make him look like a fool on a curveball.

So if it was, you know, 2-0 and the pitcher threw a curveball, he would act like he was just completely fooled, hoping the pitcher would throw that same pitch again, and then he would be ready for it.

And then lull the pitcher into giving him a home run pitch.

He did stuff like that.

He was really smart.

Condalisa Rice, the director of our Hoover Institution, her mother, and I want to be very careful in case some people on Hoover are listening, but she wrote a memoir

about the people she'd met.

And I remember her mother, Angelina Rice, was a teacher, primary school teacher, and had Willie Mays

in Alabama and had encouraged Willie Mays to not worry

if he had to take time off to go to practice.

And that was pretty interesting.

But Willie Mays was from Alabama, as was Condoleezza Rice.

And

anyway,

I just worshipped Willie Mays.

I'd always get into arguments with kids because I came from the west side of Selma.

I went to grammar school with an all-Mexican.

I think I've said that, but there's eight or nine of us that were not Mexican-American, all 400 students.

So when I went into junior high, that was with

the so-called white kids.

I didn't know them because my mom wouldn't let us go to the country school where the farmers went, Terry school.

We were about the only white kids that went to Harry Quiet.

The Jacobsons and the Dice's, I think, were the other two.

But anyway, when I met these people, they all loved Nikki Manley.

He was their other hero.

He was really good from the New York Yankees.

And we always liked Willie Mays.

And they were Dodger fans, and we were Giant fans.

We all hated the Dodgers.

But

it's

those are great years.

Willie Mays was just a wonderful person, a wonderful athlete.

The greatest, I think, for all-around baseball.

He said Joe DiMaggio was the best.

And then I think later when he got old, they said, you still think Joe DiMaggio?

He said, no, I was.

That's truth serum when you get old.

He was a legend.

I never saw DiMaggio.

I've just seen him.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, thank you for all of the wisdom today.

And thanks to your audience for listening to us on this Friday News Roundup.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thank you very much, everybody, for listening.

We much appreciate it.

Yeah, this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson, and we're signing off.