Diplomacy Dilemma: Trump stability v. Obama-Biden chaos

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host, the star, and the namesake is Victor Davis-Hanson, and he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has a website.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

Its web address is victorhanson.com.

And I'm going to talk about that later in the podcast, but then up front in the podcast, too, because Victor has an important piece or series in The Blade of Perseus.

And it's a launching point for a question about America's standing in the Middle East.

So we'll talk about that.

We'll talk about some significant leftist money going into our elections.

Is that a surprise, Victor?

I don't think so.

And maybe another topic or two by the time we wind down.

So let's get to the blade of Perseus right after these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show recording on Saturday, May 11th.

This particular episode should be up on

Thursday the 4th, the 16th, excuse me.

Thursday the 16th.

I'm going to be in France that day, Victor.

I'll try and listen in from afar.

So the Blade of Perseus, let me do the promo from the the outset, folks, but many of you are new listeners.

This is Victor's official website.

I recommend going frequently because when you go, you'll see the links and actually the full articles of Victor's Essays for American Greatness and his syndicated columns.

And these podcasts, archives, links to Victor's books, including, including...

the best-selling new book, The End of Everything.

And then,

yeah, the articles that you write, Victor, exclusively for the Blade of Perseus, they're ultra articles.

You have to subscribe to in order to read them.

And if you're a fan of Victor's writings, you should.

It's $5,

gets you in the door, $50 for the full year.

So do subscribe.

And if you do, you're going to see a series.

Why are pro-Hamas rallies so anti-Semitic, anti-American, and obnoxious?

That's the series.

And as of today, when we're recording, there are so far three parts.

And Victor,

here's a quick paragraph from part three.

A third component of the street and campus madness is the destruction of all deterrence abroad and at home by the Biden administration.

The Middle East has concluded that the U.S.

is in escalating decline.

Biden is seen as decrepit and terrified of losing power, and and thus will do anything to prevent, one, Middle East tensions that will disrupt oil supplies and spike gas prices before the midterms.

And then, number two, defections from the relatively small but electoral college important states with pockets of Arab and Muslim voters.

Victor,

I wonder

how if let's assume Donald Trump, let's pray also, Donald Trump is elected president.

How will a Trump presidency affect this

decline, this destruction of deterrence?

I mean, destruction means destroyed.

Can he do a 180?

Can America do a 180

in our standing with other countries in the Middle East?

We have the Obama and Biden, this kind of bridge over the Trump administration that have spent enormous amounts of time, attention, and our money to

upset the

standard American policy.

What could a Trump presidency do to

restore that?

Or is there some sense of permanent break here?

Well, that question can be answered in analytical and then historical terms.

So if you do the latter first,

We've had four administrations, the last four, the Bush administration, the Obama administration, the Trump, and the Biden.

Vladimir Putin, when George W.

Bush was bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq and had almost historic unpopularity as he was exiting office in 2008, Vladimir Putin tried to annex Georgia and took Ossatia.

He invaded during the Obama administration.

Remember after the hot mic of 2012, you know, tell Vladimir that I'll be flexible on missile defense if he gives me space.

This is my last election.

Presto, less than two years later, he invaded after Obama was safely re-elected, which Putin apparently complied with.

He invaded the Donbass in Crimea.

And then Donald Trump came in.

He didn't go anywhere.

And then Joe Biden went in and he tried to take Kiev.

So historically, there must have been a reason.

Before Trump came in, Kim Jong-un was serially threatening people with nuclear weapons.

Bush didn't know how to handle them.

They had special six-party talk, all that stuff.

And under Obama, the more that we appeased him, the more reckless in his language he got toward us.

And then he stopped.

Remember, my button's bigger than yours?

Will somebody tell this person?

What did Trump say?

Will somebody tell this person that I have a bigger button than he does or mine works?

And he didn't do anything.

And then, of course, he's back at it.

And of course, with Iran, there was no war in the Middle East.

And there was an ISIS flare-up.

And there's no ISIS now.

And the Houthis were behaved.

And Iran,

you know, we killed Soleimani, and they did a demonstrative little reply, but they were terrified.

And nobody, Hamas didn't kill any Jews in Israel.

And then we went into Biden, and we were back to the normal.

So there is a pattern there that we had a, there was no Chinese balloon traversing the United States for 14 days.

So whatever it was,

what I'm getting at is it was bad before, and then Trump stopped it.

That is the appeasement and the encroachment on American interest.

And then it resumed after he did, which suggests that he can stop it.

once it has started.

It takes a while.

And he was impeached twice, and he suffered from from Russian collusion hoax and the laptop disinformation and all that stuff.

So what is it that he did?

And it's simple.

He raised the defense budget.

He went over to NATO and he said, people are freeloaders.

Everybody says, oh, you can't make fun of our NATO allies.

But you know what?

They did raise $100 million, $100 billion.

In other words, they prepared themselves.

And good thing they did, because they're sending arms to Ukraine.

They would have never had had they not been forced to.

And then he got out of that asymmetrical missile deal with Russia.

He flooded the

world with cheap oil.

He sanctioned the oligarchs.

He sent offensive weapons to Ukraine that had been canceled by Obama.

And by the way, they were suspended the moment Biden came in office for a while.

He was really tough on Putin, and he was tough on the Chinese.

and the Chinese didn't talk about taking Taiwan.

And then we had Biden, and they said this is

Obama's third term, only it wasn't Obama's, it was much worse, because Obama felt that he had been constricted

because the country wasn't sufficiently woke to appreciate his left-wing genius.

But now that it was, he ran things via this puppet called Biden.

So my point is that he could do it pretty, in answer to the question, he knows how to do the border.

You just do three or four things.

First of all, you build the wall.

They're not coming through the Trump wall.

Or two, you can stop catch and release, which he did, and it worked.

And you can make people who say they're refugees apply in

their native country.

And there's one fourth thing that he didn't quite do, but he did quite do it.

And that is he went down and told Obadar, we're going to get out of NAFTA unless you start patrolling, because we know what you're doing.

You're waving them through.

And Obadar,

but he did at the end.

But now he could do something even more effective.

He could tell Mr.

Obadar, we're tired of what you're doing.

You're trying to ruin the United States.

You said it was a beautiful thing that there were 20 million illegal aliens, and you attack us all the time.

You have interfered in our elections.

You have said for Mexican-American people to vote Democratic.

Okay, here's what we're going to do.

You get $60 billion.

And we're going to do two things from your expatriates, most of them illegally.

We're going to say that anybody that cannot prove citizenship who sends money back to you has to pay, has to be clear that they're not on any entitlements.

If we want a computer check and somebody is illegal and they're sending money back, we're going to do two things.

We're going to cut off their entitlements because obviously they don't need them, and we're going to tax that 20%.

If you're legal and send to Mexico, we're going to tax it 10%,

no matter who you are.

And that's going to raise us about $15 billion, which will pay for a huge, as Trump says, a huge beautiful wall.

And that would stop it.

It would stop it.

And then we were going, then then he has to do one last thing.

He has to tell the 600 jurisdictions that are sanctuary cities and deliberately violate federal law in neo-Confederate fashion.

He has to say to that, you're not going to get any federal funds until you follow the law.

And he did that and he was trying to do that.

Now he knows how to do it.

If he gets the Senate, he'll be able to do it.

And abroad,

He's going to have to tell the military.

He's going to have to go through and say, you are fired.

You are fired.

you are fired from basically the joint chiefs down that have political appointments and get a whole new cast.

And he's going to have to line them up and say, you have one mission, battlefield efficacy, battlefield efficacy.

We don't want race-based, gender-based, sexual orientation, promotion, retention.

No, no, no, no.

And I want you to waive that stupid vaccination requirement.

If somebody's had COVID, they have natural immunity.

You get that 8,500 people back as much as you can that you kicked out.

And we're not going to do any more demonization of white males and say they're white supremacists.

We want them in there.

They're the troops that voluntarily, we don't force them, but they like to go into combat units more than any other group.

And then he's got to say to the retired, anybody who is a four-star general, when you retire from the military, you are not allowed to go on, be a contractor or lobbyist for five years because you are influencing the decisions on critical weapons systems through the context that you have in the contacts you had in the Pentagon.

So he could do that.

And then he's going to have to get,

if I were, I would get

Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson back.

They're both alive.

And I would say, you guys wrote this report.

It looks pretty good to me.

If we had followed it in 2009, when you filed it, we would have a balanced budget by now.

We're going to do it.

And everybody would say, well, you're going to cause a recession.

No, no,

it's tax simplification, three brackets.

And it cuts spending.

It will get us into a balanced budget pretty soon.

He needs to do that.

And so he can correct it.

These are all self-inflicted, suicidal things we're doing.

The border was suicidal.

10 million people, it was done for cheap political advantage.

The anti-Semitism on the campus, we can stop it tomorrow, Jack.

All we have to do is say, we are taxing your endowment income.

That's very important because their endowments are locked up in long-term investments.

And they usually let them ride.

And

they depend mostly on annual giving, not all, but annual giving for their five, six, seven billion dollar investments.

And if you start taxing that money, they're going to have to pay for it.

And that'll have to come out of their operating budget.

And they won't have money for DEI and all this nonsense.

And then you have to tell them, there's no more student loans.

We're getting out of the business.

We just can't have these big giveaways.

And we see the type of people who are on student loans.

And I feel for the 18, 19-year-old working-class American who are paying for this.

Since Wind is somebody who

gets out of high school and he works nine hours in a welding, smelling fumes, working hot, welding all day for $17 an hour.

Since when does he pay for these kids, snotty-nosed kids, to be on student loans that are trying to be forgiven?

And he could clean the university up very quickly.

And then on crime, he could say very easily, look,

all you locally elected sorrels-funded prosecutors,

You are deliberately not enforcing the law.

If you are doing that across state lines, and to the extent that it's a federal matter, we're going to charge you with racketeering and get rid of you.

And he's really got to go after those people.

And then he's, you know,

was it Josh Hammer?

Somebody wrote an article about quid pro quo.

And they said, oh, Tony Trump.

Remember, the left is projecting.

Trump is going to do this and he's going to do that.

But he pointed out that

when they fooled with the Senate filibuster, Trump, I mean, the

Democrats were stupid because then the Republicans said, it was your idea

to get rid of the filibuster on judicial appointments except for the Supreme Court.

You should have gone all the way.

We will.

And they were in the majority, and that's how they got those judges through.

And they just have to say to them, maybe that was a good idea to let in two states.

Hmm, maybe California will cut the top off of California and make that a separate state with two senators.

That might be a good idea, stuff like that.

Or they might say, hmm, pack the court.

You mean you guys thought we needed six more judges?

Maybe we should think about that.

Hmm, that's not a bad idea.

Oh, filibuster.

Now that we're in the majority, let's just eliminate it completely.

That's not a bad idea.

Oh, take names off the ballot?

Yeah, we'll get all the red states and we'll start taking Democratic national candidate off the ballot.

That's not a bad idea.

Hmm.

Hiring somebody, a foreign national, and waiving that legal exposure and having them collect, maybe we'll do that.

So they can do a lot of things and change everything.

They can really shock the left if they want to.

And then one of the things they should go through is get a special prosecutor and see on felonies.

It's usually a five-year statute of limitations, but look at 2020 and see how many of these people were crossing state lines and organizing the burning of courthouses and police stations and churches and killing people and start arresting, re-arresting them and trying them and sentencing them.

They should have a special federal task force for that.

And everybody's mad because he said he's going to pardon the January 6th.

Look, if somebody went into the Capitol and vandalize it and destroyed things, and that was a felony, then they should pay a normal prison sentence, whatever that is.

But for the other people who were charged with illegal parading

or walked through the Capitol when the door was open and committed a misdemeanor, and you look what they're doing on the student camp, they should be pardoned.

Can you imagine, Victor,

if a student at Hamilton Hall in Columbia had committed suicide?

I just read a story the other day that I think the sixth

January 6th, fifth or sixth

arrested, I don't know if you get convicted, but

they've committed suicide.

Yeah, they have.

A lot of them didn't get medications.

They were in solitary confinement.

A lot of

the prison and jail guards deliberately harassed them.

They didn't get adequate food.

They were in solitary.

They did not get a speedy trial.

They were in solitary and they had to wait, wait.

Julie Kelly documented it.

And they went through facial recognition and they tried to arrest every single person.

And then they militarized the Capitol for three months with barbed wire and barricades.

And that was all for show.

And then Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Schumer lied to the American people.

They said five police officers were killed.

What they did is there were suicides.

We don't know why.

And they connected up to a year and a half later and they connected everyone and said, well,

they were really killed because they commit suicide.

No.

Just like Officer Sicknick, they said, was killed.

That was a lie.

And so they lied about everything.

again back to matthew rosenberg the bull surprise left-wing journalist they caught on uh

james o'keefe ambush interview when he said hey the joke the fbi informants were everywhere everybody in the new york times is hysterical it was no biden that's what he said

well victor i think we should stick on foreign policy there is a piece out of a relatively new

website called the Brussels Signal.

It's an English language

daily.

And they've got a great piece, I think, on reflection on Germany.

And we'll get your thoughts, Victor, after we return from these important messages.

Hey, we're back with the Victor Davis

Hansen show.

By the way, Victor, before I raise

this Brussels Signal article, I was thinking, you were

talking before about Trump and our foreign policy, how

I thought,

I think you might agree, how powerful a right hand he had

in, oh my gosh, it's terrible.

I can't remember saying, who was the Secretary of State under Trump?

Pompeo.

Yeah, Mike Pompeo.

Excuse me, we had a brief tenure

of, let's not be hasty, Rex Tillerson.

Well, that's what I wanted to get at.

Like, Rex Tillerson is always like forgotten.

And why?

Exxon, ExxonMobil.

Yeah.

Was he ever in your in the circles that's I don't want to comment on that.

I don't want to comment on

how he was selected.

Okay, mum's the word then.

Mum's the word.

I objected to the manner in which he was upset, but I can't comment on it.

All right.

Well, he's forgettable

in many ways then.

Well, okay.

Germany.

Germany.

Here's a piece of Brussels Signal.

It's titled Nazis Out, Islamo-Fascists In.

German elites Okay with that.

Here's how it begins.

After the Second World War, Germany passed strict laws against any attempt to overthrow the country's constitutional order.

At the same time, it adopted a zero-tolerance approach to anti-Semitism.

Last week, however, the German state tolerated a rally that proclaimed both extreme anti-Semitism and the desire to topple German democracy.

The rally, which took place in Hamburg, was not organized by National Socialists, but by a militant Islamist union.

Of course, it is not okay to be a Nazi, not in Germany or anywhere else, but it appears that it is quite acceptable to be an Islamo-fascist, not just in Germany, but in most EU countries nowadays.

Victor,

before you reflect, I just want to add at the very last meeting we had at

editorial meeting at,

excuse me, board of directors meeting at National Review while Bill Buckley was still alive.

And this was, I think, in late 2006.

The meeting ended, and then Bill said, I still want to talk about...

something.

And he said, I want this institution to focus on Islamofascism.

I think that is the biggest threat we're facing in this country and in this world.

So I just wanted to add that to the memory of my old boss, the late boss, great man.

Victor, your thoughts about what's happening here in Germany?

Yeah, I just remember that.

I was just laughing because I remember the comedian Norm McDonald.

Oh, I loved him.

I did too.

He had a tragic end, didn't he?

He died young.

And didn't they?

Died of cancer, yeah.

They ostracized him, didn't they?

They didn't.

Well, in part, he was ostracized because was, he constantly mocked O.J.

Simpson.

And O.J.

Simpson was,

and he was

doing this on Saturday Night Live.

And O.J.

Simpson was a very close friend of the, I forget his name, the head of NBC

Sports or NBC News,

actually.

And it was also, he was, didn't he make fun of Radical Islam?

And they got really angry at him, I think.

He said something.

It was really funny.

He said something to the effect

that just imagine

if radical Islamic terrorists

let off a bomb.

He said, or it was maybe it was ISIS.

Let's just say,

God, it would be very scary if they killed 50 million Americans because of the backlash against Muslim America.

And they went wild over that.

But all of this stuff in Europe, this blatant anti-Semitism and pro-Hamas violence and here in the United States,

there's one of three explanations for it.

And they're not mutually exclusive.

They can be forced multipliers of each other.

Number one,

the large number

and virulence of these protesters, 19% of the population perhaps in Scandinavian,

10% in Britain, 16%, 17%,

17% in Britain, 10% or 12% in France, 15, whatever, and

I could go on.

They are terrified because unlike other ethnic groups, these groups do not integrate as similarly as the French are saying now and the Swedes are saying, and they're prone to violence.

And if somebody said, well, that's so stereotyped.

Look at Dearborn.

It's everybody said, well, you know, I think there was a Wall Street Journal when it said jihad and Dearborn, they got all outraged.

Remember that?

And they said, oh, how dare you say that there's ridiculous.

And then it wasn't more than a month later.

They had that rally when they were, maybe three months later, where they were all death to America,

people shouting, massive crowd.

And then they had that speaker who was praising Khomeini and

death to Israel, death to America in Dearborn.

And then, of course, the mayor said, this does not represent us, but of course, it did.

That was sort of the anger, the genocide Joe, President of the United States.

So it's either the fear of

the Muslim immigrant community, especially on campus.

And

I've been looking systematically at the numbers of students versus outside and older people.

And it's about 40% of students that are arrested, and 60%

are non-students and over the age of 21.

So there are people here that are either citizens,

residents, or in a green card.

And they are at the center of these violent protests.

And people are afraid of them.

Afraid of them.

I don't think it's just the 250,000.

I think people think, well, you know, it could be a terrorist.

I don't know.

I'm afraid.

Look what's happening in France.

That's one reason that explains the inexplicable, how we went back to medieval pro-terrorism, anti-Israeli democratic society, or two,

it's just simply hatred of Jews.

It really is.

And you think about it,

Europe has had a long tradition of anti-Semitism.

Here in the United States,

you and I talked about, I can't think of a major black leader who has not uttered an

anti-Semitic or

in in some way has been connected with anti-Semitism.

Al Sharpton, put on, I'll put on my Yarmock and tell him to come over here.

Remember that, Freddie Smith?

Yeah, Freddie Smith.

And who said,

I'm on my way to Jaime Town?

Jesse Jackson.

And who got a picture of Farrakhan smiling with his arm around him that was released after the election?

Some Kenyan guy.

Barack Obama.

Yeah, some Kenyan guy, some Kenyan guy.

And

who

and then you look at

the Women's Peace March.

There were a lot of BLM and they kicked out Jewish women.

I remember that Linda Sassour did that.

And then

this whole DEI movement is rife with anti-Semitism.

So that explains a lot of it.

People are just anti-Semitic.

One of them is they're afraid of

the Middle East.

Number two, they're anti-Semitic.

And number three,

they look at Israel and the United States, and it's an extension of the oppressed, oppressor, victim, victimizer, Marxist binary where white male people are neocolonialist, imperialist.

And it's not really based on any evidence or sincere belief.

It's careerist.

Because they look at society and they think, wow, this guy is making more money.

They don't do it with the NBA.

They don't do it for entertainment.

They don't care that, you know, Jay-Z is a billionaire, Kanyan West is a billionaire, or all the athletes are multi-millionaires.

They just look at where they're not when there's too many white people.

And they say, you know what?

These people are

oppressors.

And they look at Israel.

And besides anti-Semitism, they say, these are white people.

They're settlers.

They're interlopers.

You put all of that together and it explains how mad people would be, how crazy, how how unhinged to favor a terrorist organization that goes medieval on innocent women and children.

And

they favor that and they oppose the idea of trying to root those people out.

It just doesn't make any sense.

But it does if you consider that they're terrified of Middle Easterners

and

they hate Jews.

And they graft all of that on to this crazy binary that came up from critical race theory and universities, et cetera.

Victor, we've been doing this show a couple of years now, and I don't think we really ever talked about Angela Merkel, maybe once.

My memory's terrible, but

what prompted her to open the floodgates

to

Turks?

The thing about her is, remember, she was either in Leipzig or

Dresden.

I can't remember.

She was born in East Germany.

Yes, my point.

And so she grew up under communism.

And people forget that while

the reunification of Germany did bring in people who had suffered under communism, after a while, they weren't one-third of the German population was not acculturated to how to function under capitalism.

And in that period, this 30, 40-year period, they haven't done very well.

And so they're looking back nostalgically and saying, you know what,

I was better off under, you know, redistribution under communism.

So there's that legacy.

So that affected her.

Number two is the German birth rate, it was about 1.3, 1.4.

And she thought,

unlike the United States, and to a lesser degree, Britain, that you could bring in people from the Middle East to do their crap jobs and treat them the way they did Turkish guest workers.

And so, and Kurds.

So I've been to Germany a lot, and you go into Berlin, and there's a whole Turkish-Kurdish city, and they don't integrate.

They do not intermarry.

They do not assimilate.

They're not given citizenship.

They can be there for 40 years as temporary residents.

So in her way of thinking, we were going to bring in these people.

They were going to be subordinate residents.

They were going to do all the work for Germans who didn't want to have children.

And it blew up in her face because they started to exercise political power and people got terrified of them.

And then, of course, you add on the other things that she was working with, the anti-Semitism and the anti-Israeliism, which are the same thing now, that blew in, and the anti-Americanism.

She was a complete disaster.

for Germany.

She was the one that panicked after the Japanese reactor and shut down the nuclear reactors.

Meanwhile, France made a fortune by selling them electricity from their nuclear reactors.

She shut down coal plants.

She tried to shut down, and now what are they doing?

They're reopening coal, natural gas.

They're reconsidering nuclear.

And she destroyed the competitiveness of German industries.

And then the Green Party came in and they had the EV mandates and all those beautiful to quote Trump, beautiful car companies, Mercedes, Audi, BMW, they took their top of the line and they had all those EVs and they're not selling.

Nobody wants them.

I mean, who wants an EV that

might go 300 miles in theory or 400, but it doesn't really, given normal driving conditions?

And you have to wait around and find a charger and you might not find one.

And it might be...

20 minutes to an hour and it might not work.

And you get a flat tire and all of a sudden I'm in Tesla, there's no spares.

unless you, I guess you have to buy one special, but you don't know how to change them.

You can't put the front tire in the back.

All this stuff people are not acquainted with.

And it's all predicated on states like California deliberately trying to raise the price of gas through fuel blends and cutting back on refineries.

And Joe Biden initially, initially cutting back on oil production, then he panicked before the 2020 election, said, oh my God,

that stinky, gooey stuff stuff that we all hate, you make gas.

And when gas is cheap, we have power.

So I've got to go over there and beg the Saudis,

the Venezuelans, the Russians, and the Iranians to pump more.

And I've got to open some more leases.

And I've got to take that strategic petroleum and drain half of it, even though Donald Trump filled it to the brim.

I'm going to drain half and I'm going to get gas down right to a reasonable price before the midterm.

and then it's going to go up again

and then right before the election here he is he's doing the same thing now he's going to drain it again only it's not full right drain it down to the bottom you know drinks yeah

this guy is capable I think all of you who think it's just good old Joe Biden this guy is

sue generous.

He's one of a kind.

He really is.

He was always a race.

He's got the most racist repertoire of past slights and smears against blacks.

His family is utterly corrupt.

The family, and you and I have talked about that, have some weird, strange,

I don't know what it is,

perversion, whether he's walking naked in front of a Secret Service female agent, supposedly, or Frank Biden is taking pictures of himself naked and it turns up on a porn site, or the daughter writes a diary entry that she was too old to be taking a shower with Joe, or some, or Hunter takes selfies of his own genitalia.

It's just, it doesn't make sense.

Or Joe can't go to a rally without going, approaching a young girl, talking about how cute her eyes are, or hugging people too long.

Something's wrong there, and nobody wants to talk about it.

Yeah.

But

the corruption, these fixations, the

racism.

A love of chaos also.

I mean, what was Afghanistan?

Everybody says Trump was chaos.

That's what I don't understand.

All these left-wings say, well,

we don't want the chaos.

Peggy Noonan wrote one of the stupidest columns the other day

about Trump and chaos and if he comes back and

what was so chaotic about no illegal immigration?

What was so chaotic about trying to keep the Beglam

airbase and slowly getting

Afghanistan and keeping that base?

What was so

chaotic about making NATO pay their fair share?

What was so chaotic about no illegal immigration by 2020?

What was so chaotic about

trying to

make sure that inflation was only 1.4%?

This is chaotic.

And

you know, it's like that NPR, Yuri Berliner, is that his name?

He said everything they did at NPR was to try to find some angle, no matter how blameless Trump was,

to blame Trump.

And that was our taxpayer-supported radio station.

Yeah.

Your tax dollars at work, fair citizens.

Well, Victor, we have another, let's go north of the border.

And

where we think we have it, man.

Oh, my God, Canada.

But there's a big hoax up there, Victor, and of a big story that I think is worth your commentary.

And we'll get to that right after these important messages.

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

Victor, I just need to say a word, barbecue.

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Victor, my friend, here's the headline from the Federalist.

Canada's mass graves of Indigenous children was a hoax.

Here's the first beginning of the story.

Three years ago, a major story broke in Canada that seemed to confirm every left-wing prejudice against Christians imaginable.

A mass grave containing the remains of Indigenous children was supposedly discovered discovered on the grounds of what had once been a government boarding school run by the Catholic Church.

It turns out that the whole thing was a hoax, a modern-day blood libel against Christians that ended with at least 85 Catholic churches across Canada destroyed by arson, vandalized, or desecrated.

Canadian political and civil society leaders cheered on this destruction and then doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to investigate the mass graves and create a quote-unquote support fund for Indigenous people.

To this day, no human remains have been recovered at the site of the alleged mass grave, despite nearly $8 million spent looking for them.

Victor,

your

commentary on this would be appreciated.

And maybe just the broader take, if you want to share such with Canada, where not only we have this kind of thing going on, as mentioned in the article, cheered on by the ruling elite.

But Canada is also like euthanasia,

just out of control, suppression of speech.

It just seems like a hellacious land for people of the principles we hold as Americans.

Your thoughts, Victor?

You know, it's so sad because

I know Stephen Harper and I like him a great deal, the former conservative

prime minister.

And

he had,

I mean,

he was a solid Reagan Conservative, and he had popular support.

And he was,

gosh, he was there for, I don't know how long, 10 years almost.

And

Canada was,

well, it was during the Obama years.

He was much more reliable.

What's the word?

It was more reliable than we were.

And he's been the leader of the Conservative Party.

And he, gosh,

he was wonderful.

And

I think he was there for nine years.

And

he was pro-Israel, he was pro-NATO, he was pro-American, and they didn't have anything.

And then this Trudeau Charlatan comes in.

Remember the trucker strike where they went out and anybody tried to take their freeze their bank accounts?

And it was like a Norwellian bad version of 1984.

January 6th, the repression on crack almost.

It was, it's, everything's gone wrong with Canada and it's, it's in a mess.

And

I don't, I wouldn't want to worship wish it on Stephen Harper, but

somebody like him and they've got they've got a lot of people.

I think the next election

they're going to have a radical change of government because this Trudeau thing,

I don't know.

It's not sustainable.

And there's something about him that is just, you know,

I can't remember the guy's name.

I can remember it, but I don't know how to pronounce it.

Pierre Poliver, is that name?

Remember that guy, Jack, that he did a video where he's eating an apple in a

reporter.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And

he's really good.

Yeah.

And

if he were, he's like Harper, only I think he might even be more conservative.

And if he were to win, Canada would restore its sanity.

But, you know, North America is pretty scary right now because you've got a communist in Mexico and you've got a semi-communist socialist in Canada.

And you've got, I don't know what we've got in Washington,

but the whole continent is in bad shape.

It reminds me of...

the world's choke points.

North America is no longer a beacon of freedom.

And you can't navigate the Red Sea.

You can't navigate the Black Sea.

You can't navigate parts of the South China Sea.

You cannot navigate the Straits of Hormuz

without having your cargo threatened, intercepted, hijacked, destroyed.

And that's what this legacy of Biden has been.

But my God.

Canada?

Canada of all places where it's like a police state?

Mexico of all places with a verified communist in control?

And,

well, Victor, how about the United States?

Yes, of course.

I don't know what Biden is, but

he doesn't know what he is.

But the people who have pulling his strings are hardcore socialists.

And California is a hardcore socialist state now,

run by a coastal

group of insane people.

And

they are.

The California legislature with the supermajorities is nuts.

It's a very angry group of people that, you know,

and they're they're often ethnic and racially

prejudicial.

They really are.

And they feel they're in control of the state and that there's some mythical people out there with all this money they can keep taxing, tax, tax, tax, and they keep fleeing.

And the more they flee, they say, good riddance.

We didn't want you.

We want people from southern Mexico.

We want people who are poor from Africa and Asia.

We want people from Latin America.

And then they say, oh, wow, we don't have any money.

We've got to tax people more.

Oh, get out.

We don't want you.

And then it keeps that doom loop.

Yeah.

It's like a bad movie, Vic.

Where we think human nature is someone is doing something terrible and stupid.

And then there's this moment of clarity where they say, oh my God, what have I done?

What have have I done?

And

there doesn't seem to be anybody in California that has the propensity to say, oh my God, look at what the hell have we done here?

We got to stop.

Just

is

there anyone?

I know the answer is no.

So I won't even post it as well.

California is fragmented.

There's a lot of Californians.

There's the north of San Francisco, very rural, very empty, very conservative.

There's the Sierra Nevada corridor and foothills, very sparsely populated, very conservative.

There's the Central Valley, and I would say,

I don't know, 30 miles north of Sacramento and 40 miles south of Sacramento, that valley is very conservative.

except in maybe downtown Fresno.

Bakersfield's very conservative.

Inland Empire is very, you get out to San Bernardino, keep going east, it's very conservative.

And all of that together is about a quarter to a third of the population of California, which makes it the biggest red state, I think, except for Texas and Florida.

And so that's what's the, that's what's, they're kind of disenfranchised all these conservatives.

And that's why they're leaving, in addition to the fact of

they pay such high taxes and they get so little in return.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we're we're going to elongate the end of the show.

We have to end a little earlier today, folks, say Levie, but I'm going to read two comments.

And Victor, if you want to comment on the comments

as we head off into the down to the home stretch here, the first is I was going to read this anyway, but because we mentioned Michigan

on Apple, where our listeners can

rate the show zero to five stars, and Victor has a 4.9 plus rating.

Some people leave comments.

Here's one from Bruce in Grand Rapids.

And he writes, Professor Hansen, please do not judge all of the population of my beautiful state of Michigan by the one to 2% residents in Dearborn.

And it's insane.

I love Michigan.

I love it.

Yeah.

That's right.

You spend so much time

out there.

Southern Michigan, the rural countryside outside of Hillsdale College and the so-called Irish Hills, in that corridor between Hillsdale or all the way to the Great Lakes to Detroit.

I spent a lot of my time there.

My kids used to visit me and I would drive them around there.

And some days I would get on my bike in my 50s and 60s and just ride 20 or 30 miles outside.

All the way to, I mean, a couple of times I went into the Ohio border.

People would stop and talk.

They're the nicest people in the world.

There's a few really poor, angry people.

And every once in a while, a guy went on a motorcycle.

If you dressed like you were a biker, which I tried to avoid, he'd get a little too close to you

to let you know that they were the non-college people.

But

otherwise, I just thought it was a great place.

Well,

Bruce is a fan of yours, so he's just defending,

not criticizing.

But the strength of the country was in the north, at least,

Michigan, Ohio,

mid and southern Illinois, Iowa.

I had a really good friend, John Bailey, who just passed away.

He was a wonderful guy.

He was from Chicago businessman, but he had a farm outside of Chicago.

Everybody I meet, that's one of the nice things of being on the Bradley Foundation.

By

de jure, half the board have to be from Wisconsin.

So we got all these Wisconsin people, and they're just the salt of the earth.

They're just wonderful people.

Yeah.

I was in my mid-20s when I first went anywhere west of New Jersey.

I went to Iowa, which is not Wisconsin.

I'm not geographically challenged, but I thought I was in a different world.

Just a different, the people were just so

genuinely nice, non-sarcastic.

It was something about our Midwest that's terrific.

Hey, Victor, I have one other comment to read.

It's a little longer.

And this is from the website, The Blade of Perseus.

It's by someone, George.

I don't have a last name here.

And George writes,

I didn't vote for Obama, but I was still naive enough to believe, oh, well, at least race relations should continue to improve even more with his election.

Ha, relations got and continued to get increasingly worse.

And the truth of who Obama truly was becoming apparent.

He was a stealth candidate, all negatives buried or covered over in a tidal wave of media adoration.

I tried to tell friends that he had become the worst president of my lifetime until his sock puppet vice president came along, of course.

But they were, by and large, enthralled with his quote-unquote grace and articulation.

Thanks, VDH, for being one of the few in the media to trace our present woes back to the source.

He was a disaster for this country.

But on the other hand, I have to give it to him.

He was the most gifted teleprompter reader ever ever to hold the office.

The upward stare and pause as he gathered his thoughts that were already scrolled up on the screen was my favorite move.

That's from George.

And thank you, George.

I think he nailed

Barack Obama.

I think you nailed him.

I mean, gosh, what a con that was.

He was going to hear.

There is no red stain.

There's no blue stain.

No, America.

Yes, that was a 2004 lie at the Democratic Convention.

It's no sooner, you know, my own grandmother, every time she saw an African-American male, she ran to her car and locked the door.

Trayvon was like the son I never had, looked like the son I never had, and downright mean country, never been proud before.

And they always raised the bar on us.

And most of the police are stereotyping black people.

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, just non-stop.

Yeah.

Well,

certainly been in hiding recently while his alma mater has gone to heck in a handbasket.

But then again, it's the fruits of what he has helped plant.

Speaking of fruits, we're going to talk about fruits on some future podcast, Victor.

I want to thank the listeners who sent in questions

so that we could pose to you, Victor, to fill in for some recordings while you're going to be in Normandy on your extended,

I'll just call a trip there.

So we're going to, I'm going to talk about grapes on one of those recordings.

But I want to thank everyone who has sent those in.

Thank everyone who goes to Apple's and Apple's platform and rates the show and leaves comments and those who leave comments on your website.

Victor,

I want to thank those who have gone to civilthoughts.com.

That's a suggestion too, folks.

And you can do that.

You can sign up for for the free weekly email newsletter I write every Friday for the Center of Civil Society.

Do that.

You'll get a nice rundown of 14 articles that I've come across in the previous week that I think you will enjoy reading.

I sent an excerpt from the article and a link.

So please do that.

And at X, used to be called Twitter.

Go to at V D Hansen, follow Victor there.

And if you, last thing, if you haven't yet, if you have yet to purchase The End of Everything,

change that.

Yeah.

Congratulations, Victor, on the great reception the book is getting and the bestseller status it it is getting even if the New York Times is having trouble concluding concluding uh concluding that thanks all we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen show bye-bye thank you everyone for listening