The Middle East: From Brinkmanship to Conflict

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

We are recording on Saturday, April 13th, 2024.

Victor Davis-Hanson is the star of this show, and he's also the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Namashabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has a website, an official one, The Blade of Perseus.

VictorHanson.com is the address, and I will tell you about that at the end of this particular episode.

Victor, as usual, I think it's important to mention the date we're actually recording because this episode should be up on Tuesday, April 16th.

And between recording and the date of it being public, who knows what will happen, especially as relates to Iran and its implied retribution attack against Israel.

But we'll get your thoughts on what's fomenting right now, Victor.

And then some extended thoughts about Donald Trump, who had a press conference with Speaker Mike Johnson.

If we have time, Victor, we'll get all into also

some new polling about minority voters,

Alvin Bragg's antics in New York as Donald Trump is going to be appearing in court in New York this week.

So much to talk about, so much wisdom for you to share, and we'll get to all that right after these initial important messages.

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We are back, back, back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So, Victor, so much going on related to Iran.

Here's today's Daily Mail.

Here's a

headline about, again, the story is Iran wanting revenge for Israel's attack last week on an Iranian consulate in Damascus.

That attack killed two generals and

several revolutionary guards.

Here's the headline from the Daily Mail.

Iran readies more than 100 crews, missiles, and drones for deadly Israel strike.

U.S.

intelligence officials reveal as Pentagon moves aircraft carrier into the Red Sea amid fears of full-scale war.

Victor,

one thought.

Biden has responded by saying don't,

directed at Iran.

I really don't know who's trembling about that.

But Victor, if an attack happens, Can one not make the case that the missiles, the Iranian missiles, were bought and paid for with U.S.

taxpayer dollars, billions of which were supplied to Iran's regime by the Obama and Biden

administrations.

Your thoughts, Victor, on that and the general issue?

Well, we don't know.

I'm speaking on a Saturday morning, so I don't know what's going to happen in the next 48 hours.

But

indirectly, I mean, some of the money was

impounded by South Korea, and we are pressuring them to release money.

Some of the money was for Iraqi electricity, which

was impounded.

And then we did

forced to release $6 billion,

$1.2 billion hostage, as I understand it.

We did lift sanctions that allowed them in the last three years to sell about $90 billion worth of oil that they otherwise wouldn't have had, and which bought weapons for the Houthis and Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and others.

So yeah, we've been subsidizing them in the sense that we had a protocol that denied them revenue, and they were really hurting, and domestic opposition was rising.

And then Biden resurrected the Obama vision of a Shia crescent from Tehran to Beirut, to Damascus, to Beirut, to Gaza, that would balance.

or pressure the Israelis and pressure the Saudis and the Egyptians and the Jordanians.

And then we would arbitrate.

That was the vision of Alvary Jarrett, Robert Mallé, John Kerry.

That was their vision.

And that's where we are now.

As far as the war,

everybody should realize what Iran has been doing.

Iran knows that if it were to get in a tit-for-tat

with Israel or the United States, it would lose badly.

And the Chinese and the Russians would be deterred from coming in.

Now, what do I mean by that?

It means that although Iran has sophisticated missiles, many of them would be knocked down by Israel, and none of Israel's missiles or

GPS-guided or laser-guided bombs would be knocked down by Iran.

And it means that there's a target list in the West.

by the United States and Israel.

Donald Trump has talked about it.

And they include their oil refineries, their shipping ports, their military bases, and their nuclear installations.

So Iran knows that.

And Iran has no popular support because they destroyed the economy and people resent deeply that they are hurting while these billions are being funded, are funded to Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis.

Okay.

So what Iran does is they have to find a way to destroy Israel and to to undermine the Gulf states,

the Sunni moderates in Jordan and Egypt, etc.

So what they do is they take these surrogates who are either radical terrorist, Sunni terrorist, or they're Shia, Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas,

and they supply them with all sorts of weapons.

And then they tell them in exchange what they should be doing.

And they try to surround Israel down on the Red Sea.

The Houthis send rockets and they

intercept Israeli shipping and they threaten some of the southern port of Adelaide of Israel.

And then Hamas did what Hamas did and Hezbollah has the rockets.

But the key point, Jack, is

never has Iran directly sent a missile or bomb into Israel.

And never has Israel done that to Iran.

So, what Iran will now is in a very, it's a very strange situation.

They're saying, well, you hit a building next to our embassy in Damascus.

And that's an attack on our sovereign soil.

Maybe, maybe not.

And Israel is saying, we're not going to let you sit there in that building and coordinate a three-pronged attack on us of October 7th.

And that's what you're doing under

the

false assertion that you're diplomatic personnel.

Okay, so that's where we are.

And now Iran says it's going to send,

our intelligence agency said there's 100 cruise missiles, big ones, headed for Israel.

If that happens,

and you're an Israeli prime minister or a member of the war cabinet, after given October 7th, and you establish the...

the idea that you're going to let a missile come in from Iran into, that's not going to be possible to tolerate.

The last time we saw that, Jack, was in the first Gulf War.

You remember that?

Saddam Hussein in

1991 got very desperate.

So he started sending missiles into Israel.

And Israel was going to respond.

It had to.

And the U.S.

government said, please don't.

If you respond, you will disrupt the Arab, Jordanian, Saudi, Egyptian, Syrian participation in the United Nations

response to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait.

Okay.

So then the U.S.

military bellowed and bitched.

Oh, we've got to go scud hunting.

And they did.

And it wasn't very effective.

But the point is, the only time this has ever happened, the United States intervened.

So if Iran sends these missiles into Israel, which I think they may do,

then Israel will respond.

And then it will be up to Joe Biden to decide what he's going to do if they also hit U.S.

ships or they begin intercepting and destroying ships in the Gulf of Ormond.

They just took a container ship that had, you know, two or three layers of registration, but ultimately may have been owned by an Israeli.

They just took the whole ship and they they took it into port and stole it.

You can't have a world commercial system when the Houthis have taken over the Red Sea

and the Iranians have taken over the Straits of Hormuz and by extension the Persian Gulf.

It just doesn't work.

And with China, with the South China Seas, one of the things we don't remark about in the Biden administration, they have completely lost international free transit in the world's major commercial corridors.

maritime corridors, whether it's the war that's raging in the Black Sea, that ships can't go in there, or whether it's ships in the Straits of Hormuz, or whether it's ships in the Red Sea, or whether it's ships along the eastern Mediterranean shoreline, they've lost control of it.

So,

Philippines as well.

And we're going to see what's going to happen in

the next two or three days.

But it'll be very interesting to see if Iran wants to do that.

And

the subtext of all of what I just said is that this is an election year.

And Joe Biden's paranoid because he knows that even though the staples have gone up, 40% eggs,

meat,

staples of life, rent, insurance, what gets people really, really angry is gasoline.

So when you go in with a truck and you have a 25-gallon tank

and you spend 150 bucks, which is what the price of gas is now in California, that gets people enraged.

And now it's getting, it was, it's about 89 a barrel and people have suggested that if we have a war it's going to go up to 120.

So what this administration is desperately trying to do, and we've talked about that a little bit, is to do anything, even if it's not in the U.S.

national interest or if it's antithetical to our collective interest to get that price down.

So they drained.

I don't know why they,

I understand why they did it.

They drained the strategic petroleum reserve.

It's down to below 20% on the midterms.

Then they said, well, that was just a bleep.

We're going to refill it.

And then the price got too high, and they did not refill it.

They had it almost full when they inherited it from Trump.

So they're not going to refill it because that would spike prices.

Then they said,

Anwar, no.

Keystone, no.

Continental Pipe, no.

No new federal leasing.

And now they're secretly telling people, well, if you want to frack, go ahead.

And

they're begging Venezuela.

They begged Putin before he invaded.

They begged Iran.

And we saw I just said about Iran to pump, pump, pump, pump, pump.

They're told the Ukrainians do not hit a refinery.

Now, we're here to...

make sure you're going to survive, but that survival is contingent on making sure that I win the election and I have low gas prices.

And of course, he called these Saudis Biden did when he was demagoguing in 2019.

They asked him about the Saudi.

No, we're not going to have nothing to do and they're a pariah, quote-unquote, pariah.

And then they said, fine, we're a pariah.

And they started cutting back on production.

And now he's courting them and courting them.

So

that's all a lengthy explanation that he, when he looks at this war, he wants to avoid any conflict, whether it puts Israel in vulnerability or not.

He doesn't care, just so the price of oil is

going to result in moderate gas prices before the election.

And I think the more, of course, given human nature and the nature of deterrence, the more you tell the Iranians that you want back in the

Iran deal, the more we gave you sanction money.

We were nice to you.

We got rid of the terrorist terrorist designation for the Houthis.

We gave you money back for Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

We kind of favored you in natural gas disputes between Beirut and

Israel.

And Mr.

Putin, we told you when you were massing troops in January of 2022, we told you that we would suspend, delay

that was what they impeached Trump for, supposedly.

We're going to delay, Biden said, $100 million in aid to Ukraine.

And we want you to replay that magnanimity with friendship, of course.

And if you go in there, our reaction will be predicated on whether it's a major or minor offensive.

And if you keep doing your cyber attacks on us, we would at least hope that in your cyber hit list of American institutions and infrastructure, you kind of pass on, you know, hospitals, don't get too out of hand.

And the Chinese, you know, and we had, and we have led us, if you want to have a spy balloon,

take it along Alaska.

You can take pictures of it.

Don't go, oh, well, you went into the continental United States.

Why are you doing this?

You're taking pictures of our base?

Well,

it might hurt people in sparsely populated Montana if we shot it down.

Or we don't really know what the purpose is.

It might be a weather balloon.

Or they've assured us.

And then finally, public outrage as such, they shoot it down after it's traversed the continental.

If you add all of that together, that's a textbook how to destroy deterrence and prompt a theater-wide war.

And that's where we are.

Yeah.

Well, I'd like to get your thoughts, Victor, also on the immediate reactions of Biden and then also

a piece you've written for Twitter about the pro-Hamas crowds and coming to a rendezvous with reality, which includes

some

election calculating from Biden with Michigan Book.

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So, Victor,

Biden's response to these

threats to Israel from Iran is don't.

A little later, after we talk about these issues, let's talk about Donald Trump.

But Donald Trump was very much out in the public this week and seemed a figure of strength in general compared to Biden's don't.

And then, Victor, you've also written, as I mentioned earlier on Twitter, excuse me, X, a very long piece about the pro-Hamas crowd coming to reality soon.

But that did include Biden's calculations on things in the Middle East with the Michigan electoral votes.

So, Victor, all these matters, your thoughts on first on Biden's immediate response.

Well,

he says that all the time.

He said that to Putin.

Don't go into Ukraine.

He said that right after October 10th.

If you're going to send missiles into

Israel, don't.

And so I don't think anybody believes that he means it or he knows what he's saying.

And they all think that there's 250,000 Muslim-Arab-voter Americans in Michigan, and that's all he cares about.

And we don't, and so the world is looking at it.

It's not just Michigan, they're looking at that.

So they don't feel he has any credibility.

And when he was faced with the invasion, the preemptive invasion before that heroic defense of Kiev on the part of the Ukrainians, he said to Zelensky, hey, I can get you a ride out.

Just leave, and we'll get you, we'll airlift you out, abandon your country.

So he has no credibility.

And

it's one of the very strange things that

Putin leapt international.

I mean, he entered an international border when George Bush in 2008 was tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq, and unfortunately had said to Putin, if you look in his eyes, you see he's a good person.

And he went into Ossatia, Georgia.

And then, of course, there was the hot mic in 2012 during the election in March in Seoul, where, remember that, tell Vladimir that if he gives me some space,

I will be flexible on missile defense since this is my last election.

Okay.

So anyway.

We have appeased, appeased, appeased, appeased, and we know what happens when you do that.

Biden did it, Obama did it.

Bush did it.

When you appease Putin, he invades a country.

He didn't do it.

I'll let everybody make the necessary conclusion.

He didn't do it in 2017 to 21.

Okay.

Well, Victor,

could you talk a little about how Michigan is

a backdrop to all this?

All of this.

Michigan, Michigan, Michigan.

I think all of us had certain

assumptions that we've been told.

Number one assumption is that people who don't like Israel are not anti-Semitic.

Two, that Hamas is

separate from Gaza, and the Gazans are repelled by what happened on October 7th, and they're victims just as much as Israel is of Hamas.

And three,

everybody in Michigan are Americans first

and

Arab or Muslims second.

And what we saw this week blew up that whole narrative.

It wasn't just a few people.

It was a whole street, just thousands of people protesting.

And it wasn't just this crazy

Arab-American guy who works for some radical Palestinian think tank in Dearborn who was quoting the Ayatollah Homini and saying, basically this is International Coups Day and the United States is a horrible place.

And then he quoted Malcolm X and said, it's the most rotten country in the world.

And again, why doesn't he just leave?

That would make everybody happy if he took his rotten world accusation and went back to the Middle East.

But they interrupted him, Jack.

He didn't have to say, death to America, death.

The people spontaneously started yelling it.

And then there was no

there was no we we did that's not who we are no they just said we didn't authorize that not we might have liked it but we didn't author and then they had to come out later and say we oppose we that we don't that's not us but they didn't do that at the beginning and when you look at all of these signs and all of these protests

and They don't distinguish between Jews.

They didn't do it at Cooper Union.

They didn't do it in LA when they killed a person.

They didn't do it when they take over a bridge.

If you read Death to Israel, they didn't do it when they were hitting a pinata at UCLA, beat the Jew.

They don't make a distinction.

They don't do it when they pick on Jews.

So let's just dispel that idea.

They don't ask a, when they see somebody who's overtly Jewish, they go after him.

The dean of the UC Berkeley Law School, who's about as left-wing as you can get, and out of magnanimity had a party at his house.

They put up the most anti-Semitic pictures of him with a knife and fork, as if he was some demonic person eating the Middle East or something.

And then they swarmed his house and they wrestled with his wife in their own home.

Now, they wouldn't have done that if he wasn't Jewish.

They wouldn't have been able to make that type of poster.

So get over that second myth.

The third myth is these people are just, they're not pro-Hamas.

They are

pro-Gaza no they're pro-radical Islam first

and if we get in a war with Iran versus

Gaza that has nothing to do with Hamas but Iran is going back they will be cheering on Iran because the person who was speaking when they you know they they interrupted him with deaf to America he was a pro-Iranian he wasn't talking about Hamas so he was quoting Khomeini so that's my point.

And all three of those myths have been dispelled.

And

it really says to all of us, if you're listening, we need to radically

recalibrate our border.

The left, it's not even close.

There's no

dispute.

There's no ambiguity.

They opened the border to get in 10 million people.

from all around the world, but preferably from the southern hemisphere, who were poor and wanted redistribution and came from illiberal states, and they brought them in here deliberately.

This was what Majorkis was doing.

This is what Biden was doing.

This is what they were all doing, because under their new system of voting, they feel that they will register millions of them through DMV, motor voting, automatic ballots, ballot harvesting, third-party harvesting, ballot curing.

And anybody who objects will be called, as I have, a racist and a xenophobe and an advocate of the great replacement theory, even as they brag about their new Democratic majority.

So you better re-examine that because we're letting a lot of people in that

don't have good intentions.

And then we have to really look at student visas.

If these people are on student visas and they come over here with these lavish and they chase people into a library, or they go into a home of a law dean and take it over

and grab a microphone and try to disrupt things, then they should just be, the student visa should be canceled and they should go back home and try that in Gaza or Syria or Lebanon or, you know, they can try it in,

I don't know, Libya, try it in Morocco, see what happens.

Right.

Or maybe,

I don't know.

I mean, I was in Libya and I was very careful with what I said.

I had two minders that were kind of attached to me when Qaddafi was there.

And I was told very carefully, do not say certain things about Mr.

Qaddafi.

Because I said,

I write two columns.

Please do not say certain things about Mr.

Qaddafi.

And if I had written or said something in Libya, they'd kill me at that time.

And

that's just the way it is.

So it's very hypocritical to come over here and abuse the First Amendment and then

say that this is a rotten country.

And I don't think they're going to recover from that.

And this is all on top of

throwing blood at the Lincoln Memorial, defacing the wall around the White House, the Veterans Cemetery in Los Angeles, shutting down bridges, going into St.

Patrick's, tearing down pictures of Jews.

Everybody's tired of it.

They're just sick of it.

And if you want to protest

for Hamas, fine.

Go ahead and do it.

Just do it peacefully.

Get a permit.

Don't shut down traffic.

And,

you know, if you want to call for the genocide of Jews and say, from the Palestine, just accept the level, the label of who you are.

I don't understand.

They are such bullies.

The woman was just almost crying

when the dean's wife tried to take the microphone.

We can't do that.

I have a right to come into your home and disrupt everything, scream and yell at you, call you names, make anti-Semitic posters.

Who do do you think you are?

I'm a resident of the United States.

You have no right inside your home to tell me that I can't come in, burst in, take it over.

So there you have it.

It would be nice, Victor.

It's even as a premeditative action

on the,

in general, foreign students coming to state colleges.

paid for by the taxpayers of the states who cannot, their own children then cannot attend the colleges because there's so many full tuition paying foreigners coming.

And it would be nice to see a state like Texas or where you have the control of the governor's office and the legislature to stop it.

It's worse than that.

It's worse than that.

I taught 20 years at the California state system.

And we had one of the world's top hydrology departments and we had dozens, hundreds of subsidized students from the Middle East.

And they paid,

they didn't get it.

They paid, they were money makers for the campus.

And then we had hundreds of students that were not legal.

And we had thousands that were from out of state.

And guess what?

The kids that were U.S.

citizens out of state had to pay out-of-state tuitions.

The people who were illegally in California did not.

And

then,

you know, foreign students, I had, I was very friendly with foreign students in the Middle East.

I was always very fair.

I had a lot of students in my GE classes, and I got to know one guy very well.

He was a very wealthy person.

I won't name the country he was from, but it was in the Gulf.

He had beautiful girlfriends.

He had a lot of money.

He had a nice sports car.

He was studying water engineering, hydraulic engineering, irrigation engineering.

We had a great program at Cal State.

And then when 9-11 came,

I was in the air on the way to Hillsdale College to get election.

I was locked down in the Fresno airport.

I came back and I went to campus late that day,

and

he came in.

He looked like he was lost.

He said, what do I do?

This person,

these people come to my country.

This is not who I am.

They're going to kill me.

I said, no, they're not.

Nobody's that crazy.

Just go back, come in, don't.

Don't editorialize.

Americans are good-hearted people.

They're freaked out right now, but they're not going to go after you.

And so over the weeks, he was very friendly, very friendly.

Okay.

So the semester ended, and he chose to go back in January to his country.

You know what he sent me?

He sent me an email.

Dear Professor Hansen,

best regards, and may you be as warm as the ashes in Manhattan.

Oh, my God.

And he said,

we were hiding in our basement because we thought a missile was coming still.

This is four months afterwards.

And he said, now that we're out, you should be as warm as the ashes in Manhattan.

Later, I was told, I showed somebody, he said, that was a popular slogan in this particular country among radical Islamists.

Well, Victor, let's shift a little bit here.

Donald Trump

had a press conference with Speaker Mike Johnson Johnson

this past week at Mar-a-Lago, talks about Republican politics, abortion, and then it's a backdrop also

of issues to Trump's other actions.

He was in Atlanta, Trump's rising image with America's minority community.

Let's get your thoughts on all that, Victor, after these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor

mentioned it earlier while Biden was saying

don't.

Donald Trump was out in force in many places.

He had a big fundraiser a few days ago.

He had one in Atlanta.

He was in Atlanta roaming the streets too.

Not really, but he went to Chick-fil-A and a really, I think, powerful imagery of a stop there and meeting

a bunch of black college students.

The report seemed really, really well.

Trump was also at Mar-a-Lago where he had a press conference with Mike Johnson.

And it's seen, he said, I stand with the speaker.

Kind of seemed like a warning shot to Marjorie Taylor Greene and

Matt Goetz and others who seem to be fixated on kneecapping whoever the speaker is at the time.

So we have that, Victor.

And then then also some polls have come out.

Minority support for Trump is on the increase.

We've talked about this before, but it's the

trajectory seems

to continue to be up.

One poll has 30% of black men supporting Trump.

The Chick-fil-A visit really seemed to show

an

interest in Donald Trump from young black women, even.

So all this is happening, Victor.

A big stew, your thoughts on it.

Well,

Donald Trump does not have the firebrands around him.

If you look at his inner circle, and there's been articles written about it, that they're afraid that they're too sober and judicious.

And there's two things going on with Donald Trump.

He knows in his head that the degree to to which he sounds reasonable, he doesn't tweet bird brain or da-da-da-da-da,

that he wins over suburbanites, minorities, independents, and all the millions of people who are furious at what Joe Biden has done for the country, but don't vote Republican.

They are looking for a reason to vote for Donald Trump.

Okay.

He knows that.

So 75% of the time, he does just what you say.

He's the voice of reason.

He's the voice he tells Marjorie Taylor Greene, you know,

I'm the victim of VISA.

Look at Kevin Kleinsmith.

He went after Carter Page with a forged document.

I know

basically Comey and McCabe lied about the steel dossier

and claimed it had validity, and they used that to spy on my campaign and almost destroyed it.

But

the most important thing is we don't lose the House.

So if you have an internal agreement with Speaker Johnson, you handle it, but you don't lose what was at seven or eight people, and now it's down to one or two because of these crazy defections where people just quit their term and go into private employment and give up their seat.

And we have no margin of error.

And if we lose the House, before the election, we're going to look like idiots, independents are going to think we can't govern.

And all of these investigations of Hunter Biden are the investigations that stop,

that we've stopped, it's all over with.

And that crazy Adam Schiff will be right back at it as he runs for Senate, and he will go after me and after me.

So just cool it.

We'll see if it works.

So that is a,

he's acting very smart.

But his heart,

the other quarter of him says, well, wait a minute.

I'm going to spend a billion dollars on these crazy suits, fines, and legal fees.

I'm going to be in court.

Look at Alvin Bragg.

The federal attorneys didn't want to even prosecute it.

I have a perfect right if I feel that there's someone going to disclose information about me that I don't believe is true or she thinks is true.

I ask her for a non-disclosure.

I did it 2006, Jack, 18 years ago.

And so the Hillary Hillary campaign,

they dragged that up and they heard about it.

So he asked for a non-disclosure.

The incident was 2006.

So in 2016,

eight years

ago,

he did it.

It was nothing wrong.

Nobody thought it was anything wrong.

So then

people said, well, Alvin Bragg is going to run for Manhattan.

I'm going to go out.

And the federal attorney said, well, there's nothing there.

We're not going to, you can do it.

And anyway, if the rule was, it's the statue of limitations.

You know, this is at that time, it was six years ago.

So what did they do?

They got a left-wing judge and they said, well, there's COVID.

Prosecutor Bragg, you're absolutely right.

We're going to give you an extension.

How much do you need for COVID?

Oh, we need at least a year.

Okay.

Then it's no statue of limitations because I'll say it was COVID.

You couldn't do anything.

I didn't know that justice stopped during COVID.

Surely he didn't in a lot of places.

Apparently it did in New York.

So then they violated the statute of limitations.

Then they claimed, and it's a misdemeanor.

It's a misdemeanor if you don't report a,

if you do believe that a non-disclosure was not to protect his family or the embarrassing accusation that he had committed adultery, but it was only for his campaign, then the fact that he didn't report is a misdemeanor.

It's like Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama got fined over $300,000.

Hillary got fined, I think, over $100,000.

They're misdemeanors.

And Clinton and Obama both got fined.

Well, then they had to get it in, bootstrap it into a, he's not even a federal prosecutor.

So then he said it violated state law and because he altered a document.

That's a misdemeanor.

Then he said, well, if you alternate it,

if you

I don't know what the word is, not forge, but if you change or you

add something or subtract something from a document or it doesn't, it's not, you alter it, it's not quite what it should be,

it's still a misdemeanor.

But if it's done so to commit a felony, so he said he was going to commit a felony, but he didn't say what the felony was.

It was the intent to commit a felony.

So that's where we are.

And he campaigned.

He said, if you elect me, I've already sued him

a hundred times.

That was a lie.

He's only sued him 50.

And elect me and I'll go after Donald Trump.

And

feds wanted nothing to do with it.

There he is.

And then the Biden people supposedly, allegedly, have had people consult with him.

He's hoping he gets a Manhattan anti-Trump people of color jury.

He demagogues, gets into evidence that Trump is a racist.

He's going to do this to you.

And he gets a conviction.

And that's where we are.

No statute limitations, no real crime.

You can't tell us what the crime was, never been done before.

Just like Letita James, it was successful.

I think it will be successful because Alvin Bragg is crazy, the judges are crazy, and the jury pools will be crazy.

And a lot of it is pushed on and enhanced by the left and the Biden administration.

I don't know what the effect will be

other than the money he must spend and the time he must waste.

I don't know what the effect will be on voters.

What they really want, Jack, is one thing.

They just want one thing.

MSNBC, NPR, PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, one thing.

They want to be able to say that Donald Trump is a felon.

Felony, felon Donald Trump.

Felon Donald Trump.

They don't mind felons.

I mean, they'll interview Alvinetti as a felon in jail if he can say something bad they think about Trump.

Michael Cohen's a felon.

And

he's their hero.

He's on TV all the time.

But they really want to say this guy is a felon.

That's what it's all about.

And

I don't know.

They always give it themselves away.

When you read these articles in the mainstream media or hear them,

they don't ever say that he's guilty of the charges.

They always say it caught up with him.

It was bound to happen, meaning we're going to indict him for something for the last 50 years that he should have been guilty of.

Yeah, no, you wake up sometime and

you ask yourself, this isn't the United States.

It really isn't.

When you think

Hunter Biden is not,

most of his tax charges were dropped because of the statute of limitations.

And yet Eugene Carroll was able to go back.

to 19, I don't know, she didn't know the year, 1994, 95, 96, because the state legislature, a radical left-wing legislature, got them to pass an exemption for one year of the statute of limitations on accusations of sexual assault just to get Donald Trump.

And then we see here the judge, just to get Donald Trump, lifted the statue of limitations, supposedly for COVID.

I don't think that happens anywhere else.

No.

And they didn't do it.

They didn't do it for Hunter.

They didn't say, well, we have to lift the statue of limitations because there was COVID and we couldn't prosecute him.

So

when you look at the asymmetry and all of the Letita James, Fannie Will, all of the stuff that's going on,

and you know what, and the whole idea now that there's a precedent that if you're president of the United States and you commit a felony by removing classified documents and

you admit so on tape and the person that you admit it to destroys the tape and tries to tamper with evidence and the special prosecutor concludes that you did commit a felony by removing classified documents and the defenses, but you're too demented.

In other words, you couldn't work at a 7-Eleven, you couldn't be a lawyer, you couldn't operate, you couldn't drive a truck, but you can be president of the United States and be demented.

Right.

And that's what.

Well, don't forget he did drive a truck, Victor.

He drove an 18-hitler.

So he told us.

Hey, Victor,

let's

get into

some of these figures and incidents

relating to America's minority voters.

And we'll do that right after these important messages.

Back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

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Victor, my friend, minority support for Trump is increasing, 80%, excuse me, 30% of black men.

And the responses from, I think the woman's name is Michaela Montgomery at the Trump's Chick-fil-A stop.

I didn't, you know, this,

You see evidence of this, these numbers, and again, we've talked in the past also from Hispanic community.

And yet the left and even now the Drudge Report diligently pressing polls that make you think that, you know, Biden seems to be

coming close to Trump again.

Anyway, Victor, your thoughts on anything in general, the political race and the minority community?

Something's wrong.

Something is wrong because

let's go back, say, to January, February, March.

Donald Trump in the national poll was leading Biden by three to four points.

And in all the swing states, he was two to three and more in places like Arizona and Georgia, Nevada.

And then these polls came out

that black America might go beyond the 12% traditionally of a Republican for Republican and might because of the black male vote especially could get up to 20%.

Then these crazy polls came out that not only Latinos were going to go above their 35 to 40 percent

percentage for a Republican Trump, but he was leading.

Okay.

Well, if 13 percent of the population is black or 12 to 13 and

13 to 15 is minority Latino.

So you've got 25% of the polling basis has made radical shifts, but the time that this is being reported, Donald Trump is losing in the national.

So there can only be one or two explanations.

He's massively hemorrhaging among suburban women, independents, and white liberals.

I don't see any evidence of that.

Or the polls are just completely crooked.

Or the polls that show that he has this black and Latino surge are inaccurate.

But they're not, they're mutually exclusive.

What's going on?

Why are black and Latinos

reconsidering voting for Biden?

Three reasons, Jack.

Number one,

they don't care about the inflation rate.

They're just like me.

Right.

Just like anybody.

If somebody tells me today the inflation rate is 1% or what it really is, 3.5%,

I don't care.

All I care about is I go to the store

and I want to buy a can of dog food.

And before Biden took office, it was 79 cents and now it's $2.30.

Or before Biden took office,

I saw a piece of plywood and it was,

you know, $12 and then it went up to $90.

And now I'm supposed to be happy that it's $35.

So

he looks at inflation like somebody would look at obesity.

You weigh 130 pounds, you go in an eating binge, you weigh 210,

and then you go down to 211, or you only, I should correct that.

You're at 210, you go up to 212.

And you say, well, I only gained two pounds.

I'm doing pretty well.

Well, no, you gained 170.

And that's what he doesn't get, that you can't lie to people and say your mortgage rates are three times higher.

Your car insurance is double.

They're canceling your house insurance.

And things are great because the inflation rate is only three and a half.

It doesn't work because it affects people on gas and food.

That's all people.

I talked to a guy yesterday, came out, he was putting a gutter on the house.

That's all he talked about.

Buying a house, can't afford it.

Interest rates are high.

Gasoline, he has a truck has 85,000 miles.

Victor, have you seen the price of new trucks?

Yes, I have.

You know, the price of used trucks is even high.

They've gone up 25%.

Home insurance you just mentioned, Victor?

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

Have you seen your home insurance lately?

It's staggering.

I helped my daughter buy a home.

And it's an ESCO.

I paid out of the ESCO account.

I have a big mortgage on that place.

And it doubled.

They just wrote me a note and said basically that the money I pay every month is not going to go as much to the principal or interest, but it's doubled the insurance rate.

Then I had a home in the Sierras that I've had for 16 years.

16 years.

It's never had a fire.

Across the street has a fire hydrant right across the street from my house.

And

300 yards away is the fire department.

that's been upgraded with two big trucks.

And we had the aspen fire three years ago that burned most of the kindling all around so there's no wood left if you did have a fire.

And every year when I get snow damage, I do one thing, Jack.

I go up myself and get on the roof or I get a friend or I hire somebody to help me.

And we do all the, when all of the facade came off because of snow, the concrete rocks, I have a rock facade.

It all fell off because of the ice just went like a knife and cut it off.

I repaired it all myself.

It took me three weeks.

You know why?

Because I did not want to file a claim because I knew

I got a letter in February.

It said, sorry, Mr.

Hansen, on April 1st, your insurance is canceled.

So I called my agent.

I said, no, no problem.

There's 20 or 30.

No, there's not, Victor.

Have you been keeping track?

There is no people who want to insure in the foothills.

Why?

Well, Biden doesn't fight fire.

I mean, Newsom won't fight fires, apparently.

They don't do it in California.

And I asked another insurance, not this person, but another person, he says, California has one of the highest false claims.

Whatever the reason is, it's happening everywhere.

And so

there's no insurance.

There's company.

You know what I'm doing now?

I'm paying double the premium.

I have 70% of the coverage, and the deductible went from $1,000 to $15,000.

And it's a state socialist program that is way overextended.

If there was a big fire, I'd never collect.

And that's everything, car insurance.

And,

you know, I think what's happening also,

it's not just the inflation, but it's the retarded or slow reaction to the destruction of social life in America.

And by that, I mean, if you've been watching

Bath and Bed or Bed and Bath or whatever it is went broke, if you saw that dollar outlet went broke, if you see that Walmart, Target are reporting smaller profits, they all say the same thing.

There's been an epidemic of shoplifting and theft, especially at places like Home Depot and Lowe's.

There has been an epidemic in California for a long time of hit and run.

At one point, LA County had almost half of all accidents were hit and run.

And I think what I'm trying to get at is when you're letting all these people back on the street and there are thousands of them and they're shoplifting and stealing and they are committing fraud where they hit people and they don't, you know, they just run into somebody and they take off or they kill, they leave this, the insurance companies are left with the bill.

And they've decided, especially in states like California, We're not going to insure you.

There's too much regulations.

The cost of replacement is too high.

If your house burns down,

it's in California, they have so many new regulations, it'll cost a fortune that we don't want to pay to rebuild the same house.

If you've got a car, you've got a good chance of getting hit in the parking lot, or you've got hit on a road, and the guy who did it will have no insurance and flee.

And we're stuck paying for it, even if it's not your fault.

So, we don't want to do it anymore.

If we're going to do it, we're going to charge you a lot of money.

And that's what's happening.

There is a cost for all of these social experimentation.

And, you know,

it's starting to saturate.

I mentioned to Sammy, I had to go to a specialist.

I used to go there.

There were three or four people in the embers.

There were

30 in the waiting room.

You used to get 15 minutes, you get two minutes from the specialist.

And I should have had

a test for this particular problem.

Every six months, I begged him.

No, I had no time.

I haven't had one for two and a half years.

And

this is happening all over America.

You take in 10 million people and you just put them, and they're all destitute with a myriad of health problems, and you throw them in 10 San Francisco's into all over the United States, and they have no money.

There's going to be a problem with the schools, with the health care system, with the insurance system, everything.

And then you have an ideology that you would superimpose of basically radical redistribution, socialism, and no accountability.

There's no accountability.

And how does the state react?

I mentioned to Sammy, Jack, we have 14 million households that have power in California.

Four million of them.

Four million of them have not paid their bills.

Think about that.

That's

you know, 30%.

Okay.

So what do we get today?

We get a notice that if you're a PG ⁇ E customer, you get a surcharge based on your income.

So for me,

it will be a little over, it'll be about $1,100 a year.

I have to, about $96 a month.

I have to pay.

If I don't use one kilowatt of electricity, I have to pay.

That's insane.

It's based on my income.

You go into a store and you're going to have to pay a dollar more for milk because you're richer than anyone else.

Yes, because

the state will not enforce shoplifting laws and everybody is hemorrhaging.

And how do you pay if you go into a store?

You have to pay more.

So the state,

this state, has about 10 million people who have come illegally in the last 30 years.

And we've got, San Diego is now the greatest port of entry for illegal immigrants.

You bring in thousands and thousands and thousands of people.

Well, they have to brush their, you know, they have to turn on the lights.

They have to watch TV.

They have to turn on the heat.

Who pays for it?

And they're not paying.

And I don't mean they just came in today.

I'm talking about they came in last year, the year before, five years, but they're not making it.

And so they want television.

They want what anybody else naturally wants, but they don't have the money.

And under our system, you can't cut the power off.

That would be too cruel in a socialist country.

So they have to come.

And then PGE is billions of dollars behind in infrastructure.

They've been sued because their power lines cause forest fires.

So where do they get the money?

They get the money.

The state's $76 billion

in an annual deficit in arrears.

So the only way they can do it, they say, well,

I know we have $4 million, but

there is

10 million or so that are paying their bills.

And we've told them to be very, very careful and

don't use electricity, but they pay a lot.

And you know what?

We'll come up with two ideas.

Number one,

get those guys that make over 50 for one group, the guys that make over 100 for another, and then really stick it to the guys that make over 150.

And then

let's just recalibrate the whole solar thing.

So you only get so much, you got so much from the state credit into the grid.

Well, you didn't pay for the grid.

PGE's broke, we're broke, so we're really, really going to change the

credit rating on solar-generated power on your wealth.

And they have destroyed the California solar industry.

Because it doesn't make sense.

The payoff went from three to four years to six to seven.

It's about 11 now or 12, if that.

And again, it's all because of socialism.

And this country, I don't,

you know, when everybody says, well,

why aren't we respected abroad?

Or

why will it take seven years to replenish javelins?

Or

why don't we have any 155 millimeter artillery shells?

Why do we have to take all of Israel's and send them to Ukraine?

It's because we don't have the money to do any of that anymore.

Because we're spending trillions of dollars on redistribution.

We have enormous poverty in this country.

It's just amazing.

I can't believe it when I see it.

Yeah.

You see these or hear these kind of Baghdad Bob economic reporters, everything is great.

As you mentioned before, like the inflation rate, they spin it like not up that much.

And these job numbers, Victor, that come out, oh, 330,000 new jobs, but they're mostly part-time jobs and they're mostly, yeah.

I think I said to Sammy, I go down to this cut rate gas place a mile and a half of my house.

I get in line.

All the other gas stations are empty.

This one is,

you can get gas for 5.55 when it's six or something.

And you wait and you wait and you wait.

You get in line and the people park the car ahead of you.

They go in to pay cash.

So if they've got a 20 gallon tank, tank, they don't have $120 to put on a credit card.

Their credit cards are maxed out.

So they go in and get $20 or $30.

Then they realize that they're not very getting.

So, you know, they fill it up.

They look in their wallet.

I've watched it happen.

And they go back in.

And they go, you know what?

I got another $10.

I want to get a gallon and a half or something.

They come back, they do it, and then they scratch their head.

Yeah, I'll go put another $20 in.

And they're not acculturated to the idea of how expensive it is.

And they don't have credit cards anymore.

And they're maxed out.

So you can just sit there for 20 minutes.

You look around

the three pump aisles

and there's not a driver in there.

There's cars and they're all in paying cash.

And they do it.

They come back and go back and go back and go back.

It's something, it's very strange what's happening.

This is a third world country with the veneer of a first world.

It really is.

And then you've never seen, it's not just that I'm old now, but when you think of the epidemic of anti-Semitism and open season on Jews, and people right in the main street saying death to America, and Khomeini was right, that this is a rotten country, and not one person in the Democratic Party will say anything until 48 hours when they're forced to, and then only half of them will.

And you see this crime wave.

And, you know, it's another thing is

we're in a crime wave in the inner city, but if anecdotal evidence is correct, it's inordinately more than the demographic of African-American males.

And you can't talk about it.

You just simply can't talk about it.

We just had a cop killed in Tennessee.

And we had somebody tragically kill an African-American young man in Chicago.

But everybody was saying the police shot him, I think, 93 times.

They didn't say there was four policemen, and

they left out apparently the key detail that he shot first with a clip of

11 shots.

So if you're being shot at and you hear 11 shots and you're a policeman, maybe you'll just shoot 11 or 12 times back.

And maybe if there's two, that's, you know, 25.

And if there's three, maybe you're up to 75.

And if there's four, maybe up to 90 shots.

You can't tell everybody, hey, I'm the one who's shooting.

I hear 11 shots.

I will shoot 20.

Make sure I hit him.

They're not going to, you don't communicate that way.

There's four of you.

So

I guess what I'm saying is that

when you can't even discuss it, I get back to that crazy exchange between Bill Maher and

Ann Coulter, who's pretty inflammatory.

And she said that there was a case of a transgender person, the Tennessee, I guess it was.

And then there was another one.

And she said, Well, they didn't mention the perpetrator.

They always mention the perpetrator if he's white, male.

Right.

So it has to be either a transsexual or it has to be a minority.

And he got very angry.

And it turned out that in both cases, she was absolutely right.

She's right.

Guy Benson just wrote a piece on Town Hall.

Did you hear who planted a bomb at an Alabama Republican's office?

Now, you're going to read it on Town Hall and other places, but you're not going to see it on CBS News that the guy who planted the bomb was such a transgender crackpot weirdo.

I know.

It's just funny.

It's so funny how this

wealthy

elite in the media

that's intermeshed with government.

If you look at the power marriage, I talk about them in the dying citizen.

The people who run NBC, CBS, I mean, are on TV every night.

They're all intermarried with politicos.

the Jin Sockies of the world.

All of these people, or they themselves go back and forth, the bicosto elite.

And when you think about what they, they have taken it upon themselves to just censor the news and not tell the truth

on the premise that the people are stupid, they're ignorant, they're volatile, and they know what's best for them.

So they will get angry if you tell us about the shooter who was transgendered and had a manifesto.

We can't read it.

You're not capable of digesting that.

If we tell you in New York that the perpetrators who are hitting young women in the face are largely African-American,

you can't handle it.

Or the people who have been shooting police are African-American.

You can't handle it.

You're racist.

And it's a very dangerous thing to do that

because

that was the theme of a lot of Orwell's work.

Big Brother decides how to filter the news to control a particular narrative.

Yeah, you can't handle the truth is the

line from the movie that's the motto for these.

And it's counterintuitive because Donald Trump, who's pretty vocal about what's going on, is getting

a higher number of black voters according to polls than Mitt Romney, than John McCain, than George Bush, than Bob Dole, than

any other prior Republican, by being candid because When you talk to African Americans or you see them interviewed, they want people to tell the truth because

they have to live with it every single day.

They're being preyed upon by a criminal age group of young men between 13 and 30

who are inordinately committing crimes against them and others.

And they only get attention.

People get angry when they hit a white victim, but they're saying, I want this stopped.

And Trump knows that.

And he's authentic, and he talks to them about things like that.

And everybody said he's racist.

But I, you know, it's just it's a lot more racist to say, to say, keep you all in chains, you know, mentality is a lot more racist.

Or you ain't black, or hey, boy, or you're the first articulant white person that ran for president.

Yeah.

Or you're going to create an urban jungle, all that stuff that Biden.

Biden is, I hate to say it, I was going to use,

he is the most

pathetic and dangerous president we've had in a long, long time.

By a long, long time, you mean ever.

I would agree with you.

He makes Bill Clinton look like Socrates.

Makes James Buchanan look like the pillar of moral rectitude.

Yes, he does.

He does.

He's just,

he's just, if you wanted to destroy the country,

you couldn't have done a better job.

I wrote that column when we talked about 11 ways to destroy the country.

If you did the same thing with 10 ways to start a war, you couldn't do a better job.

Couldn't.

Well, Victor,

we're at the end of our tether here, time-wise.

You've been terrific.

I've got to make a thing or say a thing or two.

One is to remind

our listeners, especially our new listeners, about your website, thebladeofperseus, victorhanson.com.

Folks should visit it.

You can subscribe, and the reason for that is Victor writes two to three exclusive pieces a week for The Blade of Perseus.

They're called Ultra articles.

They'll have a little tag on it.

By the way, links to all of Victor's other writings, American Greatness, syndicated columns, archives of these podcasts, archives of his other appearances.

Links to his new book, which will be out in a few weeks, The End of Everything.

How Wars Descend into Annihilation.

You should pick it up, folks.

By the way, Victor's most recent series is called From Rural to Surreal,

a Once Small Farm, Farming Became Latifundia.

So

I think that's part six on that.

Anyway, VictorHanson.com is a web address.

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

I write Civil Thoughts, a free weekly newsletter for the Center for Civil Society at Amphil.

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It comes every Friday in your in your mailbox.

And lots of people comment on these podcasts, particularly at iTunes and Apple, where you can rank the show zero to five stars.

And nearly everyone gives Victor five stars.

Although I saw a grumpy person or two lately with less than five.

We should use one of those as a topic for one of the shows when you're away, Victor.

There are people who leave comments also at your website and the articles there.

And I'm going to read one because I've been accused, Victor, you believe it or not, that I do not spend enough time looking at the content, the comments at the Blade of

Perseus.

And here's one from,

well, we look at them all, but I just, you know, I haven't put that many many out here at the end of the show.

But here's one from Jarislaw Martiniuk.

I hope I said that right, Jarislaw.

And

it's about a comment on your interview with Benedict Bekeld about his book,

Western Self-Contempt.

And he writes, Jarislaw writes, thanks for interviewing Bekel.

Bravo, I read his brilliant book.

It is a lucid explanation of the oikophobia, I don't know if I said that right, phenomenon and the self-loathing prevailing in the West.

So, folks haven't heard that yet.

That's uh, you'll go on the Victor's website and you will see the link to that podcast.

Terrific interview, Victor, you've been terrific today.

Uh, thanks for all the wisdom you shared, and thanks, folks, for listening.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.