Protesters, Withdraw, and Impeachment

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Hello, everybody.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show, and this is our Friday news roundup.

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

You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com, and it's called The Blade of Perseus.

Please come join us.

We have a lot on the agenda today.

Again, this is the news roundup, so we'll be looking first at the Biden administration, Palestinian protesters, and Israel, and then we'll turn to

the new testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Afghanistan.

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

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Welcome back.

So we've got lots going on in the news.

As always,

this week is no different from any other, but we have a lot of issue, a lot of discussion or a lot of

political play over Gaza.

And we have

protesters in Dearborn who were yelling death to America and death to Israel, and other protesters who went into the congressional building to protest.

And then right alongside that, we see the Biden administration who seems to be responding to these protests and pressuring Netanyahu to protect Gazan civilians if they're going to invade and deal with Rafa.

And then at the same time with this pressuring that seems very anti-Israel to be saying, no, they support Israel.

And I don't know what to make of it, Victor.

What do you make of it?

Well, as far as the protests go, I mean, they were quoting that odious line from Malcolm X.

And I don't know why everybody still canonizes Malcolm X.

I mean, this is the quote that this Bazi guy, the speaker, reiterated.

He said, we live in one of the rottenest countries that has ever existed on this earth.

Well, that begs the question, right?

If it's so rotten, Sayonora, why don't you just go back to Iran or wherever you come and you could have a nice country?

But

they were screaming death to America.

Death to America means death to Americans.

So here you have this quarter million community, and I know the mayor and all the people waited.

They waited about 24 hours, and they said, we didn't authorize this.

And then they thought, uh-oh, people are criticizing us that we didn't condemn it.

So then they came out and said, a video emerged.

A video emerged?

No,

there were hundreds of people there.

They had a huge rally in your city.

It wasn't a video that

chanting statements that were unacceptable.

What do you mean, unacceptable?

They were vile and odious, and they called for the murder of your fellow Americans.

Mr.

Abdullah Hamoud, this is the person who put this out.

And then he said, Dearborn is a proud American, proud of America.

Okay.

And then they have a video of a huge protest.

I mean, it was huge.

Huge.

The Dearborn community stands for peace and justice for all people.

We are proud.

No.

Not when you people go out and say death to America and not when you say river to the sea.

That's not peace and love to everybody.

And what I'm getting at is this.

We have been six months of this.

They've shut down the Manhattan Bridge.

They shut down the Golden Gate Bridge.

They desecrated the Lincoln Memorial.

They desecrated a veteran cemetery in Los Angeles.

They've stormed into the Capitol Rotunda.

I thought that was a felony and you went to prison for three years.

They broke up the Senate dining hall.

What have they not done?

They went into St.

Patrick's Cathedral on Easter.

They disrupted Times Square

Christmas

sacraments.

They chased Jewish students at Cooper Union.

They killed a person in Los Angeles on the street.

They broke in, they being these protesters, broke into the dean, the Jewish dean

of UC Berkeley, formerly Bolt Hall Law School.

And what did they do?

He had a party.

I mean, he had a dinner for law students.

So they come in, the Palestinian protesters, they grab a microphone, hijack his event, and they put posters up where he looks like he's

a picture of the dean, very left-wing person.

I wrote an article once supporting him when they went after him as a UC Irvine dean, Zircher Maniski, I think his name is.

But the point is, it looks like a Nazi poster of him with a knife and fork, like he's going to

eat Palestinians or something.

He has little things on his teeth.

So, what I'm getting at is this is so far beyond the acceptable.

And it's gone on because Joe Biden and the Democratic Party

are held hostages by 250,000 Arab Muslim Americans in Dearborn and Michigan, and they think they cannot win the election.

And they are counting on one thing, two things, actually.

America that watches all of this and that polls 65% in favor of Israel versus Hamas doesn't care, and it's not an issue.

And the 7 million Jewish Americans, maybe 8 million,

are so loyal to the Democratic Party that they're going to watch their Democratic president humiliate himself to appease this community.

And

it's really exhibited two general truths, and

it's really exposed two general lies.

The first lie was,

well, we're just against Israel.

We're not anti-Semitic.

No, no.

You're anti-Semitic.

When you go chase Jews into a library or you club a Jew over the head, you don't ask them, were you for Israel or not?

You're doing it because they're Jewish.

When you say river to the sea, you want to kill the Jews.

So in your, and when you say global intifada, what do you mean by that?

There's no Israelis in Europe.

There's no Israelis in Africa.

You're meaning you're going to go after the Jews everywhere.

Number two, you've told us that Hamas is one thing and the people of Gaza are another.

On October 7th, they put out a notice that you would get a bounty.

And somewhere five to seven hundred Gazans spontaneously went in and captured hostages or tried to to get bounties.

And then when the bodies and the hostages were paraded, I didn't see anybody protest.

Did you, Sammy?

No.

I saw people spit on them.

I saw people kick them.

I saw and then when I saw the Poles coming out of the Middle East and coming out of Western pollsters, 70%,

75% support for Hamas.

I don't see anything different than the Hamas Charter and the Hamas revised charter and what they're chanting and yelling about.

People forget that I think it was on day one after

the October 6th, 7th massacre,

they were

chanting 700, meaning

at that point they thought there were only 700 dead.

So they were cheering on the dead.

Everybody should remember there was 20 days between the massacre and between the IDF going into Gaza.

Did people protest

in that period?

Yes.

What were they protesting about?

Were they protesting about the Israelis going in there?

Were they protesting that Gazans had sent 7,000 rockets?

Were they protesting, I don't know, were they protesting that they built three to 500 miles of subterranean tunnels with aid that was supposed to go to the people and the people knew it and didn't do anything about it?

No, they were glorifying the murder of 11 to 1,200 Jewish men, women, and children.

That's what they were doing for 20 days.

And if Israel had not gone on to Gaza, these protests would still be the same, but they would be a little sicker.

Yeah.

And I think that

connecting the dots between that October supporting murderers on October 7th, which is what they do, and

shouting death to America, they would do it if they could.

That's what's seemingly important.

When you have somebody in a public rally in Dearborn and he quotes that this is the most rotten country in history,

and then he says you have to take the whole system down and he says death to America and he's cheered on.

Remember,

he was quoting Malcolm X, and they broke in and start interrupted him, and they came up spontaneously with death to America.

So why is this happening?

And that's what people want to know.

And the answer, number one,

is we have no civic education.

We don't require anybody to know

Star-Spangled Banner, how to salute the flag, the history of this country.

We're told by Joe Biden that illegal aliens built the country.

We're told by a black legislator in Texas that we all owe reparations.

Forget about 700,000 people dying in the Civil War and $20 trillion

in the great society that was

redistributions.

So we don't push back at any of this insanity.

And then we have 9 to 10 to 11 million people that cross the border.

And we have a president who says, I can't do anything.

I don't know if I'm allowed to do anything,

but I will try.

What's the subtext?

The subtext is Donald Trump did it.

He didn't have any new laws.

He didn't have any new appropriations.

He just did it.

He canceled catch and release.

He built the wall.

He made refugee status only applicable if you were in your home country to apply for it.

And he pressured Mexico.

Biden undid every one of those things.

And he can undo them.

And he might do that, although there's a huge caravan in Chiapas that's coming up, apparently on the idea that there's so much pressure now to shut down the border that they want to get here in one last gasp.

So

the other thing that was really strange about what Biden said,

I don't know if I can do this.

Did he say that about student loans?

Well, I want to cancel more student loans right before the election, but the Supreme Court says I can't do it.

Did he say, I don't know if I can do this?

No, he said, we'll find a way to work around it.

So if he wants to do something, he can do it.

He does what he wants.

He's a pathological

prevericator.

Prevaricator, yeah.

Yes, I'm tongue-tied because I got angry.

But the point I'm making is

this whole idea of DEI and tribalism and multiculturalism

and non-assimilation, non-integration doesn't work.

And it leads to something like Rwanda or Sudan

or the former Yugoslavia or Iraq.

It really does, or what you see in Dearborn, where these people's legacy, these people's,

I don't know what it is, their allegiances.

If you're in a crowd and they are yelling death to America and you don't walk out, you don't object, and you're an official and you say, it came to our attention and this was not authorized.

And that's all you can say until you have to correct it and say you, that's not us.

Meanwhile, there's a whole huge

procession of supporters for all of this crap, and you have a Khomeini megaphone stirring up the crowd.

And then you have the President of the United States pandering to these people because he wants to win this state?

Where are the people of Michigan?

Where are the people of Michigan that says, you know what, I was an independent, but I'm not going to vote for any of this.

Let's see.

Let's see what happens.

Yeah, we will see.

Well, Victor, the House is doing investigation, House Foreign Affairs Committee, investigating Afghanistan or finding out about it.

And Samuel Orenson has testified before, and he says, I cannot call the evacuation a success from Afghanistan.

I think.

And he said, but he gave a lot of details about how Americans were beaten, passports burned, people were faced with Sophie choices with their families.

He had tales of mismanagement and incompetence.

And so it's all out there in the media now that this was a round disaster.

Do you think it will affect the election?

I don't know.

I do know one thing: that in 2021, old Joe Biden from Scranton, who was going to unite us, was cruising, even though he inherited a 1.4% inflation rate and a very low unemployment.

He was cruising.

He was about 53%.

Approval, 55%.

And then came Afghanistan.

And people looked at that.

They heard Mark Milley say, that's a righteous strike as they blew up 10 civilians.

And then when they were asked, Well, what about the American contractors?

And what about the 100,000 Afghan people people who helped us?

Nothing.

But we were told that as we flew in refugees, that we had

culturally appropriate food on the plane.

We had a pride flag.

We had George Floyd murals, as I've said.

We had gender studies at the University of Kabul.

We left 100,000 people there, but we were reassured that we were very sensitive people and we had Mediterranean or Afghan suitable food so it was a total disaster was 50 to 60 billion dollars in various munitions weaponry all being marketed all over the Middle East to terrorists and

Mark Milley was

never took responsibility the worst thing about Afghanistan was

After it happened, a number of generals retired, not because they were retiring in protest, but their billets were up.

And suddenly we were starting to hear from them that they had warned Biden.

And Biden was not telling the truth when he said, the military tells me that

we can get out peacefully, safely, with honor.

But my point was this, why didn't they just resign?

Why didn't they...

We're told that generals are always speaking their mind and they're morally superior to us.

They just, did you see the letter?

Some retired generals just weighed in as friends of the court on the immunity issue against Trump.

We had other generals warn us in the Washington Post that Donald Trump is a dictator.

They don't seem to get it.

I don't know what's wrong with the military, the top echelons, but it doesn't do us any good.

for the top-ranking generals that had some knowledge of or involvement in the greatest military humiliation in the United States in a half century to now tell us it was just what we thought it was, a total screw-up.

And you want to say to them, why didn't you tell him,

Mr.

President, if you do this,

it's going to be a disaster and thousands of people are going to die that are our friends.

And I'm going to resign.

Not one of them did that.

And then, did you?

The Ronald Reagan Library has a yearly survey of public attitudes toward the military.

And believe me,

they're not anti-military.

So they word the questions in such a way that

it's hard not to like the military.

And they're

the last two years,

you know what the number of people

told when asked do you have high confidence in the military less than 50 percent 40 i think it was 45 last year it's gone up 46.

there's somewhere 30 to 40 000

000 recruits short wow we watched in 2020 21 22 23 every single recruitment was a pregnant woman in a flight suit, somebody talking about diversity, equity, inclusion.

And you know what?

Have you seen the commercials lately?

Yes, I have.

It's like some big muscular guy's jumping out of a helicopter.

He looks like he has a gun.

And why would that be?

And then they say it has nothing to do with DI.

DEI has nothing to do with the recruitment.

It has a lot to do with it because people feel that if you're going to go into the military and you don't fit a DEI

profile, billet slot, whatever you want to use, you're not going to get promoted, or you might not be retained, or you might be punished.

And they went out, and we go back to that, I'll go back to that 2000,

is it 2021 June testimony of Mark Milley and Lloyd Alice Aston Austin, the chief of naval operations.

They were asked what about white rage, white supremacy, white

privilege.

And they all said, Professor Kendi, we have a reading list.

We're going to go out and find out in the ranks.

Then quietly they did all this finding out in the ranks investigations.

And just this last December, 2023, we got a little tiny mouse squeak.

Beep, beep.

The report's done.

There was no white privilege.

Sorry, we just turned off the one demographic that dies at twice their numbers in the general population in Afghanistan and Iraq and gave them the impression that we thought they were racist.

And just to make sure that we sent the message or not wanted, we kicked out 8,500 of our best people because they did not want to get the mRNA vaccination, most of whom had natural immunity from COVID.

And just so you didn't get the message, We took 10 to 11 to 12 generals retired, and we called the President of the United States a Nazi and Mussolini and a pathological liar.

In the case of General Hayden, he said that he is emulating the tactics of Auschwitz on the border.

In other words, he's a master of death.

And then we had two colonels who wrote an op-ed that's basically called for a coup.

Yeah, and they were talking about Trump.

Yes, talking about Trump.

And then we had a Pentagon lawyer, Rosa Brooks, 11 days,

11 days

into the Trump administration.

Had no idea what it was going to be like.

And she wrote a book, Three Ways to Get Rid of Him.

Impeachment, 25th Amendment, or

Military Coup.

And these are the people who are giving us lectures.

Everything I just said was a violation.

In the case of the generals and admirals, it's a violation.

of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that

applies to retired flag officers.

They're not to disparage the Commander-in-Chief, and yet they keep doing it, and they're doing it today.

They're writing the same thing, they don't get it.

If you're a high-ranking military officer, you do not want to alienate half the country, and you do not criticize publicly.

We should have learned that with MacArthur in

Korea.

We don't do that.

You do it privately.

if you've got a problem.

And believe me, it's not symmetrical.

It's not symmetrical.

When Barack Obama was president,

and

we had a high-ranking general made fun of him to a Rolling Stone reporter, and he said, Joe, bite me.

Do you remember that?

McChrystal.

McChrystal, Stanley Stanley.

That's already out there.

Well, I didn't want to disparate it.

But Stanley McChrystal, what happened?

He was summarily kicked out,

forced to resign.

That didn't happen with Donald Trump.

No.

And they don't get it.

It's not whether you like Trump or do not like Trump.

You cannot be a high-ranking officer and criticize publicly the commander-in-chief.

You cannot be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and on your own freelance and call your Chinese communist counterpart our existential enemy and warn them that if you get a direct order coming from the White House, in your opinion, you diagnose him as unhinged, then you're going to call your Chinese communist counterpart.

And if that had been Joe Biden as president or Barack Obama and it had been a right-wing general who did that, they would have charged him with treason.

They would have convicted him, too.

And so, what I'm getting at is

if you want to know why these polls show that it is 45%

top, that has some

confidence in the military, or a great deal of confidence.

And you want to know why people are not joining, and you want to know why we're losing wars.

We lose wars all the time.

We're losing Afghanistan.

And you want to know why we can't stop the Houthis.

There's something deeply wrong with the military.

It is highly weaponized and politicized at the top ranks.

And it's out of sync with the rank and file.

And when you ask people in military, they say this.

The people aren't joining because they're just too fat.

They're in games.

They take drugs.

They watch video games.

We've got to compete against a full employment economy.

We've done that before, and we've managed.

Yep.

Well, Victor, we need to take a break, and then we'll come back and talk about Majorkis, another person who is skirting his job expectations.

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

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So Victor,

we have Majorkas, who has been impeached in the House, and now the Senate is dragging its feet on

even bringing it to trial in front of the Senate.

What are your thoughts?

Well, he's not going to be convicted because, according to the Constitution, you need a two-thirds vote, and they have a one-vote margin.

But why would they be dragging their feet and violating the Constitution?

Because when the writs of impeachment have been approved and he's formally impeached, and he has been impeached, then the Senate is supposed to, with dispatch, take up the trial.

Now, can I tell you how quickly they took up the trial with the first impeachment of Donald Trump?

How quickly?

Yes, very within days.

And how about the second one?

They impeached him as a private citizen.

They rushed to judgment.

But with Mr.

Mayorkis, they don't want to do that.

And because there are particular senators like Senator Tester from Montana, who has been for open borders.

They all have been for open borders in the Democratic Party.

And now it's polling about 25%.

So he's up for re-election.

We have Mr.

Sheehy here.

Tim Sheehee.

And I think he's going to win.

And Tester is now, does not want to be on record that he did not impeach Majorkas.

But if he does impeach him, that breaks solidarity.

So they're thinking, well, we're just going to delay it and delay it and delay it and try to get, I mean, it's going to be embarrassing for the Democratic Party with these lose-lose decisions.

So these six or seven senators that are in purple states that are up for re-election, it's a lose-lose situation.

If they do not vote for impeachment, that is a de facto approval of Mayorkis' record, which is a deliberately

planned, comprehensive effort to sabotage the border and to destroy federal immigration law and to bring in 10 to 11 million people.

This was all deliberate.

That's why he kept lying and lying and lying and saying the border was secure.

When they get together, they say, you know what?

We took a lot of flack, but we got 11 million people in here.

And under this lax voting law, where you get a mail-in ballot, third-party harvesting, ballot curing, DMV, motor voter, we're going to get some votes.

That's the whole purpose of it.

Short-term, long-term, obviously it's going to help too.

So if you...

If you don't vote to impeach him, a lot of constituents are going to be angry.

If you're going to get really angry, if you vote to impeach him,

then you went against Chuck Schumer.

You went against the President of the United States.

You might get re-elected, but they might take that out on you.

And

that might spread.

So I don't see how they're going to get out of it except by delay, delay, delay.

If I was Tester and I had integrity, I don't know if he does or not, I doubt it, then he should vote no, because that's what his policy has been for three and a half years.

But he doesn't want to be in that position.

I think it's more likely that he will vote to impeach him, because if he doesn't, he's going to lose Montana.

Because people are at it, they're sick and tired of these caravans coming up with

People who look very middle class.

They have clothes, they're not hungry, they're well-fed.

They come in, they don't have a health audit, they don't have a background to audit, they don't have

financial means so that they can be independent and autonomous without reliance on federal support, local support.

They just come and they're breaking the law, and

it's driving people absolutely nuts.

And these officials in a campaign year.

And you know, just as a

sidelight,

I think now, Sammy, we can see with the immigration issue the whole contours of the 2024 campaign.

And we know what the issues for the Democrats are.

I might say we better, we should start by saying we know what they're not going to be.

I'm going to run on, I let in 11 million legal alien.

I got out of Afghanistan just in time for the 9-11 celebrations, the 20th anniversary.

I told Putin that he could come in.

It depends on whether it was a minor or major offensive.

I'm going to run on the idea that I didn't panic and I let a Chinese balloon come through.

I'm going to run on the idea that I am the first American president in modern memory that

forced the Israelis to stop fighting people who slaughtered them and threatened to cut off all their aid.

I'm going to run on this wonderful crime.

It's, you know, it's got a little out of hand, but it's leveling off.

I'm going to run on inflation.

Key staples, they're only 30% higher, rent, food, gas.

I'm going to run on energy.

I tried to stop, stop, stop, stop, stop it.

And then during the midterm, I wanted to start, start, start it.

And then I stopped, stop, stopped it.

And now it's an election year.

I want to start, start, start it.

Maybe I'm going to run on, I don't know.

Can you think of anything they've done that has worked?

No.

You want me to guess what they are going to run on?

I think we know what they're going to run on.

What are they going to run on?

They're going to run on, number one, abortion, abortion, abortion, abortion, abortion.

They want to kill women.

They want to kill women.

They want to kill women.

Arizona Supreme Court went back to the 19th century and outlawed abortion as if the Republican Party did that.

They didn't.

It was a stupid court decision.

Donald Trump has already said that

he's being attacked by Mike Pence and the right wing

because he said it's up to the states.

It is.

That was always the case until Roe federalize it, Roe federalizes the issue.

Now it's back to the states.

And you know, the Democrats, the way abortion works is

if you

go extreme on the right and you have an eight-week ban,

You're going to lose because that means that a young woman doesn't know whether she's pregnant.

She misses one menstrual cycle and she doesn't know the reason and then you're into eight weeks, right?

And maybe she was raped.

Who knows?

It's just,

or

you're, it doesn't do any good to say that only one or two percent are partial birth abortions.

That is, they kill the child in the birth canal.

Because that out of a million, that can be eight to ten thousand

that are being murdered.

Yeah.

And Donald Trump brought that up in 2016 with effect to Hillary Clinton.

And so

what I'm getting at is if the Republicans can, for every time they say you're killing women, if they say, you know what, you're killing children, you're killing a person, and it's not just a few hundred, it's eight, nine thousand a year, maybe not

a small percentage of the million or the 800,000 that are being aborted.

And then we're saying we are for the people to decide themselves

what they want to do.

And I think they can finesse that.

That's going to be one issue.

The second is Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, January 6th, January 6th, January 6th.

Alvin Bragg, Letita James,

all the cases.

All the cases, bankrupt, bankrupt, drain his

campaign reserves, take his time, tie him up, gag orders.

do what we can't do at the ballot.

Just like the foiled attempt to get his name off the ballot.

So that's the second.

Maybe they think they can crush him psychologically or bankrupt him.

So we have, and then the third is to demagogue and warp and manipulate the system to jack things up right before the third, I should say, right before the election.

And what would that be?

Well, Mr.

Obador said that he needs 20 billion and he'll cooperate.

Did you notice this week that Mr.

Obador had security people along the border?

Oh, has he started?

And he's either getting money from Biden or he's scared to death that Donald Trump is going to be elected and the whole thing will shut down.

So he wants to show everybody that Biden and he are cooperating so Biden gets reelected.

Yeah, I think it's option B.

Yes.

And I think Biden is manipulating us.

by dealing with Obador, even though he's basically the most anti-American Mexican Mexican president we've seen in, I don't know, 100 years.

That's one thing he's done.

Trust me, he will not put one drop of oil back in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that he drained before the midterm.

He took it way down.

I heard it was down to 17% just recently.

He did that.

It was up to 80% when he came in.

And he will probably drain that 17% if he has to.

I know.

He's pumping now more gas and oil than Trump did.

He doesn't talk about it to his base.

So he's manipulating the border.

He's manipulating energy.

He will go to Venezuela and he will beg them to pump.

He has already told the Ukrainians, do not hit distilleries and refineries,

natural gas, pipelines, oil ports in Russia.

Do not take that oil off the world market because that will get gas up very high right before the election.

And that is one reason why we're not doing anything about Iran.

150 times now, they have attacked Americans.

They've wounded them.

They've killed them.

They've taken over the Red Sea.

And he will not even reply in a muscular fashion to stop the Houthis.

And why is that?

He is deathly afraid that the Iranian oil, three to four million barrels, will cause a supply crunch if it's taken off the market.

Any little indentation.

He campaigned on the idea that the Saudi royal family, remember the word he used, pariahs, were going to have nothing to do with them.

He's quartered them.

He's courting them right now to pump, pump, pump, pump, pump.

So he can, and then

the other manipulation, he just said so.

He wants another multi-billion dollar student loan cancellation.

And there's two things to remember about that.

Number one, when he says I'm going to cancel several billion dollars of student loans, he doesn't tell you where he's going to get the money to do it.

It's again, just printing money, and he doesn't tell you that that is

an entitlement for upper middle class Americans that went to law school, med school.

business school, got BAs.

It's not for Joe Smith that's on a forklift in Bakersfield, who has to pay for it.

And he's going to manipulate the student loan.

So he's going to do energy, student loan, all the things that he screwed up.

He's going to try to use the power of incumbency and the president,

the president's

executive order power, which he says he doesn't know if he can do or not, but he will try to do something on the border.

Well, he does have Executive Order 14019 that says that agencies of the government should, quote, promote access to voting and particularly, quote, people of color populations.

So that's his democratic population.

The fourth thing that he's going to do.

So we've talked about abortion, abortion, abortion, lawfare against Trump.

Trump's a crook, bankrupt him.

Manipulate all these political issues and policies by warping the law.

And the fourth is, of course, voting.

Voting, voting, voting.

We're going to see a blitzkrieg of voter suppression, election denialism, racist, racist, racist, all to get the 70% that will not show up on election day up to 80 or 90 in most of these swing states.

The only problem they're going to have on that count is that

Just as they were surprised in 2016, thought Trump, and then they adjusted by changing the voting laws in 2020.

People on the right, and I think Laura Trump's doing a great job at the RNC.

They're onto them now.

And they are trying to play catch-up in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in Arizona, in Nevada, in Georgia, in North Carolina, in Maine, to try to get these states back to their original laws and protocols in which

it wasn't an automatic deal that you just got mailed a registration form, and then the next day you voted by mail, and somebody shouldn't say by mail, somebody knocked on your door and delivered the ballot.

And then, if there was anything wrong with it, you cured the ballot.

There's another wrinkle, too, in these big cities that will be very important in the election:

Pittsburgh, Philadelphia.

I say Philadelphia.

Do you remember in 2012, in one precinct in Philadelphia, Barack Obama bragged that he got 30,000 to one.

Remember that?

Yeah.

One person.

Yeah, one person.

One person out of 30,000.

That's statistically

impossible.

So, my point is that in the inner city, there's going to be a lot of Latino and African-American

ballot watchers, registrars,

government employees who are in charge of

ascertaining the authenticity of mail-in ballots, counting them, et cetera.

And we saw last time that there were accusations that when you say that Donald Trump is a racist, then people had a vested interest and may be looking the other way if there was voting fraud.

But if it's true, and I don't know if it's true, that 30 or 40 percent of the black vote may not go for Biden, either will stay home.

I doubt this is true.

But if it is true, you may have people for the first time

in positions of authority in Philadelphia, in Pittsburgh, in Detroit, in

Atlanta, in Phoenix, in Las Vegas, that might not look the other way because they would be voting for Trump and they would resent very deeply that their colleagues were doing things that were less than transparent.

That's going to be very interesting.

We're going to see a little bit of a foretaste of that when we get into the jury trials, maybe this summer with Alvin Bragg.

And when you see these big city juries and we're told that they're all left-wing and they're minority, majority juries, it'll be interesting to see if he gets unanimous verdicts or how many people on the jury finally say, this is enough.

I've had it.

That'll be interesting.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about the FISA legislation that Mike Johnson, our Speaker of the House, is trying to get through.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

We're back.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You can find Victor at X and his handle is at V D Hansen.

And you can find him on Facebook.

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So come join us there if that's your mode of getting information out.

And Victor, so we Mike Johnson, the new speaker, is trying to get FISA legislation passed, i.e.

legislation that would restrict FISA

warrants and that he feels is going to be strict enough so that they can't spy on Americans.

But of course his critics, and some of them are Republicans, say that the court will the FISA

FISA,

what are they called?

FISA

warrants are still making it possible to spy on Americans.

And so there's a big fight going on between Republicans.

And it looks like, or I've been hearing things said, that Mike Johnson may go the same way as Kevin McCarthy.

And it just is really infuriating for people who are

conservative to see them just bickering and arguing like this.

I think everybody's getting very, very angry.

Whatever differences they have, because we all know that FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that's what I think with the acronym.

But we know that it's corrupt.

We know that it probably does some good, but there's 10,000 people in the FBI that can apply it.

And we saw what Kevin Kleinsmith did when he altered a FISA writ and doctored an email to get Carter Page.

And they let him off with nothing.

When you have people in the FBI like Comey

and who knew the dossier was fraudulent, and so did McCabe, and these people were involved in trying to convince the court that the steel dossier was authentic, so they were lying.

So

you're torn.

You think, well, it has some good,

but it's been abused.

And if it's been abused once, and it was successfully abused in the sense that they emasculated an entire four-year presidency through it.

They'll do it again.

And then the other side says, but we can save it by limiting the number of people who have access to the act

and making, I think they have pretty steep fines.

And you can be fired and sued and fined if you use it for a political purpose.

But that's like saying,

if you don't pay your taxes, you should go to prison, Hunter.

I mean, and that's like saying if you take a classified document,

top-secret document, out, you're committing a felony, Joe Biden.

So

it's not really whether the law, whatever it is on the books, it's the spirit of the law and whether you want to abuse it.

You can abuse any law.

So Johnson was trying to say it's good to use against terrorists.

When we had the firewall between the FBI and the CIA prior to 9-11, it may have led to 9-11.

So let's try to save it, but completely reset it.

And then there's the other

Republican civil liberties purists that said, no, it's rotten.

And

the context of all this, they have one vote, one or two votes to keep the majority.

So my point is this.

Yes, FISA is important,

but you screw this up and you fight with each other over FISA

and you, Marjorie Taylor Greene, leads an insurgency, maybe of five or six people, maybe three, and doesn't, and calls for a vote, and you

lose your majority, then where are you?

You shut down the entire investigation of Joe Biden, Hunter Biden.

You have no majorities on any of the committees and you're done for.

How do they get themselves in this situation?

Because they're not very bright people in the house.

They've got some brilliant people, but the majority are very, very stupid when they attack each other and they try to destroy their own speaker and they don't have a large majority.

And all they did was show the nation they can't govern.

And now they're back at it over FISA.

So yes, there's legitimate arguments on both sides.

Keep it, but reform it radically, or no, it's so far gone, get rid of it.

But that issue does not rank anywhere near keep the majority in the House and unify.

And they can't seem to do it.

And that's their problem.

And meanwhile, if you get sick, they carry you in on a stretcher if you're a Democrat.

Not one House member breaks ranks.

They're like Stalinists.

They have

perfect order.

They're like robots, left-wing robots.

And you know who the really, when you get back to the,

if you do what classicists call Quellum Fortune, you try to search the source of all this,

you start to get back at

Representative Gallagher, Representative Ken Buck, all these people who resigned.

They were elected to serve 24 months, two years.

They weren't elected just to quit.

And you can't tell me whatever lucrative offer they had in the private sector couldn't wait until the January inauguration.

And so they put them in, they squandered that eight or nine person

House member majority and got them no margin of error.

It's 50-50 right now that the Democrats will take over the House before the election.

Especially if they do this again to Mike Johnson.

Well, Victor, speaking of laws, the DOJ has defied a House Judiciary Committee subpoena, and it's over the Biden audio tapes to his ghostwriter, where I think it shows he told him classified information.

And the DOJ says, well, they're not going to come and testify, and they say that because if they bring

these tapes in or allow it into the public, they will be used for political purposes.

The

Republicans bring in the men will be used for political purposes.

Exactly.

We know what the problem is, that Mr.

Hur's team did quote-unquote transcriptions and he looked pretty bad.

Talked everybody his remember he talked about his wife as hot in a bikini.

He started telling all sorts of lies about his career.

Remember

that he was this great lawyer.

It was all made up.

And we don't even know if that's the entire

rant because a lot of it was redacted.

So what the Republicans are saying is, well, Mr.

Hurry, preliminarily you said that he's not going to be indicted

because in your

testimonies that, you know, when you interrogated him, I shouldn't say interrogated him, but when you called him to testify under oath and you made a transcript, it was pretty damning.

It looked like he was either senile or non-composmentes, and he seemed to admit to felonious behavior.

But we don't know if that's the whole thing.

So why don't you just give us us all of the testimonies that you took under oath

and let us decide to what degree the transcriptions that you presented us mirror image those?

And if not, why not?

That's easy.

If Merrick Garland and the Democrats had confidence, they'd say, yeah, we'll give it to you.

The only other explanation is that

when asked

in the transcripts, did you take this file?

He said, to the best of my memory, I may have.

Well, that's what the transcription says.

But it may have sounded, what?

And that's what they're afraid of as well.

Today he was with the Prime Minister of Japan.

And it's just a constant slurry of words.

It's indecipherable.

He's speaking a language unknown to humans.

And it requires a translator.

He also went up the steps the other day and had that little glitch in his gait, even though the steps look like they've been reduced by half.

They look different.

And I don't know if they are or not, but he's got his hoya.

Is that hoka?

Hoka.

Hoka.

Hoka shoes.

Yeah, I have some of those.

With those big soles.

I know.

It's like wearing paddles or something.

Yeah, you could swim in the ocean.

I mean, I wear them and I feel like I'm bouncing up and down like a duckbill platypus or something.

Did you see that they arrested that illegal immigrant influencer and he went to jail?

I thought that was pretty funny.

The five that beat up the policeman, I think, that fled to California.

No, we're talking about the guy who was holding his baby.

I know that, but do you think?

I think the ones that beat up the policeman are out right now.

Yeah, they're in California or something.

But I think they're out.

Oh, and they didn't even do anything.

I don't think they're in jail.

I may be mistaken.

Listeners Listeners can correct me.

But you know, I mean,

just

society is...

I was watching the poor woman that was going up the steps to the Greek Orthodox Church in New York.

So this thud sees her and he runs up behind her.

And then as she's up in the steps, he pushes her down, she fractures her skull, she's in the hospital, she's bleeding, and and he's looting her

purse, nobody's coming to her aid, and then she's struggling, and then the tape ends, and supposedly he was watching her get up.

And as she got up, he had her key, and she went to her car, and he went and stole her car.

And

you've got a president, and you've got people on MSNBC saying there's no problem with crime.

Another thing is that you've got to be very careful, but like you have all these women who say they're being knocked out, you know, and we see the left says, well, it's because of masculinity and toxic masculinity that Trump.

No, the majority, not all, but the majority are African Americans in the big city.

And nationwide, it's 13% of the population.

And they commit interracial crimes, which are very rare.

It's about 8%

of all crimes, violent crimes.

But of those 8%,

they're six times more likely to be the perpetrator.

And in cases of hate crimes, they're overrepresented almost threefold in the demographic.

And nobody talks about this.

Nobody talks about if that had been

an

elderly African-American woman walking up the steps of a church and some young skinhead with a MAGA hat, almost as if Juicy Smolitz narrative had been true.

We know what happened when it was false.

Imagine if it had been true.

He paralyzed the nation with lies.

But if some young African-American

elderly woman had been knocked over by a MAGA and then he stood over her and looted her, we know what happened to the Kevin Covington kids.

They were almost demonized to the point of violence.

You know,

the whole country would be in riot.

mode right now.

And so at some point, you've got to have, you have to, these problems are not going to go away unless you're transparent and candid.

And you have to say, I don't care what you call me.

I'm going to be empirical.

That's why

anybody that,

you know, Heather McDonald, anybody that does that and speaks honestly, it's funny, the left always says, truth to power.

We speak truth to power.

They don't.

They speak lies to power.

And they're obsequious and timid.

She speaks truth to power.

She does.

Yeah, she's a tough woman, that's for sure.

She's an honest woman.

She's just being empirical.

And she's saying the world is crazy, and I'm not.

I'm just going to look at the crime and look at the statistics and see what the problem is

and not try to demagogue it.

Well, maybe the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletes or Athletics has decided to go the way of Heather MacDonald because they've banned transgendered

women from women's sport for the most part.

I guess there's some qualification there, but it's a very tough bar to

overcome.

So basically

they're not going to have it all

in there.

The winning coach in the tournament said that she supports trans athletes,

you know, playing on women's teams.

But you can see what the trans community is doing.

They're looking at this women's basketball and how much attention it got and the elevation in the game.

And now it's almost on par with

men's collegiate basketball.

And it's getting all sorts of publicity and endorsements.

And they're thinking, this is a pretty good thing.

And even though I'm a mediocre basketball player, if I were to trans position and be in women's, it's almost equal to men, at least in basketball.

It's not quite like swimming or tennis.

And so I think what was happening that they tried to preempt that, that they knew there was going to be a surge of trans athletes that wanted to get in on the

money, the glory, and the attention of women's basketball.

And then people said, what would the tournament have been like

Iowa versus North Carolina had there been trans athletes in it?

Yeah.

What would it have been like?

Somebody 6'3, 240 pound, pounding away at people.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, your dog has called us to the end of our podcast today.

And I just, I have one, before he can make us stop, I have one more, one comment.

Very nice.

And it's titled, it's from Apple Podcast, and it's titled, Not Buried in Philology and Etymology.

Professor Hansen, with apologies to the ministry that disdained your vulgar and simplistic use of the

English language, I think he's referring to the F-word comment.

He's suggesting that I use it?

No, he's just saying apologies for somebody having said that to you, I think.

I hope I write for others that greatly appreciate your Churchill-like dialogue with Mr.

Fowler in discussing weekly topics.

Thank you for making subjects understandable for us, mere mortals.

Respectfully, Bruce, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Thank you, Bruce.

We appreciate that.

Grand Rapids.

Beautiful city.

I was there last year.

Yeah.

Oh, get on top of it, Bruce.

In Grand Rapids, you're going to have to turn your state red.

Bruce, you're going to have to get out the vote, Bruce.

You've got an uphill battle.

And I really admire people in Michigan.

It's a wonderful state.

It really is.

I have so many friends there from 21 years at Hillsdale.

But we also, our next podcast,

we're going to resume our literary odyssey, and we need to talk about

skepticism, stoicism,

Aristotle and Plato,

and we need to, I want to talk about the novel to the Hellenistic, but especially the Roman novel.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you, Victor Davis-Hanson, and thanks to our listeners.

You enjoyed it today.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

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