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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host, the star, and the namesake.

That is Victor Davis-Hansen.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow.

at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has an official website.

It's called The Blade of Perseus and its web address is victorhanson.com.

You should be subscribing and towards the end of this episode, I'll tell you why.

We have some breaking or

hot political news.

We are recording on Saturday the 2nd.

This particular episode will be out on Tuesday the 5th.

But yesterday, March 1st, a number of stories broke, particularly the final day in the summary of arguments for the Fannie Willis

scandal.

Can we call it a scandal, Victor?

I think we should.

It's worse than a scandal to paraphrase Tallyran.

That's a blunder.

Yeah,

big time.

I think a messy one, too.

I wonder if any animals were hurt in it.

But we will talk about, get your thoughts on Fannie Willis, the Supreme Court

agreeing to hear the Trump immunity case.

And we have a New York Times Sienna poll just out that shows Donald Trump

expanding his lead over Joe Biden.

We'll get to that and other topics right after these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So, Victor, I guess we should lump those first three

politically things into one.

First off, the New York Times-Sienna poll has Donald Trump at 48, Biden at 43.

Quite newsworthy.

The Supreme Court's decision to hear the case, whether Donald Trump as president had immunity from being prosecuted for things happened while he was president, which

the mere agreement.

by the Supreme Court to hear that has the liberal media,

I should say socialist media, hair on fire.

And then Victor, the final arguments in the Fannie Willis circus.

Victor, take them as you will.

Well, you know, that Sienna poll is very interesting because it kind of takes the wind out of what wind is left, what sails are left, the wind out of Nikki Haley's sale.

Because she made the argument that her 40%, variously 30 to 40%, depending on the particular primary, signifies a group of people who will not vote on the conservative side for Donald Trump.

She's a little bit disingenuous because she doesn't say that most of them are independents and Democrats that would vote for Biden.

But

in poll after poll now, Donald Trump is beating Joe Biden by three, four,

five points, and this one five.

And then he's ahead, and I think seven of the eight key swing states, A.

And B, when you looked at that poll, Jack,

did you see that it said that of the people who voted for Donald Trump in 2020,

that 97%

would vote for him again, but only 83%

would vote for Joe Biden.

So what that tells me is

Now, 97% of the people voting for Donald Trump in 2020 is not enough to win in 2024 because he did lose the popular vote, although that was largely a phenomenon of Illinois, New York, and California running up the score when they were irrelevant in the Electoral College anyway, being so solidly blue.

But it tells me if he makes En-ROADS with people who did not vote for him, i.e.

the 17%

who now say they will not vote for Biden, and that could be, to take an example, Trump got about 9% of the black vote, say he got five of those,

and he got up to 14% of the black, and then a black vote, a 38% or something of the Latino vote, and he picked up

the other, I don't know, he picked up the other 12%.

He could really win.

And I guess it leads to another question: is

what is her strategy?

And

I guess it's to stay into Super Tuzi and siphon off money.

She said now that she's not going to go no labels third party.

she's got three choices jack if she endorses trump

and he wins she can take some credit and she's viable in 2028 if she endorses trump and he loses she will not be blamed and she's viable in 2028 however choice three

if she

says no and does not endorse him and he wins, she's persona non grata for eternity in the in the conservative movement.

And if he loses and she didn't endorse him, she's going to be blamed.

So that being said,

I would suggest that she's receptive to endorsing him because it's in her self-interest after Super Tuesday.

Is it in Donald Trump's interest?

The thing about Trump, people, I think, sometimes misjudge.

And I'm not speaking as such with any inside knowledge about him, but I'm just suggesting his record shows he doesn't hold a grudge.

You look at Ted Cruz, Lil Marco, all that stuff, Rand Paul, that he had insulted.

So what I'm getting at is I think it would be wise of Trump to be magnanimous, call Nikki Haley up after she loses and is inert.

and say, you know what, we said some harsh things, but you know, your program is not that much different than mine.

Nikki, you've got a future in the party.

This is my last term.

I want you to endorse the nominee at the convention, i.e.

myself, and see what happens.

I think it'd be a wise move because

there's a lot of big money that's behind her,

ostensibly never Trump.

And if she were to do that, a lot of them might consider giving to Trump.

I think it'd be wise for Trump to do that.

The other thing about Fannie Willis, I mean, we had this guy, Terrence Bradley, the former law partner, another, I guess, traffic judge or something along the lines of Nicholas Wade.

And

I saw that tape, Jack.

I think when he was asked, he said,

gosh dang or something that he got under his breath, that he got caught.

Oops.

Oops.

I mean, he testified that

he has a text to the lawyer,

the Trump team lawyer, Mr.

Roman's lawyer, saying you need to subpoena ABCD.

Yes, it's been going on since way, way back.

And then they call him, and I guess

Fanny and

Nathan Wade had gotten to him.

So now he recounts everything.

So what are you left with?

You're left with three people in this psychodrama that have either lied.

or they can't remember or they played the race cart or all three.

All of the above.

I agree.

Yeah.

And so I think they're going to have to...

only the only thing is the judge has bent over backward to give Fannie Willis leeway in that courtroom and to clamp down on the questioning that I've never seen before.

And that can only be because he's a Fulton County judge who's going to go up for election in a plus black district.

And he's afraid if he goes after a proud black woman, so to speak, he will never be re-elected.

And I think they're holding that over his head.

But she should be disbarred for lying.

and that

Nathan Wade should be disbarred for lying, and so should Terrence Bradley.

And this plays into the plus five in the poll, yes.

Absolutely.

And what else plays into it?

Very quickly, if you look at these cases, they've had some pretty good developments for Dahl.

I know people are saying, well, Victor, he's got, he owes $500 million in legal fees, penalties, interest,

settlement.

And he's got another $500 million that'll get him up to a billion billion when he finally gets the legal tally and he has to deal with Smith and Alvin Bragg and whatever the remnants are of the Fannie Willis case.

However,

when Jack Smith is told that the Supreme Court is going to deliberate, as you pointed out, on to what degree a president has immunity,

Does a senator have immunity?

So when Barbara Boxer in 2004 was a senator and she urged, along with House members, that they do not certify the Ohio electors, in other words, throw the election to John Kerry, would that mean that she was an election denialist and is guilty of insurrection?

I don't know.

But the point is, unless a president,

I can see he should not have immunity for personal felony.

behavior, but when you're doing something related to the office, and that is, he has a right to suggest, I'm sure that Richard Nixon had a lot of phone calls with people about what to do when John Kennedy suddenly won Cook County in Illinois in 1960, or Al Gore said he was lost and he didn't, and back and forth, and that thing went on for weeks.

Is that insurrection on the part of

I don't know who it was, but neither one was an incumbent.

But the point I'm making is I think they're going to give him some kind of limited immunity.

And even if they don't, the wait is going to delay this till late late August.

And then when you look at Eugene Carroll, that crazy 83.3 million, and we've gone through that before, but the judge Kaplan mischaracterized the assault as a rape.

TV show Law and Order was basically where she got the charge.

Statue of Limitations was lifted mysteriously for a year just to get her a window so she could re-file.

Had an app about how to break up couples.

said she had a dress on that didn't exist at the time, can't remember the year.

That thing really was a joke, and I think that helped Trump as well.

Alvin Bragg

trying to bootstrap a federal campaign violation with the feds that refused to prosecute onto a state to amp up a state charge about false documents or something.

That's never been done before.

Then you have Letita James.

What do you want to say about her?

I mean, $355 million, and she's tweeting about how it's going to go up to

$450 million.

She's trying to break him.

She campaigned on how to get him.

She fundraised on how to get him.

She used a consumer fraud bill that had never been envisioned for this.

There was no penalty.

The banks who were a lot smarter than Letita James audited him, found no culpability, made the loan, made a profit, have no problem.

And then you get to this circus

with Fannie Willis.

And I don't think that's going to go anywhere.

I mean, they're going to give it to another judge.

If it's outside of Fulton County, I don't know

who would be stupid enough to try to gin up a racketeering charge for Donald Trump inquiring in a phone call about

he's pissed off.

And then you have Jack Smith on the other aspect of the documents.

How can he seriously say, I'm going to

convict Donald Trump of removing files to Mar-Lago when Joe Biden had them for 30 years, not two, in four different locations, not one.

All of them, if you saw from the pictures in Robert Hurd reports, less secure than Mar-Lago.

He had no presidential authority, as did Trump, if he had exercised it, to formally declassify these.

And the biggest thing about it was the big lie that Jack Smith had said Trump didn't cooperate.

He didn't tell people, unlike Biden.

And now we learned that there was a tape, a tape that was erased, by the way, by his ghostwriter to try to hide it.

And her mentioned that they had

considered to indict him.

I don't know why they always do that, Jack.

They always say they consider indicting somebody on the left.

They consider indicting Andrew McCabe, lying.

But they never do.

They only indict other people.

But anyway, given all that, I don't know how he can get Trump

when Joe Biden only came to the authorities five, six years after he's on a tape saying, I have classified, i.e.

unlawfully,

documents, files in my possession, and I'm not going to tell anybody, basically.

That's what happened.

And then he thought, oh my God,

we appointed.

Jack Smith.

He's looking at the files.

Somebody's going to ask if I have a similar exposure.

Hey, go tell the feds that I voluntarily complied for the first time in six years.

And that how do you, I don't think you can do that.

I think it's going to be a joke.

But my point is whether it's a joke or not, the people know it's a joke.

And that is that is a that's driving Donald Trump's polls.

And all he has to do is three things, Jack.

He's got to come up with the money.

to pay these fines and the interest and the legal bills without draining his campaign so people feel that,

they're not subsidizing Donald Trump's personal behavior rather than

contributing to his agenda.

And then number two,

he's got to somehow get 3% to 6 to 7% of the swing voter.

And he can do that.

He's perfectly able to do that.

He can be very magnanimous.

All he has to do is just tone it down a little bit.

And he can appeal to the Haley voter or the old Ross Perot or Reagan Democrat, whatever you you count.

They don't want to vote for Joe Biden.

They feel their streets are not safe.

They feel prices went up so high, they'll never going to come back down.

They feel we're humiliated overseas.

They're sick of the three genders.

They don't like their daughter competing in sports with a biological man.

They have a lot of reasons to vote other than Donald Trump is,

you know, crude and Donald Trump is for abortion.

And the abortion issue is not going to hurt Trump as it did the other candidates because he was much more flexible on it.

So that's if he can do that second thing

and he can, he can, you know, raise the money, raise the money, get out of the legal stuff, be magnanimous, tone it down,

and

let Joe Biden be Joe Biden.

They have a big problem because

I think they're going to try to do something at the convention and open it up up and then say, oh, Camilla, proud black woman, you didn't win the delegates.

I wish you had.

I so wish you had won those delegates.

But Gavin won them.

You know, Mr.

Empty Suit.

And anytime you screw around with a convention, I'd mention that to Sammy, 76 with the Reagan Ford last-minute fight.

Or you screw around with a ticket like McGovern two weeks after the convention 72, getting Eagleton.

Yeah.

It's never good.

So they have a lot of, they have a lot of, a guy in the New Republic wrote about that, too, that it's not good to screw.

His idea was Biden is all we have and we should stick with him and basically

lie that he's composting setting

policy

licks of an ice cream cone.

He's dynamic.

I think somebody said that.

Who was it?

Oh, yeah, 20 paid-off doctors.

Yeah.

Well, I think there's a fourth thing, Victor,

related to Trump.

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Victor, that fourth Trump thing,

you're the guy that wrote the case for Trump.

I think the fourth thing is, can Trump make the case for Trump, at least policy-wise?

Maybe I'm just not observant.

I have not seen or heard yet kind of,

if I get elected,

here's my top three issues in a clear way and in a repeated way.

So

what is the Trump presidency going to look like?

Am I missing something?

No, you're right.

He has to have.

And I think from what we hear, the

Heritage Foundation is looking at 20,000 possible appointees to audit them in a way that we don't end up with Omarosa or Scaramucci encased in preparing for Trump to win so he hits the ground running and a contract of kind of a contract with America.

And I hope that they publish some of the luminaries they would appoint.

That's kind of irregular to do that, but it might help.

And also the agenda, that's a good thing.

And I don't think he needs to get away from

the trial and talk about the agenda

because he's going to be on the spot because a lot of the money he needs to defend himself.

And remember, everybody, they find his two sons, $4 million each.

They banned him from business for three years.

They put a federal judge with zero knowledge of business in charge of his company's major decisions.

He can't raise money in New York.

And everybody knows that they're like circling like vultures around his properties because he's going to have to sell some of them and they're not going to go for market value.

And so, and anybody who bought one,

if you were a billionaire and Donald Trump put up a golf course, would you buy it?

I wouldn't.

Not because

I wouldn't want to help Donald Trump, but they'd go after me.

They would, you know, if I was in New York, Letita James and Alvin Bragg

and

Eric Adams would get their aid and go, hey, did that guy give me any money for my campaign?

No, mayor, no, Attorney General, no, Fawcett, District Attorney.

Okay, find a statue.

I got the man.

You find the crime.

That's how they would operate.

It's really scary how we've had 235 years of jurisprudence and the left, just because they hate Donald Trump, just because he's not a man of the left, just because he's running for president, just because he's way ahead in the polls right now, they are willing to destroy all sense of blind justice or fairness under the law for that immediate goal and i mean that sincerely they threw it all away take him off the ballot now in illinois take him off in maine take him off in colorado six you know and then you get hunter biden and he was out i looked at some of the leaks

the the recapitulations of his testimony it was basically either here or his dad's line he says his dad went to lunch with one of these characters and he was in the room and Joe Biden said, I never met him.

I never had lunch.

He's just, it's just incomprehensible.

And whenever Hunter gets trapped in his own contradictory, he says, I have an addiction.

I didn't know what I was doing.

But then

you get Jeremy Rankin and all these people, these flaks go out and say, he has a Yale law degree.

He was on the board of Antrap.

He's a sophisticated corporate advisor.

And then he says, well, I didn't know what was going on.

I was on crack.

It doesn't make any sense.

And I think that everybody's saying, you know what?

They're insulting our intelligence, all of this stuff.

Right.

All these machinations, and we're sick of it.

And just cut the Gordian knot.

And, you know, we've talked about this in the show before, Jack, very quickly, but

we don't want to go into a downward spiral of tit for tat, yin and yang.

But I don't know how to stop those people.

So if maybe if Donald Trump is elected, he should just keep away from it, but he should appoint the most hounddog

carnivore special counsel and say, you know what, I want you to look at Fannie Willis, and I want you to look at the relationship with Alvin Bragg, and I want you to look with the relationship of the Biden White House with Fannie Willis, with

Letitia James, Alvin Bragg.

I want you to look at all of this.

I want to subpoena all the messaging between Jack Smith and Robert Hurr and the White House.

And I don't want to know what's going on.

You just go to it.

And maybe that would restore some deterrence.

And then maybe they could just say to Joe Biden, you know what?

I'm not sure you didn't still have files.

You didn't come clean.

So we're going to have an FBI.

We're going to go look at your residence.

You and Dr.

Jill will wake up one morning and they'll be going through her underwear like they did Melania.

Is that the kind of country we want?

And is that what it takes for them to stop it and say, okay, no more, no more.

Marcus of Queensbury rules.

We're not going to do this anymore.

We're sorry.

You have the power now.

And that's what they're terrified of.

We keep saying that.

And it's absolutely true.

They're thinking, you know what?

If I had done this to Donald Trump and I was Donald Trump right now and he felt like I did, I know what I would do.

And that scares me because that's what he might do.

Well, Victor, it sounds more than a, you know, coming out of the box in the first hundred days, nuking the the left in these kind of ways, but probably is a decade or two worth of work to crush all this madness out of the political system

and

some of the other, some of the institutions like the academy.

But hey, Victor, we we've got um a question

on from a listener.

I normally read these at the end, but I want to read this here because it's an interesting uh question,

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

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

By the way, Victor, before I ask the question, I did want to say that based on what you just mentioned before about the Heritage Foundation working on 20,000 or thereabouts appointments and recommendations for staff in a Trump administration, I'm wondering, would you be the ambassador to Sweden or the ambassador to Greece?

What would your preference be?

Who asked that?

I'm asking that.

That's not the question that I'm about to ask.

But

I can't imagine Victor Davis Hansen not being some.

Maybe they'll ask you to be.

Can you imagine

my wife?

With me as an ambassador, as right now she says

your buttons are improperly buttoned victor

you have dandruff on your left shoulder your shoe is untied your pants are too long your tants are too baggy are you where are you doing are you wandering around i'm trying to i'm like i'll give you an example today i was out

i had kind of a bug and i was out in the Phoenix uh area at a hotel and I was wandering around looking for the car to pick us up.

He said he texted me it was a Tesla.

And

in my mind, I was going over three things,

a new idea to add to my column in progress due

to tomorrow, a new paragraph to add to my three ultras on the Middle East that are due.

And I was composing a tweet in my head while I was looking for a Tesla.

My wife says, oh,

what are you doing?

Where are you going?

I'm here.

I said, yeah, I know you're here.

And I'm looking for a Tesla.

But the point is, she was observing that I looked like I was insane, right?

And so I couldn't be an ambassador if you tried.

Man has to know his limitations.

Yeah, I guess so.

He can't see you in a tuxedo every night.

I was an athlete in high school, but a mediocre one.

I was a farmer.

I was very good on business, but I was not as talented as my twin brother.

And he couldn't make it.

I was not as talented a farmer, and I was a very good classics professor.

I must give myself, but people say, so what?

So, my point is, I couldn't do it.

But you know who would be a great what I'm going to announce to our audience.

What

I'm going to do, whoever is president, I

hope it is Donald J.

Trump.

And if anybody in his family is listening, there is one and only one person in the United States qualified to be the ambassador to Greece.

And that is

Max Nicias, former president of USC,

fluent native speaker of Greek, teacher of classical literature, native of Cyprus, came to the United States dirt poor with nothing,

nothing.

His family's ancestral home had been appropriated by the Turks when they invaded 1974, and he was a complete self-made person through faculty, chair,

dean, provost.

And they did him a great disservice because there was a situation where a person, I won't get into it, but

he stepped down.

But he was the best president USC ever had.

And I think he would be the best.

He's a very,

I'm not going to say he's a reactionary conservative, but he is a traditionalist.

He believes in the America as no other person does.

He would would be very loyal to Donald Trump.

He knows the intricacies of politics.

He's beloved in Greece.

He gets honorary degrees.

He would cement these new relationships going to Greece.

He speaks languages.

He's got a PhD.

He's not some person that's in critical race theory.

He's got a PhD in engineering and science.

And gosh, he'd be perfect.

So I'm going to push for that.

I don't know.

I mean,

I'm a Swede.

So as people say, I'm a dame with his brains blown out.

I don't know.

I don't know who's Sweden.

I couldn't do it, though.

I mean,

I couldn't afford to do it.

I've got a lot of dependence.

So

I don't think I could do it.

I wouldn't want.

I mean,

it's a ceremonial job.

And for a ceremonial job, you have to look the part and you have to have social decorum.

I was raised.

I was, what do you call it?

I was range raised, free-range.

My parents.

Yeah, I was like a free-range chicken.

They just opened the door and they said, you got 135 acre, 40, go to it.

Go play in the septic tank.

Exactly.

Yeah, whatever.

We did.

And my father always said to me, you have all the ingredients to being a success except one thing.

I said, what's that?

He says, you have no concern about your appearance.

You've got to get clothes that fit.

And you've got to comb your hair.

And then one day I got a job at Cal State.

This is a true story, Jack.

so my dad had my mom had been yelling at him to clean out his closet so he comes to my farmhouse which is falling apart at the time and he says you've got a job now as a part-time professor actually lecturer

and he says you're going to have to dress the part you can't go with different colored socks and old jeans and t-shirts with holes in them and caterpillar hats on you got to show shave your beard and cut your hair i said okay dad what's the point he said i bought my whole wardrobe, and you know what it was?

It was

love boat polyester pant suits, and I had nothing.

So I wore like, yeah, like a

kind of a roud pant suit.

Yeah, leisure suit, leisure suit.

Yes, I wore it.

And I met, I got up there, and the second day I met my lifelong, what who became my lifelong friend and fellow classicist, Bruce Thornton, now a Hoover fellow.

And he took one look at me and he said,

the ramp to love mode is over there, not here.

So that's my that's my experience with trying to have decorum.

Okay.

Well, I have a lot of good traits, but social decorum is not one of them.

Yeah, me neither.

So don't recommend me for ambassador to the Vatican.

Ireland, but if you were Ireland, maybe, huh?

Well,

I'll cover my Irish roots someday.

Victor, I'm going to ask the farm question, but first,

our God-given freedoms are facing unrelenting attacks.

It's a battle for truth.

And the only way we win is if we stand together.

And thankfully, Alliance Defending Freedom has been defending our rights for 30 years and winning.

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so victor here's the question sent by John Spangler One, and it's titled Fortified Farms and Centenariums.

This was on iTunes and Apple.

He says, please ask VDH to elaborate on how he thinks the strategy of centenariums or fortified farms may be used as a bastion to preserving Western civilization.

He mentioned them a few times.

And I would like him to expand on the plausibility of this, given the historical lessons of, I'm going to say this wrong, Limus,

Tripolitanus.

You'll correct me.

Unlike other socialist states, America's leftists do not reside in rural areas.

So correct my pronunciation, Victor, and

John's question.

Tripolitanus.

Yeah, that, you know, Tripoli, modern Tripoli, is

it means in Greek, of course, three cities.

And I think it came to characterize Sabratha, Leptis Magna, and Olea, the three large Roman cities.

And they had in both Tunisia,

the word limes, L-i-Mias, and its genitive is limitase, and the pearl is limit.

It's where we get limit, is what I'm trying to say.

And so it's a word for border, and it became a word for fortified border.

And what the reader is talking about is in the

although Augustus had them in Africa, there was a lot of indigenous Berber tribes and then the remnants from Carthage, the Punic Berber and later Vandals.

But the point I'm making is that they decided that they would fortify large areas of farmland behind walls.

And then the Centurion

discharged veterans would get together and make a fortified agricultural compound.

These were people who knew how to fight, too.

So the person has a good question.

Given

what's happening in rural America,

well, I think it's already a matter of record.

I mean, I'm looking out at the window right now,

and I have 41 acres and two and a half acres, and I have a six-foot

stone wall that is one acre in circumference that goes down two feet below the surface.

And then it has various interior and ciliary walls and then it's staffed by four

insane on-hinge Queensland bastard dogs and so I haven't had a problem but I think a lot of people who in this area of the San Joaquin Valley who live out in the country right they're all armed and they have some type of security system cameras or something and that was not true

so

when I on a weekend and this is a weekend that's done broadcasting, I will, when I walk out tonight with the dogs, I will hear gunfire.

And on one occasion, about three years ago, I heard bullets go through the orchard.

So sometimes when a person is a half a mile away and he's firing something, a center-fire, you know, rifle, automatic, semi-automatic.

it'll go for a mile or two.

And if he's leveling it, you never know what's going to happen.

I have a solar panel that has a crack in it, I think, from a bullet.

It's out of use.

So it's already that way.

And that's the way that a lot of people live here.

This was the product of,

I'll be frank, it was Bill Clinton, George W.

Bush, Barack Obama, open borders.

And then it accelerated.

And so I have no, I look around and I see nine or ten farms that used to be 40, 60, 80 acres.

Every one of them was so-called almost, I guess you'd call them non-white.

They were,

well, they were, but I mean, they were Japanese Americans, they were Punjabi Americans, they were Armenian Americans, they were Mexican Americans.

And there was one, my close friend and neighbor was, I guess his ancestry was Dutch.

But my point is that, and he was there, his family was here from the very beginning, but they're all gone.

And the farmhouses are occupied by people who have rent, sublet them out to people who came across the border.

And that's all I'm going to say for my own protection because I try to get along with them.

But I have no idea who they are.

I have no idea where they came from.

All I know is the vast majority do not speak English, and every single

zoning and health law code is violated, whether that's unlicensed dogs or

too many people, 30 or 40, living in a single family, quote unquote, dwelling, which means here

six or seven trailers hooked up with Romex to the main house and all sorts of businesses, you know, like child care or barbershop or you name it.

off the books.

And again, that's the biggest, that's something that none of our Bay Area reformers ever talk about.

They have some great ideas about how to save California, but they don't understand that we have 27% of the people not born in the United States in California.

And we have

20% below the poverty line.

And we have another 20%,

10 to 20% that are first generation are second.

And a lot of those groups engage in cash transactions and they have huge swap meets.

So there's literally millions of dollars exchanged on mobile kitchens, taco stands, Saturday swap meets.

I don't mean swap, by the way, when I say swap meet.

I'm talking about refrigerators, washers, dryers, lawnmowers, everything up for sale for cash and no income reported by the seller and no sales tax paid by the buyer.

And that's that's kind of where we are.

So it's like North Africa.

It's just no rules out here.

And I know what the other thing very quickly is, there's a bunch of essays recently, and I'm going to talk with Sammy in the next,

or maybe we should talk about this new book

that trashes white rural America as the source of all of the problems of America.

And I've been hearing that.

Basically, that's a code word when Christian nationalist or

when Lloyd Austin says he's going to go out and find white supremacy.

And by the way, as I said earlier, he never found any.

He just quietly issued a report that said nothing there.

But

what gets me really angry when I ride my bike at wonderful Hillsdale College out in the environs, and

I'm out here and I see the Oklahoma diaspora third generation, and I look at who died in Iraq and Afghanistan at twice there's numbers in general.

I don't see a toxic

demographic.

I see something that I never have ever, until recently, ever even noticed, that they are white, lower middle class rural people in small towns and out in the countryside.

I don't like to characterize people by their demographic, but the left does it all the time.

And so now they're demonizing so-called white rural people as ignorant and Trump supporters.

But you know what?

I understand that 100,000 people are killed by fentanyl and there's an overrepresentation of poor whites.

And I understand that, you know, they're the villains in every Hollywood movie along with Russian oligarchs.

But I grew up with them and

I know them very well.

And I don't see a crime wave out here.

I don't see smash and grab.

I don't see mass looting.

I don't see carjackings.

When I go out to little towns like Osseo or somewhere out in the Michigan countryside, I'm not afraid somebody's going to hold me up.

And

I don't, when people come in for a lecture at Hillsdale from all different statuses and social classes, and I meet them in a meet-and-greet session, I see some of the nicest people in the world.

I don't see insurrectionaries.

I don't see all of this.

So I wish they'd stop because

that rubric is not responsible for the rise in crime and rise in all this, except for one statistic, and it's suicides and premature deaths.

The death rate is increasing in that demographic and longevity is declining.

That's the one group that

life expectancy has not gone up commiserately with other groups due to fentanyl and bad habits, I suppose.

Aaron Powell, by the way, Victor, these folks on the left just find this irresistible and cutting their own nose off.

So there's a, I wasn't going to raise this, but there's a piece on the Daily Signal.

about, and you may have read this elsewhere.

The Daily Signal, by the way, is the online publication of the Heritage Foundation.

The head of the Anti-Defamation League, the

Jewish anti-discrimination organization, major organization, powerful, but by the way, has been very woke-kissing up the last number of years.

And all of a sudden, October 7th, gee, I wonder how the hell that happened.

Well, you SOBs and the leadership have been

a part of

the reason why a wokeism is spreading and now it's affected American Jews and Jews in Israel.

But anyway, Greenblatt, the other day,

CPAC happened last week.

He compared the attendees of CPAC to the Nation of Islam.

And I can't imagine a more pro-Israel

gathering

and

anti, you know, defending Jewish fellow Jewish Americans than you would find at a CPAC conference.

But this guy felt he just had to do it.

He had to do it publicly, and he had to make this insane comparison

of

the true allies of Jews to

one of the most ranked racists in America, Louis Farrakhan.

Anyway,

I'm sorry.

I'm ranting there, Victor.

People

are so to hear you rant.

Well, why that is, is that

70%

of those who have Jewish ancestry or religious

affiliation who identify as Jews, 70% of them are left-wing.

And the kibbutzes, there's no more left-wing area in Israel, I've been down there, than the kibbutz near the Gaza border.

And those groups of people bent over backwards.

to accommodate Hamas.

They took them to medical appointments.

They taught them skills such as they had in agriculture.

They brought them in.

They paid them higher wages and they were butchered.

And then the left wing, and I can say left-wing as a stereotype generalization, Jewish community looked around and they thought, wow,

wow, wow, wow.

They're chasing Jews into synagogues.

They're going to their private homes.

They're beating them up on campus.

They're knocking them down.

What will they're storming bridges?

They're defacing public property, these pro-Hamas

Muslim groups.

And they find themselves in a very awkward position because the only people who are saying,

the only people who are saying Netanyahu needs six weeks at least to deal with Hamas.

And Joe Biden should not turn on our ally.

He didn't start this.

It was started on October 7th.

He should finish it.

The only people who are saying that and the only people who are angry at the way Jew, it's not coming from the left.

And if you don't believe me, listeners, remember Corinne Jean-Pierre when they asked her explicitly about anti-Semitism?

She said, that's not a big issue of our administration, but we're worried about Islamophobia.

And so when the Jewish nationalism,

when the left wing, which is the majority of the Jewish community,

absorbs all of these contradictory signals, they come to the conclusion, oh my God,

the political movement that I spent my life and funded and helped and voted for has been hijacked.

I mean, the old-fashioned Democratic Party of Hubert Humphrey, JFK, whatever, has been hijacked by an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish radical group identified with Bernie Sanders, who's Jewish, Elizabeth Warren, the squad,

and the Obamas.

And they don't know what to do about it.

So how do they square that circle?

They square that circle by saying it's the

right wing that's doing all this terrible stuff.

And it's pathetic.

It's pathetic.

And, you know, this book I was thinking about is,

I just wanted to make sure that it was this white rural rage, the threat to American democracy.

I want to look at it and I'll talk about in the later blog.

Tom Schauer and Paul Walden, written by a professor, of course.

Professors know all about rural America.

I can tell you, I spent 50 years in academia, and I have been a professor full-time at two campuses, and I've been a visiting professor at two more.

And with the exception of Hillsdale faculty who live in a small town and come from all walks of life, I have never met anyone who knew less about rural white America than an academic, except to generalize stereotype and disparage.

And, you know, it was funny, this came up.

My cousin sent me a letter today

from

my mother's first cousin, who's my mother and her first cousin's mothers were sisters.

And they had nothing.

And during the Depression in 1929, 30, 31,

this family, there were three little kids and they lost everything.

They had a little store in Selma.

They lost everything.

And they were one of the 28 people who came to this farm where my grandfather had no money either, but he worked like a dog.

He had three girls.

One was crippled with polio.

And he let every single person live in the barn, the barn that I fixed up.

They had about 10 people living there.

They had a shack.

They had another lean-to.

And this woman, before she, she wrote a recollect.

a recollection of what it was like to live here where I am in 1931 when they didn't have gas for the cars.

They couldn't eat.

They were so hungry.

And they went around and they had big gardens.

Everybody had to work on the farm.

And my grandfather and grandmother fed them all.

And this letter is very moving.

It's just about abject poverty.

And there's a nice thing where my grandmother had just enough gas to go to Fresno to buy towels, underwear, and sheets to give to this, her sister's

her sister's children.

And I'm thinking of that because what I always hear everywhere I go about this group and that group and this group and this group and this group.

But the number of, I mean, I never hear that there are millions of poor white people that had nothing and they were victims.

I can remember when I was in a school that was 90% Hispanic,

one of the big, great, besides the N-word, which was used of everybody who was darker than a Spaniard,

the other word was, you're a damn okey or you're white trash.

Everybody had said that.

They said that to me.

Hey, Okie.

Okie.

I heard that all Gringo and Okie.

I'm not trying to play victim, but what I'm trying to say is that I don't like the idea of, and I don't want to prejudge the book, but a couple of professors, or at least one of them, I'll look and see if they're both professors, writing a book about the threat to America, democracy, is white rural rage.

No, you know what the threat to America is?

James Comey

and and Andrew McCabe lying under oath.

John Brennan lying under oath, weaponizing the CIA.

James Clapper lying under oath.

Lois Lerner in the IRS lying under oath.

Kevin Kleinsmith at the FBI forging a document at a FISA court, lying under oath.

The whole Biden family enriching themselves at our expense by giving concessions to our enemy, lying under oath.

And all of this destruction that we talked talked earlier about the American jurisprudence system.

And who's doing that?

It's not poor white people out in the rural areas.

They're too busy farming and working and working.

It's our bi-coastal elite and the products of our universities.

You know, one thing I would really like to see happen is if there's going to come any good out of the destruction of all these fake universities, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, that have just destroyed their reputations by junking the SAT, hiring incompetence and dishonest people like Claudine Gay or Liz McGill.

It's that we're going to have

a new group of universities that deserve recognition and esteem based on what they actually teach.

And I think I know I beat the drum for Hillsdale College, but I suggest if anybody wants to venture to Hillsdale, Michigan, go to the Hillsdale College Library and then walk through the bookstores and look at the courses.

And they are rigorous, traditional courses.

And then walk across the campus and tell me how many locks you see on bicycles.

And then talk to a faculty member and see if he talks to you with a droning accent and ignores you, or whether he smiles at you and says, can I help you?

I mean,

that...

That demographic, that conservative rural demographic is not the problem.

It's one of the salvations of this country.

And I get really angry about this whole new typos right now that we're taken over by MAGA.

We're taken over by white reactionaries.

We're taking over by QNAN.

All this disparagement and

slander and smears against a

demographic that, as I said, is struggling economically and has a reduced life expectancy, but is not overrepresented in violent crime and violent rape and assault and white-collar crime and all of these.

You know, these are not the people stealing from the stock market and rigging things.

They're not our university presidents that have no morality.

So I get really angry about that.

Overrepresented on war memorials, though.

Hey, Victor, before we

absolutely.

I mean, go down to Kingsburg, California, and there's something called Hansen Corner, and it's Victor Hansen killed in Okinawa.

Bob Hansen served in

Iran of all places, supplying

the Russian Army against Army Group South.

William Hansen, 40 missions over Japan and Korea in a B-29.

Frank Hansen, gassed and wounded, World War I.

I could go on.

And I get really angry at these people that when they just from their faculty lounge say, you know what, I'm going to go after the white rural people.

They're the ones that are destroying America when they're underrepresented in every category of crime.

And you look at the admissions policies of Yale or Harvard and look at Stanford.

I mentioned it with Sammy, but if you're going to let in, if you're going to use race in a racist fashion, and you're going to let in 20%,

20% of the incoming class is so-called white, and with the inordinate percentage of women, it's probably about 9% white.

And that 9% white, trust me, goes to the children of

elite donors who give millions of dollars.

It goes to athletes on athletic scholarships, and it goes to the children of legacy alumni, but more importantly, of provost, of presidents, of deans, of faculty.

And there's no room there for a kid.

in Lansing, Michigan, who lives outside in a farm, who studied his whole life and gets an 800 and sends his optional score to Stanford or Yale with a 4.5 and studies every night.

They're not going to let you in.

I'm sorry.

You have nothing going for you.

Nothing.

You have everything going for you that really matters, but nothing

going for you that doesn't matter, but which they think is all there is.

Well,

to let our listeners in on our recording schedule, you and I are going to talk again tomorrow to record the following Thursday's podcast, but we will raise this terrific piece in Tablet magazine put together by an author from the National Association of Scholars about

the insanity across the board at our universities with the abuse of DEI to bring in money from non-whites who happen to be foreigners.

The proportion of foreigners in our elite universities, it's really staggering and America needs to wake up.

But we'll get to that in

greater length when we talk talk again.

But right now, Victor, we got a couple of things to do because we've mentioned Hillsdale a few times.

And I just want to take a minute to welcome back Hillsdale College, which is now a longtime sponsor of this podcast.

To our listeners, do you know that Victor is one of the professors in three of the over 40 free online courses at Hillsdale?

That's right.

The first course is American Citizenship and Its Decline, which is based on Victor's best-selling book, The Dying Citizen.

Then there's The Second World Wars, which is Victor's, you know, based named after Victor's, another best-selling book by

Victor.

I think there's over 100,000 copies of that book sold.

And the third course is titled Athens and Sparta.

And that's partly based on Victor's book, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

The courses are seven to nine episodes long.

They're self-paced, so you can take them whenever and wherever.

Go right now to hillsdale.edu slash VDH to start.

It's free and it's easy to get started.

That's hillsdale.edu slash VDH to start, hillsdale.edu slash VDH.

And we thank Hillsdale College for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor, two other things to do.

I'd like to get your thoughts on a TV show and then we have one more break and then we want to keep a promise from our last podcast to get your thoughts on this terrific and important essay you've written for the new criterion but first victor i was watching i'll tell my story here quickly i hope watching the thomas crown affair the original version and there was an actor on that paul burke he played the boston cop overseeing this you know the the detective work and i was interested in him like i wonder what else he was in so i googled him and it said oh he was in 12 o'clock high the tv show.

So I was, I'd never seen it.

I love the movie.

That's a great thing.

That's with Robert Lansing, right?

So the show, yeah.

Well, so Paul

was the head in the seasons two and three, but Robert Lansing, right, season one.

Victor, I didn't see this show growing up.

This

TV show is so well done.

Robert Lansing, I think, is the best actor I've ever seen.

He's really good.

He was great.

Yeah.

And the first episode I watched

reminded me of the story you told of your your father for your father was committed but did your father get the silver star i forget some significant uh yeah he did air medal the the air force equivalent of it the army episode was about a guy trying to you know get a get a live bomb uh stuck in in in the bomb bay out of out of the out of the uh the uh the bomber but uh anyway victor i i you knew the episode right away i believe you told me you you watched that with your father you know i did i did i did and that the reason i mentioned that is that that I didn't know about it.

And

he, when I was a little kid watching that, he said, you know, I did that.

And then he went out and he went out in a closet and he brought back this

Army Air Corps medal.

I don't know what they called it at that time.

I think it was something called the Distinguished Service Cross.

DSC or something.

I had it.

And my brother had it.

And when his house, one of his houses burned down, it was gone but it was sad that it was lost but anyway uh i remembered that episode i remember my dad telling me he never mentioned it and then oh 15 years ago oh no 20 years ago i wrote about it for the military history quarterly you can go look it up i wrote an article about it about he went out and i went back and looked at the documentation uh for the award and he'd walked out over the bomb bay over you know over tokyo they had a i guess it was a 500 pound uh 250 pound napalm napalm bomb that got stuck in the bombay

and it was sizzling hot and um

they thought it was going to you know ignite the plane so he walked out over the

you know at i think they weren't at 30 000 because they were going down with lame really low about 7 000 feet but he had a screwdriver he got pretty burned into it so i remember i remember that episode of 12 o'clock high That was a great series.

They had all those good, that was, you know, 20 years after World War II.

So

there was the game, remember the gallant men and Vic Morrow and

what was it?

Combat.

Combat, Rat Patrol.

Rat Patrol.

Everybody, we all grew up on that.

And then

Greg.

12 o'clock high was Gregory Peck, wasn't it?

Frank Savage.

Yeah.

And wasn't, there were some great actors in that.

I remember.

Dean Jagger is in that.

Dean Jagger won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

Yeah,

that was a really sad movie.

And

just one of the best movies.

Regardless of war movies, I think that was really one of the best.

Just to recall, everybody should remember we lost 40,000 people, almost as much as we lost.

We lost 56,000 in Vietnam, but 40,000 people when we sent B-17s in 1942 over there, six months after Pearl Harbor, and the British told us, do not do daylight raids in formation

over

occupied France, because when you leave England, they're going to intercept you over the channel.

They're going to pass you off all through France on the way to Germany, and you're not going to make it.

And you have no fighter escort.

And we tried it, and we only go in small numbers of planes, three, six, at night and hook up over a target and then spread out.

Don't do it.

And we did it and we did it and we did it and we did it.

And we lost 40,000 people.

We had no results to speak of.

And then finally, we got fighter escort.

We took France.

We put American fighter bases in France.

We improved the B-17s.

Curtis LeMay improved the firepower of new squadron formations.

Jimmy Doolittle got a great tactic of letting P-47s and P-51s just detach from the squadron and go out and be hunter-killers searching out on their own German fighter.

And we broke the back of the Luftwaffe.

But for 42 to 40, early 44, it was a death sentence if you were going to be on a B-17.

Yeah.

Brave men.

They had to know.

And anyone that made it through 25 missions had...

It was winning the powerball.

Victor, we're going to come back and get your thoughts,

a last segment of the show about the

important essay you did for the new criterion.

And we'll get to that right after this final important message.

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We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor, the essay is titled Israel's Eternal Dilemma.

This is a comparison about October 7th and the Yom Kippur War.

Victor,

what is Israel's dilemma and why is it an eternal dilemma?

Well, what I was trying to suggest is: I know that Yom Kippur War of

October

6th, 1974 was much different,

excuse me, of 1973.

I was in Greece and living there at the time.

And as I said earlier in the broadcast, I went down and watched us shuttle F

Phantom jets into Israel.

But it's very similar because they were both.

And again,

it wasn't that focused on, that was what Hamas wanted to do.

They looked at the 50th anniversary and they got all excited.

They said, we're going to do this again.

Only we're not going to have a conventional army.

So Israel was completely surprised, partly because they were not allowed to preempt.

People felt in the United States.

And they had about an eight to 10-hour window.

Had they preempted, they would have saved a lot of lives.

But they had to take the blow, unlike the 67

war.

But in any case, I tried to point out some of the similarities.

Israel

was high after the 1967 war.

They thought they had cracked the Arab juggernaut.

They were high

After a series of

minor wars in October 7th, the economy of Israel was booming.

They were allowing 20,000 day laborers to come in.

There was an ecumenical idea that, you know what?

Nothing can stop Israel now.

There was a kind of an unworldliness, both in 1973 and in 2023,

50 years later.

And they underestimated the cunning of their enemies.

In 1973, they didn't think the Egyptians would figure out how to blast apart with water cannon, that huge sand berm, I think 50 feet high along the Suez Canal, much less would they come in with technology like

wire-guided anti-tank missiles or SAM-3s and SAM-6s,

handheld, in some cases handheld anti-aircraft missiles.

So they nullified

Israeli armor and aircraft for about three days.

And same thing, nobody ever thought Hamas had 300 miles of tunnels.

No one ever thought that they could crash through that sophisticated

gadget-ridden, gadget-laden, I should say, wall.

And no one thought they would use gliders, or no one thought they would come in with the Israeli uniforms, or they would use people who had been shown kindness by people of the kibbutz and then use them as informants to give them sophisticated maps of where Jews were and where their shelters were.

So they were unprepared.

And then just like 1973, of course, the Israelis reacted and they react always very well.

And so in this essay, I show what they did in 1973, how they came back, how they were on the point of obliterating the third Egyptian army and all of their enemies, just as they've come back now and they've almost obliterated half or three-quarters, I should say, of Hamas.

And then what is the position of the United States?

Their internal dilemma is they're dependent on U.S.

munitions.

And they sure were in 1973, and we sort of held them up for a while.

And finally, you remember that

Richard Nixon said, get every damn plane that flies and give him stuff.

And whether it was Henry Kissinger or Nixon or who, I don't want to get into it.

It's a very complicated history of who was putting pressure on the Israelis to cease and desist after

they were attacked.

But it's very similar.

Remember Joe Biden right after October?

I'm a Zion as I stand with Israel.

I think we said on this, that would last about two weeks.

And now it's Joe Biden who's accusing.

I mean, remember the rocket?

You know, can't they shoot straight?

Saying, what's wrong with Islamic Jihad?

They didn't shoot straight.

They hit a hospital and it caused all this problem.

If they had shot straight, I guess he meant if they'd killed a bunch of of Jews in Tel Aviv, it would have been no problem.

So, this

administration is doing the same thing.

They're putting pressure on Israel.

And the other dilemma is: everybody thinks Israel is a Boolean overdog because they're disproportionate.

That's what wins wars, being disproportionate.

Being proportionate means the Verdun, Somme, Peloponnesian War, 30 years' war, 100 years' war.

But Israel has only got 11 million people, and they're very good at fighting back.

And then people forget the reality.

There are 500 million Iranian, Persian, and Arab Muslims in the Middle East that don't like Israel.

500 million, and there's 11.

And so they are the ones that are outnumbered.

That they have been able to survive by isolating their enemies or playing their enemies off against each other.

or retaliating with superb efficacy is not because they're bullies.

It's because they're brilliant minds.

And so, but they get trashed.

I get so tired of all these protesters, the Zionist bullies, bullies.

No, there's only 11 million.

They've been attacked in five wars.

They're surrounded by 500 million people.

So I went through all of the similarities and suggested at the end that

they're going to have to, even though they have a limited population means, they're going to have to find ways of

arming themselves so they are stockpiling arms so they're not so dependent on a mercurial American president that goes to Michigan and sees 200,000 votes in a

close purple state and feels that he can sell it the Israelis out and by the way I don't think that's going to work because as I said to Sammy if you look at Jewish American voters

and

you might lose as many Jewish American voters as you would gain Arab voters, albeit not in Michigan, but maybe in places like Pennsylvania or who knows.

So

it's an article about the more things change, the more we go from conventional to asymmetric warfare, the more we go from the 19th...

20th to the 21st century, the more we go from a Republican administration to a Democratic, the more everything stays the same.

Well, Victor, again, I want to recommend our listeners to check that out.

That is the new criterion.

By the way, I mentioned before,

talking about the ADL,

I recommend a piece by Noah Rothman in commentary.

Check out its website about the Anti-Defamation League and how it's sold out.

It's

American Jews.

Victor has a website.

I mentioned that at the beginning of the podcast, The Blade of Perseus.

You talked about ultra articles, Victor.

You've got to write three ultra pieces.

And those are pieces that Victor writes exclusively for The Blade of Perseus.

If you are a fan of Victor's writing, you are going to want to subscribe.

How you've been listening to the show for years and haven't subscribed yet is beyond me, but you know, fix that today.

It's five bucks to get your foot in the door, $50 discounted for the full year.

Victor writes two, three ultra pieces every week for the blade of Perseus.

And you'll also find links to his other appearances, his other writings for American greatness in the syndicated columns, the archives of this podcast,

the link to his books.

So go to victorhanson.com and subscribe, please.

I, Jack Fowler, am the senior fellow at the Center for Civil Society for American Philanthropic, now Amphil, where we try to strengthen civil society.

And one of the things I do there is write a free weekly email newsletter called Civil Thoughts.

I think you'll like it.

I send out every week 14 or so recommended readings of great articles I've come across in the previous week.

Here's a link.

Here's the excerpt.

So go to civilthoughts.com and sign up.

It's totally free.

Victor, we'll conclude.

We've read one question or one comment that a listener has left on iTunes, but there's just one more to read, and then we'll head off into into the sunset today.

And

it's titled Always Entertaining and signed by VDH's greatest admirer.

And here's what this person wrote.

Another great show, VDH.

Thank you for all you do.

Thank you too, Sammy, for not

continually interrupting VDH and for not stammering and presenting your question or discussion topics.

I think that was a compliment for Sammy.

Wait a minute.

Why did we dig it?

Is this Lent?

Is this Lent or what?

I don't know.

I'm going to offer it up.

I'm offering it up to the souls in purgatory.

But hey, he's entitled or she's entitled to an opinion.

Victor, you've been terrific as usual.

Thanks for all the wisdom you shared.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

Again, go to victorhanson.com, check it out.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

See you next time.

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