The Ick of the Left in the Campaign Season

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

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

He's a military historian, a classicist, a best-selling author, syndicated columnist, many other things, farmer.

He has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

You'll find its web address, VictorHanson.com.

I'll tell you more about that website and why you should be subscribing later in

this episode.

We are recording, just so we can make sure you get the context.

Word that's used a lot now, Victor.

Sunday, the 25th of February.

So this is, we are in the aftermath of Donald Trump's primary election win in South Carolina.

And we'll get Victor's thoughts on that, some of the things Donald Trump has said related to Nikki Haley and that race.

And then we have a few other media matters to get Victor's wisdom on.

We'll get to all these things right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, first I'll apologize to you and our listeners.

I'm in the Bronx in my mother's bedroom and there's a racket from the streets of forgive me, at least it's not gunfire.

I thought you were in one of the quietest neighborhoods in the world.

Yes.

Speaking of which, last night, all we heard was AR-15 fire from about a quarter mile away, which was one of the more, yeah, people just, I guess are just practicing, but we used to have some of the quietest neighborhood, but who knows with the open border?

So

it was all the dogs went, they broke through the

foundation door and went under the house and hid.

They were so freaked out.

Actually, now that you mention illegals, maybe we have a little time at the end.

We'll try to get your thoughts about that murder of that Georgia College student.

But first, Victor, Donald Trump takes South Carolina, Republican primary, 60, 40.

Today, the Drudge Report, not Donald Trump's friend anymore, has a headline that says 40% of Republicans vote against Trump in South Carolina.

I don't know if that matters.

A couple of other things, Victor, in the days before the vote,

Donald Trump, he went, well, he was running, Nikki Helly was running against him, and he went after her.

But he did talk about something to the effect that if he was president, he would have the Department of Justice investigate her and nothing specific as to why.

So

we have an election win.

We have some strange contre-temp beforehand.

Victor, your general thoughts about Donald Trump's victory and what lies ahead for him and for Nikki Haley.

I thought that he was actually more like his Iowa acceptance speech than he was New Hampshire when he talked.

He talked about unity.

He says, you know, he shouldn't say that about investigating this person or that.

I mean, I'm not saying that he has to be Sermon on the Mount, turn the other cheek, but he made a good point when he said this

revenge is success, and that's what it should be.

I don't know what she's doing.

I've outlined a lot of times to you, Jack, these various theories that she's hoping for a catastrophic jail event or health event, and she's ready.

I don't think that is going to happen.

And if it happened, I think the party would more likely nominate Ron DeSantis than they would her.

I think that she's not running for vice president, that's for sure.

She's not doing the George H.W.

Noble opponent, just keep slogging away, and then Reagan admires him and makes him vice president.

It's not happening.

She's gone.

She's right on the abyss of going full never Trumper and the things she's saying.

When she says he's unqualified and unfit for president, She's putting herself into a position.

I mean, it's much worse than George H.W.

Bush voodoo economics, what he said about Reagan.

I don't know how she's going to get out of that and whether she wants to get out of it.

And maybe the no labels brand is sort of falling apart.

Joe Manchin's not going to run.

There's all these other minor candidates.

I guess what she's doing is the fool Liz Cheney, that she's positioning herself as a noble opponent.

Most of her rhetoric, Jack, is more on the left than the right side of the spectrum.

She talks about fellas.

There's 11 fellas and I beat them all and I'm a woman and I was an immigrant.

We heard it once, but we hear it every damn day.

And she's using all the tropes and modalities of the left.

And I don't, when they say 40% of her supporters, that's what they say now.

But let's see what they say in November.

They always say that.

They never unite.

The only time it's ever really happened is...

with the never Trumpers in 2016, and Trump still won.

And it doesn't really matter under the the Electoral College because no matter what the South Carolina Republicans do, he's going to get a lot of conservative Democrats and win that state.

So it's not like Michigan or Ohio

or Georgia or Nevada or Arizona.

So I don't know what she's doing.

I don't think anybody does.

I don't think she does.

Donald Trump said something that was very prescient.

He said, I don't know how she gets out of this, but maybe on Super Tuesday something will happen, but I doubt it.

I don't know why she's going to go down.

She's going the Harold-Stassen route.

She hasn't won one primary.

I don't know if that's ever happened where a person, a major candidate, has stayed in the entire primary season and not won one.

But that's what she's headed to if she doesn't get out.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, switching from raw politics to foreign policy, there's a really troubling item that appeared on Powerline, Powerline blog, which

all our listeners should check out that terrific website daily.

And this is from Steve Hayward, who writes regularly for Powerline, and it's titled Giving Rational Ignorance a Bad Name.

And let me just read this quickly, if you don't mind, Victor.

This is about Joe Biden's UN ambassador, Linda Thomas Greenfield.

I don't know if anyone remembers her, but

she is a diamond.

She is such a treasure to America.

Here's what Steve writes.

Greenfield gives Kamala Harris a run for her money in word salad platitude sweepstakes.

Thomas Greenfield outdid herself when

this happened in the UN the other day.

After the Algerian ceasefire resolution was defeated a few days ago, she concluded her statement as follows.

And

this is what Linda Thomas Greenfield, listeners, your UN ambassador, had to say.

We intend to do this the right way so that we can create the right conditions for a safer, more peaceful future, and we will continue to actively engage in the hard work of direct diplomacy on the ground until we reach a final solution.

Steve writes here, wait, did she really say that in this conflict between Israel and Hamas, the U.S.

is seeking a, quote, final solution, end quote.

Victor, your thoughts?

Well,

i thought she might say and we're going to address the jewish question but she didn't quite go that far but i mean her whole experience diplomatically is only really in i think she was an ambassador to liberia african-american affairs black affairs she's not qualified for that job she has no bot

broad background.

It's also a commentary on how ignorant our leaders are.

They don't know any history.

Anybody with an eighth grade knowledge of world history would know something about World War II.

And if they read a textbook in their eighth grade class, they'd see a chapter called, or a subchapter called The Final Solution.

And so for her to say that after October 7th, this just destroys all of her credibility.

Probably makes her very popular in the Arab world.

But other than that, just more of what you

know, this administration is so strange.

They all pose as these humanitarians and these therapeutic people, and they say the meanest, nastiest things, not just stuff like this, but Joe Biden destroys the border, and then he blames and says that Donald Trump destroyed the border.

And then he blames Ukraine on Donald Trump, the only administration of the last four that Russia didn't invade someone else's borders.

It just gets so nauseating and frustrating because I don't know if people buy all of it, but she's an ignoremus, she really is.

And

I don't know how you walk that back.

back.

Oh, I don't mean a final solution.

I just mean an ultimate solution.

I don't know.

No solution.

Also seems to be a lot of, you know, media silence.

We can do this relentlessly.

As you know, Victor, if the shoe was on the other foot, if a Republican had said, if some Trump administration

said something about a final solution, it would be hell-raised.

We had a good conversation.

I interviewed Ron Johnson.

That's going to come out next week.

And he made a really good point that I don't even think that what CNN or MSNBC or NBC says anymore, given the audiences of a Jordan Peterson or Daily Wire or Ben Shapiro or Joe Wogan, Megan Kelly, I just don't think they have any influence like they used to.

I used to think media, media, media, but

Is Rachel Maddow just ranting all day in line about Russian collusion, Russian disinformation?

Now they've got a new Russian collusion disinformation with this spy that they say, oh, he collapsed the case against Hunter.

This is the guy they praise as one of their most valuable assets until he wasn't, i.e.

until he told the truth about the Biden family.

So I don't think anybody listens to them anymore.

I really don't.

And,

you know, she said final solution, and then they, what are they going to say?

If they ask Corinne Jean-Pierre, what did your ambassador to the United States,

United Nations mean by that?

She said,

I've addressed that elsewhere, or

we'll address that, or she didn't, I don't have any information.

She doesn't even know.

She doesn't know what the final solution was.

None of them do.

So they're ignorant.

They don't have any knowledge.

All they have knowledge of is grievance, grievance and DEI and unfairness, and America's bad.

Outside of that realm, that context, they don't know anything about history, the Renaissance,

European history, any history, world history, much less 20th century's history.

Yeah.

Well, we're going to have to get stick with the media a little as a topic and get into some 1776 history, Victor.

And we're going to do that right after this important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Again, we're recording on Sunday, the 25th of February.

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Hansen Show.

So Victor, you know, that media you just said that nobody listened to, but I'm still going to have to ask your opinion on a thing or two.

One has to do with an MSNBC performance, and the other has to do with the CBS

reporter, Catherine Herridge.

So here, first on MSNBC, and I'm confident most of the listeners have seen some clip on social media of Heidi

Prisbila.

sure I mispronounced her name, but she's a politico reporter and she was being interviewed on MSNBC by Michael Steele, who was the former chairman of the Republican Party and a former fellow cruiser with you and me on a national

interview cruise with you.

I'll be candid.

I never had much respect for him or his competence.

He was put there after,

remember when Barack Obama won, they thought, wow,

we can't win the black vote, so we're going to have Michael Steele, but he wasn't, he was never a conservative, and he said a bunch of crazy things, and he was triangulating from the very beginning.

He has no sense of identity of where he is politically.

He just gets on television and he looks around at the panel or wherever he is, and he always agrees with 51% of the people.

In any given situation, he has no intellectual courage or independence.

Well,

I'll get a little more out of you on him in a second.

Let me just say here that while

Prisbala is speaking, you know,

under the screen says, the Republican mess, how Christian nationalism could shape a second Trump term.

And here's what she said.

Christian nationalists, quote, believe our rights as American, as all human beings, don't come from any earthly authority, don't come from Congress, don't come from the Supreme Court.

They come from God, end quote.

She says this shocked.

And of course, there's been a ton of response by very smart people about, did you ever hear this thing called the Declaration of Independence, where our rights come from God?

But then also, the other thing is, Michael Steele's shaking his head as she's saying that.

So,

I just

your general thoughts.

Well, I happen to remember some, wasn't it?

I think I even memorized it.

It said something like,

All men are created equal if they're endowed by the creator, right?

Endowed by the creator.

And so, I don't know.

It seems familiar.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean,

she says that she got on to natural law, the extremist area.

She has no idea of natural.

Natural law is one of the oldest philosophical concepts of Western civilization.

It goes back to Aristotle and beyond.

And it basically says that when we're born into the world, we have a natural, divinely implanted sense, moral, of moral rectitude.

And that people do not have to be schooled necessarily to know that it's wrong to steal or it's wrong to rape or it's wrong to kill.

That is an innate moral sense.

It doesn't mean they won't violate that, but they have been given an endowed sense of morality.

That's natural law, and that laws reflect that.

And that's the basis of law.

It's an assumption that people have a common sense of propriety and evil, etc.

So when she says, you know, that anybody who believes in natural laws,

if you ask these people, would you define a Christian nationalist?

She wouldn't know what to say.

She really wouldn't.

And if you ask her

what a deist is, I mean, even if some of the founders were not themselves practicing or even

active Christians or believed in Christianity, they were deist.

And that means that they believed that a deity, i.e.

in the Christian, Judeo-Christian context, was very important for people.

In other words, the concept if you don't, you know, kind of a Nietzschean idea that if you don't have a God, you'll replace it with something far worse.

So they thought that Christianity in this context of the founding, some of them, most of them believed in God and practiced as Christians, but the ones that didn't believe that Christianity was a very valuable tool for moral instruction.

And that's not,

I don't know where these people,

when we get all of these people talking like this, and, you know, it's like we've boiled down the collective intelligence of our elites to the view or something, you know?

about that's what, that's about what they have.

And

I wonder if they ever look at the coinage in their pocket, Victoria.

I'm a $20 bill right now.

It says, In God We Trust.

Says the same thing on a quarter.

How is this?

This is kind of shocking to them.

What does he think?

The dollar bill, anoret coeptus.

He nods on our beginnings.

That's right.

How about Virgil's Aeneid, but it's been used for the idea of a God nods.

God nods on what we've started.

And new age of

noble seclorum, nobos ordos seclorum, a new age, new order for the ages.

That comes out of the fourth ecologue of Virgil, but not at India, but the fourth ecologue.

And

it's part of a classical tradition that was embodied later into Christianity.

And that's why

our early

foundational documents, mottos, everything are saturated with references to God.

And the idea that you're a Christian nationalist because you believe in reality is just nuts.

But where does all this come from?

It's just, you know, I don't want to, I want to be concise and not going to rant, but where does Greenfield's idea of final solution is okay to say that?

Or she's ignorant of it.

Or where does Michael Steele nodding?

Or where does Heidi somebody

thinks that natural law is embodied by only Christian nationalists?

It comes from ignorance.

In other words, these people go to universities, they get degrees, but if you actually look at the courses they take and the assignments they're required to do and the grade that reflects actual performance, there's nothing there.

It's just a joke.

And I think a lot of people would be better off not going to college.

Just a waste of time for these credentialed ignorant Ramuses.

It really is.

And we get fooled.

We get fooled.

We say, wow.

I would rather have a person who went out and ran five 7-Elevens as the ambassador to the United Nations than Ms.

Greenfield.

And I would rather, for the head of the Republican National Committee, I would rather have a guy that has six tire stores than Michael Steele.

Really would.

And it just, and that's

we've got to get rid of this idea that you're credentialed or you're,

I don't know, it doesn't have any connection with knowledge, much less ethics or anything.

This is, um,

I

I saw a headline, I didn't click on it, about Peter Thiel's, you know, $100,000

to folks, and that it's very popular.

That was the headline.

I didn't click on it.

But then I also, I think I sent you an article from Law and Liberty, which is also a terrific website by Jonathan Leaf.

Jonathan,

he's written for a whole range of publications, including a National Review.

And I've known him quite a while.

He's a successful playwright and novelist, amongst other things.

But he had a great thought

about,

we talk about accreditation of colleges.

His thought is deaccreditation of colleges based on what you just talked about.

Let's look at some of these departments.

You picked on English departments because I guess they're the easiest for us to

picture in this sense.

English departments that don't teach Shakespeare, et cetera, you know, the great literary writers, why should they be accredited?

Why should a college that goes that route be accredited?

His thought was find some, you know, some conservatives of means should bankroll an assault on this.

I think we still need colleges, Victor, right?

Well, I do too.

I do too, but they're not, they have to be reformed.

And the only way they're going to reform is by paying.

And that means that people are not going to buy their product because it's not worth the investment.

And then when that happens, they will react to market reality.

But you've got to get the government out of it.

And the government is 10 times the largest donor.

It's a larger donor than all of the endowment.

The amount of money that it gives, either in direct research or tax write-offs for giving to the endowment are but federally subsidized loans.

Speaking of which, Joe Biden went out to here, California, of all places, and he gave another $1.2 billion.

I think he's up to ⁇ he had already given $150 billion that the Supreme Court said was illegal.

And he excused another $150,000 right before the election.

And, you know,

what does that do when 150,000 people get their contractual obligations wiped off the books in a manner that the Supreme Court says is illegal to do by the exchange.

Even Nancy Pelosi said he couldn't do it.

And that means that what if you're a person right now and you owe $20,000 and you've seen, I don't know, 300 or 400,000 people get from Joe Biden in these waves of relief.

Would you keep paying?

I wouldn't.

I just say,

you know what?

If he did this in February, he'll get closer in March.

He'll do it again.

He'll do it in April.

But he'll give a big one right on November 1st or late October.

So I'm going to wait.

Why pay?

And then have my...

And he's destroying the whole sense of these young people took out an obligation, they took out a debt and they were required to pay it.

And,

you know, my daughter had

student loans and she paid absolutely on time and I helped her.

And when she passed away, she still had, I think it was $13,000 and I paid it.

I think everybody has an obligation, no matter what, to pay any debt that you incur.

And

I do blame the universities because they take 18-year-old kids and and they're much more of a loan shark than car salesmen.

They get them in there, and they send them student aid packages, and they jack up the tuition so it's like $70,000, and room and board, $80,000.

But we have a very multifacet loan package.

We're going to give you a discount of, you know, $20,000.

And you can get a student loan for $40,000.

You only have to come up with...

But the price has been so inflated given the value that you receive that all of these are gimmicks.

gimmicks and they're not the price isn't worth what they're charging.

Right.

If we got the student loan, the federal government out of the student loan and told these universities they have to back their own loans, it would be very different.

Well, and the societal ramifications are massive.

It is.

Graduates 22, they have six-figure debt.

So it's essentially they're coming out of college with a mortgage.

It's not exactly,

I would think it suppresses the interest in marriage.

It does.

I wrote about a whole section.

I wrote a whole section of that

in the Dying Citizen.

I said, it creates prolonged adolescence.

You get these people, they take three units, six units, nine units.

change their major, and before they know it, they're in their late 20s and early 30s with a BA in environmental studies or sociology or psychology.

They can't get a job.

They see people that they make fun of without education that are making, you know, $80,000 a year as plumbers or electricians that they look down on, and then they get angry and whiny and they say, Why do I owe $300,000, $200,000?

And it's and they took that loan out.

And they're not going to buy, you said they're not going to get married, they're not going to have children, they're not going to buy a house till they're in their late 30s, if at all.

And it's very detrimental to us as a nation.

So I think we should just

phase it out.

And if Harvard and Stanford and Princeton and Duke

and University of these colleges had to take their endowment and say, Look, here's the loan, and you have to pay it back.

If you don't pay it back, we're going to go after you, but we'll have to take it out of our endowment.

You would have a much tighter run ship because the moral hazard would be where it is.

By the way, last point on this, Victor, just on the financial Penn Wharton,

Biden's various schemes here to cancel these loans.

Penn Wharton analysis says that the efforts will cost a total of $475 billion over

10 years.

Half a trillion with the interest lost and all about.

Half a trillion dollars.

For what?

And this is really funny.

Some of you who are Democrats or independents are listening, I know Trump says things that bother you, but

we're watching something that we haven't seen before where this guy will drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve without any interest

at all in our national security.

And right before an election in the midterms, he will go over to Saudi Arabia.

He will go send signals to Iran that he's not going to sanction even Russia, Venezuela, because he wants the oil price low.

He will forgive.

student debt right before the election.

And we haven't seen something that's so nakedly

either illegal or amoral.

And he does it because he thinks that this old-fashioned media, the Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, PBS, network news, all of them will just not say a word.

I don't know.

Well, he's right.

But

again, I just have to hope that people watch this and they have nothing but disgust about it.

I really do.

And there's some evidence that that's true because his polls are between 33 and 38 percent.

That's about that's lower than we've seen in a long, long time.

And it's going to get lower.

Well, Victor, we have one more media thing to get your opinion on.

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So Victor, that one last media item has to do with Catherine Herridge, who I'll assume most of our listeners would know of her.

They probably saw her on Fox.

She used to be at Fox, but she was at CBS until last week when she was fired along with

a number of people let go, excuse me, by CBS.

But hers was a little more shocking because she was quite a prominent reporter.

And she was on the Hunter Biden laptop beat and the Hunter Biden beat in general.

And her personal files were taken by CBS when she was fired.

And this is an unprecedented move.

So, Victor, this is really, you know, typical.

Is the Biden administration in league with media giants, major corporations to suppress

and

contain bad news about Hunter?

I think that's a rhetorical question.

Your thoughts?

I don't know the answer, but I do know that

Hunter, the more that Joe Biden says he knows nothing about Hunter and he lets, and Hunter's going to be equal under the law as every other person is, is a complete lie.

We know that because when he was facing severe IRS penalties and he had the DOJ under O'Biden and Merrick Garr, O'Biden,

and that's a true statement, the Obama-Biden consortium,

he

did what?

I mean, he was going to walk free, basically, with a slap on the wrist if it wasn't for one judge that said, wait a minute, this is outrageous.

And then we had some felony indictments, which I don't think he's going to be convicted on.

I really don't.

And because of the politicized nature of it and the half-hearted effort of the prosecutors.

But

Charles Gasperino had a good article on this.

He said that there might have been, even in a financial angle, that CBS is bleeding a lot of dollars for its global Paramount group or Paramount Globe or whatever it's called that owns it.

Paramount owns them.

Yeah, yeah.

And that they want to merge.

And

there's a lot of antitrust implications, and they feel that if they were to get rid of her and go easy on Hunter Biden, then

the Federal Trade Commission might be more likely to approve the merger or not.

I don't know if that's true or not.

And he says, I'm not a conspiracy theory, but this is very weird that they would go after this woman, who, by the way, when she was on Fox, was not one of the Fox.

uh conservatives she was always uh

i guess jennifer griffith and her and Jackie Snyder and those people, they were, is that what her name?

Jacqueline Heinrichs, I guess her name was.

They were not conservative.

They were just reporters.

So it's not that she's some far-right reporter.

So there's some agenda there, and it has something to do with her research on Hunter Biden, and they want to impair it by

getting rid of her platform and her voice.

And

also, I guess, her research materials.

I don't know how they can confiscate things that they don't own that she had maybe when she was working at Fox, but they're doing it.

And

well,

it's troubling, deeply troubling.

It's sort of like,

you know, what's her name?

Is it Cheryl Atkinson?

Remember her?

Yes, sure.

Yeah, she was Cheryl, I think she spelled her name S-H-A-Y.

Yes.

And she, you know, she alleged that they were actually spying on her via computer.

And the same thing for her research that got too close to what the Hillary Clinton-Biden team were doing and the weaponization of these institutions.

So

again, again, everybody is very cautious and weird and freaked out because all of the reference that we grew up with, the FBI, Ephraim Zimbless Jr.

on Sunday nights, and

the CIA is trying to fight Cold War communism.

The DOJ is taking a disinterested view of this.

It's on the civil rights beat, doing a good job.

The IRS, we all dreaded, but we felt that anytime anybody tried to tamper with it, Nixon or anybody, everybody was outraged.

All of those have been weaponized.

And the left never said a word about the corruption of the FBI, corruption of the CIA, corruption of the DOJ, corruption of the IRS, corruption of Homeland Security.

You could say there's a lot of corruption in the Pentagon, weaponization, politicalization.

It's just amazing what they've done to the institutions.

Yeah.

Well, there's an interesting piece you put up on

Twitter/slash X that gets into some of that.

And maybe we'll get a little time to

get your reflections on that, Victor.

First, if you don't mind, I think we should maybe get your thoughts on this murder of a Georgia college student, and we'll do that right after these important messages.

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

So, Victor,

here's the story.

Lake and Riley.

A 22-year-old nursing student at Augusta University was found murdered on the University of Georgia's campus, arrested and charged with the crime is 26-year-old Venezuelan Jose Ibarra, who entered the U.S.

illegally in 2022 in Texas.

And he'd been arrested for other crimes, including in New York City, and of course, let go.

And I want to personally congratulate, I'm being sarcastic, the local Georgia community, Athens, Georgia, you know, that's a sanctuary city.

Anyway,

He has been apprehended and he's been charged with murder.

And a final little note, the Department of Justice also arrested and charged his brother, his older brother, Diego Ibera in Georgia related to the possession of a fake green card.

So, you know, the Ibera family, just two people wrecking their havoc

in the United States, murdering a college student who's going to grow up to be a nurse and

save people's lives.

And who's to blame, Alejandro Mayorkas and Joe Biden?

When they lied and lied and lied and said the border is secure, they were deliberately doing this.

They opened the border.

They destroyed the progress of the wall.

They destroyed catch and release.

They destroyed applying for refugee status from your home country.

They let Obador of Mexico off.

They did all of that.

And they did it for one reason, to greenlight millions of people, partly to satisfy the Chamber of Commerce wing, the apolitical corporate elite that wanted cheap labor, but mostly because under

non-election day balloting, it was just 70% in some of the swing states, they were convinced that a lot of these people will be able to vote, and they're completely right, they will.

And they didn't care about the human costs and the horror and carnage that would accrue when you let that many people in from some of the most violent places in the world without any audit and you do not subject them to the rudimentary audits that you require of citizens.

You tell a citizen, not only do you have to have a license or a passport to get on a flight, but next May you're going to have to have a real ID,

but not if you're an illegal alien.

And if you leave this country, you better have a passport card or a passport, but not an illegal alien.

And you just can't walk into a hotel and say, I want a bed, you owe it to me, but not an illegal alien.

And that is what...

That sends a message that there is no deterrence and all of these people are coming out of the woodwork.

The worst of it is, Jack, we were told, well, we can't deport them because Venezuela is angry at us or we're

and they don't have, why don't, what does that mean?

Venezuela sent them there.

Does that mean Venezuela said, oh, we can't let our illegal aliens go to the United States because we don't have a reciprocal treatment?

They didn't say that.

So why don't we just put them on a plane and land somewhere in Venezuela?

Or just take a bus and just go down to the, you know, take a big barge and just dock at a Venezuelan port and say, here they are.

Thank you, but no thanks.

See what happens.

Yeah.

Put them on a cruise ship.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they should, they should do that.

And they're, and think of all the destruction that happens.

And everybody's what they, this poor young woman would be alive.

All she wanted to do was just exercise.

And I got so tired of the news coverage.

It's very dangerous to young women should not jog.

Yeah, that's true.

But when in America can a young woman not jog in the broad daylight on a very traveled, you know, without worrying about two people who the president of the United States let in who were criminals?

I mean, we don't have to live like that.

And

it's like that Kate Steinley, when she was killed, the only thing that people got angry were that illegal alien supposedly had been shooting sea lions.

And they would have convicted him if they could prove that, shooting at them, because that's something that they were really upset, but not somebody who was killed and life was extinguished he got off he'd been he'd had uh five felonies and seven illegal entries he got off

he's i think he's out by now and they all they don't have any respect for life they really don't it's all this abstract leftist dogma it's you know to make a omelette we've got to crush some eggs or scramble some eggs they don't care

That's just a horrible story, and it's going to happen again and again and again.

I was thinking the other day,

last night, I took a walk around my small farm and I hear all of this gunfire, maybe, I don't know, 800 or 900 yards away.

Why do I have to do that?

I have no idea whether the guy is shooting an

AR-15 through the orchard or he's shooting up in the air.

And it's coming from what used to be a nice little farmhouse and now it's rented out to, I don't know how many people live there.

And there's no audit.

And the other morning I'm walking at five o'clock in the morning.

I turn around and here's a car car park.

And two people don't speak English.

They're going at it sexually in the car.

I try to say, what are you doing?

And

they yell an obscenity to me in Spanish and they drive off.

I don't have to do that.

I mean,

why does Joe Biden say, you have to do that?

We can do this.

We have to destroy the border.

We have to let in some people without any audit.

I don't care what race they are or what language they speak.

It doesn't matter to me.

I don't like people coming from Russia.

I don't like people coming anywhere illegally.

And it just makes a mockery of the law and all these people who are waiting.

But it's this strange things that we have to put up with it.

In New York,

why do New Yorkers have to put up with that when people just

commit crimes or they attack police?

Why doesn't people just say no more?

That's it.

And it just keeps going on and on and on.

Well,

there's some truth to the saying about we get the kind of government we vote for.

We do.

We do.

In many cases, like even we've talked before about the philanthropists with college who are now shocked by what's going on.

Like, what did people think was brewing and percolating all these last years?

I don't think, and I think everybody has to be honest.

We don't have to put up with this racialization.

Eric Adams, I was watching him the other day.

He ran for office saying, I'm the guy who stood up, remember that, to the crackers on the police force?

And then he got in there and he said, look at this council.

They're after me

because

I'm black and we've never had a more chocolate.

Can you imagine anybody who came in and said, look at me, we've never had a more Asian yellow group.

Or look at me, I'm white.

We've never had this many white people before.

And then same thing with Fannie Willis.

I'm not going to take down a proud black man by saying something.

And then black people,

all this lies and race, race, people don't have to take it.

They just say, you know what, we don't have to listen to it anymore.

We're sick of it.

And I was listening to that clip from that woman on the view, Sony Sonny Hauston.

Is that her name, Holston?

All she does is talk about race, race, race, race, race, race.

But we wake up, we're like an insect in a kafka.

We wake up and it's just,

you know.

cockroaches yeah it's just everything you have to assume that a person can just collectively demonize a whole group based on their skin color contrary to the civil rights movement and then you have to realize that people can come here illegally and break the law and face no consequences this is what you the america you're going to have to face

and it's just it's going to keep going till somebody says no and i don't know you get what you pay for i was looking at san francisco

you know i was in the bay area this week and

even the Silicon Valley downtowns are suffering, but I was just thinking these people voted for all of this overwhelmingly.

And when I hear Gavin Newsome, I think, wait a minute, you were

on the board of supervisors for eight years and then you were mayor for eight years and then you were lieutenant governor.

governor for eight years and then you were now governor, I guess, six.

So you've been 30 years in the Bay Area, which is deteriorating to nothing.

And then Jerry Brown weighed in on something the other day from his Echo Estate up in Grass Valley.

I thought, wow, you were mayor of Oakland for six years.

You were governor of California for 16.

That's 22.

You were attorney general for four.

That's 26.

You were mayor of Oakland, I think, for eight

or four at least.

30 years.

Between the two of them,

no two people are more responsible for what California came than those two guys.

Between them, they're going to be governors for 30.

They're going to be governors between the two for 24 years.

And you add their mayorships and their border super, all that, attorney general, and nobody's more responsible.

And yet they never say a word about what they did.

And people kept...

I don't think either one of them.

Jerry Brown ran for Senate and lost, but I don't think they ever lost an election other than that.

And Jerry Brown lost the presidency also.

Well, yeah,

he did as a primary candidate.

Well, we have just a few minutes left, Victor.

So maybe we can squeeze in here this wonderful post you wrote for ex-Twitter last week, and it's titled.

I want to encourage our listeners to visit, if they're on that platform, check out at V D Hansen.

That's Victor's handle.

And I'd say twice is so week now.

You're writing really interesting original posts.

And this one was what the left has bequeathed us.

The left has created new rules for national politics.

Here are 20 some precedents.

they have now established for America in the future.

And

it really is when they're all, when you've collected these 20 thoughts, enough thoughts, Victor, but 20, well, as you say, precedents

in the collective,

it's shocking.

Well, I mean, it's the stabilizing of our nation.

Yeah, I mean, they just make up rules

and they pass it off as their principle, but I'll just name a few of them.

If they get control of the Senate, then the filibusters are racist, archaric, fossilized, and you got to get rid of it.

If they're in the minority, it's essential.

They used to love the Electoral College.

They call it the Blue Wall.

When you wake up at Jack on Election Day, you have already lost Republicans, Illinois, you've lost Michigan, you've lost Wisconsin, you've lost New York, you lost California, you can't win.

And then all of a sudden, it's a racist,

fossilized,

you know, out-of-date institution.

And

in election year, you try to

change the state balloting.

That's supposed to be fair

so that 70% instead of 30 vote on not on election day.

Remember electors, you flip the electors.

Everybody said that Trump was in election denial.

It's 2004, Barbara Boxer and I think 34 House members said they weren't going to ratify the Ohio, tried to delay it.

Then we had those people in 2016, Jill Stein sued to stop it.

Stacey Abrams sued to stop the, we overturned the Georgia count.

We had all those celebrities remember, hey, electors, please vote your conscience, not your popular vote, constitutional mandate, and vote for Hillary.

Switch your votes.

That was supposed to be okay.

If you're next president, you can raid his house.

That's a new one.

I guess when Joe Biden leaves, Donald Trump is supposed to

talk to his DOJ and say,

we've got rumors that he's got filed.

Let's go raid his house with a SWAT team.

And

swarm the homes of Supreme Court.

When did that start?

You just,

I thought that was a felony to swarm the homes of Clarence Thomas or,

I don't know, Judge Alito.

When did that become okay?

You can just go to a threaten a justice or go to any politician's home.

Right.

And they did that to a leftist the other day.

I don't know who it was, and everybody got really angry about it.

25th Amendment, you just smear a president, say he's crazy, and you get the FBI director, Andrew, an interim director, Andrew McCabe, and the Deputy Attorney General, and they say, let's wear a wire and catch him in a ⁇ can you imagine right now if Christopher Wray went to somebody high in the Justice Department and they say, you know, Biden is just dangerous.

I got an idea.

We'll wear a wire and we'll catch Biden saying some crazy crap.

And then we'll, you know, leak it and we'll get the cabinet to vote him out.

That would be unthinkable.

So, you know, and I talked about the rioters, you know, it's okay to riot for 120 days, 14,000 people arrested, the majority let go.

One day, January 6th, people are going to be in prison in some cases for a decade.

Used to be a sin to pack the Supreme Court, but if the Supreme Court is no longer the Warren Court, then it should be expanded to 15.

15 justices.

I guess they have a new one that, and I hope all these Republican prosecutors at the state and local level are listening because what they have bequeathed to us is in a national election, if you want to hurt the national opponent of your party, what you do is indict the president.

So if Joe Biden, you think, has violated a campaign, if he has raised money in your state, even though it's a federal violation that was illegal and you think that that was improper, he hasn't given the right names, you can indict him and tie him up, but time it to tie it up during the election season.

And if you think he's violated a contract in your state or he's done something improper, then you indict him.

And that's what we are seeing with Fannie Willis and Alvin Gregg and

Letitia James.

And

you can just open the border.

You can just say, you know what?

I guess the idea is if people are coming in very poor and very needy, then they're going to be

valuable constituents.

But if you think that people who have skilled degrees from conservative places, why don't you just open the border to people that have master's degrees from conservative places that are very wealthy and have that asymmetry and see how the left like it?

I don't think they'd like it.

They'd say that would be terrible.

And maybe in this election, I guess another thing they bequeath to us is the FBI just goes out and censors people's news.

They work with Twitter and Facebook.

I guess if Trump was, he should

appoint an FBI director, and then in the next election after him, they should go to FBI and say, you know what?

FBI should go to Twitter or Facebook.

We want to, you guys, this story right here, we want it squelched.

And by the way, When I retire, I want to be deputy general counsel, as James Baker was.

I think he went from something like $200,000 to $6 or $7 million a year.

Oh, by the way, you can hire, right now you can hire foreign nationals.

That's supposed to be illegal to hire a foreign national in your campaign.

But what you should do is go out and hire a foreign national to make a dossier full of lies about the Biden family, because it's okay now.

You cannot be prosecuted.

And if you are prosecuted for a campaign finance violation, as was Hillary Clinton, who paid, I think, $113,000, and Barack Obama paid, what, $375,000 for violation of hiding the names of his donors.

You're not going to go to jail if you're a Republican.

You're just not going to go.

It's only going to happen to Democrats.

That's another thing that I think would be

reciprocal.

And I said another one is I mentioned that earlier.

You should just every Republican right before midterm should drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, just flood the nation with cheap oil and hope that people pay you back with obeyance

at the

midterm election.

Another one is cancel federal debt.

I mean, student debt.

And don't go whole hog.

So if there's a Republican in the White House in the 2026 election and you want to, I don't know, get a bigger House margin, just wait to about a month before and then just start canceling student debt as much as you can and draining the and see what the New York Times and Washington Post say about that.

Yeah.

Washington Post

says democracy dies in darkness, but I think it's happening in

plain sight, right?

Yeah, I mean, it's all asymmetrical, and it's all predicated on one thing, that they are the adolescents in the room, and nobody would dare do what they're doing.

If you were going to be reciprocal to recreate deterrence, then you would be in a doom loop, and the whole country would unwind.

So they believe that the country can maintain the rule of law, its constitutional system, its apparent normality if one side

tries to pack the court or tries to undermine

the Electoral College or tries to get rid of the filibuster or tries to let in 8 million people or tries to use the FBI to censor the news.

It's okay because it's just one side.

If both sides were to do it and normalize it and institutionalize it, we wouldn't have a country,

which puts a dilemma on the Republican conservatives because the logic that the left use is not inaccurate.

It means that, are we going to do what they do to recreate deterrence so they stop?

But if we do do that, then we don't have a country.

So are we going to be the adult that says to the child, I'm not going to jump up and down in the supermarket aisle and get on the ground in a fetal position?

Because if I were to do that, then you were to do that, all chaos would break out.

So I'm going to just take all of your insults and tantrums and give you the candy, and then we'll go out peacefully.

And that's the theory behind it.

Brinksmanship.

Well, hey, Victor, we are running out of time here today.

I do need to tell our listeners to visit your website, the Blade of Perseus, at Victorhansen.com.

That's the web address.

Victor writes three,

two or three, mostly three, original pieces for the Blade of Perseus every week.

They're called ultra articles, and you can try to read them, but if you're not subscribed, you won't be able to.

And if you're a fan of Victor's writing, of course, you want to subscribe.

Costs $5

to get in the door, discounted for the full year at $50.

Right now, Victor's got, he's in the midst of a three-part series so far, Ode to a Collapsing Barn.

So it's pretty interesting stuff.

You'll also find the archives of these podcasts, links to Victor's pieces for American Greatness.

He writes every week for that website.

His syndicated columns.

Link to his forthcoming book, which you need to buy.

Go to Amazon, buy it.

It's called The End of Everything.

And it's about how war,

there are certain stories.

I got to get the subtitle here, Victor, how wars descend into annihilation.

Anyway, VictorHanson.com is for me, Jack Fowler.

I write the free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society.

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signed up.

What else do I have to do?

Well, we have to read a comment, Victor.

Lots of comments coming coming in.

Some of them are still, of course, Fowler showed up.

But here's one.

It's simply titled Thank You.

This is from iTunes/slash Apple, where you can rate the show zero to five stars.

Thanks for those who do that.

Thanks for those who leave comments.

When I was writing my college thesis on religious capitalism, I wished I had a better understanding of the classics.

Listening to VDH is wisdom and knowledge of the topics.

You fill in the blanks.

Thank you.

Trek

6500.

So thanks, Trek 6500.

And all others who do leave comments.

Victor, you've been terrific as usual.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.