Lackluster Left: Iran, Bombings, and a Border Bill

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

Our star and namesake, Victor Davis-Hanson, is the Martin and Ely Anderson

Senior Fellow.

Sorry about that.

I should know that by now.

Martin and Ely Anderson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has an official website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its address is victorhanson.com.

We'll talk a little bit about that later on.

In today's podcast, we are recording on Saturday the 3rd, and

we mentioned the date because it matters.

given the subject matter, which is most preeminent at this hour.

And that happens to be the Biden administration launching counterattacks, we'll call them, in Iraq

to revenge the death of three Americans killed because of the ramifications of his genius foreign policy.

But we'll get Victor's thoughts on

this military response.

And then we have

Justice Soda Meyer, the beginning of progressive efforts to pressure her out of the Supreme Court.

And another topic or two

to discuss today.

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

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

So, Victor, today is Saturday.

And yesterday, Friday the 2nd,

there were numerous bombings in various places.

Some Iranian

stooges,

I think 34 yesterday were killed, according to an article in the Daily Mail.

More attacks are taking place.

Right now.

Okay,

things are happening.

But

is

this troubling to you?

Is there some flaw in this response?

What are your thoughts?

Well, I want to thank you, Jack, first of all, for introducing me as a senior fellow, which I am, but I never felt such until I turned 70.

And now I'm not only a senior fellow at Hoover, but I'm in a more important brotherhood of senior fellows.

Did I miss a birthday?

Yes, you did.

September 5th, 1953.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

I never thought I.

God, I used to be.

I look at the millennium.

I said, oh, my God, I'll never be 47 in 2000.

I'm just not going to, I'm going to be exempt.

That was 24 years ago.

Okay.

You know,

the great

Roman military

analyst Vegetas said, if you want peace, prepare for war.

We sum pacum vellum repare.

If you want war, then continually to

the inverse is true.

If you want war, continually prepare for peace.

And that's what we've been doing.

So we have been under a colossal...

There's two versions of how we got into this.

Three versions.

Excuse me, everybody.

There's three versions how we got into this mess.

Number one,

in a Pavlovian,

and they're not mutually exclusive, a Pavlovian response.

Joe Biden came in.

Jake Sullivan Sullivan would later say the Middle East was calm, and he said to himself, I'm going to overturn

every single thing in foreign policy that that SOB Trump has his fingerprints.

And now we know that it wasn't an SOB, Jack, because we've been told he called him a effing asshole as well.

So he despised Trump, so he said, oh.

Cut out of the Iran deal, get back in.

Did Trump

raise sanctions and cost him $90 billion?

Lift them.

Did he call the Houthis territory, lift it?

Did he cut off Hamas?

Give it back.

Did he have this Abrahams go up?

Junk the Abrams.

And that's what he did.

And he took a mild, calm region and turned it into a hellhole.

Then number two,

he may have been doing all of this crazy things in addition because, as I said before, he has a crazy idea that he inherited from Barack Obama, that if you empowered the Shia-Persian crescent from Tehran to Beirut to Gaza,

then you would have creative tension against the Gulf monarchies, Jordan, Egypt, Israel.

And we would step in and not have to be the policemen, but we would adjudicate, playing them off as neutrals.

In other words, we had just as much in common with the theocracy in Iran as we did.

with the constitutional government in Israel.

If you doubt me, ask yourself when they had the Green Movement 11 days into the Obama administration in 2009.

He didn't say a word as if all these poor Iranians on the street risking their lives were neocons, and he was against that.

Or three, Jack,

he just said to himself,

I'm in an election year

and I'm 80 years old and I don't want a screw-up.

So whatever it takes to buy people off, Iran, give them the $90 billion.

I don't like them, but if they have hostages, give them a billion point two for each hostage.

Hamas, just give them some be nice money.

Just give them 700 million bucks.

And so he did that, and they interpreted that magnanimity

as weakness to be exploited, not to be reciprocated in kind.

So here we have this thing, Jack, where

by not retaliating immediately in a measured response and not

reinstituting economic sanctions on oil and travel bans and sanctions against military and economic leaders in Iran.

We have to, the longer you don't do that, the more you will have to accelerate and expand your response

the longer that it's delayed.

It's like mowing the lawn.

If you don't mow the lawn when the grass is an inch high, then try it when it's five inches high and you almost kill yourself trying to do it.

And that's where we are right now.

So now they're going to have to have a sustained attack.

And if they don't,

people

all around the world are going to say, well, that was just nothing.

It was nothing.

They didn't do anything.

All you did was throw a bunch of bombs.

And the world is watching, Jack, for another reason.

There is an impression, fair or not,

that the United States either does not have or will not use its accustomed power to help its friends and punishes its enemies.

Maybe it's we've given too many of our stockpiled weapons to Ukraine or Israel.

We're not producing them.

Maybe it's the 30 to 50,000 short recruits.

Maybe it's the notorious DEI promotions and retention policies that have not rewarded merit.

Maybe it's the weaponization of the four-star class that seem to can't keep their mouths shut and they have to weigh in, retired and current, on every political issue, whether it's McChrystal or McCaffrey or,

you know, Michael Hayden, whoever it is, James Clapper, they just can't be quiet.

Whatever it is,

of all these reasons, there is an impression that we will not deter our enemies.

And this is a chance,

for everybody to be seen, to see that we can deter.

And so that's important as well.

We'll see.

It has to be sustained.

It has to destroy their capability.

And I don't think you can do that unless you address, you don't have to go into Iran, but you have to sanction it.

You have to just, why do we allow any Iranians that are not refugees and hate that regime to come to this country?

We should go through every single university.

And anybody who is an Iranian national without due citizenship and is

not checked out by the CIA, FBI, whatever, should be sent back home immediately.

And we've got to do that.

Otherwise, you're going to risk a wider war.

And we don't want that.

So if you do it incrementally and steadily and serially, then you don't have to all of a sudden say, oh my God, look what's happened.

We've got to go bomb the, you know, the...

Tehran or something.

So we'll see how long it's going to be sustained.

That Iranian ship that everybody references, Jack, that seems to what, mysteriously like a ghost, float around the Red Sea, full of antennae, and it's bringing in missiles.

Supposedly, it's surveilling our forces.

On day one, it should have been blown out of the water.

If you want to be nice about it, we could have just taken a bullhorn and said, pulled up alongside it and said,

in five minutes, we have a cruise missile that's coming right into your outtake pipe, and it's going to blow it up.

So we suggest you all get off immediately.

That would be very easy to do, and that would send a message.

We were also still sending them cash.

I mean, not only are there not sanctions, but I saw something on Fox earlier today that implied.

Yeah, this, and you've, you know, the English at least weren't sending Germany cash in the late 30s.

They were, though.

Oh,

well, sorry about that.

They were sending them arms as well.

They were sending them airplane engines and everything, domestic, I mean, civilian, but they were still helping it.

And so were we, by the way.

We were doing it after 1939,

pharmaceuticals and oil technology and drilling and stuff.

But my point is that we could stop it right away and that would make a profound impression.

Then the move would be on their part.

And if they didn't see this was a retaliation rather than a preemption, and they didn't see that they had warned that this was right, and they felt they needed to escalate in retaliation, and that would mean only one thing,

that would be a terrorist incursion into the United States or against our airliners or in embassies, then we could be justified in doing something that would cause them real damage but wouldn't hurt the Iranian people.

And that would be taking out their military, their military bases, their ports, et cetera, if they retaliate.

But let's hope it doesn't come to that.

But we have to do something.

The other thing that's really important is we have to stop and take a deep breath and ask ourselves why we have 25, 30 of these places all over Jordan and Syria,

parts of mostly in Iraq, and as well

in the Middle East in general.

And these smaller places that are in southern Syria and Iraq and northern Jordan, they apparently are there to prevent the resurgence of ISIS, which

proposes a really bizarre, surreal paradox.

ISIS is a sworn enemy of Shia theocratic Iran, Persian Iran, and they just staged a big terrorist attack on the anniversary of Soleimani's death, and there was a funeral observation, and then they killed a bunch of Iranian.

And reportedly, Jack, we warned the Iranians to get on their good side that ISIS was going to do that.

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

That made the news rounds.

But my point is,

think a minute.

We're putting Americans in very exposed places without sufficient defensive capability or or without the ability to deter their enemies by offensive operations.

And we're there ostensibly to stop a recruitance of radical Sunni jihadists from doing what they did earlier during the Obama administration, take over half of Iraq.

But in the process of doing that, we were de facto allied with Shia Hezbollah and pro-Iranian militants that were fighting ISIS.

And under the Obama Obama administration, we were told that in the

hierarchy of evil, the seventh and eighth rungs of Dante's Inferno, that ISIS was worse than Hezbollah, Shia, you know, all those terrorist organizations.

If that's true,

so we're being attacked by the people

who we used to ally with against the common enemy.

And is the enemy of the enemy now our friend?

That is the radical Sunni jihadist?

I don't know the answer, but somebody's going to have to come up with a rationale to the American people why these places are so exposed without sufficient deterrent capability.

And if you don't do that, then you're going to get these wonderful young Americans killed again.

And it's just going back to Afghanistan, the 13 dead Marines.

You know, another final thing, and this is kind of emotional.

I apologize to the listeners.

I'm getting so tired tired of Obama, of Biden losing his temper and screaming.

The other day, I don't remember Jack, he got on the food markets and he said, they think we're suckers.

We're suckers.

Have you seen a Snickers?

Nobody knew what he was talking about.

Three days before that, he said, and you know what he did?

He called him losers and suckers.

Trump did, the dead in Normandy.

And that was an insult to Bo, my son, who died.

No,

Bo died in 2015 from a malignant geoblastoma brain tumor.

He was out of uniform.

It was tragic he died at 46, but it had nothing to do with Donald Trump's supposed slur.

And there were over 30 people in that room, including arch enemy of Donald Trump, John Bolton, that all said, with the exception of one, that he didn't say that.

But my point is this.

When you watch those tapes, he gets so animated.

Have you noticed that, Jack?

He gets angry.

He's demented.

Yeah, he goes into a complete rage.

And you know, I thought when I saw that, you don't act that way when you're referencing Putin in Ukraine.

You don't scream like that when you're talking about Hamas.

You don't lose your temper when you're referencing Iran.

You're not mad like that against Obrador and what he's done.

You don't even talk about the cartels with that passion.

You're lizard-like, you're reptilian.

You only come out of hibernation and come and animate when it's Donald Trump and the MAGA people.

Then it's semi-fascist, semi-fascist, mega extremists, ultra-mega.

How dare you?

I just, it just, it's eerie.

It's creepy.

And

I hope to God the voters see that, that this guy is not only demented, but he is irrational and he's a mean SOB.

He really is.

And again, Victor,

it's not

a function of him being 80.

No, it it is.

He was just on the ⁇ we've beaten this horse to death before, but him exploiting the death of his first wife and exploiting the death of his son, lying about them, it's something that comes naturally.

And then

the 2008, 2000, excuse me, going back to the 88 campaign, when he was exposed.

as a liar and a plagiarist.

He started yelling at the reporter,

try me anything.

I'll put my record against yours yours anywhere.

And then in the 2020 primaries, 2019, remember he said to that kind of overweight, hey, fat, hey, fat.

I'll do push-up, that kind of stuff.

I'll take Donald Trump behind

the gym and beat him up.

And corn prop, I got it.

I just measured a bunch of shame.

Or.

This guy made fun of my sister.

I just took his head and I just smashed it on the lunch counter.

I get so sick of that braggadaccio, you know, especially when it's matched by anemic reactions and does not deter our enemies.

Our enemies are not afraid of us, and our

friends cannot count on us, and our neutrals put their finger in the wind and say, where is the power in the world?

And I have to align with it because the United States is no longer there for us.

And this didn't have to happen.

For all of you who are listening that are never Trumpers, or you hate Trump, or you...

may not vote for Trump because you feel he's crude or he's the e-gen carol sordid details of the stormy, whatever it is, this is an existential moment in our country's history.

And you only you don't have to be perfect.

You just have to be 51% better than the alternative.

And the alternative is a nightmare of four more years of this.

So you should take that very seriously when you consider what to do.

Amen.

Well, Victor,

you and I know this because it's, well, for me anyway, it's late at night when we're recording, which is an appropriate lead-in

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Well, Victor,

the other day, day, Justice Sodomaier

complained.

She's turned 70.

It gets a pit in her stomach with all these conservative decisions.

There's a lot more work, and it has nothing to do with ideology.

A lot more emergency rulings.

Any big case now has many, many amicus briefs filed.

So she's

whining, or maybe rightly so to some degree, about the burden of being a justice on the Supreme Court, and then ideologically about the outcome.

So that prompted immediately an effort by progressives to urge her to

retire.

They're looking at the tea leaves, thinking she doesn't, you know, if she retires now,

we may have someone in for 30 years, but if she doesn't retire now, Trump might be re-elected.

And

they're looking at those tea leaves.

So anyway, Victor, we have this effort on the left to get get Justice Sotomayere off the court.

Your thoughts?

Well,

they are terrified because of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Remember when Ruth Bader-Ginsburg

had cancer, I guess, on two occasions,

and she was the heartthrob of the left.

She was really their poster girl on the court.

There were mumblings about this.

And then all of a sudden, you remember we heard these stories, Jack, that she lifted weights and she was in great shape and she worked out with athletes and she was in perfect health.

And so during the Trump years, she did not step down and they really got burned, they think.

But,

you know, I don't, did you hear, I mean, Clarence Thomas, I think, is 75

and three years ago, he was 72,

two years older than so to my year.

I don't remember anybody.

Did you

saying during the Trump administration, oh my God, Clarence Thomas is 70, 71, 72?

I mean, he, you know, Scalia

dropped dead at 80, and I didn't hear anybody saying he's got to get off.

So I think the Republican attitude, the conservative, this is our guy and we're going to stick with him from hell or high water.

And the left is always so paranoid about the progressive agenda.

And they're always calculating and overcalculating that they're a lot more ruthless.

This is so counterfactual because they're always telling us that they're the humanists, humanists, but they're the heartless people.

They're just telling a woman of color.

Remember we were told in her UC Berkeley Law School speech that she was a wise Latina?

I think she said Latino 45 times in that speech.

And she was better equipped, remember, to rule than a white male was on the court.

And so she had her

DEI feates cemented.

And yet now they turn on her in a second.

And they've only got a year to go.

I don't don't think she's going to drop dead in a year.

The other thing is, she must not be well because she's, as I said, she's five years younger than Clarence Thomas.

He's been on the court a lot longer.

If she thinks that workload is terrible, she should go back to the Clarence Thomas hearings that you and I have talked about when Joe Biden demagogued him mercilessly.

And that was in 91, 92.

So we're talking

35 years, almost, 33 years.

He's been

in that cauldron for 33 years.

He's five years older.

And I will guarantee you that the amount of abuse that Clarence Thomas has suffered is a magnitude greater than what the right has said about Sodoma Year.

And yet I've never heard him say anything.

Have you?

He's never, does he ever say that he's wiped out?

He's tired.

He can't do this.

No, he seems to be a happy happy guy traveling around the country in the summer in his Winnebago.

So I don't know what to make of it, or the left is pretty calculating.

And they look at the court as their court because they feel that eventually, quickly, eventually, abruptly or immediately or sooner or later, the people catch on if they don't have a crisis to waste.

If it's not 2008 meltdown or it's not COVID or it's not George Floyd, and they can't push through an agenda.

Normally nobody wants

what they have to offer.

So they either have to import a constituency, a new demographic, or they've got to control all the institutions of communication and information.

We've said that, media, social media.

K-12 academia, foundations, et cetera.

Or

they have to have a permanent lock, as they'd had at one point for over a half, well, for 100 years on the Supreme Court.

And when they lose the court, and they've lost it now, I think they have, but you never know quite

where all of the moderates, Republicans are going to weigh in on any issue, but they've lost that deadlock they had on it.

They want to get it back in in costs.

So now

they talk about packing the court or removing justices that are too old to make sure they get a radical in there, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Final thought, she has not been a stellar judge.

She was a DEI appointment.

When you looked at all of the other justices

that were available and would have been far more effective jurists for the liberal project,

they didn't choose them.

And maybe they thought she would be iconic to the Hispanic community.

I don't think that people in Salma, California, the vast majority are Mexican-American, breathe easier tonight because so do my years on the bench.

I've never heard one person mention that.

Right.

Right.

She's a Bronx girl.

We'll hold that against her, Victor.

Hey,

speaking of women on the left,

Representative Ayanna Presley from up in Massachusetts.

is raging

over closed stores and, of course, making racist charges.

And we'll get to that, your thoughts on that, Victor, right after these important messages.

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

Hey, Victor, before I get to that topic, I do want to remind our listeners and hello to welcome our new listeners.

Let them know especially that your website, The Blade of Perseus, can can be found at victorhanson.com.

And anyone that goes there, and everyone should go there, will find links to the weekly pieces, the essays you write for American greatness, your syndicated columns, links to your other appearances on other podcasts and shows, archives of

this podcast.

links to your books, including The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation.

That's coming out in May.

And then the three or so, roughly every week, average of two or three, I should say, pieces you write exclusively for

the Blade of Perseus.

They're ultra-articles.

They can only be reread.

I wish I could talk.

They can only be read.

If you subscribe, and folks,

it's really cheap.

And it's five bucks a month, $50 discounted for the full year.

If you're a fan of Victor and Victor's writing, you've got to subscribe.

So go to the Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com is a website, web address, and sign up.

So Victor,

the

very colorful Ayana Presley, and maybe people will recognize her.

She's one of the squad members.

She's a black woman who shaves her head, so she kind of stands out.

She represents Boston area and Congress.

And

Walgreens, the

pharmacy, it's, you know, another product store, has shut down another store

in the Roxbury neighborhood.

It's a predominantly minority community.

But

these stores have been just robbed blind over the last couple of years.

Looters have, as you know, and we've talked about looters have not been prosecuted.

She took to the house floor to attack.

Walgreens for engaging in racism by closing down these stores.

I I don't know, Victor, are they supposed to just stay open and be

free products?

I guess, in her view, they're, as she said, billion-dollar companies.

So they're supposed to say,

because of all of our intrinsic sins and the history of racism,

we owe it to the black community to open up a store and to allow people in the community to come in and shoplift to a point where we're unprofitable.

And we will not stop this shoplifting, nor will we hire security guards or the police will not act.

And

that's basically what she's saying.

And they just say, no, we'll pass on that.

We like you, but we'll just go somewhere else.

And then she considers that racism.

So notice two things she didn't say, Jack.

She didn't say,

I tell you what, why don't...

people in my district under my leadership and my husband, remember him?

He was kind of in a scandal.

He was the ex-con, and he had a quote-unquote security business, kind of like Fanny Willis's boyfriend that got in on the trough.

And Ilyan Omar, another squad member, remember her husband was a consultant.

Well, he was a security consultant.

I guess he knew a lot because he'd been in prison 10 years.

And then she sort of used him for her own security, and he profited by that connection.

But the point was

that she seems to know a lot about security matters.

Why Why doesn't she get her husband?

And why doesn't she get the leaders of the black community together, which she's not my reference to that?

She brought up race by calling them racist.

So I assume she thinks that the problem was that they left because there was an inordinate percentage of black shoplifters, or that was the predominant.

population in her district in which Walgreens decided to leave.

But why doesn't she just get her husband and say, you know what, we're going to work on the black community.

We're going to try to inculcate values among young people.

We're going to have voluntary patrols.

We'll just divide up these jobs and we'll be in presence.

We'll get the Black Panther, the new Black Panther Party.

We'll get BLM.

We'll get father figures.

We'll get members of the community.

And we'll line the corridors of Walgreens to ensure there's not theft.

She could do that, but she doesn't.

And

that's the paradigm she prefers: that they just lose money and then they'll be continually

not profitable.

And that would be worth it, not to be called a racist.

So she's basically saying to Walgreens,

I won't call you a racist if you stay here.

But another fine thing, the second thing she didn't do, Jack, is

why, this was brought up by a lot of people.

Why didn't she just offer an alternate paradigm?

She was talking about corporate greed.

Why didn't she just say,

let's have a co-op?

There's co-ops.

There's a Berkeley co-op.

When I was in graduate school, there's a Powato co-op.

Maybe it's still there.

Why don't we just get members of the community and they will each invest, I don't know, $1,000.

We'll get three, there's $700,000 plus in a congressional district.

We'll get, I don't know, $7 or $8 million.

And we'll have our own co-op pharmacy.

And it will run on socialist principles.

And therefore, theft and loss of inventory won't affect it because it's not a greedy corporation.

And let's see how long that would last.

It would be a wonderful thing to do and to show Walgreens up.

Why doesn't she say we're part of the community?

The community wouldn't steal from itself.

We're not going to make a profit.

We're going to return dividends to all the community.

So come on out.

And I, you know, being a cynic and human nature being what it is, I don't think the theft rate would decrease at all.

I love this idea.

And you and I are, well, I'm intimately involved in the affairs of nonprofit world.

And

you are a two-year sit on a great foundation board.

But we understand,

well, you don't have to be involved in nonprofits to know that at a local level, all these big city city councilmen and state reps, they all do this nonprofit hustle.

They create them to get jobs to family members and whatever.

It's rampant in New York, and I assume it's rampant across the nation.

Wait, you're not talking about another squad member.

Remember Corey Bush?

I just thought of her and her, what was her husband's name or boyfriend, Courtney Merritz?

And all of a sudden, remember she gave him all this money for, quote, security, the big advocate.

She's under investigation, I think, by the FBI, the advocate of defunding the police.

And now all of a sudden she married him.

But it was Fanny Willis.

It was Illian Almore.

It was

holding the big buck side hustle.

And by the way, people listening, that's not because they're black women.

I'm not suggesting that at all.

I'm suggesting they do it because there's no deterrence.

And it's exactly what happened in the case of, I said, white people who in the age of Jim Crow knew there were no consequences.

Once you establish a principle that a particular gender or race will not be subject to the same degree of accountability as other people, then human nature being what it is, they're going to take advantage of that.

And on each one of these cases, Corey Bush, Illian Olmar,

Fannie Willis, Miss Presley, they always do the same thing.

When they're caught, then they start screaming about racism.

Racism, racism, racism.

And you know what?

It's the

old myth of crying wolf.

Nobody listens anymore.

I'm sorry.

They just don't listen.

They've heard it so much.

And it's so common now that

with

these prosecuting attorneys, these district attorneys, the congresswoman, the staff, all these people on the public trough, and then when caught with questionable financial dealings that involve their relatives or spouse, their paramore, whatever, then they go to the race card.

And everybody just kind of shrugs and says, well, there's a lot of rot in the united states as uh great economists have said about successful societies so we have the wherewithal the money just to subsidize this and i'd rather just pay it and get let them you know extort some money than be called a racist and that's pretty much where we are

well i victor i still like

your

maybe made in sarcasm but your challenge uh before these locals who are so adept at using nonprofits to create an actual one that would that would actually benefit their community.

So I think I'm on the Bradley and it's a nonprofit, but the board are

half the board are conservative business people and the other half tend to be center-right lawyers or academics.

And they run it like a business.

So in other words, every two or three years they stop and say, what was the foundational principle of the Bradley Foundation?

What did the Bradley brothers have in mind when they were so generously giving their estates to fund this thing?

Have we honored in spirit and in fact their original foundational mission?

And if we haven't, then we better,

for the sake of our own honor and their legacy, readjust.

And we go into periods of self-examination all the time.

We talk, we have a wonderful staff, and they do the same thing.

And that's very important.

It is.

Well, if I may tip my hat to Bradley, because Alicia Manning, who's the number two there, I know, is very

interested and focused on,

you take the West Roxburys

of the world, who's actually helping?

What small organization is actually helping these people in need.

It's not the Congress,

Ayana Presleys of the world who are helping them.

There are people there.

Bradley, the Great Conservative Foundation, is the one that's actually helping these folks.

So, you know,

folks should know more about that.

Honored to be on the board.

Not only Alicia, but also Ingrid Gregg.

They're the two.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, they're too.

Yeah.

I mean,

I've never seen

people in public service like that

that are so professional.

If that happened, I can guarantee you, Rick Graeber, the director of the Bradley, if any hint of what we see with all of these people hiring, we wouldn't stand for it.

And we were open to the books.

We have audits all the time.

And I think that's true of a lot of conservative foundations.

And so

I don't have any empathy.

And

when she

should be, all these people, it's very funny.

All these people on the left make all these accusations and they slur and slander people.

And then it's almost like it's just

a Pavlovian tick that you know it's projection.

The more they feel that they're exposed by their own dubious behavior or their compromise, they project

that sin onto somebody else.

And it's just typical.

They do it all the time.

And then they count on the media and the institutions and everything to protect them from public outrage.

And it's so old.

I've watched this.

I'm 70 years old.

I've watched this for 60 years.

And it's getting worse by the year.

Second time you mentioned 70, Victor.

I think you.

Hey, must have had a rough day.

Hey, we're going to come back, and we're going to talk about two things.

One,

this

madness in Minnesota, and an arson attack on building with some conservative operations in it.

And then a piece you wrote just yesterday

on X slash Twitter about making sense of the current senseless absurdities of America.

And we'll get to these topics right after

this important message.

Back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor, before

we raise the Minnesota story, I just want to take a moment to welcome back our sponsor, Factor.

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Speaking of good people, Victor,

the good people at Powerline, one of them is John Hendricker, and he

reported the other day on Powerline

that

it wasn't immediate.

that where his offices are in

the Minneapolis area and his offices are also, he sublets or is involved, you know, across the hall or some other, we'll call them conservative institutions.

It was a firebomb, an arson.

And it took a freaking week for the Minneapolis Star Tribune to report about it.

So

a knock at the media here, but also,

you know,

we have to assume, like

this building, by the way, that John's offices are in, they have chiropractors, other doctors.

This is a leftist progressive arson attack against conservatives, and we hear barely anything from the media.

Victor, your thoughts.

No, you don't hear very much.

There's no better people than the writers at Powerline, John and Scott and Steve Hayward.

and Lloyd Dillonsley.

They're wonderful writers.

They're not radical at all.

John runs a very important

public think tank, and I guess they just give them exemption.

I think it's going to be even worse because there are videos.

Obviously,

it's in the urban center, and they're going to find out the people who did it because they'll be on the video or their car, and we won't hear anything about it.

It's very analogous to the whole abortion thing, you know, the abortion protesters who were going to face lengthy prison sentences.

And if you remember that testimony by Merrick Garland, and they asked him why it was so asymmetrical,

that, in other words, when people were firebombing pro-life advocacy centers and they weren't doing anything to the perpetrators, but they were trying to put people.

Remember the guy in his family?

They went and had a SWAT team come to his house because he had a son.

He pushed somebody that was pushing his son.

And remember what Merrick Garland said?

He said, well, they do it at night.

They do it at night.

So it's kind of like it's hard to find them.

I thought.

So you would rather go after largely peaceful, daytime, transparent people with their identities not hidden than you

would take a little extra effort to go find nocturnal terrorists that pose a threat to the general welfare of the society.

And that's where we are right now.

I feel like I've, you know, it's a cliche.

I'm in a Kafka knock, and I woke up as an insect, and I don't realize

how I look or what I'm looking at.

It's just a different world.

And

the world changed somewhere around May 2020, right during the riots and the George Floyd and then the aftermath.

And it's an unrecognizable America.

And we saw that with the immigrants, you know, that kicked the police.

We talked about that, kicked the police in the head, and then were only some of them arrested and then were released immediately.

And I suppose because they were not even charged bail,

the charges were dropped and then four of them just headed right out to Gavin Newsom's, California.

They're probably here by now, Jack, where they get free because they're illegal.

That means they're entitled and get free health care.

They even get scholarships.

You want to go to college.

And there won't be anything.

no reactions to kicking a law enforcement officer in the head and trying to kill him.

And that's where we are, you know, They're not in rights.

I know you discussed this with Sammy on a recent podcast, but tonight, Victor,

the Daily Mail reported that

the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg,

defended his decision to not charge them.

And then some...

kind of as an aside, some judge in New York State chewed him out, not over this, but essentially, like, you're letting all these people go.

And Bragg was trying to

cherry-picked and tried to hard prosecute

people, a few people who bought

fake COVID shot cards.

I got my shot.

And so he lets murderers have...

He's an absolute disgrace.

He is going after the ex-president of the United States for supposedly overvaluing a real estate asset, i.e., Mar Lago, to obtain a loan from a bank

who willingly looked at the same portfolio that Alvin Bragg had seen, saw no, either didn't see it as overvalued or saw no problem given Trump its apparent other assets, and then gave him the loan and profited handsomely by the charging of interest and then had the principal paid back and then had no complaint and was happy with the business.

And for the first time in American,

excuse me, New York

real estate history, they're charging with a felony and trying to kick him out of New York along with Letita James

for no, there's no crime, there's no victim.

And yet this same prosecutor has no problem.

with illegal aliens kicking the head and the face of law enforcement officers with impunity, and he lets them go, and then they get on a bus and come to the only state that's worse than New York, and they knew that in advance.

After they did that, and they thought, well,

we got out of this, so we'll stick around.

But, you know, we kind of overdid it a little bit by flipping the bird.

And people, you know, in New York, they don't really get mad if you kick a law enforcement officer in the head and try to kill him.

But if you flip a journalist right

with a bird and you say things like, kiss my ass or something, they can get angry at you and they'll give you some bad publicity.

So where should we go, Jack?

Well, where's the other state where there's the biggest sanctuary jurisdictions in the country and they're even more crazy and liberal than New York?

Why, it's Gavin Newsom state.

Let's take off.

And that's what happened.

It's, again, it's surreal.

It's a Kafka novel.

And,

you know,

I was talking to Sammy a little bit on the other.

Half of me is outraged, but half of me is outraged at the voters who vote these people in.

Here in California, we had Prop 47,

and we all voted by, I voted against it, but we being the people of California voted it in, and it reduced felony theft to a misdemeanor if it was under $950.

And I remember opponents in the Chamber of Commerce said during the Prop campaign, which was a

dissimulation campaign, they said, you know, criminals are going going to get their iPhone and actually do the calculus as they steal.

And everybody said, that is so absurd.

And that's exactly what happened.

They do that.

And so they've just turned the state into a state of thieves.

And now people are outraged.

Oh,

this is horrible.

Who voted for this?

Or Gavin Newsom goes into, again, we've talked about that, but he goes in.

to, I guess it was a Walgreens.

He said, they're walking out with $350.

And they say, well, yeah,

You, the clerk, not knowing who he was, and he got angry because he thinks everybody knows who Gavin Newsom is.

He says, well, you, the governor did it.

No, I didn't do it.

Well, you did.

You pushed 47 and you were asked recently, why don't you repeal it?

And you wouldn't do it.

You said, no, that's not the problem.

And then there's this 553 bill in the Senate that says that an employee of a store, unless he's properly trained, can't make a citizen's arrest or protect the property of his employer.

And then when you point that out, and Gavin Newsom's behind that, they say, oh, it's not,

you're lying, Snopes, you know, we're fact checkers.

We're letting people

respond to shoplifters.

If they're trained and if they go through proper counseling and training, who can afford that to do?

So

it's just a nightmare, and the voters are ultimately responsible for this.

My only

confusion about it, to what degree, when you see these scenes of abject insanity at the border with 8 million people, or what we saw with the police being kicked in New York, or what we see with

Miss Presley or Miss Fanny Willis, or all these smash and grab.

I think there was more

carjackings in Washington, D.C.

in one month now than there was an entire year, just eight years ago.

That guy died, by the way.

He did.

That lawyer died.

He died tonight, yeah.

Oh, that's sad.

Carjacked and shot.

Nobody cares either, do they?

They don't care that a really wonderful family guy, all he was doing was trying to park the car so his wife could easily get in and wouldn't have to walk in that crime-ridden, infested city.

And he's shot and killed by a thug, and the thug will get out.

They won't do anything to him.

But my point of all this is when you look at all this madness, then you say, okay, these people voted for all this, and they were not really deceived because they knew the character of the people they were voting for.

But at some point, do they just say, I'm at it.

I can't, the civilization is at the abyss.

We're going to vote these people out and we're going to bring in, I don't care if they're crazy Republicans or not, I don't care if it's nutty Trump or not, anything

as an anecdote.

And I don't know, I'm not confident.

You know, you look at the Virginia elections, which are sort of know, canaries in the coal mine.

And before that, the

2022 midterms, and those are not great harbingers for

I went on Tucker Carlson and said, it looks pretty good.

What an idiot I was, because like

Tucker said, what do you think?

And I said, I think it's going to be...

a good night.

I think it's going to be good because they've screwed the country up.

I said, I didn't sound so incoherent, something to that effect.

And then I had no idea that on the eve of the election, he was going to cancel student debt and then drain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and then demagogue abortion when it was up to the states.

And there was no national federal law either, you know, making it legal in every state or illegal in every state.

It was up to the people to, you know, ascertain their own futures on abortion.

And I didn't think even when he did that, that by any stretch of the imagination people would be so stupid to fall for that.

But they did.

They did.

Students said, Oh my God, I'm going to get free stuff.

I don't have to pay back what I owe the government.

I'm going to vote for Joe Biden.

And people said, Oh my God,

gas was $5.50 a gallon, and now it's $5.10.

I'm going to vote for Joe Biden.

And oh my God, I might get pregnant and I'll be killed by Republicans.

I'm going to vote for Joe Biden.

And they voted for his party in the midterm.

Well, Victor, we

maybe we should talk about one more important matter.

We've got a little time left.

and

th that's this

Senate immigration bill that

while this particular podcast will be up on, I think, the sixth of February, the dynamics of the legislation and its how it's playing out on the floors of the Senate, the floor of the Senate.

You know, there's there's something there's something coming up ahead of when we're talking right now, but I'd like to get your thoughts on some of the political dynamics of this, and we'll do that right after this final important message.

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

Victor, quite simply,

Mike Lee, the senator from Utah,

wrote a piece for the Federalists.

McConnell wants me to pass his $106 billion bill without reading it.

Hell,

no.

And

so we have this

McConnell, Schumer.

Yeah,

that's exactly what it was.

You're right.

Chuck Schumer and McConnell.

They wouldn't let anybody see it.

And then they just spun it on everybody, and they passed it off as if it was sober and judicious border reform.

And

I don't understand what the problem was.

They don't have to pass any legislation.

They don't have to vote any new funds.

They have a border.

They have a fully funded border patrol.

They have a fully funded Homeland Security.

They have a good paradigm they inherited when there was almost no illegal immigration by 2020, June, July.

The problem has been solved.

All they have to do at minimal expense is continue the wall that was stopped by Joe Biden, A,

end catch and release, no extra money,

make people apply for phony refugee status in Mexico, and four,

tell Mr.

Oberdor,

listen, you stop people coming into our country.

We're not going to be a safety valve for the failure of your government to provide social services to your own people.

And if you don't stop it, Donald Trump said he'd get us out of NAFTA.

But here's what I'm going to do, Joe Biden.

I'm going to tax at 20%.

And every day you don't do something, it's going to go up by 1%.

I'm going to tax 20% the $60 billion in remittances that you depend on as the largest source of foreign exchange.

And by the way, five,

you're going to have to

clamp down on the cartels.

because they're killing 100,000 people.

And we can't do that.

It wouldn't cost any money.

So what is McConnell and Schumer doing?

What they're doing is they're giving a little pretense that they're going to fund border security while they, Schumer gets in what?

More judges, more little courts, more counselors, more facilitators.

So when you get 8 million people streaming across, you can say it's orderly.

We're going to tell everybody, come in, here's the border.

It's wide open.

Get in single final, quay up.

queue up and then you're going to be processed fast by a metrics we're going to facilitate your entry into America without a background check.

That's what they're talking about.

And I guess McConnell goes along with it because the Wall Street Journal, Chamber of Commerce, big corporations think,

wow,

you've got 3.5%

unemployment under Trump.

We have it again under Biden.

There's a shortage of workers.

We have a very anemic labor non-participation rate.

62% of it only is the number of people working.

We've got got people who just won't work.

It's more lucrative to stay, so we're short workers.

So we need to import these workers in meat packing and hospitality and restaurants,

you name it.

That's what's behind it.

Schumer says to McConnell, I need more votes.

I need more constituents.

I need more patrons for big government high-tax federal policies.

And Mitch says, okay, I need cheap labor.

And in between this, can't we make a deal?

And they did.

But we have to keep it quiet.

And we've got to spring it on the dummies before they get angry.

And that's what's happening.

Well, the dummies, the dummies are already angry, right, Victor?

They are.

They are.

But now it makes it look like, oh, well,

Biden, they're mad at Biden.

Biden says it's not his fault.

They propose this legislation, which makes it look like, well, you need legislation to fix the border.

Biden says, I can't do anything until I get the legislation.

Why is Mitch McConnell?

I don't know, but I don't want to just rant.

I read the bill.

It said they're going to give 50,000 green cards.

They're going to give lawyers immediately.

They're going to have 5,000 people a day rather than, what, 12 or 15?

And

so what is so good about 5,000 people illegally entering the country?

Why not just say none?

No, no, there's a law.

It's illegal, Mitch.

You're a senator.

It is illegal for you to enter the United States illegally, especially without going through a port of entry and a judicial legal process.

If you don't do that, you're illegal and you can be deported.

Why don't you just say for once, we're going to deport everybody.

It's not going to be that much more expensive.

It's going to save billions of dollars in social services, and we're going to do it right now.

You know, he's, I, you know, I wasn't a big McConnell critic, and I, and because I thought he had mastered the intricacies of Senate

maneuvering, and he had been very instrumental in getting confirmed these justices, and he did.

But those days are over with, and his hatred of Donald Trump outweighs his love for the conservative constituency.

And so he's doing a lot of damage with this.

It's going to take decades to get over this.

We're going to live with the ripples of this for decades.

All I do, Jack, is pick up, as I said to Sammy, Fresno Bee,

KMPH, the local TV websites, are there blogs about Valley News?

And it's every single day someone has hit somebody with DUI and left.

Some body is found in an orchard, in a vineyard.

Some party has erupted in gang fighting.

Some person has been caught with $5 million of fentanyl.

Cartels have done a hit in a rural farmhouse.

It's every day.

And it's not where Mitch McConnell's multi-million dollar mansion is.

It really isn't.

Nor Chuck Schumer's, nor Joe Biden's three houses.

It affects poor people and middle-class people.

And they don't give a damn.

They really don't.

Well, Victor,

we're at the end of this episode other than to thank our listeners

for doing just that, listening.

And the folks who do that on Apple and iTunes can rate the show zero to five stars.

Most leave five.

Practically everybody leaves five stars in appreciation for the wisdom you share.

Victor, we thank them for taking the time to do that.

And some actually take even more time and

write particular comments.

And here's one.

It's titled Longtime Reader, New Podcast Listener and Subscriber.

Here it goes.

and concise analysis with strong overtones of historical perspectives, as good as any poignant lecture.

Every word needs to be savored.

The mainstream media is failing, going out of business.

I find most of my friends only read the headlines.

In addition, they do not pay for subscriptions.

The paying customers are long gone.

Their false narratives are just too toxic.

I've even gained an appreciation of Christopher Hitchens.

You mentioned him during a review of Henry Kissinger.

The world could surely use both men today.

Thank you, V D H.

And it's signed by M.

Guzick, M-G-U-Z-I-H.

Thank you.

Kate Guzick.

I appreciate that.

I really do.

I'll just end by a comment, Jack,

interrupting you, but

it's your show.

Don't you?

Have you noticed that at a time of near record on it low unemployment that

the LA Times, the Messenger, just, and I like Jimmy Finkelstein, the the guy that just had to close down the Messenger, of which I wasn't very familiar with, but he seemed like a nice guy.

But all of these venues are laying off journalists.

And

I think it's because people are walking, walking in the sense not opening their web pages or not buying their subscriptions or whatever it is.

But people are so tired of just turning on NPR, PBS, picking up all of these and just hearing the old stuff.

You know, they say to themselves, do these people ever apologize for Christopher Steele and those lies?

Do they ever apologize for telling us that Hunter's laptop was cooked up in Moscow?

Do they ever talk about they were wrong about that crazy ping and the Alpha Bank and Trump Towers?

Do they ever apologize to any of this?

Or do they just go on and on to the next lie?

And people are sick of it.

And

they're going the way of the Oscars, the Emmys, the Tonys, and the Grammys.

You've seen it before.

You've heard it before.

It's boring.

It's predictable.

It's scripted.

And it's not just half the country.

It's starting to be,

you know, a large number of people who didn't vote for Donald Trump are sick.

And I think they're sick of it because it's starting to affect them, too.

What with the newspapers?

What used to be newspapers, because there are very few anymore.

Okay, it was the liberal media, but it has become the leftist media.

And why do people buy newspapers?

Why did they mostly?

Sports and local news and even the local news has become so ideological.

You know, how they report the stories, the kind of stories they report, it just doesn't seem, it's normal to normal people, offensive to most people.

And who needs this crap?

I don't need you to ideologize at me.

Screw you.

I'm not going to subscribe anymore.

I'll spend my time

on Instagram or TikTok.

It is.

And you know what?

It's weird.

The media is always going to be liberal because it's kind of like academia.

It's divorced from reality.

And these people are not subject to market reality.

And they come out of university journalism schools.

So they're always going to be tainted.

But at least they should go back and they should look at 60, 70 years ago, and they should look at John Chancellor, Edward R.

Murrow, even Cronkite.

I used to listen to everyone.

Remember Eric Severide?

Yeah.

He would give those commentaries.

He was kind of an old-style liberal leftist, but they were very well-reasoned.

They were coherent.

He made an effort to look at both sides of the issue.

So my point is that the old-fashioned liberal who dominated the media, and they did,

they were so much superior morally, intellectually, and educationally than this bunch.

It's just shocking.

It really is.

When you go back and look at Meet the Press, John Chancellor, or those type of people, Charles Corral and all those people, they were just

miles,

just atoms ahead of what this group is.

It just shows you.

And those were all liberals, Sue, you mentioned.

Maybe there was one or two.

Howard K.

Smith, maybe.

Howard K.

Smith was.

Frank Reynolds Reynolds is kind of fair.

But there wasn't very many of them.

I mean, there were conservative columnists.

But even when you look at the columns, the way that people wrote the prose style or the argument or the analysis was so much better than this crap today.

And I'm not talking about blogs and saying, oh,

we don't have a hierarchy that screens.

No, the actual grassroots people are much better writers than the people that

quote unquote qualify for these liberal left-wing outlets.

And they've destroyed, they cooked

their own goose.

Yeah, no, they're whining about it.

Let's not continue.

They're looking for a billionaire.

Where's my billionaire?

Remember the weekly standard when the guy said, no more, not going to do it.

I don't need to hear every day that Trump is Satan, that Trump is Lucifer, that Trump's the devil.

That was in 2015, I think.

He said, I'm done.

I don't want to pay for it.

Pay for this brilliance.

You owe us.

You need to subsidize us.

Bill Bill Crystal, that was the idea.

I think he was making seven figures a year

at the legal standard.

They were all making,

all of them were making a lot of money.

And that was,

if you want to be honest about it and you dissect all the never-Trumpers,

it was a fixation.

It was an addiction with them.

It was a fix.

It's incomprehensible, but they hated Donald Trump.

They hated him to such a degree they were willing to renounce all the positions that they had spent their life advocating and claiming to the American people that these were the only solutions and cures for the maladies of America.

And yet when this one orange man did more than anybody else to enact the very positions and ideologies and policies and protocols that they had spent and told everybody, they were angry.

They said, I would would rather America fail.

I would rather the Republicans fail.

I would rather the conservatives fail than that person.

And they didn't understand that in that way of thinking,

it wasn't that people didn't like them.

It wasn't that Donald Trump had the power.

He maybe had the desire to ruin their career.

He didn't even know who they were.

He did not know who they were most of the time.

They, they blew up their own careers.

They destroyed them.

How dare you not listen to me, Bill Crystal?

Yes, people said, you know what?

I got better things to do than to read the 1500 column about how awful Donald Trump looks, acts, speaks, how crude he is.

And they never once said to themselves, two things, compared to what?

Right.

Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama?

Or two, they never said,

and

do we have to be good or can we just be 51% better than the alternative?

And is it more likely that my lifetime vision of a conservative America is more likely to be furthered by this person I don't like or by

presentable Joe Biden?

And they gave us Joe Biden, who personally was a reprobate.

And you can name for every sin that is alleged of Trump, I can give you the exact same sin.

For every Stormy Daniels or Gene Carroll, there's a Tara Reed, or there's some little little girl that was, what,

take a shower with her dad too early, or a Secret Service agent that had to look at the genitalia of the vice president, or somebody who had her ear gobbled, her neck gobbled, turkey gobbled by the president.

So don't give me any lectures about morality.

They did a lot of damage, and they were damaged.

And I liked a lot of them.

They're friends.

I don't try to go after them.

But my point is, they blew up their own careers by their obsessions and their addictions.

Well, also, Victor, there's

many of them are also focused on, and not we shouldn't be focused on Ukraine and Russia, but

we wouldn't have a war in Ukraine if it wasn't for Joe Biden being president.

There are hundreds, hundreds of thousands of people dead in the world because people worked against Donald Trump's reelection.

Just to finish, Jack, you read that, I mentioned it to Sammy.

You read the John Bolton Wall Street Journal column the other day.

It was the most sophisticated thing I've ever read.

It was,

Donald Trump is going to destroy America if he's elected, and here's all the reasons why.

Oh, by the way, you could argue that

elephant in the room,

that

what Putin went in in 2008 when the Bush

White House was buffeted by Iraq and Afghanistan and polling about 30% in the latter part of 2008.

He went in in 2014 when Obama had appeased him and the hot mic and all that stuff in Seoul, South Korea.

And he went in and win, 2020,

22, when what?

When Joe Biden had said, hey, Vladimir, if you're going to hack American institutions, please lay off the hospitals.

Or when he said, man, I don't know.

I'll react.

It depends on whether it's a major or minor invasion.

Or, you know what, we'll give Zelensky a ride out of Kiev.

So, and that was right after Afghanistan.

So, in that column, he couldn't quite explain the central truth that there was a four-year hiatus.

And by that, I mean of the last four administrations, and Bolton knows that better than anybody, talking about George Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden.

Why was it?

that just one, just one administration did not see Vladimir Putin cross the borders of a sovereign neighbor.

Not one.

Not once.

And they can't answer that question because they hate him so much.

That whole column was just mystifying.

And when I read it, I thought, this is, and then I thought to myself,

you were hated by the left.

They demonized you.

They hated the very sight of you.

They spread scurrilous rumors about your sex life, your marriage.

They did every dastardly thing they said about you.

You could not, you were made an interim appointment by George W.

Bush.

You were totally inert.

No other rhino administration would have ever got near you.

Not Mitt Romney had if he'd been elected, not John McCain had been elected.

You were inert.

And along came John,

along came Donald Trump.

And I think there was a, I know him, I respect him, I like him a lot, H.R.

McMaster.

He was very different than the other generals.

If he disagreed with Donald Trump as National Security Advisor on a policy matter, he did not try to subvert it as some other general.

He did not do that.

He tried to use his expertise to enact it, even when he disagreed with it.

And they fired him

and brought

John Bolton was resuscitated.

No Senate confirmation necessary for National Security Advisor.

He would have never been confirmed.

And he was there.

And you would think that of all the things he saw, if it was so bad, he should have resigned.

But he never did, Jack.

He never resigned.

He was fired.

And only when he was fired did he go back and take his preemptive notes and compile in a book that synchronized with the impeachment of Donald Trump.

And after all that, there's no self-awareness of just, you know, I don't like this guy, I hate this guy, but he gave me the most important job of my life.

And And I would have never had that opportunity from anybody else.

And he can't think of that.

And it warps his view about why Putin invaded in one period and why he did not in another period.

And he's the expert, the world's expert in American foreign policy, supposedly on deterrence.

And it just mystifies me.

And I'm not excusing Donald Trump's language, his tweets, the mess he got in with Stormy Daniels, all of that.

I'm just saying that at this late date in the country, you've got to look at, is Donald Trump that abnormal when he was in office compared to what we've seen with other presidents?

I mean,

I told you that.

There was no passion for Never Biden in the fall of 2020 from these people.

And that's why we got what we got.

Well,

I did this twice, Jack.

I have close family members and friends, and they said to me essentially anytime they said, Victor, aren't you going to wake up and see this monster that you are going to vote for?

And you know what?

I said on two occasions.

I said, I am sorry.

I came to my senses.

I agree with you.

I'm not going to vote for Donald Trump.

They said, oh, good.

See?

But why?

Why?

And I said, because

his daughter set up sexual liaisons in the White House.

They did?

I didn't hear that.

They said, yes.

And then he had an aide, and they went down into

the White House swimming pool, and he asked this young 18-year-old intern that he had deflowered as a virgin in the marital bed, in Melania's bed.

And

he had his girl, this poor little intern, fillate, tried to fillate

an aide of his.

And then, you know, what was worse, in the bathroom right off the oval office,

he had oral sex with a...

with a subordinate woman, a young woman,

in an asymmetrical power relationship.

And then the worst thing is, he pulled out his phallus and he held it and said, Does a foreign leader have anything this big?

And you should have saw the reaction.

Come to Jesus, Victor.

And I just said, you know what?

I just described Anna Roosevelt helping Lucy Mercer see Franklin Roosevelt.

I just described LBJ holding his penis.

I just described JFK deflowering a young intern and bringing her down.

And the pool doesn't exist now, but the people and the conversation didn't catch on.

And I just talked about Bill Clinton.

And I don't want to be lectured about presidential behavior in the Oval Office.

That was a great composite.

Well, I talked too long, but

we're in the 11th hour.

We're near the abyss.

I know we always say that before in election, in election year, but this time the country's gone completely insane, and we've got to rescue it.

Their attitude is, we've got to destroy your America so we can reboot it for us under different auspices.

And that's the plan.

And we've got to say no, no, no, no, no.

Can't reboot ashes.

That's what's going to come.

Well, Victor, we, yeah, we're, we're, we're over, and you've been terrific.

And, folks, thanks for listening.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everyone.