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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host, the star, and namesake that is Victor Davis Hansen.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its web address is victorhanson.com.

I will talk a little more about that at the end of this recording.

We are recording on the 27th of January.

This particular episode should be up on Tuesday, the 30th.

So, Victor,

as ever, increasingly, so many important big issues to get your take on.

And the first will be about the verdict in New York, the Eugene Carroll verdict against Donald Trump, $83 million hit by the jury.

We'll get Victor's thoughts on that, on the pending House vote for impeachment for

Secretary Mayorkis.

And we'll look into Victor's big essay,

Year of Living Dangerously.

All that, maybe more, right after we come back from these important messages.

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

Victor, our listeners should know you are active on Twitter/slash X,

and that twice or so a week you're writing significant reflections there.

And you wrote one

yesterday or early today.

Again, we're recording on Saturday, the 27th, right

in the aftermath of the New York

jury handing Eugene Carroll

an $83 million verdict against Donald Trump.

Victor, your thoughts on what's happened here.

Well, it's still preliminary, but a couple.

This thing bothered me.

It really did.

You know,

if you look at Judge Kaplan and the things that he said

during that trial, for example, I'll just give you one.

The initial battery claim

was and rape claim, she said that she was raped.

I'll get to that in a minute.

But

it was under New York law, given the circumstances of the allegation.

Remember what we're talking about, that two people go into a major department store.

She sees who at that time was a celebrity, comes over, they talk.

They're in the lingerie

section.

they're buying gifts, I guess, and they get into apparently sexual banter, which reaches a crescendo that ends up in, she claims,

into a private dressing room during business hours.

And at such time, whatever little sexuality that was the purpose of going in there, I don't know why two adults, if she's telling the truth, go into a locked room during business hours for a reason other than intimacy.

But she says it went went too far and he penetrated her digitally.

He claims he doesn't have any memory of this.

Okay, that's where we are.

I'm not going to weigh in on who's telling.

He said she said Rick Kavanaugh, the whole stuff.

Terra Reed, Joe Biden.

That's what this is in the category of.

But what disturbs me about the judge is the jury did not find that he raped her.

They said it was sexual assault.

Later, he said it was almost,

even though it didn't fit the, in a commentary,

the rule of rape, it was virtual rape.

It was rape, he said.

So here you have a judge who is adjudicating a very specific piece of legislation that is the basis for this complaint.

And according to that wording or the legislation, the verdict is that he did not commit rape, but the judge then extrapolates and said it's virtually the same.

I think that right there is grounds for a reversal of this defamation.

Remember what we're talking about.

Sometime in 1994, 95 or 96, and she can't remember.

She can't remember the date, John.

It's within a three-year.

She says this incident happened.

She was silent.

Let's say it's the latest, 96.

She was silent 97, 98, 99, 2000, 2001, 203, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, somewhere around 25 years.

She gets up to Donald Trump is inner politics somewhere around 2017.

She writes a book about who needs men,

and she writes a New York magazine extrapolation in which she says a major person raped her.

First time.

Okay.

And then she identifies him.

And then the whole left-wing anger machine gets in.

And why don't you do something about it?

So Jack, she files a battery suit.

But unfortunately for her,

it's past the statute of limitations.

So it's dropped.

And who is she, E.

Jean Carroll?

She is at this time 76 years old.

She's a successful columnist for the fashion risque magazine LA, kind of a cutting-edge feminist magazine.

And she writes a sex advice dating

partnership relationship column.

It's pretty explicit.

I looked at some of it.

Okay.

So

it's over with.

Statute of limitations.

However, there is a fellow in the New York legislature that hates Donald Trump's guts.

And he has a habit.

He has a habit of, I don't know what you'd call it, Jack.

You can't quite call it bills of attainer, which are, those are specific legislative statutes that go after individuals by name.

You know what I mean?

You just make a law that says he's guilty, which is what the English crown did and which

outraged

the colonialists to the point that they declared their independence.

But my point is this, that

he, in 2016, he introduced a colleague called the Trust Act.

And the gist of it was that sealed state New York tax records could be released without the permission of the tax filer if a committee in Congress needed the information.

And everybody said this was basically a bill of attainer that they were trying to get at Donald Trump's tax returns.

And remember, they were variously leaked later, so they got them anyway.

And one of the things they would try to do was get the state return, and then on the state return, it might have information not only about New York, but about the government.

So this guy in the legislature

used that tactic to get to Trump.

Now we fast forward

to 2022.

There's no case, Jack.

It's the statute of limitation.

And he introduces another bill that says,

if you file a claim of sexual battery or assault,

and if it is past the statute of limitation, so it's not, you have no legal validity to do so, for 12 months after we sign this bill, and only 12 months, you have a window of opportunity to file against anybody at any time, anywhere, no matter how far in the past it was.

And she immediately then takes advantage of that and files again.

And here we are.

So they have this battery case

before a left-wing judge, Kaplan, a left-wing jury, and they find Donald Trump guilty, not of rape, as alleged, but of sexual assault.

And they fine $5 million of damage.

Then she sues for defamation of character based on the idea that Donald Trump said she's a whack job and there's no validity to this.

And then yesterday, Jack, she gets an 83.3 million settlement.

So

here's the gist of it.

We're talking about giving $83 million in punitive and actual damages to now

an 80-year-old woman who lost her column at LA.

And she says this ruined her career because in defending himself from this charge, which Trump says he's never met her, and he wasn't in the store, he said she was a whack job, and then therefore she was fired from her columns.

But how many, Jack, if you're 76 years old, you don't have a long shelf life.

And she was making $120,000.

They reduced it to $60,000,

and then they fired her.

And the editor of LA said it had nothing to do with her complaints and her notoriety.

We just didn't want her anymore.

You know, she's 76 years old, and we don't need her writing about sex and everything for our magazine anymore.

We don't want to pay that much.

It was on that basis that she and

this is in a backdrop of media publications just collapsing.

So

it should be no surprise.

Yes, and that's the very point.

They wanted a reason to get rid of her.

And they said that she was no longer a persuasive or popular author based on.

And

I think that's very important.

So here's some other things that were really bad.

Number one,

she can't remember the year.

Number two,

she says she has a memorance of a particular stylish dress that she wore.

She's got, she took a picture of it.

That dress was not in existence when this three-year period of which she can't specify that she was sexually assaulted.

Number three,

she went on and made a little app on your phone.

And it's, there's a long story.

Everybody, if I tweeted about this, it's on Axios.

If you go to 2015, that's when she did it.

And she basically, it's, you know, lover's game or something.

And you go in this app and it gives you a proposition of two people who are in love.

And then you see how you can break them up and destroy them.

And it's called Evil, Evil, Evil in the story about it.

How to be evil, evil, evil.

And some of the things that you do are you make accusations about people and then people react to it.

Number four,

she also wrote a blog about ex-boyfriends and she traced her ex-boyfriends down and then she, as a part of the story,

with their consent, moved in with them and their wives.

That was one of the essays she wrote.

Number five.

This is really, I don't know how to say this, Jack, but apparently in 2012, on a Law and Order episode, there was a woman who went into the Bergendolf, whatever this is called in New York, this big department store, And she met a very powerful man on the story.

And they went into the dressing room and had some kind of encounter.

And then she sued him.

Okay.

This is

15 years after this thing happened.

So one or two things are going on.

She either

says didn't tell anybody about it and then she used that actual incident to sell sell a script to Law and Order,

or she made this up to Law and Order, and then that was the basis for her complaint.

Either way,

it's really something.

And then before she filed the complaint against Donald Trump, recently, before, maybe a year or two,

but 20 years after she said she was sexual, she tweets that her favorite show is what?

On television, Apprentice, Donald trump show

and then we get

into

i don't know how to put it but

we have these

uh

this question of defamation so what judge kaplan and the jury are saying

is if somebody comes out of the woodwork jack and says 26 years ago you sexually assaulted me in a room and there was i had there was no witnesses and I have not said a word about it for 25 years and I don't know what year it took place but I wore a dress but the dress didn't exist at the time she said she wore it and I've had apps about how to destroy men's relationships with women

and I've been on Anderson Cooper and said I wasn't really rape you know rape people say rape is sexy she said people say rape is for me it wasn't so you're she's now

into this huge defamation suit.

And by the way, who is funding it?

A Silicon Valley left-wing billionaire, Reed Hoffman.

He sees this going on and he says, oh, my God, this is a way to get Trump.

I'll give you an unlimited legal expense account.

Do what you got to do to sue him and bankrupt him.

Okay.

But what gets me is this judge is now saying that if anybody comes out of the woodwork and charges you with all this and has very little proof, no witnesses, and gets confused about the evidence.

And in the meantime, has showed no hostility to you, but to the point that she's admired you so much that she's tweeted to the world that you're her favorite TV show.

And

in addition to that, she's made an app about how in relationships you can destroy somebody.

And in addition to that, the exact same thing has been transmogrified into a TV episode.

Then you reply to that.

And so Donald Trump says, this is crazy.

I never met her.

Maybe he met her or something and he, I don't know whether he did or not.

I'm not going to get into that.

And then she defames him for the things he says about

her.

But what is more defamatory than to bring a suit against somebody and charge him with all these things and then go into the New York court system with an unlimited account from somebody who hates Donald Trump's guts in an election year

and do things against him that you never, for 25 years, you never had a problem apparently with

until he was famous and president or running for president.

And then on top of all this,

we've got the final question, Jack, and this is something I want to be very careful about.

There is something weird about the Washington, New York justice system for conservative white males.

Here's what I'm saying.

It was a cornerstone of the civil rights movement that blacks could not get fair trials in the South because they were segregated juries, they were white people, and they were prejudiced.

Okay,

so as a result of the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 65 and further court rulings for the next 40 years, roughly there was a statute or a protocol introduced that a person, when the Constitution says you're going to a jury trial by your peers, that the peers would have some rough approximation.

So if you're a

black man in Detroit and

you're charged with murder, you're not going to have 12 white wealthy suburban mates, right?

Just not going to happen.

And you're not going to have a white judge.

And that is something that we've seen.

So what we've seen here though is when you start looking at the voting records of Brooklyn, Manhattan and Washington DC, you see 50, not 50, not 70, 80, 90 percent, it goes Democratic

and they're heavily minority districts and what we're seeing on the left is that prosecutors will go into these two jurisdictions and Washington, remember, is the jurisdiction because

it involves everything to do with government.

And that's why Donald Trump is in these two.

And we saw with the January 6th that the juries of the defendants' peers did not look like America to use the left wing, either ideologically or ethnically or racially or anything.

And so what we're seeing with all of these rulings, and it's going to be the true same thing with Atlanta.

This is really law affair where prosecutors are relying on the ideology and other racial or cultural questions to come into the play as well as the evidence produced.

That's what I'm suggesting to you.

And if somebody said, well, that's reverse racism or you're crazy or that's horrible, then if that is true, then you have to ask yourself, where did we get that idea of what I just said?

Where did we get the idea that Rodney King didn't get a fair trial because

he was tried in Semi Valley and there were mostly white conservatives there.

And that's what the president did not come from the right.

It came from the left.

And this is something that I think terrifies people and it's been used as a political weapon.

And that is when you go into the Trump administration, there is a subtext that if you screw up, you don't have to screw up.

If you're controversial of Peter Navarro, you think Peter Navarro is going to got a fair trial?

He's going to go four months to prison for refusing a subpoena.

And maybe he will get a pardon.

I doubt it because Trump may not pardon him or he may not get elected.

He's 74 years old.

He's going to go to prison for doing what?

Doing exactly what Lois Lerner did or Eric Holder did or an array of other Obama or Democratic

Hunter Biden.

And by the way, Hunter just agreed to go when this all came out because it was unsustainable to see

Peter Navarro, a high administration official, go to prison for not obeying a subpoena when he thumbed his nose out.

And so

there you go.

And so it's lawfare in a very strange way.

So just to sum up, everybody, I'm not trying to suggest that what Donald Trump did or did not do

didn't occur or did occur was bad or good.

I'm just saying that when you have a legal system and you can come after somebody 25 years later with no evidence in in the sense of physical evidence and no witnesses and you got yourself into a situation that in the middle of the day you locked yourself into a dressing room with a man for what purpose consensually and willfully and then you have a complaint post facto that it went way farther than you wanted and it was assault even though the person the other party denies this happened And in that interim, you did not say anything for 20 years.

And only when the person that you are now accusing became a celebrity in the sense of a politician, a controversial one, and in that you filed it, and you still would not be able to file except a left-wing member of the New York legislature changed the law to post facto accommodate your complaint.

in a way that he had done things earlier to target Trump.

And in this

meantime, the judge judge says it doesn't matter that there was a TV show with the exact, basically the same story, the same department store, the same controversy.

That I guess she either saw that and created the story or that she herself influenced that stealthily.

I don't know the answer.

Or if you had said that the perpetrator of this heinous act in the meantime was your favorite celebrity on television and the dress that you say that is the proof doesn't exist at the time, as I said, that you filed the complaint.

And then you're going to try all of this in a left-wing city with a left-wing judge and a left-wing jury.

It's not fair.

It's not fair.

And this is something that we see

with Fannie Willis, we see with Letita Jaynes, we see with Alvin Bragg and Jack Smith.

And I'm just telling everybody that whatever you think of Donald Trump, if you create a system where an ex-president and a leading candidate for the presidency is going to be charged with crimes that everybody knows would not be filed if he was not running or if he was running as a progressive Democrat, you don't have the United States anymore.

It's not.

It's just a blank, blank banana republic.

And if you compound this and add it on to the fact that we have 17 states that that are trying to take his name off the ballot on grounds that he's an insurrectionary

and he's never been charged with insurrection, much less convicted of it.

And this takes place in a larger canvas of the Russian disinformation laptop bogus story that nobody believes but was very effective.

in influence the 2020 election.

And this comes on top of the Russian collusion charge of of the steel dossi that everybody knows now was fake,

then something is very wrong with the United States of America.

It's gone completely off the rail.

And that's what I'm saying.

And I could also say,

do you remember, Jack, when

Joe Biden during the campaign of 2019 and 20 was accused of Tara Reed, a former Senate assistant, of being forcibly

confronted by him, pressed himself up, and then he digitally penetrated almost the same charge.

And not only, and was there any evidence, no, it was just like this.

It was, he said, she said, except

her mother called a talk show.

If you remember that, Larry, Larry King, right?

Larry King and said, my daughter has been sexually assaulted by a major politician in Washington.

And we found out later that they were, you know, mother and daughter.

And then during the campaign, you remember they asked an array of people, it was very embarrassing because it was a tail end of me too.

I think, I think, was it Liz Warren said she should be believed?

Maybe even Kamala Harrell said that.

I can't remember.

But the point was,

is anybody going to come out now in a red state?

Was it Tara Reed?

Maybe she'll go to Idaho and maybe the Idaho legislature will pass a bill that says anybody can file a sexual assault charge regardless of the statute limitations, at least for the next 12 months.

And then she'll do this and then they'll get a pro and we'll go down the whole thing.

This is what we're looking at.

And it's all predicated on one thing, everybody.

Remember that.

It's predicated on one idea, that conservatives will not try to take

their opponents on the Democratic Party off the ballot.

Conservatives will not dream up laptops,

disinformation, ruses.

They will not hire foreign spies, bankrupt, has been foreign spies, and pay them and have them hired by the FBI to create lies about their opponents.

And

you're not going to have politicized trials in cities like Casper, Wyoming, or

Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, or

you know, Mobile, Alabama, et cetera, or Fresno, California.

No, it's not going to happen to go after your political opponents.

And until there's some types of deterrence, I don't know how you're going to stop it.

Well, Victor,

maybe a little more on this.

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Victor, two

quick

thoughts.

You know,

you mentioned the statute of limitations, and we always still believe, we conservatives, that we're a nation of laws.

But in New York State, fertile ground for doing that kind of stuff in the legislature, because in response to

lingering, long lingering, decades-lingering charges against the Catholic Church of priests molesting boys and girls.

The New York State legislature, I think Andrew Cuomo was the governor at the time, made mincemeat of the then standing

rules and laws for statute of limitation.

So right now,

there are, I know guys from my high school, I'm 63,

and

they've taken civil action against the church and others for things that happened in 1977, 78, when people, you know, I don't know how you prove it.

There's no question malicious things happen.

So that's kind of one fertile ground for doing this kind of nefarious changing our system of laws.

And then one other thing to add, and then maybe we'll get on to Victor, we'll get on to your thoughts on what might be happening this week with Secretary Mayorkis,

is also on the civil side of things.

This week, Mark Stein and Rand Simberg are in a court in Washington, D.C.,

sued by Michael Mann, the Penn State, now he's at UPenn, climatologist, over something Mark Stein wrote in National Review in 2012.

And why was this case filed in the District of Columbia Superior Court?

Why didn't Mann bring his actions in

where he lived, in Pennsylvania or Idaho?

This is an extremely expensive trial that has cost this side, our side, which is National Review, Stein, Rand Simberg, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, many, many

billions of dollars.

If the Republicans take the Senate and the House, they need to address this, and they need to have a statute, a law that says that anybody charged in New York or Washington, D.C.,

and then they have and then they should specify the grounds by which you can get a change of venue.

Because what's going on is they are doing two things.

They're assuming that if you're charged in Washington, you're going to have to pay $1,000 to $2,000 an hour for

that legal environment.

And you're going to go before a jury that will not look like America, not look like your peers, and will definitely, if you're conservative, be 90% or 80% against you, as the voting records in that jurisdiction show.

And they will bankrupt you.

And everybody knows that.

And that's why you, and what's the purpose of it?

So then you don't get good people that want to serve and take a pay cut and go to Washington and be the targets of lawfare.

And the case of the legislature, just to finish,

you're absolutely right, but this guy, Brad Hoyleman, I'm just trying to remember by,

I think it was Brad Hoyneman.

He was the first gay

legislator in New York and the Senate, I think, of the state senate.

And it wasn't just this, though.

He had a history of looking at the landscape and hating Trump and trying to figure out how he could get the Democratic majority to go after Trump.

And he went after the taxes with the special legislation.

It doesn't mean that other people didn't fall into this trap, but the point was that the catalyst for the legislation was Donald Trump.

And, you know, the Constitution, when you read about the Bill of Attainders, they're a little different.

I understand that.

But the spirit is the same, that we are all walking around as free men and women in this country with the assumption that somebody that doesn't like us is not going to go in and pass a law and make something that we did in the past that is not actionable now actionable.

And

if that's true, then

you have no freedom or you have no bill of rights.

You have nothing because it means you're walking around with a time bomb.

Anything you've done in your past,

forget the statute of limitations.

I'm not talking about rape and murder and robbery.

I'm just talking about your taxes 20.

Anything will

come under scrutiny in a particular legal environment where the judge, jury, and prosecutor, if you're a conservative, will be of the opposite party.

And you are going to be in big trouble.

And when you look at Donald Trump Trump.

Even if you didn't do something, Victor.

So it's not even if you did something 40 years ago.

Even if you didn't do something.

No, you didn't.

You didn't.

Was Donald Trump's tax actionable?

No.

They went after him and they went after him and they went after him.

And now we found out that he had legitimate write-offs.

And that was leaked.

And did the leaker ever face this type of exposure?

No.

They didn't do anything to him, essentially.

And Hunter Biden was going to get off in the same place.

So it works in reverse, everybody.

It's not just they go after

the right.

You get, on the other hand, the subtext is if you want to come to Washington and work for us on the left side and you get in legal problems, we have prosecutors and we have judges and we have juries that are going to protect you.

And if you're...

If you're Lois Lerner and you just say, screw you to the subpoena or you're Eric Colter and you say, I'm not going to give you anything.

I'm just screw you, house subpoena.

There's not going to be anything that happens to you.

And they won't even try it because because they know it'll happen.

We will nullify it and it's not going to go anywhere.

And that's a great attraction for people to go to Washington.

Just like it's not a great attraction.

If you were Peter Navarro and you were kind of a,

I don't know, a Septuagarian

late 60s maybe

professor of economics, Harvard PhD from in economics, teaching at UC Irvine, you were kind of out there in the sense that the mainstream economists were not as libertarian or I shouldn't say libertarian, they were not protectionists like he is, and that you were, you know, you were kind of controversial.

So

you advise Trump and you go to Washington.

And everybody hates your guts because you have a voice that they don't agree.

Wall Street hates you.

Wall Street Journal hates you.

Banks hate you.

The big corporations hate you.

The huge China globalist investment hates you.

And

you finish your tenure

without any controversy.

And all of a sudden they say, we want to talk to you about January 6th.

What did you say to Trump?

It's executive privilege.

I'm working for the president.

I don't have to tell you everything.

And Lynn Cheney and Mr.

Kissinger and the Democratic majority then slap a subpoena and you're going to put him in jail.

It's not America.

It's not America.

It is not America.

And you know what?

It's not America when 51 intelligence authorities come out out and swear to us that that laptop looks like Russian disinformation.

And then you have someone just to pick on him, Leon Panetta, the former director of the CIA, who actually was sanctioned and reprimanded for flying on his private government jet back and forth to his home in Monterey.

But he signed that.

And when he was asked about that, he had no apologies.

He didn't say, Well, this was Russian disinformation.

He not only had no apologies about it, but now he's involved with another group, one of these pro-democracy groups that is warning us that they have to be very vigilant and they're already ready to start taking preemptive measures to stop Donald Trump from being president in 2024.

And I'm sorry, Mr.

Panetta, but

I had nothing against you.

I thought you were a sober and judicious public servant.

But when you signed that thing and you told the Americans on the eve of a debate and on the eve of the 2020 that this laptop that was so incriminating was cooked up or a likely work of Russian disinformation, and then you were confronted when even Hunter's legal team does not deny it is his.

In fact, they are using the fact that it was authentic to say that the person has no right to take information because it's Hunter's private correspondence.

And then you won't apologize to the American people that is just absolutely shameful he not only didn't apologize when he was questioned about it I forget if it was on Fox maybe Brett Bayer or somebody he laughed he laughed about it so

it's kind of he's he's no Harry Reid but he's of the same mind we won didn't we I'm a religious person both

in the terms of Christianity, but also pre-Christian in the sense I think there was a

force in the world.

You know, in the East, they call it karma, and in classical literature, it's nemesis.

But when you go excessively out of the way to destroy people, and you go out of your way

in a hubristic fashion to trample the law and threaten the Constitution, and you do this and do this and do this, there's a force of nature that's going to correct that, believe me.

And the left should be very, very careful because what they are doing is destroying the constitutional system we've had for 232 years.

And, you know, they wanted to pack the court.

They wanted to get rid of the Electoral College.

They wanted to bring in two left-wing states.

They wanted to get rid of the filibuster.

Now they're going,

and they were stopped.

And now they're going with the open border.

And now they're going with getting the name of the president or the leading Republican candidate off the ballot.

And now they're using the court system and somebody who has has very little legal claim to cherry pick a judge and cherry pick a jury and just try to bankrupt the leading candidate.

And this is just the preview, Jack.

All summer, everybody listening.

We know now that Fannie Wills, Mr.

Wade, went to the White House to be prepped and tutored about his special prosecution in Georgia.

We know that they communicated with the January 6th Committee.

And we don't know what Mr.

Smith and Mr.

James and

Mr.

James and Mr.

Bragg are doing, but you can bet that someone is coordinating these suits all year long till the election.

And what they want to do is they want Donald Trump to be nominated and win the primaries and then be ossified, inert, calcified, can't move, and then at some point indict him and get him in jail, and then there's no candidate and they have to scramble around like the Democrats did in 1972 when

they had to pick, was it Sergeant Shriver at the last moment as their vice president candidate for McGovern?

It was just a joke.

That's what they want.

And

it's not good.

It's not good what's going on.

Well, we're going to talk a little later about this year of living dangerously because it's dangerous in other ways to vector, but false two isn't also.

But we also want to

address Mayorkis.

And let's do that.

Let's get your thoughts on what's pending right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I apologize to our listeners if there's anything hinky with the sound here, but

little old Jack Fowler's got some technical issues.

I'm in my mother's bedroom in the Bronx, so it's not exactly a student.

You're suggesting that the Victor Davis-Hanson show doesn't have a sophisticated studio with neon lights and blinking lights and

$68,000 of sophisticated sound equipment.

No, no, Victor.

I think sometimes you and I are connected by those oatmeal boxes with string.

But anyway, anyway, let me lump three things together here, Victor, border-related.

One, your favorite person, Joy Reed, on MSNBC, saying those who declare border security is important are, in fact, racist because they declare that.

The second thing.

mentioned earlier several times now is Alejandro Mayorkis, the Secretary of Homeland Security, has articles of impeachment will be voted on by the House of Representatives this week.

And the third thing, which I think is related,

and this is interesting because you just talked about Fannie Willis in Georgia, there's a poll out

from the University of Georgia of

Georgia voters, about 1,300 or so registered

concerning the upcoming elections.

And the backdrop is Joe Biden got 88% of the black vote in Georgia in 2020.

Right now, according to the survey, Biden has support of 58.6%

of registered Georgia black voters.

Donald Trump has 20.4%.

I have to think, Victor, as this is a byproduct in part, as we've seen in some other black, major, cities with major black majorities, such as Chicago, just pushback and outrage over the madness on the border, what used to be a border that is now affecting not just the folks on the border, not just Texas and Arizona and New Mexico, but affecting all of America.

Victor, this big ball of wax here, your thoughts.

I think the black community and the Latino community are starting to see that

this Democratic Party is not Bill Clinton.

You know, in the Dying Citizen, I went back and looked at all the speeches at the 92 and 96 Democratic Convention.

by Nancy Pelosi, by Joe Biden, by

Bill Clinton, by Hillary Clinton.

Jack, they are to to the right of the Republican position on the border.

They were so angry at open borders, they felt that it destroyed the wages of their greatest constituency, which was union, middle-class Democratic America.

Barack Obama gave a speech early in his administration why it was unfair to let people cut in front of the line, he said.

So this is a revolutionary movement.

And I think a lot of people in the Democratic Party are saying, these people don't care about us.

They don't care that people are defecating in the park.

They don't care if people are urinating on our doorstep as they beg us for money.

They don't care that we can't even get into the ER in Chicago.

They don't care.

We're nobody because they have these utopian globalist views about there's no borders, they need cheap labor.

And I think it may, I think this is...

This is behind a lot of the things we talked about.

This Carol Reed Hoffman, you know, sending millions of dollars to

using the vessel of E.

Gene Carroll to sue Trump to bankrupt him.

The same thing with all this law affair.

It is a terror that Donald Trump is going to win and not just win, but win with the aid of 20% of the black vote and 45% of the Latino vote.

And they don't know how to stop it because they're addicts to this ideology.

They can't change, even though they know the border is destroying them.

On the wider question of the border, very quickly.

So we've got got this situation, Jack, where you almost have a Civil War Fort Sumner-like collision on the horizon because we have a state that has an identical border as our federal border.

And the Constitution

says that in two parts,

is it Article 4, Sections 9 and 10?

I'm just doing my memory.

It says that it's the responsibility of the federal government to protect the states states from foreign invasion.

Well, if you're getting 100,000 people dead from imported fentanyl, and you're getting 8 million people that are overwhelming your country, and you have the federal government that is not fulfilling its constitutional duty, then what do you do if you're a state?

You start to enforce your border.

Yes, it is their border twice.

It is the Texas border because as Americans, that is an American federal border, and as Texacans, that is a border.

And they start enforcing it.

And you would think that the Biden administration would say something like this, Jack.

Hmm.

Well,

you've got the Silicon Valley, we've got the Chamber of Commerce, we've got the corporate boardroom, we've got all these special interests that we cater to because they're big donors that want cheap labor.

And then we've got the Latino left-wing elite caucus, the La Raza people, the BLM, the Antifa base, the squad, and they want

a BLM, Antifa, DEI agenda, and we got to be careful about them, but it's hurting us.

So maybe we'll do this.

We'll just yell, they can't do this.

This is no effying federal law.

And then just let them do it.

Just let Texas put the barbed wire and stop it.

And then we'll just deplore it.

And that will depease everybody.

And they can't even do that because they're such ideologues.

They're tearing down any state effort to stop illegality.

They are on the sides of illegality.

That's just what it's about.

So what happens then when other governors and the other states send their National Guard to help the Texas National Guard?

And Joe Biden has talked himself into,

I don't know what you call it, Jack, a civil discord, a civil war type of situation where he's going to do what now?

Try to nationalize all these state guards and say, now you work for me, or tell the federal, federal, the ICE people who I think 45% of them are Latino that live in that area, and they're diametrically opposed, and their cousins and brothers and friends work for the Texas border.

So is he going to tell his ICE people or his Border Patrol people, we want you to physically confront your cousin and your brother or your wife on the other side that works for Texas because you're Texas residents, and remove all this so more people can break the law and ruin your community.

I don't think that's it.

But there's a lot of issues here.

And then we've got this other issue.

And Joe Biden, there's a great tape out on the internet.

It's everywhere.

It's 2007.

And they're asked specifically when Joe Biden is beginning to run against Barack Obama, and he's staking out territory, he thinks, on the democratic right.

And they ask him specifically, do you think

sanctuary cities are a good idea?

No, they're bad.

They're illegal.

You can't do that.

And what he's saying is that you can't be one of 550 local and state jurisdictions and say to the federal government, we are George Wallace.

We are state writers.

right to hers.

Our rights are more important than the federal government.

We nullify your federal immigration law.

If you send a federal immigration agent into my city or go to the jail to pick up somebody convicted of a federal offense in which you have jurisdiction, we're not going to let you in.

We're going to forcibly stop you.

And you're not going to deport anybody within our jurisdiction.

And everybody thought that was wonderful.

And now they're trying to say, Texas, you believe in state rights over federal control.

No, no, they're just following what you did, only there's a big difference.

You followed the nullification example of South Carolina that started the Civil War because you wanted to weaken federal law and destroy it and make state law preeminent over the federal law.

Texas wants to enforce federal law.

They are more federal than is Joe Biden.

And I don't know where this is going to go, but,

you know,

just to sum up, where we are right now, Jack, is a very weird political situation, a very critical point in our history.

You have about 60% of the people in the country.

If you look at Joe Biden's 33% ABC approval and you look at his approval on the border, that's in the 20s, on these issues, there's no support.

So then you have the MAGA movement, and whether you call it Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley, not Nikki Haley, but

It goes beyond Donald Trump.

But let's say it's Donald Trump right now, and it is.

And you've got about 60% agree with everything he's doing.

So then you look at the Democrats and they're thinking, oh my God, they caught on to us.

They caught on to draining the petroleum.

They got on to canceling the liquid natural gas terminals.

They got caught on to the three-gender scam.

They got caught on to the DEI and the anti-Semitism.

They got caught.

They know who we are now and what we're trying to do.

So we're going to lose everything unless we can do two things, destroy their candidate.

And they get on the phone.

Hey, Reid Hoffman.

Hey, Mark Zuckerberg, you're building on $100 million bunker, a dollar in Hawaii.

Get over here.

We need another $419 million to absorb the work of Purple State Registrars like you did in 2020.

Hey, Antifa, BLM, remember?

We modulated your protest.

Molly Ball wrote about it in Time Magazine.

We need you to get back out in the street.

That's all they have.

And it's going to be a very, very, it's going to be the most dangerous year.

I'm really afraid about it in our lifetime.

Because I think the left is, it's very dangerous domestically, Jack, when they know

the people are not with them.

And more importantly, the people who were never with them.

cannot be fooled twice, to quote Abraham Lincoln.

You can't do it.

They can't do it anymore.

The Joe Biden, oh, I'm just old Joe Biden from Scranton, working class guy.

That's not going to work.

It's not going to work anymore.

And they are headed for a big defeat.

And even the drain the strategic petroleum reserve, forgive

student debt, scare everybody about nine-week abortion bills and Red State, all that stuff that helped them stave off a landslide defeat in the midterm.

I don't think it's going to work.

So they're going to do some stuff we've never seen before, whether that's get Trump in jail or get him off the ballot or something.

And we're starting to see this $83 million.

So they are telling America a 76-year-old woman who charged a president with sexual assault that she could not prove.

And we went through all of the discrepancies for 20 minutes today.

With all of that,

They're trying to say she suffered $83 million of damage because she did what?

She can't write now at 78.

She's 80.

She lost her job and everybody said, well, you, she lost her 20 plus years at LA magazine.

And we see Miss Garcia, the editor, said, no, I fired her.

We're laying off people.

I just didn't want her around anymore.

We've had nothing to do with Donald Trump.

And so that's where we are.

And it's going to get nasty because that's just the first of five suits.

We've got to go through this same thing five times over.

And believe me, these people hate his guts.

You look at that face of Jack Smith, man, that guy is so pissed off.

It doesn't help Donald Trump.

You know, when he goes in there, he can't,

he can't suppress it.

He starts yelling.

The judge says, you know, you're out of order.

He says, you are too.

It's all true.

And his theory is, I'm going to do it, they're making a mockery of me.

I'm going to make a mockery of them.

But they have the

quote-unquote law on their side.

And so contrived or not.

He's got to be quiet.

He's got to get, I guess what I would say to Donald Trump is,

speak softly and carry a big stick.

Or I would say, don't get mad.

Get even.

Get even.

Keep quiet and let your attorneys beat this in court.

Smile.

And then when you get elected, you get a contract with America through the first hundred days that makes this stuff impossible.

And maybe we can do it.

But don't, don't just scream and yell when you can't do do anything legally.

It hurts your case.

Well,

your lips to God's ears.

And I'm not a good person to do it because I've been in situations like that

where I have people at Stanford University went after me.

And I've been at Cal State for, I mean, when you walk on campus.

And you wrote a book called Mexifornia and you pick up the voice of Otsalan everywhere on campus and you see your picture with crosshairs and the bullets right in your head where where the crosshairs meet and you go tell a high official at your university this is incendiary and said you shouldn't have written the book

and so

you know you get in situations where you have understandable anger but every time that i've been in a situation like that

I've tried to be a little bit my first impression or my first surge of anger, I've tried to modulate it.

And usually that means you write really angry letters and you keep writing them and writing them so they're more logical than angry.

Right.

Gosh.

I don't think righteous anger is

a winning

characteristic.

It's a thing that happens,

let's say, usefully when it happens rarely, but when it becomes a

reminding of you,

I don't see it helpful.

You know another thing I was thinking that when we're going through all this,

everybody,

we're kind of inert because if this had happened three years ago, this is what would happen four years ago.

You would get up in the morning, you turn on Rush, and for three hours, he would analyze it and break it down and have 20 million people.

And then at night, you'd turn on Tucker.

And Tucker would be fearless and just lamb-based it.

And then you'd go to the Drudge Report, and they would have all sorts of esoteric stories about, and you know what?

And then you would pick up maybe the old weekly standard, or you'd read a George Will column about stuff like this.

And here's what's happened: Rush died, Tucker was fired, Drudge flipped from right to hard left,

and the people who used to be the establishment bow tie representatives of conservatism detested MAGA more than they did the left-wing Democrats and have completely not just,

you know, become non-Trump people, but they are now hard left.

And so the result of all that is there's a big vacuum.

There's not a, there's not a, there's not the same resonance.

I know that there's new avenues, there's new podcasts, there's blogs, there's good websites,

but we don't have the amplification or the mega wattage or the bandwidth or whatever term that we used to have.

We really don't.

And

institutions matter.

They really do.

And ask yourself about every conservative institution.

Is national review stronger right now or was it 10 years ago?

Was talk radio stronger 10 years ago or now?

Was big news aggregators, and there's some good ones out there, but Did they have the audience that they had 10 years ago and the influence?

And was the 8 o'clock, Eastern, 5 o'clock as strong?

I mean, I think Jesse Waters is doing a fine job, but is it as strong as it was in the Bill O'Reilly days and the Tucker Carlson days?

And I could go down the list.

And when you pick up the Washington Post, yeah, you pick up the Washington Post or you pick up

the New York Times, do you see real conservative,

the token slot?

Are they real conservatives?

Is Peggy Noonan a real conservative at the you know and the people at the new york are they real conservatives and then you ask yourself when you look at the public sphere does npr and pbs have the conservative voices is there somebody like brian lamb now at sea spot you know what i mean not necessarily ideological or political just a consummate professional that doesn't bring ideology and the answer is no No, no, no, no, no.

No, no, no, no, no.

And

it's amazing.

It's the same thing with the university.

When I was a graduate student, an undergraduate in the 70s, it was left-wing,

but the politics were secondary.

And there were people who were reasonable, sane.

There wasn't a clodding, gay,

clone type of president all over the United States like this is today.

We have completely lost control of the institutions.

The NFL, it would have been unthinkable 20 years ago that that people would just sit there during this Star-Spangled banner and not even get up and insult it like that, or what, or just pout every day like LeBron James and the NBA, when you think back, or the same thing about late-night comedy, Jay Leno

and,

you know, all those guys of the old, they were on the left side, but they did not get into the pure political hatred that you see with Jimmy Kimmel and all those people.

And the same thing with the foundations, the Sorreles Foundation or Reid Hoffman or Zuckerberg Sinish, all of these are so far to the left, even of the warped Rockefeller and

Guggenheim and all those foundations that went left in the 70s and 80s.

It's just different.

The left has absolutely marched through the institutions and warped them to be unrecognizable, but very influential in getting their minority and unpopular message mainstream.

And you can really see it when you ask people about transgenderism and Leah Thompson, whatever his name is, do you really want him in the Olympics destroying all the hard work of female swimmers?

Everybody will say no, but mark my word, he'll get so many puff pieces and so many editorials and so much pressure that he will be in the Olympics competing as a woman.

Yeah.

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And I think in a, in a soon-to-come out, their great magazine comes out six times a year.

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Victor, to continue the year of living dangerously, but on a foreign

angle, that's the title of your recent essay for

American Greatness, which, folks, you can find that at, well, at American Greatness, but also at the Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

You wrote this, Victor.

In particular, both enemies and neutrals, we're talking about foreign matters now, have accordingly drawn a number of self-interested conclusions about the waning Biden administration and what may follow.

Three points.

One, that Joe Biden, to their apparent delight, has in the last three years reversed the Trump deterrence policies and thus has greenlit their aggressions.

Number two, that given the the ensuing chaos, they have further agreed that Biden's growing unpopularity with the American people makes it likely that both he and his appeasement policies will be gone by January 2025.

And point three, and this is the important point,

that Donald Trump may well return to office.

That would mean a much worse deal for Russia, China, and Iran and its terrorist satellites, and thus recognition that 2024 is a brief brief window of opportunity for aggression.

Victor, this is why we are looking at a year of living dangerously, not only domestically, but abroad.

Your thoughts?

Well, I mean, historically, when you have a weak or lame duck presidency, either the last year or even after the election during the transition period, and there is a perception abroad that there is going to be a correction with a stronger leader, then obviously

foreign belligerents want to take

advantage of that situation.

Domestically, too, I mean, when James Buchanan was one of the weakest presidents we've ever had, one-termer,

and so his tenure was going to end in 1861, and he lost the election in November of 1860.

He didn't, I don't mean he lost the election.

He chose not to rule, and Abraham Lincoln was elected.

because the Democrats split, the Southern and Northern Democrats split the vote.

So he was elected.

And everybody knew that the abolitionists were behind Lincoln, and he would not back down about succession.

He would protect federal property.

Remember, that was the issue.

Slavery was a real issue, of course, but the issue that triggered the war was,

how do you get in a war over slavery?

Well, you say that the federal government owns property in the South, and it did.

And the South had no right to take federal property like a federal fort.

And therefore, they would.

And I don't think Buchanan,

he didn't increase enrollment in the military.

He didn't be, he wasn't going to do anything.

He was a northerner, but he felt sympathetic.

So he, the elections there and what happens in that, in that interim, seven states immediately succeed.

Succeed.

As soon as they find out Lincoln, they said, you know what?

There's nothing going to happen to us.

And by the time Lincoln is president,

he's got 10.

He's going to have one more 11.

Virginia's, I think, the last.

Same thing with Nixon.

Nixon had the Vietnam War I by 1972.

And then the Paris peace accords, they had the whole thing

set up.

And the North Vietnamese, given the strategic first generation bombing with laser-guided shells in Hanoi, they went after the hierarchy of the

people's, the North Vietnamese Army.

They went after them, and we had a peace settlement.

And then Watergate came, early 73, 70, all of early four.

And then when he resigned in 1974, and people knew that Jerry Ford was weak, but that at some point this was not sustainable, they just took over Vietnam.

We didn't do anything.

And they knew and understood that.

And you can say that right now people are, and I could give you more examples, but right now people are looking abroad and they're thinking, under Joe Biden, who doesn't know where he is anymore,

they had the greatest humiliation in their history in Afghanistan.

They just fled

and they left billions of dollars

of munitions and arms that are circulating all over the Middle East.

And then they just sat there when a Chinese balloon just lazily, laxadaisically floated across the continental United States taking strategic photographs of bases and things.

They didn't do anything.

And then they begged Iran to get back in the deal.

They told the Houthis, you know what, you're no longer a terrorist.

And you'll like us for that.

And then they said to Iran, you can sell oil.

You can make 50, 80, 90 billion dollars.

And Hezbollah, they said, you know, we'll back, you know, back the Lebanese government and dispute with Israel, who owns offshore gas rights.

And we're going to give money to you, Hamas.

You've been behaving.

Same with you, Palestinian.

And so they did all of that.

And as I said before, they had a choice between dishonor and war, and they took dishonor and they got war, to paraphrase Churchill.

So everybody understands it's chaos now.

And we got the Ukrainian war, I didn't even get into.

And they're looking around and they're thinking, hmm,

we don't think at 33%

Joe Biden will be the president next.

It may be a Democrat, Democrat, but

it may not.

And it looks like Donald Trump is ahead.

And we know what Donald Trump was like when he was president.

He killed Soleimani.

He clapped down on China.

He killed 200 Russian mercenaries in Syria.

He slapped higher sanctions on Iran.

He slapped higher sanctions on the oligarchs.

He pulled out of an asymmetrical missile deal with Putin.

He sent Javin offensive, first president to send offensive weapons to Ukraine.

I could go on.

And we understood what he told about North Korea, that everybody hated him, but he said, you know, you don't threaten Portland and Seattle.

I have a bigger button than you do, and it works.

And

he did the typical art of the deal where he threatens, he creates deterrence, and then he doesn't rub it in, and he's conciliatory to China.

And we had peace, but peace on our times.

And with Mexico, by 2020,

let's say January of 2000, there was no illegal immigration.

He went and told Obador: if you keep doing this,

you keep it up,

you're going to have the NAFTA thing in a way that we're going to get out of it and we're going to shut down your economy and we're going to tax remittances.

And they did, and Obador complied.

We had that finally solved the problem.

So now they know he's coming back, Jack.

And what are they going to do?

They're saying we have January 20, 21st,

2025.

We got one year.

And there must be the optimum mood where Joe Biden is at his nadir.

And we saw what happens when Lloyd Austin had prostate cancer and was missing in action for basically no one communicated him for eight, nine days, and Joe Biden didn't even know.

And we saw, you know, what the Joint Chiefs has become with Mark Milley, you know, calling his Chinese counterpart.

So this may be be the best chance, I would say, somewhere around October or November, or even better, after Joe Biden loses, say in December, January of next year, to do something, something stupid.

I don't know what that would be.

Hezbollah attacks Israel.

Ukraine,

I don't know, Putin threatens the...

Lithuania or

Estonia or the Chinese decide that they're going to push their weight around in the South China Sea vis-a-vis Taiwan.

Mexico just says, you know what, it's time to just

8 million was not enough.

We're going to let in another 3 or 4 million as quickly as something like that, I think, is going to happen.

Well, Victor,

I think we may have time for one more quick little topic.

I think Robert F.

Kennedy Jr., I'd like to raise him.

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

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So Victor, a couple things quickly about Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

One, I saw in some poll that he's at a three-way poll.

He's about at 14%.

Then I saw something in today.

I don't know if it's over, maybe it just came out in the last 24 hours when we're recording or earlier this week where Donald Trump is toying with the idea of maybe I'll ask

Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

to be on the ticket with me.

And Kennedy says something like, I'm open to that, talking about it.

But to me, the most important thing here, worthwhile,

just a quick thought, since we've already talked about the border, is that he

backs Texas Governor Greg Abbott

in this border standoff with the feds.

And maybe I should get in Kennedy's former, maybe was Andrew Cuomo his brother-in-law or something?

Cuomo was married to a Kennedy.

Yeah, he was married to a Kennedy.

Yeah.

And Andrew Cuomo has come out of the woodwork just to attack what's going on on the border.

So, anyway, any thoughts about Kennedy

in 2024 and the politics of Robert Kennedy?

Well, let's start with just very quickly because I know we're over time, but

Robert Kennedy, I mean, let's just make it clear that Donald Trump will be 78 years years old if he is elected to the presidency, and he will be one of the first presidents in my memory

with an interrupted term.

I think Glover Cleveland was the last one, and he will only be there for four years.

So basically, this vice presidential pick.

gains importance much more than the usual Republican paradigm that a candidate in the late 40s, 50s, or early 60s is running for president, and he picks somebody to balance the ticket who will be vice president if he's reelected for eight years.

That's not going to happen.

So all of these would-be vice presidents are looking at this and they're saying, you know, Trump is tied up.

He's going to be in all sorts of legal jeopardy, even if he's selected president.

And he's only going to be there for four years and he's going to be stressed out and he's 78.

So taking the vice president nod is not a dead end, you know, Jack Garner.

It's not worth

a bucket of the warm blank.

I think he said spit euphemistically.

It's something very valuable

for Roosevelt.

And

so that's one thing, and that has enticed Robert F.

Kennedy.

Then Robert F., there's another thing going on.

He looks at their Democratic Party, and he thought, you know, I'm going to run on my Kennedy name.

And I'm going to run kind of like an old classical Hubert Humphrey, JFK, Bobby Kennedy.

You know, it's kind of, I'll have to update it a little bit because everybody's got universal health insurance.

They've got eight-hour week.

They've got unemployment insurance.

They've got Social Security.

We got the whole shebang.

We got the great society.

We've spent all.

So I'm going to just kind of trim it around,

but I won't quite sign on to ESG and DEI and open that.

He's going to separate himself.

But what he didn't calibrate on is that this is not the Democratic Party.

This is a hardcore neo-socialist movement.

And

they sustain no criticism.

So when he started to campaign, they hated his guts.

They could not stand him.

He was an apostate.

Forget the Kennedy name.

They went after him.

They tried to keep him off the ballot.

They will keep him off the ballot as much as they can.

So now he says,

okay, screw you.

If Donald Trump wants to make me, there's not only a good chance I could be president, and I wouldn't need the Democratic Party as it's duly con, but I'm pissed off at them for what they've done to me.

So that's another element.

And then the third element is, I think it's exaggerated, Jack, but there's a lot of hype on the conservative side that

they won over Robert Kennedy.

In other words, well, even he sees that we're right on these issues and on the border or on China or on the vaccinations or the quarantine.

He was with us.

Yeah, no, he's with you about 10% of the time, 10 or 15%.

He's with you in the sense that Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton are worth with you.

He's a little bit out there on some issues, but I think

if he runs as a third party candidate and you are a conservative listening and you vote for him as a third party, instead of Donald Trump or whoever the Republican nominees, you're voting for Joe Biden.

And that's very important because we're going to have Jill Stein, we're going to have Robert F.

Kennedy, we're going to have Cornell Webs, we're going to have Representative Phillips, we're going to have four of them on the ballot.

And if anybody, let the Democrats vote for these people, but if you, this is the one time you need unity and solidarity on the, on the conservative side, no matter who it is.

Even the most unimaginable candidate on the conservative side is preferable to Joe Biden.

Never Biden.

That's my hashtag.

That's my, yeah, absolutely.

That's a good term.

Never Biden.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

we've heard an hour and 20 minutes of your wisdom here and appreciate it.

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Thank you, La Quinterita, for your kind words.

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Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.