From the Pre-Socratics to Kari Lake and Bibi Netanyahu

Flu season is here and COVID cases are still climbing across the country.

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

Right now, they've dropped prices on ivermectin and mabenzazole by 25%.

Plus, you can save an extra 10% with the code VICTR10.

You'll also get 10% off antibiotics, antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, and more of the medications you actually want on hand.

Whether you're fighting off a cold, protecting your family from flu season, or staying ready in case COVID makes its way into your home, having a few months' supply brings peace of mind and control.

They work with licensed doctors who review your order online, write the prescriptions, and ship your meds straight to your door.

Go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor and use the code Victor10 today.

Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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

He is also available on his website, VictorHanson.com.

Please come join us.

It's $5 a month or $50 a year and you get access to all the VDH Ultra articles.

If you just want to join for a free subscription, you will have a newsletter that gets sent out three to four times a week with all the new stuff on it, and there's lots of new things to read that are free as well.

So, please join us at the website.

This is the weekend edition.

So, we will be looking at something cultural.

And this weekend, we're looking at the pre-Socratic philosophers who inhabited Miletus, and

they were the first to try to answer questions of man, nature, and the universe through observation and experimentation and logical analysis, rather than attributing things to the will of gods.

So that should be very interesting.

But first, our first segment, we're going to look at some news stories.

Kerry Lake has a recording of Arizona Governor Chair Jeff DeWitt that's been in the news.

And then also the federal government has given Texas a deadline for tearing down the wall.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

At a time when Americans are more divided than ever, Connecting America is a place where everyone can gather and express their opinions with no disrespect.

And what better place than a Jersey diner to host this show?

Because where else but a diner can you find a buffet of opinions, ideas, and real connections?

Connecting America, a brand new national program that aims to truly connect everyday people and is dedicated to showcasing ideas and embracing civil conversation.

We'll also include amazing ways to improve your fitness, health, and nutrition, revive your spiritual self, and give your home a makeover.

Connecting America streams live every weekday from 7 a.m.

to 9 a.m.

Eastern Time.

Our program is led by a group of award-winning journalists, including me, Jim Rosenfeld, plus Allison Camerata and Dave Briggs we'll also hear from America's psychologist Dr.

Jeff Gardier and former Fox News senior foreign affairs correspondent Amy Kellogg join us wherever you get your podcasts

If you're a homeowner, you need to listen to this.

In today's AI and cyber world, scammers are stealing your home titles and your equity is the target.

Here's how it works.

Criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee with your county, and just like that, your home title has been transferred out of your name.

Then they take out loans using your equity and even sell your property and you won't even know what's happened until you get a collection or foreclosure notice.

So when was the last time you checked on your home title?

If your answer is never, you need to do something about it right now.

And that's why we've partnered with Home Title Lock so you can find out today if you're already a victim.

Go to home-titlelock.com/slash Victor to get a free title history report and a free trial of their million-dollar triple arc protection.

That's 24/7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes, and if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it.

Please, please, don't be a victim.

Protect your equity today.

That's home

lock.com/slash victor.

Welcome back.

So, Victor, have you heard this Carrie Lake

recording?

I guess both of you and I are not sure whether she's the one that did it or not, but definitely she was her side that recorded it.

Jeff DeWitt has

quit as the chair of the GOP in Arizona, so because of this.

And I was wondering your thoughts on it.

Yeah, I don't know who recorded it, but the rumor I think was that when she goes out in public, she has a little, you know, like microphone, I mean a speaker on her lapel, and it's got internet, you know, with her husband as kind of a news junkie.

So I think it's to protect her because people say she says things, so they just constantly stream everything she says in public.

Wow.

That's scary.

Yeah, and I bet that when he, Mr.

DeWitt, called her up, she had some inkling of

what the offer would be.

I don't know what the legality is.

I say to you,

I don't know, Sammy, if you want to just, yeah, you step down off the podcast.

We have a guy who wants to help you out and pay your salary.

And you say, is that a bribe?

And I said, nope.

Nope, just a little sweetener.

Victor, if you want to quit your podcast, we can pay you your right-wing views.

I don't know what that is.

But it's getting very close.

And in the age of Hunter's laptop, Mr.

10%, Mr.

Big, I pay half my father's bills.

It doesn't seem like there's much of an accountability, so I don't think they're going to do anything.

Although he did resign, and she threatened to release more of these conversations if he didn't resign.

He did say, what is your price?

Everybody has a price.

That was

blunt.

She was, I mean, she knew, apparently she knew she was being recorded, so that's hard to know the veracity of her opposition.

But I take her at her word that she's honest.

But the thing that

was most disturbing about it was he said there are some big, powerful people who want you out.

And that sort of jives or resonates with what everybody's been saying about their donor class, Nikki Haley supporter, all of the big, big, big money.

that is scared of Joe Biden.

It's not quite liberal and it's on the Romney, McCain wing of the Republican Party.

And they do, they've, I don't know why they don't like these candidates.

They think they're going to lose, I suppose, and then they won't have influence.

Or if they did win, they'd be crazy people and want to close the border or be tough on China.

I don't know what it is, but it's pretty disturbing.

Yeah, it is.

I can't,

I mean, I haven't followed her very closely, but I can't see what the right wing would, why they so adamantly would want her out.

I realize that she's very much a MAGA person, And so maybe that's just it, right?

Well, what...

Well, you know, just to say,

did you read what he said, though?

He said,

it's pretty bad when you can't trust a person to have a private conversation

in confidence.

Yeah, but when you call somebody up who's running for the Senate and you offer them a basic bribe to quit, I think you kind of go beyond the confidentiality, right?

Yes.

So he was, but he played victim, of course, in our society.

Everybody's a wounded fawn.

Oh, poor me.

I offered a bribe and it was so mean that she broke the confidence of my bribe offer.

Yeah.

Aren't you getting sick of that?

I sure am.

I am so, I'm so sick of the wounded fawn.

You know, I always feel like saying, I've never been a victim, so get away from me and I'm going to victimize you.

I know, exactly.

Half the country are victims and the other half are victimizers.

All right.

Well, speaking of victims, how about the state of Texas broadly against with the federal government's overbearing effort to get them to tear down the wall?

They've given them a deadline, and they say if they don't take it down, then the federal government's going to take it down.

I mentioned a little bit last podcast, but there's about three or four issues here that I didn't understand Justice Roberts and Comey Barrett's ruling, at least that's a preliminary ruling, in favor of the federal government for this reason.

It's not like George Wallace standing in 1963 in the

University of Alabama entryway to stop somebody from going there.

And then they defying a federal court order or a federal law.

It's arguing that in the Constitution, A,

it says that the federal government explicitly shall protect states from foreign invasion.

So when you look at what's coming across the border,

I guess you could say it's a hostile invasion because there's 8 million people and we don't have the wherewithal, apparently, from the outrage in New York and Chicago and Baltimore to take care of these people.

They know they're breaking the law when they come across.

They know they're breaking the law when they reside here.

We know.

We know, in addition, that they're smuggling drugs in because 100,000 people die, so it's a hostile invasion.

We know there's people in the terrorist list that come in.

So you would think that given the Constitution, Joe Biden would say, oh my God, they're breaking in the southern border.

It's my constitutional responsibility to protect this state.

And then he didn't do it.

So then the next issue comes up.

It's not like they're sanctuary cities and they're trying to break federal law for their own benefit.

They're in the exactly opposite.

position.

They're trying to enforce the federal law.

They're trying to be more federal than the federal government.

They're trying to, the governor Abner is trying to say, I'm not a federal official, but I'm going to act like a federal official and enforce federal law because you are the federal officials and you are abject,

abjectly failing to your oath of office.

So he's more federal than Joe Biden and Mayorkas are.

They're the ones that the court, seems to me that they should hold him in contempt for violence.

And they should impeach Mayorkas.

He's violated his oath of office.

He didn't didn't enforce the laws.

He didn't execute as he said he would.

So I don't understand that.

And then, when you, as I said last time, when you juxtapose that to 550 jurisdictions of sanctuary cities, whether mayors, governors, county boards of supervisors, they deliberately nullify federal law, just as if they were neo-Confederates, and say, you cannot enforce federal immigration law in my municipality or my county.

And nobody does a thing to them.

Not one thing.

Well,

this is an issue, by the way.

If anything is going to get Donald Trump elected, it's this issue.

Because everybody says, ah, nobody cares about it.

When they polled voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, this was almost the most important issue.

Because it's starting to affect now not just Fresno County, but people in the north and people who are liberal and people who are black and people who are Latino, and they don't like it.

And the Democratic Party is forcing it down their throat.

And a lot of them are going to say, well, I wouldn't vote for Donald Trump.

I'm not going to vote for Republican.

But secretly, they'll go in and do that because they're so angry that nobody listens to them.

And they don't like to be called illiberal or racist.

You know, you can't say to people who have declared themselves victims that now suddenly you're a victimizer against poor foreign nationals.

It doesn't work.

You know, now that you're mentioning it, I just read an article,

will COVID voting rules stay in place for 2024?

And what you made me think of, well, okay, we've got all these issues and we're looking at the campaigns going on and it seems like Donald Trump is going to win.

So now let's think about

how he's going to win without having to win beyond, like we always say, well, if he really wants to win because they're going to get some votes from him, he's going to have to have overwhelming to actually win.

But

are the Republicans ready to do something about all those COVID things like mailing ballots, automatic voter registration, early voting?

Well, I would say that any swing state that has a Democratic legislature,

no, they can't do anything because they set the laws, but I would go even further.

Any state that has a Republican legislature but a preponderance of Democratic left-wing judges, which can overturn the legislature.

That's how they got in.

They had this huge Mark Elias Soros-funded legal fund, and they sent attorneys all throughout the country in 2020 in the early winter and spring.

I wrote about it because I was reading about it.

Molly Ball in her infamous Time Essay talked about it, and they changed the voting law under the guise of COVID.

And the result was in many states, what had traditionally been, oh, 20 or 30 percent at most mail-in ballots went up to 60, 70%.

I think California was almost 80%

did not vote on Election Day, either through early voting and through the mail.

And people say, well, why would they do that?

Well, they did that because the error rate went way down, not 5% of usual mail-in ballot rejections for not having correct addresses or names or matching registrars' lists, but 0.3, 0.4, 0.5.

So they were just swarmed with this stuff and they just all passed it through and that's what Mark Zuckerberg was hoping for.

He put $419 million to absorb the work of registrars in swing precincts.

And, you know,

we all know that it's going to happen again.

And if anybody thinks they got caught in 2020 and we all had finally learned out what the Google people were doing with their search, the orders of their search, or what the old Twitter was doing and suppressing the laptop or what Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Bankman-Fried and George Soros were doing.

Yeah, does that mean because we know they're doing, they're not going to do it again?

No, they're going to double in.

They're going to spend $2 billion this year, not just on legal stuff.

They will outspeed, if Trump is a nominee, and even if it's Haley, whoever, they're going to outspend three, four to one.

Because the big money in the United States is on the left, and they understand something very clear: that nobody wants their agenda, nobody wants their ideology, and they have the money, therefore, to get it through by any means necessary, other than a popular referendum.

And that's what they're doing.

Well, this article in The Spectator by Billy McMorris seemed to be optimistic that the GOP lawyers could turn these COVID rules back, but

I don't see it happening.

But I mean, he gave some cases.

I think some of the winners.

I think sometimes,

I think in 2020, Trump didn't want to spend the money because he had a limited amount of money in their campaign to fight it.

And of course, they said, remember what they said?

They said, it's racist.

It's voter suppression.

And what they meant by that was, we're going to call you every name in the book, and we're going to scare you, and you're going to say, I'm not, I'm not a racist.

What's so racist about asking for an ID in person?

It's racist.

And so they put everybody in the defensive.

And I don't think people, I think after what we've seen at the border or in Afghanistan or crime or I don't think anybody cares anymore of being of that epithet.

Nobody cares if you call someone a racist anymore.

It means nothing.

It's been, you know, like Gresham's law of current of inflated currency.

It has no currency anymore.

It's just fanny, you know, it's like Clouding Gay.

She didn't make any reference to race, and then, bam, she got in trouble with that pathetic testimony, and then that clear record of plagiarism.

And as soon as I heard that, I thought, race card, and she did it, and then the Harvard Corporation did it, race card,

and then we had Fannie Ellis, and I thought, well, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, she goes to a black church.

Racism, racism.

And it's always the same thing.

It's a proud black woman that people are so jealous of.

And there's nobody jealous.

All they're trying to say is if you plagiarize, you're going to be treated the same way as anybody else.

And if you go up in front of Congress and you lie your head off and say that you respect the First Amendment and you can't enforce codes suppressing anti-Semitic speech, but you suppress every other type of, then you're going to get fired, just like...

Liz McGill did, who was white at Pennsylvania.

She didn't say, this was directed at me because I'm white.

You know what I mean?

It's just, it's so tiring.

And it takes so much time and effort with this

DEI and all the money and capital and labor.

And every time we touch an institution with DEI or this polarized racial, it destroys the institution.

Look what it's doing to the military.

Military is just...

You can't.

I've noticed one thing about the military.

I was watching ads the other night.

Have you noticed the difference in the ads?

They're not about gay people.

They're not about minority people.

They're not about women.

They're not about pregnant heirsuits.

They have pictures now about white guys that like to fight and kill people.

For the first time I've seen in five years.

And I think the subtext of that is: oh my God,

we're short

40,000, 35,000 people in the military.

We looked at the data.

Latinos are no more, no less than before.

Blacks, no more, no less.

White males,

way less.

They account for almost all of the general shortfall.

And we know why.

DEI,

the Afghanistan debacle,

going in optional wars and being inordinately killed in combat, and then being insulted, the vaccination, all that stuff.

You just got the message, you know, Mark Milley, Lloyd Austin saying that they were going to run an investigation.

You know, it's kind of like, you guys are guilty.

You know, here's the people who are guilty.

I got to find a crime.

And so

that's what they did.

Yeah.

Well, let's move to the last topic and look at Trump.

You know, a very strange thing.

Trump gave a speech in Iowa that was so unity-focused.

And then he went to New Hampshire and he gave this one, the speech afterwards.

It was so combative.

And he called Nikki Haley delusional, said, she's lost.

She was third place in Iowa.

What is she doing?

And it was very, and he even said, Tim Scott, you must hate her.

And it was so much, the tone was so different.

I was wondering if you had any, you know, analysis of the Trump of Iowa to the Trump of New Hampshire.

Well,

everybody has remarked about it, and

I guess they came up with that famous thing from Heraclitus.

I think that all our people write are that character is destiny, athos, anthropo, anthropo,

daimon.

Character for a man is his daimon, is his

destiny.

But it really doesn't quite mean that.

If you can't translate it

literally, I guess it says a man's nature is his fate.

But either way,

they're saying that Trump can't help himself.

That's who he is.

And that's true, and I think he knows that when he gave that speech in Iowa, it was conciliatory and it was good, and it was uplifting.

And guess what?

They didn't cover it.

They deliberately suppressed it.

So, and then he got ambushed with a reporter, says to you, Are you going to hold a grudge against these people?

He said, No, I'm not.

He was very magnanimous.

I'm getting back to that thing I said before when they asked him if he drank like his brother, he said, No.

Why don't you drink?

Can you imagine what I would be like if I drank?

You know what I mean?

It was, so he's capable of that.

But

I have two reactions to this.

I wish he wouldn't do it.

And here's why I wish he wouldn't do it, because

they're going to

be

very,

the left is going to be very adamant in raising money.

They're going to be enthused about destroying Trump.

And they're going to

sue this, that, about voting.

They're going to get as many people not to show up on Election Day as possible.

So So Trump did not win the popular vote

in 2016.

He did not win it in 2020.

I know people are going to say, well, Victor, he did, but they cheated.

He got a lot of votes, but I don't think he might have won the Electoral College, but the irregularities had, that's what lost it for him.

Maybe.

But my point is this, is that he needs 3 to 5%, that missing 3 to 5%.

Who are the 3 to 5%?

I see them every day.

There are people that say this.

Well, you know, I really, gosh, there's nothing I can say wrong with those four years.

But why does he have to call Nikki Haley bird brain?

Yeah, you're laughing, see?

Why does he have to say that Ron DeSantis walks like a duck and he waddles on his cowboy boots?

Why does he do this?

Because I just, not in my name, not in my name.

That's not who I am.

I'm not going to put my impromptu on that.

And then you say to them, well,

you're going to put your impromptu on an open border and an Afghanistan withdraw and crime going crazy?

Well,

Joe doesn't do it.

And then Joe Biden, semi-fascist, ultra-mega, screaming and yelling, this laptop was Russian disinformation.

He just completely lied about all that.

So

that's what bothers me about it, but it still gets back to the point, would he be better off if he toned it down?

Yes.

So why doesn't he tone it down?

And one of the things that is, he's reactive.

Do you know what I mean by that?

He's not preemptive.

So Nikki Haley gave her speech very early in the evening before Trump did.

And what did she say?

She basically said that Donald Trump was senile, that he was too old, and that, yes, he had appointed her.

And where was she going before he appointed her?

Nowhere.

And he appointed her, and she had a a high-profile, controversial, but successful, brief, successful tenure as American ambassador to the UN.

And

she said she was going to support Trump, and then she didn't.

That's free country, fine.

But if you're going to call somebody senile and he's lost it and confused, then he's going to deal it back.

Everybody said he should have never said that about John McCain.

No, he shouldn't have.

When he said he preferred people to be, to kill or capture the enemy than be captured.

And by the way, he was quoting George Patton.

That was Patton's, nobody ever won a war by dying for his country.

It was kind of vulgar and crude that Patton said.

And I'm speaking as someone who was named after Victor Hansen, who was killed on Okinawa, so I take that kind of personally.

But my point is, John McCain had said, Donald Trump gets all the crazies.

That's who we're dealing with.

That's what prompted that remark.

Is that Old Testament tit-for-tat wrong?

Maybe so.

But that's the first thing.

And his supporters know that.

So, number two,

I don't know if I could, if you could,

if anybody could have taken what they've dished out to him.

Or maybe, let me put it this way.

Is calling Nikki Haley

Birdbrain a mortal sin or is Rachel Maddow for two years getting in front of the American people and saying Russian disinformation, this laptop was cooked up, and Donald Trump is working with Putin after she had said, Christopher Steele has it laid it all out.

It's all accurate.

And Adam Schiff did that.

Leslie Stahl did that.

Remember 60 Minutes?

They all did it.

They lied and lied and lied.

50.

Did Leon Pianetta ever apologize for lying to the American people on the edge of an election, right before a debate?

No.

He said that this laptop was watching disinformation.

Does he believe it now?

No.

Nobody does.

It's authentic.

Did Hunter Biden, remember when he looked at the camera and he said, I don't know if it's his or mine.

It could be.

Well, what do you mean it could be?

Well, it might be my laptop, but then it might not be my laptop.

It's just a red herring.

And they quizzed him further and he said, are you missing a laptop?

I don't know.

He was lying.

He knew it was his.

So my point is, when you're lying about these existential issues that affect an election, i.e., you get 50 people out there to swear that this laptop is Russian cooked up in Moscow, and then you get all of the media to lying night after night right before a debate and right before an election.

And then you compare that with calling somebody bird-brained.

So what I'm getting at is the refined Polish people of this establishment are amoral.

And just because they go to Harvard or Yale and they have nice accents and they're polished doesn't mean they're not pathological liars and malicious people.

So that's number, does that justify what he did?

No.

But maybe the third reason is

I don't think I could take what

has been dished out to him.

Were they hard on George Bush?

Yes, they called him a Nazi and proud shirt.

Were they hard on Obama?

Trump was.

He said that he, you know, he was not born in the United States.

Of course, I want to have a footnote there.

Where did that come from?

That Barack Obama was not born in the United States, but was born in Kenya.

It didn't come from Donald Trump originally.

It came from Barack Obama.

And why did he do it?

Or why did he have his publicist put that on the advertising jacket?

Because it sounded neat that he had a weird-sounding name and he was born in Kenya.

And then all of a sudden, oh, I don't know why she did that.

I didn't catch it.

No, you peddled that lie.

So, my point is that everybody's had problems, but no one,

no president has ever been gone after like this.

There was a whole repertoire of blowing, remember Madonna, let's blow up the White House dream.

There was Snoop Dogg, let's shoot him.

There was the Shakespearean Festival, let's stab him.

There was Peter Fonda, let's incinerate him.

Let's put his kids in a cave.

Remember all that stuff?

It was a, remember Kathy Griffith?

Let's cut his head hanging, picking up his decapitated head.

Then it was, he said that the people who died on D-Day were suckers and there was one person in a room of 30 that claimed that.

Nobody else, including John Bolton, said that he didn't say that, his arch enemy.

So they just keep doing it and doing it and doing it.

And Hunter Biden can't even go up, he can't even go up for a subpoena.

They just sentenced Peter Navarro to four months in prison.

They did the same thing to Steve Bannon.

Why didn't they indict him immediately when he refused to go?

And you know, then all of a sudden they said, Hunter, you better go.

Well, now they, why did they say that?

Because they knew they were going to sentence Peter Navarro.

And why don't they go back and prosecute Eric Holder?

He was held in contempt.

Did he ever come before Congress?

Did he bring the evidence that was requested?

No.

He just said, I'm Obama's wingman.

First attorney general, the only attorney general ever to be held in contempt by Congress.

Zero ramifications.

So what I'm getting at is that they have done so much to this guy that he can't always do what is in his favor.

But I'll finish this rant by saying I don't believe that he can't control himself.

because he does sometimes, and he's much more sober and judicious than he was.

So my my point is, I'm not shocked about it at all.

I don't give a blank blank.

I'd like people not to be crude.

I don't like ad hominem.

But given what they have done to him and all the lies that they have lodged against him and all of the hypocrisy about the double standard and the administration of justice that they use, they should be ashamed of themselves.

Right now, Adam Schiff and Rachel Maudow should go on national TV and say, Mea Culpa, I am sorry.

I misled you for two years.

I fed you outright lies that I knew were lies, and I never apologized.

And yet they go after Donald Trump.

He gave a brilliant,

remember that 60-minutes interview with Leslie Stahl?

And she says, Well, you don't believe that laptop.

He says, Of course I do.

It's there.

She goes, Well, our experts have shown that it's not very, well, who are your experts?

And he said, You'll never, you'll never

interview Joe Biden.

You'll ask him about ice cream if you do, but you won't ever ever.

He was absolutely right.

So yes, Donald Trump, if you're listening, it's going to be in your interest to tone it down

and do this instead.

When you get really angry that Nikki Haley is calling you senile,

okay,

do two things.

Direct that anger at Joe Biden and say, Joe Biden is just,

I can't worry about Nikki Haley.

She's not going to get the nomination.

All she's going to do is drain campaign funds away from our cause.

I don't like that, but she wants to do it.

And he basically said that.

She wants to do it in her business.

My worry right now is the guy I'm going to run against.

Joe Biden has destroyed the country.

And here's why.

That's number one.

And then number two, he needs a contract with America.

Anuk Genrich, point by point.

If you elect me, this is what I'm going to do.

And he's already done it piecemeal.

He said he was going to make the biggest anti-ballistic missile, Irondome.

That would be very popular.

And then he said he was going to close the border immediately and deport people.

That would be very, very popular.

Then he said that he was going to look at federal remedies for crime.

Then he said he was going to pump.

Just list them, 10.

10 things.

Remember,

what was that?

Who was the one that said 8 by 30?

Was it

that candidate for president and said 888 or what was it?

I don't remember.

Okay, let's stop that for a second, Robert.

You know the guy that died of cancer, the black guy?

Herman Cain.

Herman Cain.

What was his little slogan?

Oh, yeah, the tax thing.

Yeah,

10, 10, 10, 30, 30.

I thought it was like 111 or something.

Anyway,

I'll start again, Robert.

4-3-2-1.

It was like Herman Kane when he ran for president.

He just kept repeating that trifecta numbers, you know, tax cut, all this stuff.

And he just needs to repeat it, it, repeat it, repeat it, and go after Biden and ignore Haley.

And you know what will happen?

He will do better and better and better.

And South Carolina, he will just clean up on her.

He will do better everywhere.

And then you know what will happen if he ignores her?

All he has to say is, I'm not going to, I can't spend my time on Nikki Haley.

If she wants to be Don Quixote and chase windmills, that's her thing.

I just have to worry about two things, that Joe Biden is destroying the country, and I have a plan, a 10-point plan that we're going to enact immediately because we're going to win the Senate and get a bigger share of the House.

That's what I'm working on.

And I think

he would eventually get the donors to come back as well.

He would do very well.

And he's capable.

That's what gets so frustrating because it's not that he can't do it.

Everybody says, I get so tired of these pundits that says he can't do it.

Yes, he's a tragic hero, and he has this propensity, but he is a very smart guy.

And he gets angry, and he knows when he's doing this that he says to himself, I'm only doing this because they attack me, and I got to restore deterrence.

Yes, but you need to ignore them because they're not worth it.

And you got to, you have responsibilities beyond Donald Trump's reputation.

You have responsibilities to half the country.

And for better or worse, you're the only person at this particular moment in history that can save us from chaos and destruction because that's what the left is doing to the country.

So for all of the people, and I was just talking to people today from all walks of life.

I talked to a carpenter who came out and looked at a problem I had.

I talked to people

in an office getting a blood test.

I talked to people when I went down and got a truck accessory.

I can tell you they were Mexican-American, they were Oriental, they were poor white.

And they all had one thing in common.

Mr.

Hansen, what the hell are we going to do?

What are we going to do?

Victor, what are we going to do?

Who's going to save us?

That was their whole thing.

I went to a coffee shop in a rural town where I was waiting for this truck to be fixed.

And they said, what are we going to do?

Who's going to stop this madness?

And it's Donald Trump.

And he's got to realize he has responsibility for all these people, to get that 3% to 5% to get elected.

Well, I'm not worried when he gets elected.

Everybody says, well, he's going to destroy it.

No, he's not.

He's been there before, and he's got a much more seasoned team, and he's going to get people who are on the same page, and they will be wonderful, but he's got to get elected.

And he's got a lot of people against him.

They're going to try to indict him.

They're going to try to put him in jail.

They're going to try to take him off the ballot.

They're going to try to...

get 70% of the electorate not to vote on election day.

They're going to do every imaginable thing possible.

He has no margin of error.

And so he has to be very careful about every word he says because he needs 3 to 5 percent who are not MAGA people.

Yeah.

And does that mean that I'm critical?

No, I'm not.

If I was him right now, I would do the same stuff.

I would be so frustrated at being attacked unfairly and called a liar when Joe Biden and the media were the liars we know now for the last five years.

Yeah.

So we need the Iowa Donald Trump.

So hopefully he's listening.

Donald Trump, you have to do it.

We're going to go for a break and then come back and talk about the pre-Socratic philosophers.

Stay with us.

Audival's romance collection has something to satisfy every side of you.

When it comes to what kind of romance you're into, you don't have to choose just one.

Fancy a dallions with a duke or maybe a steamy billionaire.

You could find a book boyfriend in the city and another one tearing it up on the hockey field.

And if nothing nothing on this earth satisfies, you can always find love in another realm.

Discover modern rom-coms from authors like Lily Chu and Allie Hazelwood, the latest romanticy series from Sarah J.

Mas and Rebecca Yaros, plus regency favorites like Bridgerton and Outlander, and of course, all the really steamy stuff.

Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com/slash wondery.

That's audible.com/slash wondery.

Welcome back.

So, Victor, yes, the pre-Socratic philosophers started the tradition that would start to analyze man, nature, and the universe through human reason and leaving out the gods as they were usually evoked to explain things.

So,

looking forward to hearing about these.

Well, pre-Socratic just means before Socrates, doesn't it?

And Socrates roughly

lived to be 70 years old.

He was executed in 399.

So

these were people that were born or were active before Socrates came of age as a philosopher, say around 450 BC.

So the term was a very late term.

It came in in the 19th century classical scholarship.

So there was a group of philosophers who were philosophizing before Socrates, the famous Socrates.

So it is a chronological term.

It is also

a

term of method.

These philosophers did not use dialectic.

They didn't question an answer.

And in the case, Socrates never wrote anything down, but we know that Plato and Aristotle did, and they wrote in prose, meaning it was not in a meter or a poetic vocabulary.

Most of the extant pre-Socratics are poets.

One of the weirdest things in my life when I was a graduate student, I had a brilliant German pre-Socratic.

She became very famous, but she was at her first year or two at Stanford University when I was in the PhD program, Dorothea Freyda.

And she taught Greek composition.

I really learned a lot from her how to write in classical Greek, but we had the pre-Socratics.

And she assigned one to each person.

And mine was...

Parmenides, the obscure man, the obscure philosopher.

And he has this long poem I can mention in a second, but it was almost incomprehensible.

It was in meter, it was fragmentary, and then she, I went to her and I said, I can understand, I can translate it, but I have no idea.

She goes, I don't know what it means either.

Nobody does.

And here's what you read.

And then she gave me like 15 articles in the most difficult German you can imagine to read.

It was just overwhelming.

But I never forgot that class because we read all of the pre-Socratics and the famous Dieil Kranz, and they're all fragments.

And the extant ones are mostly all in poetry.

So that's another distinction between the later prose poets.

The biggest distinction is

they always said

an aphorism about Socrates was he brought philosophy down from the clouds.

In other words, he took prior philosophical thought and turned it into how people treat each other.

So that meant that the other people didn't quite do that.

So what did they talk about?

They talked about cosmology, the universe, how the world came into being,

where the world, what would happen to the world, what were the stars and the relationship of the Sun, was it a big burning mass, as one of them said, in the sky, and what was the elemental nature?

And this started in the mid-6th century, around 550 in Miletus.

It was a very, very prosperous town on the coast of Turkey, what is now modern-day Turkey.

So it had influences from Egypt, Eastern Mediterranean, Persia.

And the first one we know of

Thales, or Thales in Greek, and we don't know much about him, except that all of his fragments are lost.

So he only survives in quotes that people who had the papyrus could read it, and they quoted him.

And now we have the quotes, but not the papyrus.

Okay.

And he seems to have basically said that all things were created of water.

And it tips us off that they were very interested in what is this stuff?

What's the dirt on the ground?

What's the wall made of?

What is paint made of?

What are plant leaves?

What is flesh?

There has to be something that it comes from something.

There has to be an elemental

something.

And he said it's water.

And you think, well, we're not all jellyfish.

He meant different solidified states of water.

But eventually, if you take everything and you compress it, you're going to end up with water.

And he had two associates roughly the same time, Anaximander, and he's even more obscure than, I mean, he's extant, we have some fragments, but he said that

everything

is

a,

there's an element, an everything.

And he didn't really define what everything was, but there has to be something there.

So my headphones that I'm talking through and my fingernails,

obviously not all water like Thales said, but they have to have some common carbon, right, or something.

So he knew there was some common material.

And that was his great introduction.

And then, of course,

Anaximander, I should say, was, you know, the common.

But then we had Anaximenes, and his was air.

Air is everywhere.

Everything is

density.

Things are iron is just air that's been compressed, and clouds are things that are dispersed.

So they were trying to, they were cosmologists,

and they were trying to explain things

from what the fragments

that explain natural phenomenon.

What is lightning?

What is rain?

Why does the sun come up?

And most of those exegesis prior to them had been Helios and his chariot are going across the sky.

That's the sun.

Zeus is hitting somebody with a thunderbolt, or Poseidon shaking the earth for an earthquake, or Zeus's lightning bolts, or lightning that we see in the sky.

They were anthropomorphic personifications.

And they kind of dispense with that.

There were a couple of others in the coast of Asia Minor, Xenophanes.

That's an extant poem, and it's a brilliant poem.

And it's a really funny poem because he basically says, you know, that if

you ask a horse or a cow to draw a picture of their gods, it would look like a horse or cow.

So he wasn't dismissing religion because the pre-Socratics really were trying to find reason to explain phenomenon, but they didn't say that, they didn't mean that that questioned the existence of God.

They were just trying to show people that a lot of the baggage of religion, of the Olympian gods, is just human nature.

But there were still the obscure that you couldn't explain scientifically.

And so they were not atheists or not even agnostics.

Another person from the coast was Heraclitus.

And I think everybody remembers something about him.

He thinks everything is made of water.

And

he's famous for that ponta re,

all things flow.

And what he's trying to say is that

nothing stays the same.

You take a picture and look at yourself 20 years ago, you don't recognize it.

You get

a new truck, and three years ago, it doesn't look the same.

You get a brand new light switch, and five years later, it breaks.

So everything is in a process of decomposition and recombination.

And you will get, I mean,

the atomist will say that's because of atoms.

But he's famous for saying that.

And he has this idea of opposites.

Everything reverts to its opposite.

If you're really, really, really, really wet, you'll become dry.

If you're dry, you can become wet.

If you're hot, you can become cold.

I don't know if that works with human nature.

If you're a man, you can become a woman.

Maybe now he was prescient.

Yeah, something like that.

Anyway, the next generation came.

There was one other person, and that's Pythagoras from that area.

Samos is right across the coast from Miletus.

And

we all know the Pythagorean theory of

the

unchanging ratio, 3, 4, 5 of the three legs of a triangle.

But that was important because

he introduced the idea, or he expanded on the idea that there's certain glimpses into divinity.

Think about that, everybody.

2 plus 2 is always going to be 4.

Even the postmodern Foucaultian can't tell you anything different.

Even Colleen Gay can't say it's 2 plus 2 is 5.

And there are these relationships, these prime numbers, these isosceles or equilateral triangles, and they have forever ratios.

And we know that what pi is, pi will never change.

Well, why is that?

And you're seeing that there's a whole planet of the universe, and the only way that you can get a glimpse of it is mathematics.

And

you won't be able to discern mathematics unless you are shorn of the obstacles to that divine wisdom or that divine insight.

And some of the things are

your greed, your big house,

your big lavish dinner.

So the Pythagoreans lived in socialist communes.

They were vegetarians.

They

avoided

money.

They were kind of the precursors of the cynics, dog-like Diogenes people.

And they were hated.

They were driven out.

they had enormous influence on people.

Pamanondas, the Theban, that I wrote a lot about, he was a Pythagorean.

So he only had two cloaks.

And he lived very poorly.

And

he felt that he could not be a great general or democratic leader if he was distracted by material obstacles or distractions.

And Pythagoras.

And then finally, because I don't want to go through all of them, there were the philosophers from Magna Greccia.

That's just a word for, remember that Italy was originally settled or colonized not by Latin-speaking people in the south, but Sicily and the southern boot of Italy

were Greek-speaking.

And there was a group of philosophers, Zeno and Parmenides are the most famous from the town of Elea.

That's a town right at the very boot or the southern part of Italy.

And he had this famous thing on nature,

De Natura in Latin,

Perifusius.

And

it's a huge poem.

You know, there's a lot of fragments, and

it's kind of a story

of

there's two forks in the road.

It's about a pilgrim, kind of a pilgrim person, a young lord.

And it's hard to read.

It's almost impossible to understand what he's saying.

But

he...

tries to tell you that there's two things in the world,

Alethea

and Doxa.

Lathea, some people, I've met girls that are named Alethea.

It's just a word in Greek that has an alpha privy of lanthano or lathe, the river lath means forgetfulness.

You put an A in front of it, it cancels it out, not forgetting.

That's what the truth is.

You can't forget it.

And doxa, doxology is

belief or faith or convention.

And this will go into later binary of nomos, convention or construct, and phusis,

absolute nature.

And so

he's going to really start the later Socratic movement, Pythagoras and Parmenides, because he's trying to show us that

we all have human constructs.

We wear clothes, we have speech, we have codes of behavior, and we have certain suppositions about the gods, but that does not mean they're true.

Because the only way they can be true, they have to be subject to a rigorous type of dialectic and examination.

And only then can they be accepted.

And usually that will be a minority point of view.

And so

that's really the

open door to philosophy, that the philosopher is going to be unliked because he's going to be a skeptic, because most people are ignorant, and they're going to be guided by convention.

And finally,

because we're running out of time,

in the generation right before Socrates and contemporaries of Socrates, there were people called the sophists.

The Greek word for wise person is sophos.

In English, S-O-P-H-O-S.

So they weren't wise people, but when you put a Greek suffix in istik, it means like.

So wise, like.

Notice the difference.

Sophist.

They think they're wise or they act like they're wise, but they're not necessarily wise themselves.

Most famous, of course, is Protagoras, and then Gorgias and Hippias and Cretius.

And what were they, how could you just sum them up?

Most of them, not all, but most of them were agnostics or atheists.

Man is the measure of all things, the most famous thing that was said.

And some of them felt if you could express something

in language and it would be convincing and people would believe you, then it must be true.

Or otherwise, nobody would be persuaded by it.

So they said, well, you're just using fancy words.

They say, yeah, we are, but if you're persuaded by it, it's because it's true,

because we hit on something.

And so you know where that led.

The other thing is that

they

were relativists.

That's what their big argument, and most of the Socratic dialogues that Plato recorded, it's Socrates versus a Sophist.

And the Sophist is trying to say there are no such things as absolute truths.

And Socrates says there's an internal form, a Platonic, what will become the forms or the ideals or the ideas.

And so, what do we mean by that?

They were Foucaultian relativists.

So a sophist would say to us,

you guys have crime statutes in San Francisco, and it says if you go into a clothing store, you can't take Adidas.

And you think that represents something in nature, an internal truth?

Yes, I do.

I think that society doesn't work.

Everybody, it's natural law that you can't take something that's not yours.

Well, I don't think so.

I think, who made the law?

Did you make the law?

No.

Did your elites make the law?

Yes, they did.

Do they steal shoes?

No, they don't.

So they make a law to make sure that people, their shoes aren't stolen by people who need them.

There is no law.

There's no morality.

If they have a bunch of shoes and they want to keep more shoes and more shoes, so they make a law, you can't steal them.

You see where this goes?

It's nihilism.

And that's the great criticism of the sophist.

And, you know, Gorgias says that you can give me any...

Give me any proposition and I'll take either side.

And

I I can convince you.

Because I don't believe anything.

I just believe that everything is construct.

And this goes into the anti-Enlightenment, postmodern contemporaries.

They were the ideals of a Foucault or Derrida or Lacan that

what we call truth is just a convention.

And there is no truth.

It's all based on power machinations.

That people who have power and influence.

You can see where we're going with the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, cultural Marxism, critical.

Critical, yeah.

Yeah, critical legal theory, critical racial theory.

It's sophistic.

And it says

we have certain ideas about punctuality.

Has anybody ever proved that things absolutely always work better to be there at one second before eight?

Well, maybe other cultures have,

on the way to work, they look at the sky and they get enthused, or

they are more human, they want to talk, and they get there at 20 after 8.

And then you call them tardy, and

the African-American

Africana Studies has postulated that, that timekeeping and punctuality is a racist construct.

And so you can see where this goes, that

ultimately, and you can see where postmodern planes, postmodern architecture.

So you're saying that all your buildings have to be based on right angles.

You see postmodern, you know, sometimes you see their architectural, they're all different angles well yes there's certain laws of nature that says that a right angle is stronger than another type of sloppy angle or that a truss there's a whole science of trusses and you end up with a kind of a building that's uniform it's a platonic ideal plato says here is a house It's an ideal house.

Here is a chair.

It's an ideal chair.

Now, there are going to be thousands of chairs and thousands of different houses, but you know them.

You know that you never call a house a chair and you never call a chair a house.

Now why do you do that?

Because there's an ideal divine house imprinted on your brain.

And that gives you the insight to see all the manifestations.

And they're not constructs.

They're divine, absolute nature, truth.

And that's what the sophists were fighting against.

And that was what Socrates, most of the dialogues get down to the

ideal form of something.

And that's why we can identify a dog.

Oh, I have four different looking dogs.

Is Spotty a dog?

Yes.

Is Spike a dog?

Yes.

Is Sport a dog?

Yes.

Is Gracie a dog?

Yes.

How do I know that?

Because I know that somewhere in my brain, somebody when I was born said, these are dogs, and they have four legs.

The whole Linnaean system of classification is built on find the ideal form that makes you be able to identify them.

I'm not saying

you can confuse a centipede with a worm, but they are different.

And so.

And all their names must start with SP, I guess, too.

Well,

so all of this ends then with the founder of philosophy, Socrates, in the fifth century, and he creates A, a prose via his pupil Plato, who supposedly records what Socrates says.

Of course,

what he's really doing is the early dialogues when he's a young man record him, there are 80% Socrates, and he is almost a transcriber, I think.

And then the middle dialogues, he's adding, and

after Socrates' death, usually adding, subtracting, and they're not necessarily public events like the Apology or the Euthypo or the Crito, where people were witnessing the trial, like the Apology, so that Plato can enhance.

And then the last stuff, at the end of Plato's life, the laws and the Republic, that's 100% Plato.

And he's putting Socrates in the mob, but as he gains stature and knowledge and age

and distance from the death of Socrates, the actual words of Socrates become Platonicized.

And then we'll get into Aristotle.

But right now

we've started with Homer, Hesiod, the lyric poets, Pre-Socratics.

And I'd like to talk next time about the great historical movement of the fifth century.

And then we'll get into, that would be Thucydides and Herodotus.

And then in the subsequent weeks, we'll go into the great three tragedians, Euripides, Aeschylus,

and Sophocles,

and the great comic poet, Aristophanes.

And this could go on for a long time, I can see.

I know,

I got to shut up because

we still have to go into Roman authors and then Renaissance authors.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

I want to get, in a year from now, if we're still alive, we still have an audience.

We'll still be going.

Yeah, I want to get into Joseph Conrad's novel, Victory, or Nostromo.

Yeah.

By the way, I just thought, was Nostromo, wasn't that the name of

The Alienship and Aliens?

Or was it Narcissus?

It was, I think that,

was it Ridley Scott?

I think he was a big Conrad fan.

I think he named one of the ships Narcissus or Nostromo.

Oh, maybe.

I don't remember.

All right, Victor, let's take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about news.

We've got an anti-BB campaign going on with the Biden administration, and the LA Times is starting to reduce its workforce.

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

So, Victor, I was reading in, I think it was tablet, Gaudi Taub was talking about, and his article was titled Israel's Left's New Military Messiah.

And he was addressing the anti-Beebee campaign that

Joe Biden and his administration, but that they were supported by a guy from the war cabinet of Bibi, and his name was Gaddy

Eisencott.

And Benny.

Gantz, too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Israel has

a strange thing that they give enormous credibility to military leaders, and that allows a lot of left-wing generals to get not suffer the wage that they're weak or they're not deterrent because they're generals.

And that allows them to be even more left-wing.

That's true, I think, of generals

in general.

If you think about it, I mean, look at Mark Milley and all of the generals that hated Donald Trump, and nobody could say anything about him because they were generals.

And so, in Israel, the military and Mossad

and a lot of the intelligence agencies of the tripartite intelligence, they're left-wing.

And what's interesting about this story is that what we're building to is that

Bibi's the longest serving prime minister in Israel's history, and they don't like him.

If you go to Israel,

if I first went to Israel in 2004, I think,

and I can tell you in the last 20 years it's unrecognizable, the prosperity.

And a lot of that's due to Bibi's service as an economic minister under Sharon, because he deregulated the economy.

He deregulated

regulations concerning investment.

He simplified the tax code and cut taxes, and it just unleashed the creative powers of the Jewish people in Israel.

So

people didn't like him because he was a Reaganite in those days.

Now he's compared to Trump.

And the left has always hated them because the left essentially always favors the so-called underdog and the anti-Western

group constituency.

And when they they look at the Middle East, it's settlers, it's a bunch of white guys in covered wagons, and the Palestinians are the indigenous people.

Or they're a bunch of white plantation owners, and the Palestinians are the noble indentured servants, blacks.

And that's how they force that paradigm on everything, but they particularly do it on Israel.

Especially after 1967, when Israel was not in existential danger, but turned out to be more powerful than its its much more numerous enemies.

And how we get to the situation, there's 500 million Arabs in the Middle East and they're oil-fed riches and they are the underdog.

And this little country of 11 million people is the overdog.

I don't know, but that's the paradigm that this administration is

occupied.

But more importantly, when Blinken and Sullivan, our national security advisors, they look at the Middle East and they think,

gosh, we're supporting this.

They don't say this.

They don't say we're supporting the Israelis because

they have a Western system of jurisprudence.

They have a Western system of government.

They have a Western system of free thought and expression.

They have a Western system of equality of the sexes.

They have a religious tolerance.

There are people in that country who do not believe in Judaism.

They're Christians or they're Muslims.

They don't look at that.

They say, oh my God,

we could get along with, if they're right-wing, they say we could get along with the oil people and the money is in the Gulf.

Or if they're left-wing people, we could have everybody like us because we would be behind Liberate.

But these damn Israelis that we have to support.

And so every once in a while,

They really pull out all the stops.

So after October 7th, everybody knew, I think we talked about this.

I said that it would last, I think I said two weeks.

Somebody said to me, Maybe it was Jack, how long is it going to last that Biden before he sells Israel out?

I said about two weeks.

And so

they didn't even ask it, last that long.

It lasted one second.

As soon as the news was heard about October 7th, the campus started to rejoice.

The Cornell professor said he was exhilarated, etc., accepted.

But we said that we stood shoulder to shoulder.

But the problem was that Netanyahu was very conservative and the people in Israel were very polarized and most of the Jewish community in the United States votes 70%

left-wing for Democrats, right?

So that special relationship with Israel is really a relationship that 70% of the Jewish community influence and the Democratic Party influences.

And Bibi

does not have a constituency among the Jewish community in the United States.

And he is a conservative in Israel by his family's record, his own military service, his brains, and

people voted for him.

And now they saw an opening after October 7th.

Was Bibi surprised?

He said he was.

So was the Intelligence Committee.

So was the IDF.

But they are using that.

And by the way, we know that there's a pattern in Israel.

When you are a leader like Golden Meir and you are surprised as the Yom Kippur war, 50 years almost to the day of the October 7th,

you don't get thrown out.

You redeem yourself.

And she did.

And then

you usually retire.

So I think in the case of Bibi,

he wants to destroy Hamas and win the war, and then

he is at peace with himself.

But they don't want that to happen.

They want to destroy him.

And so

these two figures are working with the Biden administration.

And by the way, they give us lectures all the time about interfering in the internal affairs of countries as we did supposedly with Cuba and Chile and Venezuela and it's horrible and Iran, Mossadegh.

What the CIA did or did not do with British petroleum and MI6 or whatever in

Tehran in the 1950s with Mosaddegh, pales in comparison with what this administration and what the Clinton administration did interfering in Israel's internal politics.

Remember, they sent over

political operatives during the Clinton administration to make sure the Likud Party lost in a free election.

And this administration is openly,

openly criticizing Netanyahu, not as an ally, but as a political Trumpian-like opponent.

And they're favoring his opposition.

And they're basically saying to the opposition, you got to get rid of him if you want all your Patriot missile resupplies.

If you want your 155-millimeter shells, you're going to have to get rid of him.

That's what they're telling.

Wow.

And you have to weaken him.

And we don't like him because he's an obstacle.

And

what is he an obstacle to?

He's an obstacle to this mythical idea that if you give the Palestinians a separate state, then they're going to live in peace.

They're going to be like the Emirates.

You're going to pour billions of dollars of federal money in, and I mean, international money in there are federal money.

And Gaza is going to look like, I don't know, it's going to look like Miami Beach or Palm Beach.

It's going to have a Marriott, a Hyatt every 50 feet, every half mile along the coast.

That's what they they think.

It's not going to happen.

And there hasn't been any Israelis in Gaza for 20 years.

And they had an election one time.

And they took billions and billions, as Donald Trump said, billions and billions and billions of dollars.

And what do they do with it?

They built the greatest underground labyrinth of military tunnels in the world.

And they had a propensity and a skill to build tunnels.

They're very good at that.

They're very good at taking hostages.

They're very good at killing civilians.

They're very good at throwing people off the roof who disagree with them.

They're very good using mosques and hospitals and schools to hide their military operations.

But they're very bad of just saying, you know what?

I just want to make a nice country.

I want to make sure that everybody in Gaza has the same freedoms as 20% of the population that are Arab does in Israel.

They look over at Israel, they know in their deep heart the Israeli Arabs are freer, they're more prosperous, and they're more secure than the people in the neighborhood in Syria or Iraq or the West Bank or Gaza or Jordan.

They know that.

And

so Tony Blinken and everybody says, see, they just want to be free and prosperous, and they don't get the chance.

So we radicalize them.

And that's very dangerous because there's no evidence that the Palestinians have ever changed their

charter of Hamas and the implicit charter of the Palestinian Authority, the

river to the sea.

So we have this disconnect where our

diplomats, Secretary of State, National Security Advisor president go to Netanyahu and say, you're holding up peace.

These people are only radicalized because you're in Gaza blowing stuff up.

Now you've got to get out.

And then we're going to have an international group and we'll let the Palestinian Authority take over Gaza and then we'll have a peace

and Bibi saying

that's what you said.

What happened on October 7th?

We weren't in Gaza.

They hate us for who we are.

They don't hate us for what we did.

They hate us.

What do you think your campuses, Mr.

President, at Harvard and Yale and Stanford mean when they say river to the sea?

These are not uneducated people.

These are not poor people.

These are affluent, elite, highly educated people in the Middle East that are in your universities.

And they are calling to destroy Israel and kill every Jew in Israel.

That's what they mean when they say, River to the sea, or when they get up in front of Columbia the other day and say, we want another intifada that killed thousands of Israelis.

And I guess we're saying to them, no, they don't mean that.

That's just rhetoric.

They're trying to do leverage Bibi to get out of there.

And they're always saying, if he just gets out, the Arabs will like Israel and we'll give you whatever you want, but we've got to get him out because he has this idea that you can't trust the Palestinian to create a state on his borders.

And they're building a new wall along Gaza.

They're furious about that because he has...

Can you imagine after what happened on October 7th, he says, I don't think I just want a little thin fence right along the border.

I think I want, you know, half a mile of non-inhabited space, a zone that we have on our northern border.

So I just, and oh my god, he's appropriating territory.

Didn't MacArthur say put a whole bunch of

nuclear reactive material all the way down the demilitarized zone and you'll be, you'll solve all problems.

He did that in Korea, yeah.

It's very funny because I don't hear any Israelis saying to us, can you tell me what you're doing when you're retaliating for the 150 attacks on Americans in Syria and Iraq?

Have you ever hit a

collateral?

What are your drone assassination missions doing?

What are you doing when you hit the Houthis?

Are you so careful that nobody dies when you go into

Yemen and have to bomb people for doing what they're doing?

So we have a complete standard that's different.

with Israel and Bibi is the personification.

And if anybody listening thinks that if you get rid of Netanyahu,

that the Arabs and the Israelis are going to have peace,

it's not going to happen.

You know when they're going to have peace?

I can tell you when you're going to have peace.

When a Christian person who lives

in Gaza or a Jewish person lives in Gaza, they are treated the same way as a Christian or Arab in Israel.

And that's not going to happen.

Nobody makes that or a gay person who lives in Gaza is treated the same way as a gay person who's treated in Israel.

Or a woman, or a foreigner, or a protester, or a dissident.

And when that happens,

to quote John Wayne in the search, that'll be the day.

It's not going to happen.

No, not when 75% of the Gazans supported the Hamas attack.

I think I just saw in the Arab world was a recent poll on gutter.

It was 95%.

95%.

And we're starting to see, just as a note,

I just wrote a very disturbing ultra piece.

You can go to our website and read it.

It's about an Israeli soldier who was killed on October 7th trying to save, stop the raping, and he was beheaded.

And his father...

was told, don't look at the remains by the IDF, and he insisted on it, and when he did, he saw that his son was headless.

And then he was told that beheading was a common practice of Gaza civilians who were getting bounties of $10,000 if they could get a hostage.

They tagged along, hundreds of them, for hours to kill and rape and steal and behead.

And there's a picture on CNN of all places of sawing heads off of dead Israeli soldiers.

So what did the father do?

He just did everything he could.

He tried to find his son's head.

What happened to it?

Did they bury it?

And then the Israelis would, as they captured people on October 7th, they went back and interviewed them.

And when they took people prisoner, they started asking.

And lo and behold, they found the person who had his, had

cut off his head.

Where was it?

Oh, they sold it.

They have a, it was in a refrigerator and ice cream store in Gaza.

So they sent out a patrol.

And they found the deceased's head.

And what happened when they found it?

It wasn't enough to decapitate them.

It was mutilated, the head was.

And the person who had it,

apparently it had either been he we don't really know whether he was the buyer who bought the head for 10,000, or he was the middleman who was willing to sell it for 10,000,

or he was maybe related in the seller for $10,000, but he had it in his ice cream refrigerator appliance.

So they got the head back,

and

it was mutilated.

And the father then could bury his son.

So my question to all of the people who want to get rid of Netanyahu and all this stuff is, can you ask yourself

what side beheads and what side doesn't?

What side sells body parts and what side doesn't?

What side takes hostages and what side doesn't?

And what side rapes and what side doesn't?

And what side decapitates women who are being raped with a shovel and which side doesn't?

And which side has sex with people who have deceased and which side doesn't?

And which side puts children into microwaves and which side doesn't?

And if you can answer that question, then you might ask yourself, does that enlighten us in any small way when we look at protests like the other day in Colombia?

Which side shuts down bridges at commute time and stops emergency vehicles from going across on very critical missions or people trying to get home to children who are living alone or people who are ill or people who are poor?

Who does that?

Which people deface the Lincoln Memorial and which don't?

Which people try to disrupt a Christmas ceremony and which don't?

Which people take a pinata and say,

smash the effing

Arab or is it Jew?

Which side does all that?

Which side goes to the L.A.

Memorial Cemetery on Wilshire Boulevard and tries to deface a monument to the American dead?

Probably as a guest in our country.

Does everybody see a pattern here that what's going on in this country mirror images what goes on in the Middle East, in Gaza?

Which side rushes in?

Everybody talks about Islamophobia.

If you notice this, that no college president, under force, under pressure from donors that he will ensure the safety of Jewish students says he's going to make a committee to

explore what we can do about anti-Semitism alone.

They do it, but they have two qualifiers.

One, they always have to have an Islamophobia.

twin committee because they're so timid.

And yet, do they ever see Arab students that are hiding in a library while while a bunch of Jews are surrounding them?

I don't.

No.

I've never heard of that.

Have you ever heard a Jewish professor say he's exhilarated?

You know, they had a guy at UCLA that argued and they suspended him.

And he didn't say anything like that, like what was going on.

Of course not.

And then the other

thing to remember about these anti-Semitic committees,

they're not...

Their purpose is not to go find anti-Semitism and deal with it.

It's kind of the opposite.

David Wolpe is a rabbi.

I've met him.

He's a great guy.

He was a visiting professor.

I guess he was a scholar of religious studies at Harvard.

He was on their anti-Semitic committee, the first one.

And he resigned.

It was hopeless.

He just resigned.

So then Harvard, after the Clauding Gay disaster, has another committee.

But guess what?

They had to just...

One of the members of the committee who was, I think, Jewish and studying Jewish studies, he had a history of calling the Israelis settlers, and he called them apartheid, and he was

pro-radical, anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish.

And he was on the committee, who will police the police?

Is that an odd thing?

No, it's where I work at Stanford.

They had an anti-Semitic committee to find out...

where anti-Semitism is and root it out at Stanford because it's there.

And guess what?

One of the members had to resign because he had a history of saying that anti-Semitism is no big deal.

He was Jewish.

And so they can't even, it's like I said the other day, it's the Genesis and

the myth of find me 50, no, 40, no, 30.

I think that Claudine Gay and

all these presidents are talking to God and they're saying,

God says, I'll save you people if you can find me 50 people for a committee that aren't anti-Semitic.

And they said, no, 40.

40 and they said okay how about 30 okay how about 20 how about only in this case it's like four

can you if we can find four people on campus we can put on a committee for and stop anti-Semitic behavior and speech that aren't anti-Semitic can you save Harvard

no but you're leading

they can't you're leading all the way to our administration whose Kamala Harris recently was talking about how she understood understood the plight of the Palestinians and there was nothing but a two-state solution that would solve that.

She doesn't know that.

If you ask her to explain a

two-state solution, she wouldn't know what it was.

It's delusional.

She was talking about her Wikipedia entry and said that she was, they say that I'm only 5'4, I'm actually 5'6 and a half or something.

She was getting down to the micro measurement.

She's so worried about this, so insecure.

And now we get all this, there's a new book out that she hates Biden.

Of course, we knew that.

And Biden hates her, and she undermines him.

She's trying to position herself as she could no more be president.

They made her space, what was that?

Space czar, and she hired those actor, children actors, and then they put her as borders are, and we found out she'd never been to the border.

And

can anybody name one thing that she hasn't screwed up?

And who put her in there?

Barack Obama.

We understand that now.

And who wants her to be president?

Barack Obama.

Everybody should just take a deep breath and remember that this country

is

BO

and AO.

And it is 2008,

9, and 2016, 2017 is the AO-BO divide, before Obama.

and after Obama.

Because before Obama, we were an ecomenical society working out our racial differences.

And then we elected this guy, even though he said he never missed one service at Reverend Wright's Church.

Goddamn America, chickens coming home to roost on 9-11, said he never missed, he married them, remember that.

And then he said his own grandmother was a racist.

Remember that?

The woman who worked day and night to put him in prep school.

And then we were told that Trevan

would have been, looked like the son he never had.

If anybody else said that, Bill Clinton said, O.J.'s wife looked like

the daughter I never had.

He would be through.

And

the whole,

never been proud of my country, Michelle.

The Obamas started the whole racial polarization.

Remember the Beer Summit

and

all the police stereotyped black people, all of that stuff.

started with Barack Obama, the apology tour, all of that.

And we've never been really the same.

No.

Never have.

No.

And our current administration is completely delusional about the anti-Semitism and Israeli policy, that's for sure.

They've turned the children of the Holocaust into white settler oppressors.

That's what they've done.

And they're very angry.

They hate Jews for one reason.

because of all in their victim

ideology everybody has to be a victim and if you go down that route, there's only one victim that's never been victimized any way close to the Jews because they killed six million of them in industrial murder and they'll never forgive them for that.

They'll never forgive the Jews for that.

Because in their hierarchy, every time they start to whine, they see Jewish people who are very successful, very hardworking, and yet six million of them

were slaughtered and there was a plan to slaughter all of them.

And not very many many people had a very good record in Europe or even the United States in saving them.

And yet, given that history and given where Israel came out of that experience, you would think that they might just keep that in mind.

But no.

They hate Israel, even though, and according to their own logic of victimhood, the Israelis and the Jewish people should be the greatest victims of all time.

And yet they don't think they're the victims of all time.

And that's what's happening.

That's what they hate them for.

Yeah, that's what they're doing.

I get so that I can't even...

Every once in a while, I just think October 7th, they went in there in a time of peace, and they were drawing on their knowledge of working in Israel, and they were treated very well and paid well, and they used that and Iranian money to go in at peace and not just to kill IDF soldiers, but to slaughter helpless men, women, children, infants, and to these horrible things they did.

And this is all in the context of saying they wanted to do what the Holocaust did.

And it was so obvious who they are and what they are and what they want to be.

And here in this sophisticated Western world, people couldn't see it.

And then it's been very valuable to everybody.

I really do think it's been a very, very valuable wake-up call because we always say this:

How could the nation of Goethe,

how could the nation of Schiller, how could the nation that gave us the gymnausium, Germany, how could they have done this?

The answer is,

look at your universities.

How could your great Harvard and Yale and Stanford be bastions of anti-Semitic hatred?

Ask yourself, how did that happen?

And how could these Palestinian pro-Hamas people be just ratcheting up the anti-Semitism and the hatred with complete impunity, as if they're brown church?

And that's the answer to what happened in Germany.

It just takes a few people to speak out against it, and they won't speak out against it.

No.

If everybody would just say, you know what, you should be ashamed of yourself.

If you don't know the difference about what happened on October 7th and the retaliation and the prevention so it won't happen again, you are a moral idiot.

And they should.

And I really, you know, everybody makes fun of Representative Stefanik, Stefanik.

Stefanik, yeah.

That was one of the best courageous

cross-examinations I've ever seen.

She just dissected those three presidents and just showed the world what they were.

They were just amoral people.

And they basically, when they were answering her questions, their little brains were going, okay, I have to come up with something because when I get back to campus,

I always favor the Palestinians and the radical and the DEI agendas and I can't say anything.

They'll be used against me.

So I'll retreat to the First Amendment and

I'll say I'm a big advocate of freedom of speech.

And these guys, congress people, are kind of stupid.

They don't have PhDs.

They won't really get the idea that I'm lying to them.

And she said, you're lying.

You don't do that at all at your universities.

You suppress every thought you don't like.

And now you come up in front of us and you lie your head off.

No way.

That was great.

That was a wonderful moment.

I hope it wins her the vice presidency nomination.

We've been talking about her, huh?

I like her.

I followed her career.

Maybe she's not quite ready, I don't know, but I like people who speak out.

Yeah.

She's one of the alternatives or in terms of women or South Dakota Christine Noam.

And they have another one on that list of women that Trump might like to.

I can't remember which one.

Oh, Carrie Lake.

Kerry Lake.

I don't know who's going to.

I mean,

just to finish our conversation,

I wrote an article today about

we've talked about, so I don't need to get into the strategies we've already talked about, that's open now

to Nikki Haley.

It's in today's Real Clear Politics four different choices.

But my point is that

usually when you have a two-person race in the Republicans, and it's the to unite the party, there is a unification process, no matter how wide wide the ideological gap.

And so the loser then

and then the loser usually takes over the next time.

So Bush loses to Reagan.

Reagan makes him vice president.

And

Bush gets 1988, and he gets a term.

He blows it, and he's not re-elected.

So you would think that Trump would reach out to either Haley or I think DeSantis would be far better.

And then he would be vice president, unite the party, and then

he would be the frontrunner in four years.

The only problem with DeSantis is in this postmodern dialectic of

race, he's a white male.

Trump is a white male, and he's a mega, and Trump is a mega.

So you need the opposite.

In the old days, it didn't matter.

Bush and Reagan, it was just ideology.

But even

there,

Bush was very smart.

He did get into the voodoo economic stuff and thousand points of light later, but he didn't attack.

He did not.

Everybody said, well, George Bush was noble.

He didn't.

And Reagan was noble.

But Bush did not attack Reagan the way that Haley has attacked Trump.

And he did it for a reason.

He wanted to be vice president.

And he had an objective.

He wanted to show that he could run.

He won Iowa, knew he could run very strong and get independents and rhinos to vote for

Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan was like Donald Trump in 1980.

They hated him, the establishment, Wall Street, Chamber of Commerce people.

But I don't think that's going to happen now.

I don't think Trump cares to do that.

I don't think it's possible even.

I think he'll just pick somebody he's comfortable.

And he's kind of said that.

Maybe it'll be Vivak.

Yeah, well,

he has the advantage of being able to articulate the position better than Donald Trump can.

Wow, I'm just saying that because

I've seen two occasions now, one in Iowa and one in New Hampshire.

And Trump is, he's pretty good.

And he just goes, take it away, Vivac.

He only got a minute because I know what you'll do.

You'll speak all, you know.

And then Vivac is just like.

You know, I know I had a letter from a reader the other day.

He said, Victor, you said that you weren't impressed with Vivac.

I plead guilty.

I said that I didn't quite trust him in the campaign.

I am gaining more respect for him because he is a really sharp guy.

You know what I mean?

And he's fearless and he understands the left.

He would be a very good vice president candidate.

I don't know if he's ready for the presidency, but

he would be very fun to watch.

Yes.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of our podcast today, and

we've got to get going.

So thanks to you and thanks to our listeners for your ears.

I hope we tickled them a bit.

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson.

We're signing off.