The GOP Nominee Race Takes Shape After New Hampshire and Other News

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

This is our Friday news roundup, and we're going to be looking at campaign questions, Fannie Willis's paramours records, our divorce records are released, and Supreme Court rulings.

And then we're going to turn to the Middle East.

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

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Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody Victor is the Martin and Ellie Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He can be found at his website victorhanson.com

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Victor, lots of news and lots of campaign news.

I had a couple of questions.

We are today recording while the New Hampshire primary is going on.

So we'll probably have to talk about that on the Saturday show.

But I was wondering so wait wait wait wait wait wait you didn't ask me about my echo piece.

I was hoping to avoid that question.

I'm getting close.

They said they're going to buy it back.

And they gave me a little coupon for my six months of non-use.

So I'm buying a 5.7 Hemi

if and when I'm going to get my Echo Diesel money.

But that's, we're into month two,

finishing month two almost.

So, and I love my Echo Diesel.

You know what?

I got it back in my shop, it's sitting in the garage.

I'm not going to touch it because it looks beautiful.

It's all cleaned and waxed, and it ran beautifully after being in the shop for six months.

And I know that if I drive it one mile, something could happen.

Okay, wait a second, though.

You wouldn't be stupid enough to buy another Dodge Ram before you got the money for the lemon Dodge Ram.

That's what I'm doing.

That's what I'm doing.

I haven't had a pickup for six months.

It's a long story, but

when you look at the whole thing, you're not going to believe how much money I lost.

Yeah.

It's a love-hate story, eh?

I know.

And I'd look at that beautiful Echo Diesel, and I'd go at home from the shop, and it ran like a top.

The little indicator said 31 miles to the gallon down Mountain View Avenue.

It was just humming.

I thought, wait a minute, maybe just maybe it's fixed and we'll just call it six months lost.

And then I thought, no, I'm not going to do that.

I lost six months, and so they're going to buy it back.

I'm going to lose money, but I'm going to buy a gasoline tried and true Hemi engine, which I think is going to be out of production the next year.

Well, we can talk about the New Hampshire primaries tomorrow, but

I wanted to ask you a couple of things that since Ron DeSantis

has decided to get out of the race, I was wondering if you could give us an appraisal of what happened to the DeSantis campaign.

And then the second thing is I'm hearing floated maybe vice president for DeSantis, maybe for Haley.

And I was wondering what you thought about that.

That is a

Gordian knot.

And I don't want to cut it.

But on DeSantis,

I think what happened happened was he won that midterm in 2022 with over a million votes, and he carried all of these blue counties.

And he actually, partly because of his good governance, partly because of the influx of people from blue states,

under his directorship, Florida is a red state.

It voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

So he did, he was just soaring.

And that was coupled with, or dovetailed with, the nadir of the Trump care.

He was coming off the January 6th.

So there was two issues here.

One he had no control over, and one I think he did.

And the first one he had no control.

Nobody in their right mind thought after that August,

you know, that August 22 raid on Donald Trump's home that they'd go beyond that.

That was so outrageous.

They'd never taken a bureaucratic dispute and elevated it to a criminal SWAT team matter, and they did.

And Trump got a little bit.

And then DeSantis declared at his zenith.

He waited maybe a little bit too long, but he did declare at his zenith and Trump's Nadir.

And then what happened?

They started filing these indictments.

And when you have Fannie Willis and Jack Smith and Letita James, and Alvin Bragg, and you looked at them very carefully and you think Alvin Bragg is trying to make Stormy Daniel's non-disclosure into campaign finance.

You should go look at Hillary.

She hired a foreign national to destroy her opponent,

paid him through three paywalls to hide it.

And then we have Letita James for the first time in history, a New York real estate person, is being prosecuted for overvaluing his assets on a loan that he performed very well and made the bank interest profit on, and the bank had no complaints.

And then you look at Jack Smith when he has a parallel.

The DOJ is appointing him as a special prosecutor to go after Donald Trump for taking out classified documents when the administration that appointed him has Joe Biden, who's been doing it for 15 years and putting it in his garage.

And so that was very questionable.

And then you've got this Fannie Willis, no comment on Fannie Willis.

She's just imploded in the worst imaginable fashion.

But my point is, each time they did this, it was so outrageous that Trump got empathy.

And they said, My God.

And then the mug shot.

Remember the mug shot?

Fanny Willis's mug shot?

She thought that was so cute.

And then all of a sudden, a lot of marginalized, quote-unquote, people said, I have a mug shot, too.

That's neat.

That's cool.

That's the man, man.

That man's doing that to him, too.

I like him.

I hope they let prisoners vote.

I don't know, but I thought that was exaggerated, but I'm not even sure about that.

I think it really helped him.

And so, and then, coupled with, there was a decision,

I think, that

Ron DeSantis should not trust the mainstream media because they were so prejudiced against him.

But it turned out that when he got on, after maybe a little stiffness, the guy has a photographic recall and he has a mastery of the issues.

And

what happens is the first one or two minutes people notice his voice is a little weird or this, and he doesn't do well.

And then he does really well.

So with Gavin Newsom there was Newsome you know combative slick back hair looked like a little mafia big mafioso he's strutting around he has all his one-liners and then he's an empty suit and after 20 minutes

Ron DeSantis deconstructed him told the world that the guy's a complete liar.

He destroyed the state and would you like him to do to America what he did to California?

He did the same thing with Haley.

She was young, ambitious, vigorous, got a lot of one-liners.

He was kind of

stolid, matter of fact, and then he just wore her down.

And I think people started to realize around him that he does very well on media because he knows so much.

And so I think they lost an opportunity not using him in the very beginning.

He should have been swarming last March, a year ago, right?

all the meat-free media.

Donald Trump had that paradigm down perfect.

So that was a mistake.

And then

I feel,

I don't approve of abortion, but I don't think that nine weeks is a viable political position to take.

He did that.

And that hurt him with, I don't know if it hurt him with the voters, but it surely hurt him with the donor class.

And they thought that he would be vulnerable in a campaign.

And they were rused because of the midterm.

And the midterm

I don't know whether it was draining the petroleum reserve or promising free stuff for students, but I have a feeling it was more likely the abortion issue right before the midterms that deflated what could have been a big Republican gain.

And I think that scared the billionaire class.

They said, oh my God,

we can't get a good administration because of the abortion.

And Ron just went to the nine weeks, you know.

That hurt him.

I think he did a really wise thing because he was not going to win in New Hampshire and they were going to tag that with him.

And he got out.

And as soon as he got out, he endorsed Donald Trump.

Even Donald Trump said some very unkind things about him.

He attacked his wife.

He attacked his shoes.

He attacked his name.

He attacked everything about him.

And he was magnanimous.

I think that positioned himself, if not for a cabinet or vice presidency offer, I'm not sure that's going to happen.

The 12th Amendment is ambiguous about that.

It says that you can't be in the same party, but when you start looking at the language, you can see it may not be as clear as everybody thinks.

And more importantly, he'll be in a position in 2028 to be on good terms with Trump and the MAGA people.

So it was a wise move to do that.

You mean you can't be in the same state and be vice president-president?

You said the same party, so I was just

saying.

It's hard to know if the elector, if it refers to maybe the electors in Florida or all the electors.

But I'll leave that to attorneys.

So I thought that was wise.

Now, Haley is in a catch-22 position

because for her, first of all, when he dropped out,

this is what was weird about it.

She said, if I can just get Donald Trump Mono on Mano,

one-to-one,

young, ambitious, attractive, vigorous woman versus 78-year-old tired guy, right?

Or I can just get

my appeal to independence and swing voters versus his mega-based Neanderthal.

I can really win.

And no, because she didn't understand

that when DeSantis got out, he just swung all of his votes to Trump.

And

not one DeSantis voter will vote for her.

So how is she going to do respectable in New Hampshire tonight?

I'm speaking on Tuesday here in California about almost noon.

And how is she going to do well in her own state?

There's only one way she can do it.

And that is what she's doing right now.

Advertising on left-wing media, getting swing

billionaire class type people who would not give a dime to Donald Trump, but would for her, either because they hate Donald Trump or they think she'd be a weaker candidate.

But independents and Democrats, she's relying on to come out, and that is catch-22.

How do you square that circle?

So even if if that worked, and she won New Hampshire upset tonight, and she won South Korea, and she had what George H.W.

Bush called the big mo,

there is no momentum because she would lose the general election.

She doesn't understand the mega voter.

The mega voter is not going to go all down the line with Donald Trump and then suddenly

When that doesn't work any longer, move over to a candidate that attacked him him relentlessly and

has a weak record in the past, not now, but in the past, on the border, maybe a little bit neo-Khanish and interventionists overseas, and has used the feminist card, you know, that she, and she used the race card the other day that she grew up brown in the south.

She never really mentioned that before.

It was always my, this is a wonderful country.

If my parents can come from India and they can come to a supposedly reactionary racist area, and yet I had a wonderful childhood and it was very successful, then this is a great country.

But now she's

giving the opposite message.

I know what it was like being the only brown person.

That's like Victor saying, I know what it was like being the only white person in Selma.

It was very hard.

I went to Eric White's school.

There were only eight white kids and there were 245 Mexican kids.

I don't think like that.

I think, hmm, Louis Carbajal, Frank Cinterres, John Trevino, Armando Chavez, my best friend.

So

I don't know what she's doing, but she'd be really smart to go to Donald Trump right after this loss tonight and say, look,

I would be a perfect vice president.

I'm not endorsing this, so everybody be clear, but I'm just thinking, because you asked what she should

do.

Whether it's possible.

Yes, she should say, I will bring in swing voters.

I am a conservative.

And I would be in a position to really help you, just like I did at the UN.

And we can win, because

I won't be a Kamala Harris.

I will be an active partner.

And she is much brighter and much more accomplished than Kamala Harris.

That's her only, or I want a cabinet position.

And then I would endorse it and have a unity ticket.

And she wouldn't even lose there because if by chance Donald Trump is tied up and they put him in San Quentin or something similar to it, right?

And they put bars on the window and they put a soundproof.

I'm not kidding.

I'm not kidding.

They're capable of anything.

But they put him in a room and they put, what was that thing, that

Silence of a Lamb, that thing that Anthony Hopkins had over his mouth?

The mask.

Well, it was not even a mask.

It was a...

It was to keep him from biting people's tongues out.

Exactly.

So if he has that,

then she could say, well, I was the next person and I can step up.

You see what I mean?

It's not like, I mean, if something happened to Donald Trump and they got their wish, the left, and, I don't know, put him like,

you know,

Gulliver with a bunch of ropes, these little putians are working on him, she still could come back.

So she's not going to lose anything.

That's what she should do.

Unite the party.

And then Donald Trump would do what he did to Ron DeSantis.

He said, and I want to thank Ron DeSantis.

And he looked at me, twinkled in his eye.

I'm not saying sanctimonious.

And it was one of the weird things.

It was basically the subtext was, I'm not going to make fun of his cancer-stricken wife, which I thought was really bad.

I'm not going to mention that I made fun of his boots and he walked with pads in them.

I'm not,

he's my buddy.

And Ron DeSantis was very magnanimous, I thought.

He played the card the way, the only way it could be played.

And he can come out.

He's not damaged at all.

Yeah.

And Donald Trump, I'm just thinking about this because I don't endorse it either, but he'll just come out and talk to his base and say, you know, whatever he needs to say.

He just needs to construct an argument that makes it plausible of why he would have a Nikki Haley as a vice president.

Although DeSantis would probably be a better one for him, right?

Yeah, I think so.

And

I think it's going to be very very difficult to win because he was spent, what, $3.5 billion to a billion in 2020.

I would say it's going to be $5 billion to a billion or two.

I think

they'll outraise him four to one.

We have a little advantage in that people have seen their modus operande in 2020 and how the ballot laws were changed.

And there are grassroots, mostly

led by brilliant women like Cleta Mitchell.

And they are trying to activate and they are trying to warn everybody, hey, watch out.

The mail-in ballot error rate has dropped from 4 or 5% to 0.3 or 0.4%.

So it's a magnitude of 10.

And so be careful.

So

it's kind of like everybody knows what's going to happen.

They know that Biden, if he's still around, will campaign from the basement.

They'll know they'll have tons of money.

They will run every single ad they can.

They will outsource the campaign to these four prosecutors.

They will outsource it to Secretary of States

and courts and all of the swing states to get him off the ballot.

We know what's going to happen.

And you just have to persevere.

And he's got one great argument, Trump does.

I was president for four years, and before COVID hit, you'll go back and look at December of 2019 or January of 2000, everything was finally solved.

And then more importantly, look at Joe Biden.

This has been an utter disaster.

I know that the stock market is up.

I know that interest rates are not rising.

I know that unemployment was low.

But given that prices have never gone down and they are 20 to 30 percent higher than when Joe Biden took office on cars, on rent, on medical things, on bananas, on milk, on you can't even buy meat anymore.

I went and bought, just for the heck of it, I went to a local supermarket and went to the old-fashioned meat section where you actually get it wrapped in paper, right?

A big thick ribeye.

I thought, I haven't had a good steak in three years.

It was about, I don't know what it was.

It was $60.

And it was delicious.

But I felt guilty.

I've never bought one since.

It's just outrageous.

Yeah, it is.

Yeah, really.

So that's that.

The last thing that's bothering me in this campaign season is that while watching Trump win by 50%

his primary in Iowa, I was thinking, yes, but how many of those,

how much of the voting population does that represent?

And I came across the statistic because when you think to the national campaign and November, Iowa really meant for Trump 3.7% of registered voters in Iowa and only 2% of the actual voting population.

So that's not very.

Don't go down that rat hole.

What's the rat hole?

That's an ancient

tick.

Mim.

Oh, well,

there's a national election.

George H.W.

Bush only got 49.8%.

There was only 50% turnout.

When you do the math, only one in three.

It's the polls that matter, not just one, but

the people who voted for Donald Trump, the small percentage

that you mentioned, pretty much when you looked at what people were polled who were not

intending to vote, they have all kinds of polls.

They have polls of just everybody.

They have registered voters.

They have people who intend to vote.

They were pretty much the same.

So what I'm saying is if everybody who was an adult who was eligible had, you know, it was 90 degrees outside and they all went to vote, it wouldn't have been any different.

It would not have been any different.

Yeah.

Okay.

So,

well, let's stop right there and take a break and then come back to talk a little bit about the Supreme Court ruling for the Fed against the state of Texas.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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We're back.

So, Victor, this is very interesting that the Supreme Court ruled on the side of the federal government that has the right to cut the Texas state razor wire that they're putting at the border to let illegal immigrants in.

I was wondering if you had thoughts on that.

That seems crazy to me.

I do have thoughts on that.

So let me get this straight.

The Supreme Court said to the state of Texas,

yes, the federal government has abdicated its duty to enforce the borders of the United States.

You as a state share a national border.

That is your border as well as a federal border.

The federal government has broken the law essentially by not honoring its own statutes.

You took an initiative to help the federal government enforce what it should be doing.

We've ruled that illegal.

Can't do it.

We not only ruled it illegal, we did it with two Trump, one Trump-supported appointed judge, Comey Barrett, and then of course,

you know who?

Chief Justice Roberts.

So we had four conservatives and then the left doesn't do these things.

You see what I'm saying?

Kagan doesn't say, oh my god, I know I'm an Obama judge, but

this is terrible that the federal government abdicated and forced the state to do it.

So maybe it's state's rights in a weird way.

It's not nullification, it's amplification.

And therefore, I'm going to vote with Texas.

They don't do that.

They have solidarity.

It's straight ticket.

It's only we, our side, does it.

And then you have to juxtapose that to what, 550, 550 local and state what we call sanctuary city jurisdictions we don't even say city anymore because they're whole states they're counties they're towns and in those jurisdictions they say the federal government's immigration law does not apply here we're better we're nullification we're south carolina 1832 and 3 we're south carolina 1859 we're going to nullify federal law and make state law preeminent.

And guess what?

They do it.

Nobody says that's wrong.

No court says that's wrong.

And somebody can say, well, Victor, you're inconsistent because you're standing for state's rights for Texas, but you're not standing for state's rights for sanctuary cities.

No, I'm not.

I'm very consistent.

The rule is that a state has a right to force

enforce the federal law when the federal government by design will not fulfill its constitutional duties.

And so Texas is trying to follow the law.

Los Angeles and San Francisco are trying to deliberately break the federal law.

In the case of Texas, the federal law is not complying.

They're trying to resist.

They are nullifying their own laws.

In the case of San Francisco and Los Angeles and 550 cities like them, the federal government's trying to enforce the law.

ICE is trying to say, look, you've got a felon who just killed somebody and he's illegal, give him to us because he broke the law, immigration law, and we'll handle him.

Oh no, he's a victim.

So there's the difference.

It's very consistent.

The consistent principle is when a state is in danger and it is trying to force an existing federal law, enforce it and follow it, and the federal government is renegade and won't, it should be allowed to enforce the existing law.

And when a state is trying to break an existing law over the objections of federal authorities who are trying to enforce it, then it should not be able to do it.

Yeah.

I'm really disappointed in the Supreme Court.

I really am.

I know that's not the end of the story, but it's just, I don't think they can, I don't know how they can't see that.

Yeah, it seems pretty obvious.

Well, let's turn then to Fanny Willis.

You know, I was just thinking of, oh, no, go ahead.

I was just thinking that,

and I've mentioned this before in a podcast, you can see

where the Sanctuary Cities is getting into weird positions because

there are a lot of conservative communities that would love to say, take your federal handgun registration and stick it.

We're not going to follow.

So in our little town in Utah or Wyoming, and you want to go get a Glock, just go in there and buy it and walk out with it and violate federal.

gun registration law.

Or, you know,

you're out here in California, in rural California and you're trying to build a shed and you find some

I don't know three-toed white rat that's on the endangered species and there's like five little rats in a hole and you just say bulldoze a son of a bitch I don't care we're nullifying that federal law you can see where it's going to go yeah and they don't do that the left will not do that they will say you are a renegade you are a southern nullificationist you have to follow federal law you don't can't decide as a state jurisdiction your little town doesn't have to register guns.

And then you say to them, and I've had this conversation, that's why I brought it up, and you say, well, you nullify federal law all the time.

You just let people who commit crimes into your jurisdiction.

You won't give them the federal immigration.

That's different.

It's for humanitarian purposes.

So that's where we have the problem.

Yeah.

And their idea of humanitarian is suspicious.

Is let a citizen be killed if

it's not a pressing problem, as we saw with the Kate Stanley

Stein

well so turning to Fannie Willis just recently the court has allowed or what is it called un

unclassified her

declassified

on seal I think is a legal term oh okay they've unsealed Nathan Wade her paramour's divorce record so we're going to find out what Fanny had to do with all that I was wondering your thoughts on that.

Well, we will find out if we had a media, but you will have all sorts of media stories.

They've already appeared.

This is the subtext of this right-wing attack is an attack on a powerful, proud black woman, etc., etc., etc.

But it will be pretty embarrassing because

there are statutes that prohibit this.

Because what we're basically talking about is

She hired her paramour,

who she was sleeping with, to be a special prosecutor and classified him at a pay rank that was higher than another prosecutor that had extensive criminal and felony prosecutorial experience.

This guy had never prosecuted one felony or one

racketeering case.

None.

I don't think he'd even ever prosecuted any criminal, even a misdemeanor criminal case.

Okay.

So why did she pay him so much?

And then

she was a direct beneficiary of that largesse, the taxpayer's largesse, because she junketed with him everywhere.

And then she

had sealed the, she and the

people she knows sealed the divorce record.

And now she's even challenging the divorce record to keep it out.

Why would she do that?

It's none of her business, right?

It shouldn't be.

Shouldn't be.

And so, you know, it's

she knows what she did.

She knows what she did.

She just got a lot of attention.

So she campaigned on the idea that Donald Trump was interfering with an election.

He was a denialist, and he made a phone call to the registrar.

I don't see it's any different than a fellow Georgian, good friend of Fannie Willis, Stacey Abrams, just claiming from the day

the counting was finished, I won.

They robbed the election.

She complained to everybody.

She asked for, she sued, she did everything.

She toured the country.

She went out to Silicon Valley.

She went to Manhattan.

She made all kinds of fundraising efforts.

She introduced herself as a real governor of Georgia.

That was all election denialists, and she tried to do all she could do to overturn.

Nobody ever said, Did you call somebody in the Georgia government?

Stacy, if you did, that's a felony.

So it's

when I say it's a joke, that's what Trump says it's a a joke, but jokes can be very deadly.

They can be lethal.

Just because they're a joke and they're a

travesty of justice doesn't mean the left is going to say, hmm, I'm ashamed that I did that.

They're going to say,

I like it better.

We took a travesty and turned it into a Trump-destroying gambit.

That's how they look at it.

Never underestimate them.

Yeah, that's a sad statement, but true.

Well, let's look at other things about the West.

At our universities, I know that Harvard has created an anti-Semitic committee and they've picked Derek Pinsler to head it.

But he, I mean, not that you necessarily have to be Jewish, but it would seem natural to have somebody Jewish.

But I believe he's not Jewish.

Is that true?

Well, he's Jewish.

He's a Jewish history professor at Harvard.

He was on something called the Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Semitism.

And what was that about?

That was in response to former President Claudine Gay's meltdown, where she either could not or would not say that Harvard would not allow genocidal speech directed at Jews.

Because she says she's a free speech advocate.

And we know she's not because she's gone after every type of professor or student who said anything in her considered opinion that was insensitive to blacks, Latinos, trans, gays, women.

In other words,

Claudine told Congress, if you decipher her enigmatic response, you can say anything you want about Jews at Harvard.

I don't give a damn.

But you don't say one blank word about other groups.

That was what it was all about.

So they appointed the task force.

And so they thought they were going to put a Jewish history.

The problem is that just because you're Jewish doesn't mean you're not anti-Israel or not anti-Jewish because you're an academic.

And academics are by nature timid.

timid,

and they're scared, and they go with the majority.

It's like Heidegger, you know.

I won't need to get into Heidegger, but my point is

that Derek Pensler has had a long career, that he has called Israel an apartheid state.

I think he said it was a settler, that's a new word now, settler nation.

He's

downplayed anti-Semitism in Harvard.

Of course, Harvard puts him on the anti-Semitism committee.

And then it's kind of like Stanford.

So Stanford beat them to the punch because they were a little earlier because they had the lecturer, remember, that

told the Jews in his class to go to one side of the room and leave their property on the other as if they were refugees in Gaza.

And by the way, there's a petition now to bring him back.

He was

Kopernick's mentor.

But that guy was named, I think his name was Kelman, and he had the same record of

kind of trashing Israel and saying anti-Semitism wasn't that big of a deal, or at least that was alleged.

And he resigned from the Stanford anti-Semitic on my campus.

And then remember there was an earlier anti-Semitism committee at Harvard, and David Wolpe, whom I've met is a great guy, he's a rabbi, he quit for the opposite reasons, because he felt that it was just it was just useless to be on the committee because it was so stacked.

So what are we going to sum up, the Stanford experience, the two Harvard anti-Semitism?

Can they find one person on a contemporary campus who can be trusted to be disinterested and really look for anti-Semitism?

You know what it reminds me is Genesis 20, what was it?

Genesis

1824 or something, the famous Lot story

with Sodom and Gomorrah.

Oh, I was raised Catholic.

They would never tell us about this story.

Tell me, tell me.

It It was the Methodist, and she read it to me a lot.

Well, and I'm just,

Sodom and Gomorrah is so full of sodami

and like

excesses that God wants to destroy the whole thing.

Get that abomination.

And Lot and his family are the noble people that don't indulge.

And Lot is a good man, so he says, don't do that.

And he said, well, you can find me 50 men.

And then it's sort of a parable on Middle East negotiation.

He said, ah, if you do 50, how about 40?

God said, okay, 40.

He said, I want 30.

In other words, this is such an awful place.

I want 30 people I could possibly get on an anti-Semitic committee.

And God says,

okay.

And then he says, I don't think I could find 30 good men.

I don't think I could find 30 people on an elite campus that would be fair to Israel.

How about 20?

And then he says, okay.

And then he says, you know, God, my last and final offer, just let me get 10 people.

And of course, he can't get ten, so when the two angels come in to, I guess, escort him out, right, and his family,

the Sodomites try to attack the angels and sexually assault them.

I guess they were turned on by their wings or something.

But my point is, it's a parable, and then of course, we have that sad Orpheus-like Eurydice movement.

When they were going back, he's not supposed to look back.

And

she does and is turned into salt.

And then God God brings fire and brimstone and destroys Sodom and Gomorrah, but not sodomy.

But my point is this, that it's very, apparently it is very, very hard on an elite Harvard, Stanford campus to get a committee to investigate anti-Semitism on campus, even if you pick a Jewish professor.

And even if you pick a Jewish professor of Jewish studies.

Because if you're on that committee and you tell the truth and you see that Jewish students are systematically

ostracized, canceled culture, harassed, then you point that out, what happens to you?

You're in big trouble.

You're a persona non-grata.

If you want to get on the committee to investigate Islamophobia, which is not very much, because apparently most of the protests on campus, they harass Jews, they chase them into the libraries, they push them, tear down posters.

But if you were on that committee, that would be a career enhancer.

So they'll find plenty of people on the Islamophobia committee.

And most of them will be

people who do not like Israel and do not like Jews.

So that's what the parable is on that.

They can't, I mean, if Stanford can't find, can't make a committee without getting somebody on that has a long history of,

I would call, I don't say anti-Semitism because they're Jewish, but anti-Israelism and

positions that the Jewish community overwhelmingly on that campus don't trust.

And you still put them on the, who, then you're back to juvenile quis custodiat custodias.

Who's going to police the police?

Yeah.

Well, speaking of academic timidity, et cetera, and their general lack of character quite often, they also ask for raises all the time and I understand that the CSU in your own area, the faculty are asking for a 12%

cost of living increase and they're going to shut down the university if they don't do it.

CSU, remember the California State University system is the largest university system in the world and I was a member of it for almost 21 years.

And it has one of the most powerful,

the California Faculty Association is one of the most powerful unions there are.

And of course, you know, I'm empathetic about inflation, and I get my 3% cost of living at the Hoover Institution.

But the idea that I would ask for 12%,

and they're asking for 12%, of course,

during what?

A time when the state of California is over $60 billion

in the hole.

And who is going to have to pay for that if if there's 60 billion in the hole?

It's the students.

And of course the students are out there on behalf of the faculty for the most part, even though they don't quite get it that they paid.

When this last came up, I was a faculty member.

When they threatened to strike, I didn't strike.

And I told my students, this is how much there is tuition.

These are your 15 units.

And this is how many dollars you pay per hour of instruction, right?

Don't count grading papers and stuff.

And it was a lot.

And once you told them, you know,

you paid $200 or $300 for this hour, and the guy didn't show up, and it's probably a lot more now, it's pretty bad to do that because these students don't have money.

And the idea that the faculty is just going to walk out, and I think they settled this morning.

I think they got 5% now, and then 5%

next

in six months,

they got it.

And so they got 10%, and then they got all their, what they, you know, what they usually want, lactation rooms and transgendered bathrooms and the whole left-wing caboodle, but somebody has to pay for it.

And they're striking in a state, as I said, that not only has a 60,

it would probably be up more closer to 70 billion, but it has a 13.3 income tax rate, the highest in the country.

It has the highest gas taxes in the country.

And it has, it's about number six in sales taxes.

And while it doesn't have a high property tax rate necessarily, it has a huge,

hugely high property assessment.

So it ranks up there with property taxes.

And so

it's just another commentary that here we have the most taxes.

And I taught there.

I can tell you that CSU is a good university.

It offers, especially, things that I didn't teach, that I ended up really supporting more than maybe the humanities, nursing, engineering, business, agriculture, a lot of good things.

And when I was there, the infrastructure was not very good.

Bathrooms were not up to par, except when there's a measure E and Fresno, as we've talked about, to tax everybody

one-quarter cent

to

to improve the infrastructure of Cal State Fresno because the CSU system has not done it, which means this.

The CSU system is tens of billions of dollars behind in retrofitting their facilities and building new ones to accommodate rapid growth.

And in that deficit, the faculty

wanted a 12%

raise right away.

So

they got a 5% and then another 5%.

And that means the students are going to have to pay more.

We're going to have a bigger deficit.

And nobody's going to look at the restrooms or

the mold on the ceilings.

You know, I taught at the lab, call it the lab school, an old lab school at Fresno State.

I'd come in every morning, I'd look at the acoustical tile.

It was all black in the corner where it leaked with mold.

I'd go to the bathroom.

It was just one toilet and sink.

And there would be homeless people from Shaw Avenue that would come in there.

One time I went in there, I called my colleague, Bruce Thornton.

He was teaching there, and there was a guy who had

locked the door with clothes onto the door so he couldn't open it.

And he was using the toilet to wash his clothes.

And he was stark naked.

I pushed the door open, and he was sitting on the sink picking clothes and pushing them up and down in the toilet.

And that was kind of what it was like.

Well, with that image of our CSU, our local university, let's go ahead and take a break and we'll come back to talk about the Middle East.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

We're back.

You can find Victor at Twitter.

His handle is at VD Hansen and he also has a page on Facebook called Hansen's Morning Cup.

So come join us there on either of those pages.

Well Victor, the Middle East, a lot going on.

The United States is still dealing with the Houthis and

I can't figure out whether their policy is appeasement or deterrence.

But I just wanted to add before you go in to talk about this

that Israel, the Israeli Defense Force has had its worst day of killing in the last couple of days.

And they had 24 losses.

Yeah, 24 killed.

So that's two things that are going on.

I was wondering what your thoughts were.

What is this policy the U.S.

is following?

Because I was listening to Blinken.

I couldn't make him out.

Like,

what was he really trying to say that the united states was willing to do to stop all the craziness in the red sea and the the whole issue of iran period

well

very quickly the israelis were trying to demolish a headquarters or a hamas building and they had put explosive for dem demolition and then the Hamas people apparently saw that and sent a rocket in and blew up the people who were trying to blow up the building.

So it collapsed on them.

So it was not something that happens a lot.

It was terrible.

So what in the larger sense of what's going on right now, because we have the only chips that are going in the Red Sea are Chinese and Russian, right?

They get waved on by the Houthis.

So what is going on with this administration?

Very quickly, they came into power thinking that everything Donald Trump touched was wrong.

They looked at the Middle East.

Jake Sullivan said, you know what?

My portfolio is calm.

I don't even have to look at it.

Everything was going great.

The Abrams Accord were working.

And what did they do?

They started attacking Saudi Arabia and said, you know, it's all illiberal.

And they just stopped the Abrams Accord's cult.

And then they said,

well, we're going to give money to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, $700 million.

And they propped up the UN again, which is worthless.

And then they said to the Houthis, Did Donald Trump call you people global terrorists and cut off your financial resources?

Well, that was mean.

That orange man, we're going to let you get back and get money again.

And then they said to Iran, Did Donald Trump kill your general Solemani?

And he sanctioned you and you lost 50, 60, 70 billion dollars?

That was mean.

And you'll like us now because we want to beg you to get back in the Iran deal.

And would you please sell all the oil you want to Russia and China?

And

you'll get billions of dollars.

And if you want to give the money to Hezbollah, they have some rockets, and we've been working with Hezbollah on oil concessions in the Mediterranean.

We've kind of favored them over the Israelis.

And so that was what their attitude was.

Everybody likes the United States, everything is calm.

And then

all of a sudden, October 7th, and they said to themselves, Oh my God,

all of that magnanimity that we showed Iran,

and all of the kindness we showed the Houthis,

and all the forbearance we showed Hezbollah, and all the money we

gave Hamas, they looked at this that as weakness to be exploited.

Why?

Uh-oh,

now there could be a regional war.

So you know what?

If we didn't appease enough, we've got to appease more.

So we're going to tell Iran, you you know, don't do that.

We know what you're doing.

You've attacked us 130 times at our bases.

And maybe you can go 150 or 160, but at some point we're going to get angry.

And we've told the Houthis, we've struck back.

I know you're still doing it.

It hasn't had no effect on your ability to stop maritime commerce in the Red Sea, but please don't.

And we've told Hamas, don't get too angry at us.

After all, you got a little out of hand on October 7th.

We didn't quite know what you were going to do.

And now the Israelis got kind of mad, but we'll restrain them so they don't liquidate you.

And then we told Turkey and Qatar: we don't like what you're doing, harboring Iranians, helping them finance, but can you kind of knock it off?

And then we said to Hezbollah, you better not send too many rockets.

Just send it, keep it down to about 10 or 15 a day, but not too many.

And that's where we are.

And we cannot protect our friends, we do not scare our enemies, and we cannot win over neutral.

So, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Gulf monarchy said, nah, I'm not going to get involved with you guys on the Abrams Accords.

I know you tried to claim it as your own, but you're too unreliable.

And Egypt and Jordan are saying, you crazy?

You think we're going to come out?

And we wanted you to liquidate Hamas and get rid of it.

We'd like you to get rid of Hezbollah.

But why would we come out and say that when you're not going to do it?

You'd cut our legs out from under us.

So we're not going to ally with you until we can rely on you.

And I don't think we can rely on this.

And that's the message that's going on.

So then there's one final

tessera to this sad mosaic, and that is we're in election year, 2024.

And the last thing Joe Biden wants is a Jimmy Carter hostage situation, humiliation situation that makes us look weaker than we are.

And we're right on the verge of a 1939 blow-up where

Iran, if Iran keeps doing it and Israel goes after Iran and then China and

the whole thing could blow up and that's what Joe Biden is terrified of because it all is a result of his weakness and therefore

they're just trying to talk their way out of it to election time.

Yeah.

Well, I was just reading in the American Spectator an article by James McGee, and he writes that our inconvenient truth is this,

quote, we are at war with the Iranian regime, unquote.

And he says, we've got to disabuse ourselves that the war is against the Iranian people.

It's not.

It's against their theocrats.

It isn't a war of choice because this is a very important region to world peace.

And that finally, it's not confined to the Middle East and Israel.

It is everywhere, as we saw with the October 7th protests.

And I was wondering if you had thoughts.

Are we at war with Iran, Victor?

We are not at war with Iran.

Iran is at war with us.

So Iran is sending ships daily into Yemen to give them rockets.

And they had an Iranian spy ship, and they have told Yemen

that we want you to put pressure on the Jewish state from the south to weaken Israel.

So we want to shut down their port at Elat.

That's what started the 67 war.

The Egyptians shut down.

You couldn't get there.

So that's what we want you to do.

No shipping goes into Israel.

And the rest of the world, the Western world, will pay a price as well for their support of Israel.

That's number one.

So keep sending those missiles.

Then they go to Hamas.

And they say, we're going to train you.

We're going to give you the weaponry.

We've got some nice Afghan weapons we bought from the Taliban.

They're pretty good American.

And we want you and you're October 7th to go in there and kill as many Jews as you can inside Israel.

But we're not going to say that we told you.

Our fingerprints are not going to be on it.

But we're going to train you in Iran, we're going to train you in Syria, etc.

Then they told Hezbollah, we're getting close to the 150,000 rocket stage.

where you have a depot of 150,000 rockets and you can overwhelm, swarm all of the so-called Iron Dome, Patriot missile, etc., etc., that they have.

And they know that.

So that is a deterrent.

And we want you the moment Hamas goes in to kill Jews.

We've got the Yemenis and the Houthis sending rockets into the Red Sea.

And then we'll have Hezbollah jump in with 150,

and we'll sit back and watch the whole thing.

And that's what they're doing.

And they look at Biden and they say,

we may or may not, maybe sort of, kind of, maybe have enough fissionable material for maybe two or three bombs next month, but maybe we already have one.

And this is what we're going to do.

And you know, the sad thing is that anytime anybody has stood up to Iran

Remember Ronald Reagan, they were starting to attack American ships in the Persian Gulf, and he had something called Operation Fran Mantis.

Nice name.

And they sunk, I mean, they

sunk

a big ship, an Iranian frigate, and they damaged another one.

I think they lost a couple, but they were just obliterating all these little harassing boats.

And then

they just sent a message to Khomenei, and they said, what do you want to do?

They said, well, can we stop?

We won't do it anymore.

We'll just stop.

And they did.

They did.

And they will stop if you tell them that.

All you have to do is saying, we're going to sanction you right now.

And if you do it next week, we're going to embargo and shut down your ports, and you're not going to be able to send anything out.

And if you do it the third week, we're going to take out your naval base.

If you do it the fourth week, we're going to take out all of your military base.

You do it the fifth week, you're going to take out your

just graduated

escalation with them making the choice of where they want to go.

And

that would stop.

And you know what?

It would put pressure on the regime.

Remember when Obama came in, they had something called the Green Movement of 2009?

He had a million Iranians out in the streets protesting.

He did not say one word of encouragement for 11 days.

You know why he didn't?

Because he was favoring the theocracy.

He thought that the Democrats in the street were kind of neocon, pro-American stooges.

And he had this vision of Tehran,

Damascus, Beirut, Gaza City, one big crescent from Tehran all the way to the Mediterranean of anti-Israel, anti-moderate Arab, anti-Gulf monarchy,

power blocks, creative tension in which we can adjudicate.

That's what the whole idea was.

Israel doesn't want to listen to us?

Okay,

Shia Crescent, throw some rockets at them.

Shia Crescent, get a little bit two-hand.

Okay, Saudis and Israel will give you a week.

That's how they thought they could be the puppeteer.

what a sick idea it was that sure was

well Victor we're at the end of our show and I do have some comments from Apple podcast for you the first one is a thank you comment and it's titled Absolute Truth and of course they gave you five stars.

I think it's a she

says, thank you for providing a clear discussion of the topics from the useless elite college system to the horrible October 7th massacre by satanic Hamas.

I really appreciate the breadth and depth of your discussion, VDH.

You are the voice of reason.

That racist lecturer from Stanford should never be allowed to

access to any young minds.

Not sure how to stop this Marxist and anti-Semitic madness.

That's a good, I like the character.

characterizations of people in that one.

Another viewer said, what about the Napoleon review?

So they're waiting for you to view the review.

I want to watch it.

I have highest regards for Andrew Roberts, a good friend of mine, and I reviewed his Napoleon book, which was fascinating.

It was based on previously unpublished correspondence with Napoleon and his grandees.

And Andrew didn't like it.

Ridley Scott's movie.

It's almost three hours long.

So I'm looking forward to go for it.

I was going to play at the local Selma Theater, and I was all ready to go.

I was only there for a week and I didn't get around to it.

And I don't want to go to Fresno and watch it.

I don't go to theaters anymore.

Kind of a principle because I can't stand Hollywood.

But I really am a big admirer of Ridley Scott.

I like him a lot.

I liked his brother Tony.

Scott, remember True Romance he directed.

He did Man on Fire.

He was a really brilliant director, Tony.

So is Ridley.

And so I'm going to watch it and I'll give a full appraisal.

In the meantime, if you want to go to the Times Literary Supplement and go back in the archives, you can see I wrote a long review of Andrew's book.

Napoleon.

It was called Napoleon.

I think in Europe they had it, they retitled it Napoleon the Great.

I'm not a big fan of Napoleon, but Andrew was more balanced and said that he was kind of a precursor of some needed populist reforms in Europe.

The Napoleonic Code,

he tried to create a meritocratic bureaucracy.

Marshals of France, there were some

merucratic criteria that made his military more lethal than the adversaries.

It wasn't an aristocracy of incompetence.

But he was pretty ruthless, you know.

Remember he took 600,000 men into Russia and I think 150 came out.

And when he was every they were all freezing, they got the carriage and they said, Mon empire, it's time to go.

And he said,

my army would not want their emperor to freeze.

And he did the same thing in Egypt when he left people starving,

shouldn't say starving, but struck with typhus and dying by the thousands.

And he left them.

And if you don't mind, I have one, and I'm just going to read the end because they give themselves away.

They were critical of you, and I don't know how they can be.

They didn't really say much.

Don't worry,

I get that at the airport.

I get that whenever I go anywhere.

Their very last line was this.

There is clearly a market for this tripe is what they're calling it, among a certain low-information portion of the American electorate.

Sad.

Oh, they gave themselves away low information.

The assumption of their own brilliance is just.

It's very funny because...

They said that about, not that I'm comparing myself with Rush, but they said that about Russia's viewers.

And they said that about a lot of conservative people.

And then they actually had, I think it was the Schorenstein Center, but it was a media communication

group, Institute, whatever term we, and

they surveyed listeners to talk radio, which is always the

hobby horse of the left, they can't stand it.

And they found out that the average conservative person who listened was much better informed on the issues than was the left.

So what I'm saying is that our audience that listens to us, I would

take the people who are listening to Rachel Maddow any day.

I take this audience that knows more.

And they can't accept that.

They just can't accept it.

And

I'm just struck in my adult life how many times I have had a conversation with a person with letters after their name:

JD, MA, BA, PhD,

MBA, you name it, MD,

and on basic questions of politics and contemporary affairs, and they have no idea what you're talking about.

And at the same time, I will go into the local electric motor shop, or I'll go to a pump shop, or I'll go talk to a mechanic.

Or a car salesman.

A car salesman.

I'm just talking about our friend Brian the other day.

And they will, with a staccato, repetitive, automatic, machine gun-like question, da-da-da, what do you think about this?

And how about this?

And this, this, this.

And they bring up things I'm not aware of.

And that's because they live in the real world.

Yeah.

And they have to deal with the real consequences of political decisions.

They don't have tenure.

They don't have summers off.

They don't have a lot of money.

They don't see the world as a birthright for income of theirs.

They look at the world as a very dangerous place and unsettled and unpredictable.

And so

I take it with a grain of salt when people write and attack our audience.

Yeah, exactly.

And I haven't asked you, but I haven't looked at it, listeners.

I don't know, I haven't seen it, but I would bet you that on the Angry Reader scale, we usually have it, there has to be at least some capital letters.

Yeah, I think he did have a capital letter.

Oh, yeah, capital.

Look at it.

Let me have a look.

Oh, no.

Sorry.

It was just your VDH.

There's no exclamation points?

No.

Is there any misspelled, crappy grammar and misspelled words?

No, but.

How about ad hominem, you're an idiot, you're this, you're S-H-E?

No, because this is a public forum, so he.

Oh, oh, I'm sorry.

It's not a letter addressed to me.

No, so I get a second chance.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, it's a comment.

No, but it is, he does say what you say is repetitive, and then he uses the word low information, which is the most repeated thing in all of left left linguistics.

Well, I know that there's a difference between the level of commentary and the sense of explicitness.

I didn't know you were mixing letters or not.

No.

I do the angry readers.

We have somebody that collates them and sends them to me, and I have a scale.

I have certain points are given for the usual all-capital letters, misspelled words, grammar.

The word F gets you a high rating, S-H-I gets you a high rating,

and

ellipses,

wrong stuff.

Yeah.

Yep.

Well, Victor, thank you for the morning, afternoon, night commentary on the news this week.

And thanks to our listeners for staying with us.

We really appreciate you.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson.

We're signing off.