The Last News of 2023

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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 Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find him at his website victorhanson.com and it's called The Blade of Perseus.

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So, Victor, there's a lot going on.

This is our news roundup.

So, we're going to be talking about the pro-Palestinian demonstrations during Christmas, the border, and lots about Israel.

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

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Welcome back.

Victor, so

very crazy week.

I know that we're on the last week of 2023, and we've seen pro-Palestinian protests going on and on and on.

And so Christmas Day was not really a surprise, but they did shut down traffic to LAX and JFK.

And there was a long line of truckers who toured the suburbs of Chicago protesting on behalf of the Palestinians on Xmas Day.

I think some 150, so an extraordinary train of trucks going about

supporting the Palestinians.

You know what I don't get about it?

How do they have that much support with so much going on in our country?

You know, so many in our country so visibly supporting that pro-Palestinian movement.

So that most of the people are of Mideastern background, and they have come in large numbers through immigration.

But it raises a lot of questions.

And that is,

the protests in the United States mirror image the nature of the fighting

in Gaza and in Israel.

So when you look at the question, you say, who started the fighting in Israel?

Who surprised attack and precipitated all of this?

And don't believe this stuff about the al-Aska mosque, there was no threat to it, or it was because of solemni.

These are all past post-facto excuses.

But

who commits necrophilia?

Who decapitates?

Who mutilates?

Who desecrates?

Who tortures?

Who takes captives?

Who, when the war turns to Gaza itself in response, who uses mosques, schools, and hospitals as shields?

Who uses civilians as shields?

Who steals UN food?

Who

misappropriates billions of dollars to build a 300-mile?

Okay, I'll stop.

You get the picture.

Yes.

So now we're looking at the respective protest.

Who desecrates the Lincoln Monument and throws red paint on it?

Lincoln Monument.

Where are the Capitol police?

Who desecrates the gate to the White House?

Who swarms Rockefeller Center on Christmas

to stop the National Christmas Tree?

Who goes into the New York nativity scene?

Who shuts down the Manhattan Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge?

Who shuts down JFK and LAX?

Think of all the people whose plans they ruined.

Think of organ transplant vehicles that were delayed.

Think of all of that stuff they cost.

And then ask yourself:

who says river to the sea, genocide?

Who goes after Jews in a library?

Who says beat the effing Jew at UCLA?

And then you look at the other side, who does not get arrested, who does not obstruct traffic, who does not attack people, who does not call for the genocide of the palate.

And you see a pattern there, don't you?

And the pattern is that there is a culture that grew up under dictatorial, illegitimate governments and a extreme religion that does not tolerate apostates or

free speech.

So if you're in Israel and you say, I do not want to be an Orthodox Jew anymore, or any Jew, I don't want to practice, I'm an agnostic, fine.

If you're in Gaza and you get on the street corner and say, I don't believe in this one, you're in trouble.

So what I'm getting at is

when we know that, and we have these immigration policies under Obama and under Biden and we welcome people from these autocratic governments and they come over here, then they bring and they do not assimilate or integrate rapidly.

They bring the ethos of where they came and they employ the same mechanisms here and then they end up in this embarrassing paradox that here they use all of the illegal means at their disposable with no fear of prosecution.

Because after all, just a parentheses here, if any of these people who went after a Christmas scene or disrupted LAX traffic or shut down the Golden Gate Bridge was charged with conspiracy, racketeering,

disrupting, breaking, you could get a lot of felonies.

And then if they were on a green card or a student visa or here illegally, they would be deported.

And if you did that in 100 cases, they wouldn't do it anymore.

So let's be honest, the government facilitates that because they feel this deep state and the Democratic Party and the left wing are in sympathy with it, the courts, the prosecutor.

And the question is,

American people are like a sleeping dragon.

At some point, do they ever get upset about this?

And then I have another question for you.

So Israel, I think, is

progressing in its destruction of Hamas at a more rapid rate than people assume.

And in response to that, Hezbollah has stepped up border attacks on northern Israel.

They were asked by the UN, according to the original ceasefire of 2006, to back off 15, 20 miles from the border and have referendums and free.

They didn't do any of that, of course.

And they started shelling.

And now as

Israel gets knee-deep in street-to-street fighting, they are stepping up these rocket attacks.

Israel had to take out a terrorist that was an Iranian that was there organizing and helping strategize Hezbollah, their surrogate.

And now Iran is bragging they're going to do something.

But mark my words, when the Hamas theater

cools down and they lose, you may see Hezbollah start to do stuff.

And then here's the question.

What is going to be the attitude of our students?

from the Middle East, the truckers, the people who shut down when Hezbollah gets into it, a Shia terrorist organization, just like Hamas is.

What will they do?

Will they protest on their behalf too?

Will they say, hmm, I'm in the United States.

I'm a guest here.

I have all these First Amendment rights.

Can't have any where I am.

And I'm going to repay that magnanimity by my host by rooting for Hezbollah to kill Americans in Syria and Iraq.

Is that what they're going to do?

Yes.

Do you expect me to answer that?

Yeah, I do.

I don't know.

Yes.

Yes.

And so what would happen in any country in the world if you went over there?

What if you are American and you went over to Gaza or the West Bank and

you started cheering on the Israelis or say more aid to Israel?

What would happen to you?

You would be dead in a second.

Yes.

And so all these, and I'm getting really tired of this because it brings back the central question.

We're getting at a point when you look at higher education, because this is where it all comes from.

It either comes directly from students that are there, or it comes from professors from Middle East, or it comes from the schools of education that train the K through 12, whatever.

Okay.

And so you have to ask yourself, when we see all of this stuff on the campuses, because

that's the nexus of it.

And you think of all the great things that universities do for the United States, medicine, CEOs in business schools, cancer research, medical research, biological research, engineering, STEM.

And then you put aside all of that and you counterbalance it with the schools of social science, the school of education, school of arts and humanities, where we're into

woke and

cultural Marxist binaries, oppressor, oppress, victim, victimizer, etc., and Foucaultian relativism, sophism.

Is it worth it anymore?

I mean, is the good that they do, does it counterbalance all the damage they're doing to the country?

Because almost every bad idea, from critical race theory to critical legal theory, to critical border theory, you name it, comes out of these places.

And

there was a very good article today by Jim Hampkins, who I've met and I like.

He's a medieval historian at Harvard, sort of a conservative.

He was a friend friend of a very good friend that I had, Stephen Osmond, the German historian at Harvard, who was a wonderful person, passed away, I think, three years ago.

So I have great respect for him.

And he wrote a very good article.

And he said, basically, the universities are destroying their,

in general, their commitment to...

preeminent research because there are certain standards and guardrails you have to enforce.

We're not a medieval university.

And he goes into that.

And then he looks at his own university, Harvard.

He doesn't take a stance to the degree of which gay is guilty and should be fired.

He just said that the defenders of gay

are making arguments that are preposterous.

A.

Well, if

the person who was stolen from doesn't object,

then what's the crime of intellectual thievery?

If, you know, we're back to Nal Saga and Norseland sagas where somebody breaks into your Viking home and slits your mom's throat and you say, well,

to stop the cycle of violence, we'll just accept it or you can pay me some money or something.

But you don't go to a central authority and press charges.

It'll be handled extra

judiciously, like the Harvard Corporate Board.

So we're into a pre-civilizational thing.

There is no crime of that.

Okay.

And then he points out,

you can't have a university when you have that institutionalized.

It's not just gay that did it, it's the board institutionalized it.

And we talked about that in an earlier broadcast when we said they created this duplicative language.

They created this idea that if I said earlier, if the victim doesn't

complain, there is no crime.

So at some point, as Hankins points out,

Harvard is not going to be preeminent if it is now.

It isn't prestigious anymore.

Not with that board.

And Alan Dershowitz has a long piece pointing out how they censored his own letter to the Harvard Crimson.

Their admissions are not merucratic.

Their tenure, promotion, retention are not meritocratic.

And now it's caught up to them very quickly, very quickly.

They've been doing this for three or four years.

These reparation type of admissions and hiring, and now it's caught up to them.

I had one disagreement with Jim Hankins.

He said, then, but conservative calls to clamp down on Harvard or look at their tax exemptions or their board are misplaced I don't think they are misplaced the reason that he is able to write that and the degree to which his argument which is excellent will resonate is not depending it's not dependent on his stature at Harvard or the brilliance of his argument you know what it's dependent on it's dependent on about four things A, the degree to which private donors say, F you, I'm not giving, and that's getting up to the billions now.

Number two, the degree to which they are worried that their endowment income of five,

six, three, four, five billion dollars a year is not or is taxed.

Three, the millions of dollars that go to Harvard and the Ivy League and research grants are not predicated on honoring the 10

amendments to the Constitution, free speech, due process, or you don't get federal money.

The degree to which the government is willing to give them $2 trillion, them being higher education, to subsidize student loans, 30% of which default and are known to default in advance.

Okay,

that pressure

to take all of those goodies away will determine whether they reform or not.

Not arguments like Jim Hankins that are absolutely inductive, persuasive.

He's to be admired as a Harvard professor coming out against his own board and president.

But when he says that it's kind of misplaced or, you know, you shouldn't go to the state of Massachusetts to intervene, you have to because these are not private universities.

They take our money through tax deductions and tax deferments.

Yes.

And we have a say in them.

If we don't, I don't want to have a say in Harvard or Stanford.

I think they're private institutions.

I like the idea of the Hillsdale model.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hillsdale just says, I don't want any federal money.

And they say, you know,

they said, F you Hillsdale.

The Obama administration did.

So they said, you know, even if you get

a federal grant, if you're a student, if you're a veteran, and you get a grant to go back to school when you get out of, you can't use it at Hillsdale.

No.

Okay, because they don't follow federal guidelines.

Fine.

They said, fine, we'll raise the money.

And there you go.

So I think if they want to have this independence and draw up new rules about, you know, race-based admissions or try to skirt skirt the Supreme Court, and they will try to do it because they don't believe in the rule of law, because they're kind of like lawless, aren't they, these universities?

If they want to do that, just say to all of us, F you, you stupid, deplorable, clinger, irredeemable, chomp, crazy.

I'm just using the Biden,

Obama, John McCain, Hillary

vocabulary.

We don't want your F and money.

And we're independent and we'll part.

And then you can have your race-based,

non-merocratic, deductive university, postmodern, post-structuralist, medieval university.

That's fine.

Don't take the money from us and then say you're independent.

Yeah.

And just as a note, Hillsdale is a sponsor of this podcast, and we're really happy to have them.

And all that money that's not going to Harvard, it's got a good place to go if it wants to.

There's only a few little atolls in this island of

this sea of madness.

There's only a few little islands.

Hillsdale is one.

I hope to think that the Hoover Institution is one.

And, you know, the School of Public Policy, Pete Peterson School down in Pepperdine University is pretty good.

Isn't that Grover City College?

That is very good, too.

So is, you know, I spoke

and walked around St.

Thomas Aquinas for two days.

Yes.

Excellent.

Yeah.

Excellent.

So there are places that are exempt from these

criticisms of ours.

Well, Victor, you mentioned Israel, so let's go ahead and take a break and then come back to talk about what's going on in Israel for the last time in 2023.

Stay with us, and we'll be back.

We're back.

So, lots of news coming out, obviously, given the war, but different things, and I'll mention them, and then you can go ahead and talk about any one of them.

I thought it was interesting that the U.S.

Eisenhower is helping to shoot down both missiles and drones that the Houthi Houthi in Yemen are shooting at, container ships and commercial concessions.

The Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, said that, quote, the Palestinian Authority is prepared to fulfill its responsibilities in Gaza if Israel pulls out of the strip.

And that comes out of the publication called Memory.

And then the last thing is just that Netanyahu and Erdogan seem to be having a little fight, and Netanyahu recently has slammed Erdogan for his genocide of the Kurdish people.

So any of those three, those are the new things coming out of the region right now.

Yeah, well, when Abbas says that they're perfectly willing to take on the responsibilities, that's not quite true.

Remember when the Israelis got out and the Bush administration had elections, Before the elections were actually conducted, they started throwing, they being Hamas, started throwing Palestinians out the window in Putin style, and they started executing it.

And one reason right now,

A, that Hamas is not fleeing to the West Bank for sanctuary, but in Lebanon are in Ghatr.

And one reason that the Israelis know where Hamas's hierarchy is is, guess what?

There's a lot of Palestinians.

They're getting on their non-traceable disposable cell phones and texting their Israeli contacts and saying, these are where Hamas are, because they want them gone.

And then they want to take over.

But the magic question is, if Mr.

Abbas wants to take over, can he just say a few simple things?

We recognize Israel's right to exist, and we're all going to live within borders.

And

that's it.

Is he going to say that?

And then is he going to say,

and Hamas,

we'll have an election.

And because I had one election at one time, so I'm an illegitimate leader.

But you know what?

I'm not the generian.

I'm going to see the errors of my pathway.

So we're prepared, the Palestinian Authority, to do the following.

Release all of the hostages.

Release the people who planned this massacre.

Have open and fair, transparent, internationally supervised elections in Gaza and West Bank.

And the winner then unites the government of both.

How's that?

And you know what the answer will be, not just from Hamas, but from Mr.

Abbas, a big fat no,

because he knows that he is an illegitimate leader who wrote a thesis on Holocaust denial.

As did, I mean,

the whole Middle East, Bashar Assad just gave a little harangue about there was no Holocaust.

They really hate the Holocaust because it makes them feel like they have to show empathy toward Jews.

And they hate that.

So then they start to deny it.

As far as Mr.

Erojan,

he has this bad habit.

He gets a new little rocket and then he starts bragging that he's going to

shower Athens.

He said one day the Athenians, I think two years ago, will wake up and they'll see my new rocket coming down upon them.

He said that about the Israelis.

Maybe I'll have to intervene or maybe you're going to wake up in Tel Aviv.

And now he's called Netanyahu Hitler.

And then Netanyahu replied and said, no country has jailed more journalists and people and suppressed free speech than did Mr.

Erdogan, who was famous for saying

the thing about elections, you can get off at the next bus stop.

And

meaning I can get off and then just have an autocratic or rigged election.

And then we, this was Obama.

Remember, Obama bragged, he went to Turkey, the first country on his apology tour when he got elected, when he got inaugurated.

And he said he was my conduit to the Middle East.

there is no there's not one person who's done any more damage other than iran to the middle east than turkey no doubt about it turkey hates israel

and

turkey is now a neo-Ottoman state in other words the

uh ataturk legacy of the young turks and the 1918 1919 post-World War I depot disposal or deposal I should say both of the Ottoman Sultanate and the takeover of secularists who introduced what?

They got rid of the Arabic alphabet for Turkish.

They started using Western letters.

They outlawed the Fez.

They outlawed the Burqa.

They ensured that Santa Sofia would be a secular, international, and eventually UN

historical site.

And they were autocratic.

And they fought bravely in the Korean War.

Turkey did.

We have a huge base near the Syrian border at Isilur.

So they were a very close ally, and then they reverted to what Turkey always does.

In the 1974, they went into Cyprus and started butchering people.

And now,

when Mr.

Erlion's talking about that, he just said about the disputed lands

between Armenia and its Turkic

Islamic neighborhood that we might have to look at the solution that our grandfathers used, which means, of course, two

genocides of the Armenian people.

He

has gone into Syria and carpet bomb Kurds.

He's got his whole jails are full of Kurds.

He said that he wants to wipe out Kurds.

He's gone after them.

So he's a despicable person.

He is

not to be trusted with components of NATO common munitions because he'll give them to the Russians.

We kind of pulled out of him participating in the F-35 assemblies because he's not reliable.

I don't know why he is in NATO.

He's the only Islamic country that is.

It's got the second largest military.

He's trying to keep Sweden out.

Any country he feels that has clamped down on Turkish immigrants that are causing a lot of problems or that he feels they're not as sympathetic to being overrun with Islamic illegal aliens.

He thinks is great.

He likes that.

He goes to Germany every once in a while and tries to stir up trouble.

So if we had a war, I don't think he would be on our side.

So now the question is, when you talk to people in our government, they all privately off the record of the military say

we don't trust them.

They're enemies.

But what are we going to do with them?

We've got nuclear weapons, maybe still.

They don't talk about it.

Some Cold War big bombs in our base in Turkey.

They're flying over the Aegean in Greek airspace and they promise one day to take back.

They never had it.

They were Greek.

I should say they never had it until they stole them in the 15th century and kept them till the 19th.

But the islands off the coast of Turkey like Samos or Rhodes or Chios or Lesbos.

They overfly them every day.

They basically tell the Greeks, someday you're going to get tired of coming up and

swarming us and escorting us back because we're going to have a fight.

We have four times as many planes as you do.

You may be better pilots, but we're going to swarm you.

So there's nothing good coming out of Turkey.

And the only question is, in a cost-benefit analysis, is it better to get out

and get them out and then have a, we don't know how to get rid of NATO members.

We know how to get them in, but we don't know how to get them out.

And does anybody really think that if there there was an

a NATO member was attacked, if Russia goes into,

say, Poland and they call Article 5, that Turkey would send any help for the Poles against the democratic elected government of Poland, against Putin?

No, they wouldn't.

So it's just a matter of what do you do about it.

And that brings up the question of frenemies.

You mentioned that.

And we have about three of them, don't we?

Turkey is a frenemy.

I don't even like the word because they're not friendly at all, friendly enemy.

Then we have Gutter, where the Hamas apparat is ensconced in wealth, luxury, and safety.

And they promote or they anchor, what, Al Jazeera, that every single day Prince just lies and anti-Western lies, anti-Christian lies, anti-American lies.

And then

as well,

they facilitate Iranian finance and launder money for Iranians.

So they are an enemy, except they built this big, beautiful base and they said you can use it and we don't really have restrictions.

So like Turkey, the military goes to the civilian government in the United States every once in a while and says, yeah, yeah, yeah, we get it.

Yeah, Turkey's an enemy.

And yeah, gutter's an enemy.

And

they're two-timing, duplicitous SOBs.

But what are we going to do without this big base?

And they're not saying us, to be fair to them.

They're talking about the United States as national interest.

And what are we we going to do without gutter?

Well, gutter is replaceable.

There's so many bases in the Middle East we could develop with the same magnitude.

And then we get to Mexico.

Mexico is an enemy of the United States if you defined it by any rational analyses.

The cartels run half of Mexico.

They send in a drug that they know will kill 100,000 Americans.

every year.

And they know that because they disguise it, they put it in different colors, different names to fool people into taking it or to get addicted on it.

Mexico is a transit for world immigration and they loved the idea until recently that 80% of the 90% of the illegal aliens were Spanish-speaking because in

and I'm not just making

fun of Obador.

He said this.

He said, isn't it wonderful how many millions of people have entered the United States illegally?

Because in his view, because he is a racist and an ethnic chauvinist, he believes that

this North American project was an aberration because Spain had colonized all the indigenous people and out of that grew a medzizo culture and it's superior to anybody and it's the war of 1848 or 1821, whatever date that he sees the revolution taking place or the wars with America, it's now payback time.

That's how he looks at it.

And he's never going to do anything to help us.

All he has to do is say, don't come into Mexico and build a wall at Guatemala and then send people back from the Mexico City airport who come in.

Don't give them a visa from China or Russia or, I don't know where, but he won't do that.

He likes what this is doing.

He likes the turmoil.

It's payback.

He's a socialist.

He doesn't do anything to the cartels.

And he was

terrified of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump.

The best thing Donald Trump ever did was saying, you know, if you don't do this and this and this,

we're not going to have catch and release.

You're going to have to apply for refugee status from Mexico.

And I know people like Ann Coulter and everybody fault him and say he didn't build the wall.

Yes, I understand that.

But he had,

and maybe it was his fault, I don't know, but he had an entire bureaucratic and judicial movement that was trying to undermine him from Anonymous and Homeland Security to Kelly.

They were all after him.

The Pentagon didn't cooperate, and judges were fighting him, and he was getting sued left and right.

But Mexico, like gutter and like Turkey, is not a friend.

No.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then maybe we can talk a little bit more about Mexico and then maybe turn to the Giuliani lawsuit.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

We're back.

You can find Victor on social media at X.

His handle is at VD Hansen and on Facebook, Hansen's Morning Cup.

So please come join us in either of those places.

So, Victor,

you were talking about Mexico, and just recently, yesterday or the day before,

Biden's team went down there.

So, Blinken and Mallorca showed up in Mexico to talk with Obador.

And

what I want to know from you is this is just crazy.

They've got 8 million illegals in here already, and all of a sudden they're trying to make some show of discussing the immigration problem with Mexico.

But what's your take on that?

Well, Biden,

Mayorkas and Corinne Jean-Pierre and Biden said the border is secure.

And they were perfectly willing to lie because they understood the squad and Bernie and Elizabeth, but especially the Obama duo, wanted it open.

Obama always wanted it open, but politically it was impossible.

We were a a more conservative country 15 years ago.

But more importantly, he couldn't get through an open border and get re-elected, he thought.

But now,

as he said, I keep saying this, he gave this interview where he said, I'd like to be president vicariously.

Call it in from my basement.

So that's what he's doing.

And under that theory, this is a long-term investment.

You bring in all of these people and just good things happen.

Now we've got 55 million people, the largest number of people that were not born in the United States in history, both as a percentage, it's probably over 13% by now, and in actual numbers.

And what I mean all good things happen.

A, you have a huge constituency that needs federal help, education, law, food, housing, health care.

More workers, more, it taxes the system.

The left says, oh, this is racist.

There's people who don't have kidney dialysis.

And they're right.

They don't.

So you expand the federal bureaucracy, win-win.

And then you have to raise taxes, they feel.

Win-win-win, redistribution.

And then the DEI says, and yes, we're up to 30%.

This is what Joy Reed was bragging about on TV.

They get angry when anybody on the conservative side mimics them.

As I say, they libel you as a great replacement theorist, but that's what demography is, Destiny, the new Democratic majority text are all about.

So they bring in more constituents that they feel are non-white and therefore they're going to have a DEI left-wing perspective.

So they think that's good.

A lot of them are needless.

They like the idea that people

are disrupted and the whole system of America is stressed out, stress tests.

They love that.

There's a lot of people in the minority community when they think not right at the border because they are impacted, but they feel at least as long as they're mostly Spanish speaking they feel

well if we get millions and millions of people here eventually we have a majority in many states of Spanish speakers and it's our turn that kind of sort this separatism and ethnic chauvinism is also at play so they win win-win win with an open border and they're going to keep doing it and doing it and doing it.

And you suggested, well, why are they going to Mexico?

Because Because there's an election coming up.

And except for the economy, this one issue has the least amount of support.

All of the constituencies I talked about, they're pressure groups, but they do not represent a grassroots populace 51%.

And it's a losing issue.

And you see that with the African-American community.

You see it with Mexican Americans on the border.

You see it in towns here where I live where some of the people have been bussed.

And you see it with Eric Adams and big city mayors, mostly African American.

And their idea is, hey, wait a minute,

we have a monopoly on social services.

And you can't bring these people in because they take social service from our constituencies.

And that's where it is.

And by the way, I would say the same thing if all of a sudden we got

millions of poor Russians that were had nothing and they were coming over here illegally and being bussed in.

They were blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and there was a million among the border coming across.

I'd say, sorry, you have to come legally and you have to come in measurement that we can assimilate and integrate you.

And you have to have some skills.

It would be nice to have a knowledge of English or just wait.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, the Chicago mayor seems to be saying, we can't do this without federal help now.

So he's.

He was telling us

it was a wonderful thing.

As was Eric Adams when it all first started.

He's one of the worst mayors that Johnson, Mayor Johnson, or whatever his name is.

Brandon, I think.

Yeah, Brandon Johnson.

He was a teacher, and then he's a racist, and

he's a socialist communist, and he's destroyed the city almost in Chicago.

Yeah, he had a high position in the teachers' union, I think.

I have no sympathy, though, for all the people who are complaining now because they voted for him.

Yeah.

And they will vote for him again.

Yeah, they would just vote for him again.

Yeah, they would.

And complain.

Isn't that weird?

And I guess that's what the left assumes.

We're all so stupid that now after three years and 8 million people in the United States illegally, they can go down to Mexico and act like they're.

Yeah, this raises a really fundamental existential question that we haven't talked about.

And I think a lot of people

live with it every day, but they're afraid to articulate it.

So this country...

for all of its flaws and biases and prejudices,

it was better than the alternative and it was was good without having to be perfect.

And the proof of the pudding is that its economic, social, cultural, political, military system

created more freedom, more prosperity, more security, and more happiness

than elsewhere.

Maybe some rural places in Europe are happier.

I've been to a lot of them.

They seem very happy.

And they have a good standard of living, but they don't have the freedom that we do.

Okay.

So who who did all of that?

And I know that slaves were exploited in the South, but the problem was, is that this particular paradigm of the Constitution,

Constitution is really the key to the whole thing because it was a brilliant work of the European Enlightenment.

And

the European going back to the Renaissance and going back to classical roots, as you know, from the founders.

So they created this system.

And the system itself was not predicated on their own appearances.

It doesn't say one place, black, Negro, or white in the Constitution.

So the logical expression of their Constitution was that all men are created equal, even if it wasn't always true in reality.

But eventually people would have to honor that pact, as Martin Luther King reminded us.

Okay.

So they created this system.

And they created so much boundary that everybody wants in on

but then the squad and the universities and nicole hannah-jones and all these palettes they hate it and you you say to them what do you hate about it

and

the answer is anytime they're deprived of it if they're deported or if you right now said if you came in this country illegally and you don't have legal authorization to reside here and you're going to get your wish to go back to your beautiful homeland in gaza or mexico or venezuela or whatever it is they would be outraged outraged so do they ever

i guess what i'm saying to these multifarious critics ever ask themselves why they're so privileged when this has not been a socialist or communist country it has not been a race-based country It has not been an Islamic-only country.

It's religiously free.

Why do they think it works?

And why would they want to come here when they don't renew it and they don't honor it and they don't say, you know, it's got a lot of problems, but I love this country.

And it's not sustainable when you have 30 or 40% that are not on the same page.

And so

that's what I don't understand when I listen to all these people, these protests that are interviewed.

Genocide Joe,

and from the river to the sea, and you think, okay,

that's what we do in America, but you can't go out and shut down a bridge.

You can't destroy our icons.

You can't take over our holiday events and try to desecrate them.

You don't have that right to break the law.

So, why would you come over here and do this?

But then, if you don't like the country, why wouldn't you go back and help your own people?

Go back to Gaza.

Start being a brickmason, rebuild, be a political activist, ask for freedom.

You know, say that

I just got back from New York.

I shut down a bridge because I deposed the government.

I'm going to go to Gaza and shut down a border crossing until we get freedom.

Why don't they do that?

It's not possible.

Because they're passive-aggressive.

It's hypocritical.

All these students, when you hear them, they go crazy when a policeman tries to arrest them.

They start shrieking, you can't do that.

I have rights.

You have rights, but nobody else has rights when you shut down the bridge.

But suddenly they arrest you for that, and you have rights.

You have no rights when you break the law other than due process.

So

there's going to be a, I guess, what's the word?

I wrote an article about a reckoning.

It can't go on.

You know, Herbstein said what can't go on will stop.

What can't go on won't go on.

And if it goes on, you see it in history with the city-state in the 4th century.

In Greece, you see it in the 4th century and 5th century in Rome.

You see it in 15th century, 6th, 15th century Byzantium.

You can see what's going on and it's not sustainable.

And there were people who wrote about it and said, this is not sustainable.

And yet they were voices in the wilderness.

Even Livy said that famously,

we have reached a point where the medicine is worse than the disease.

We know that our sins, what our sins are and what has to be done about them, but we know the doing about it.

would be worse.

So they go on on their fumes.

And you know what we'd have to do?

We'd have to have a balanced budget.

We'd have to massively cut back all this wasteful social spending.

We'd have to have a flat tax so it'd be simplified.

People wouldn't have the black market.

We would have to build more prisons, clamp down on criminals, enforce the border, legal only immigration, get rid of woke in our universities and military, go back to meritocracy and racially blind admissions and hiring.

You know what it would have to do.

It would be a revolutionary experience.

The media would go crazy.

Yeah, and you would have to ask, why would they go crazy?

It'd be back to a better time.

They don't want a better time.

Than what we have now where on Christmas.

Yeah.

We have on Christmas Day a stabbing in Grand Central Station in New York City where Stephen Hutcherson had stabbed two young girls

One in the back and one in the thigh, collapsed her mom.

And said, I want all white people dead.

And I think people are trying to ask the question if this was a hate crime.

And I don't think there's any question.

Yeah, I love that one.

We're investigating this to see whether it's a hate crime.

If it's not a hate crime, and I'm not sure I agree with hate crimes, can you have a criminal statute?

Just enforce the criminal statutes.

Exactly.

But what would it have to be?

Would he have to, as he's put the knife in the door,

He's a black man who goes into a restaurant and says, I want to sit with the crackers,

and I don't like black people who work with white people.

And he's had 17 prior arrests for violent conduct, and he's done things like this before, and he's always been let out by liberal judges.

And then he says, after all this racist...

verbiage, he goes and

he stabs two, it's not funny, two white girls, and

he thinks nothing's going to happen to him.

He'll feign craziness.

And then the authorities said, hmm, let me see.

He's expressed hate for all white people.

He's got a record of hate for all white people.

He's got a record for 17 violent arrests and, I guess, convictions.

And

we're wondering if he's committed a hate crime again.

Well, that's how stupid things are.

I am committing a hate crime.

Watch me.

It's just silly.

It's as though 2023 was the year of stupidity, I guess.

I don't know.

You know what?

You go back to the FBI data, and please correct me if I'm wrong because I haven't looked in the last two months, but we're in the year 2024 coming up.

And you look at the FBI or the DOJ crime statistics, you can't find them for 2023 or 22 or 21.

They're back to 19, I think.

Really?

And then when you look at the racial rubrics, it's very hard to, they don't mean anything anymore because they have other and Hispanics of various different ethnicities will say they're white or not white.

So they're all jumbled up.

But even with that miasma of data,

when you look at particular victims,

it's

the biggest attack group are Jews.

I mean,

and

60% of all the victims have hate crimes.

And so-called white people, white supremacy, white rage, white privilege, they are overrepresented as well as victims and underrepresented as perpetrators.

So when you look at who is committing height hate crimes

and look at their demographics and who is disproportionately overrepresented as perpetrators, it's DEI constituencies.

And yet, hate crimes, what does hate crimes mean?

It's in the media.

It means a white deranged guy with tattoos and a missing tooth tooth and a southern draw, the villain in movies, or a Russian oligarch that came over here.

Not an oligarch, but a Russian middle-class mafioso.

Mafioso, yeah.

Also, the villain in every movie, maybe with the South African guy, and they're all running around going after poor black people.

That's what the popular culture says hate crime is.

And gays.

Yes.

They don't ever say that it's mostly people from the Middle East, many of them Muslim, and the DEI, meaning Latino and black, who are committing crimes against Jews and Asians and whites at a disproportionate number.

And that's why they say we're investigating whether this is a hate crime.

And what that means is the authorities involved are having a meeting today, and they're putting their finger up.

They lick it and they put it up in the wind and they say, Hmm, this is a hate crime, but what's the constituency to protect white privilege, white supremacy, white rage?

There is none.

So if we say this is a hate crime, people will think that we're targeting the black community, which as a victimized community is incapable of being victimizers, according to their Foucaultian paradigm, critical race theory.

So we'll just say we're investigating whether it's a hate crime, and then we'll never hear the end of it.

That's it.

They investigate it.

And it's so weird.

I mean, they're creating such a cynical,

and I'm not trying to dwell on race.

Race to me is irrelevant, what a person's superficial appearance is, but what gets me is the lack of honesty.

So

when you go look at a major crime story on Twitter, X,

on

online blog, but especially on the major AP, you know what I mean?

Reuters, et cetera, McClatchy news outlets or New York Times.

And then you read the comments.

And that's the voice of, these are not all right-wing venues.

And generally, if the perpetrator is non-white, his picture is not there as much.

Sometimes it is.

And the description is not.

If the perpetrator is white, like my Cleriac

Stanford Communications, then we hear he has dirty blonde hair.

He was white with dirty blonde hair.

The poor Islamic victim of a deliberate car crash against him, but we never really heard the aftermath.

Conservatives in the Stanford Review said that the incident didn't happen, but my point is this, you've got a pretty good description of him.

You got such a good description of him that you would think they had every single letter of the license plate, but they only found one.

They couldn't see the license plate, but they could see that he had a dirty blonde beard.

Okay.

And then when you get

any other suspect,

you don't get the description in our media.

And then you read the comments and all they're doing is stoking racial animosity because everybody is so cynical.

They'll say things like this.

And I'm not talking about right-wing things.

I'm talking about just the news, you know, USA Today and everything.

And you read it and they'll say, oh, the

perpetrator is non-white because there's no description.

You see what I mean?

It's almost the mirror image of the 1950s when if you were black and you committed a crime, they always said, Negro does this, right?

It's just the same type of discrimination and racism, and everybody's on to it.

And I think it's not sustainable.

Yeah, yeah.

So in 2024, hopefully, we'll have a different world with a lot less

lies.

But what makes you think we will when

you think we're going to have

a very different Congress, House, Senate, White House, and the left says, hmm, the Poles think there's going to be a conservative backlash, House, Senate, White House.

Hmm.

That means John Kerry won't have a job.

and John Kerry's agenda.

That means that if Iran starts shelling people and killing them or maiming them overseas, or the Houthis try to absorb the Red Sea, the U.S.

fleet will hit back and hit back hard.

Hmm.

That means that we will not support men in female sports.

Hmm.

That means that

we might stop all of these lawfare projects that the DOJ is running.

Hmm.

That means we might not mandate EV cars or what, Pete Buttijeg, we're going to outlaw gas cars and I don't know what it was, 25 years.

Hmm, you think they're going to give that?

We're going to have to get rid of DEI in the military.

We're just going to say the military, we don't have to get rid of DEI.

All we have to do is honor the Constitution and we will not racially discriminate against anybody.

Yes, but what do you think the left is going to do about this?

I think the left is going to do what they did.

I know people who say, Victor, do not mention Molly Ball's Time 2021 essay.

She's now a left-wing writer writing for the Wall Street Journal, and that's that dichotomy at the Wall Street Journal where the actual reportage is left-center and the opinion page is right-center.

But

she was promoted for that article.

She used the word cabal, not me.

She used the word conspiracy.

She said that the street demonstrations all of 2020 were modulated by the left, and they kind of calmed down right before the election.

So they didn't look like you were going to elect a Kamala Harris than Joe Biden.

That rooted them on, maybe.

And she talked about

getting rid of misinformation on social media.

She had a pretty good insight, didn't she?

The FBI at the time was paying $3 million to suppress the laptop story.

And

Mark Zuckerberg gave $419 million.

You think Mark Zuckerberg is going to say, hmm.

Well, that was really the only important election that I saw, so I had to have my PAC or my foundation or me give $419 million to absorb the work of registrars.

We needed more employees in key swing precincts.

We needed more drop boxes.

We needed our guys running the election.

Okay.

Now he's going to say, God, I got a lot of Zuckerbucks or Zukbucks or whatever they call it.

Gosh.

I got into politics over my head.

I'm just going to pull back.

Because 2024 doesn't have the importance of 2020.

No.

No, of course not.

He's going to say, that was not enough.

But the question, yeah, the question is, are they going to be able to convince the people on the margin with their stupid, I mean, that's what

is the begging question.

That's all they need to get is the margin.

It's hard to know because

I heard Lynn Cheney on television this week, weekend, maybe,

when she pretty much outlined a very frightening scenario that Donald Trump had to be stopped, and he had to be stopped because he might have supporters in Congress.

Think of that, the statement.

Donald Trump might be elected by the people of the United States, and whatever she says,

the left controls the electoral process at the federal level and in many of the key swing states.

Okay.

And if he is elected, which he's afraid of, given that she has the media and she has the institutions and she has the corporate boardroom and she has the big money and she has K-12 and academia and entertainment, you've heard it all.

And then

he might not

only be elected, but people who support the agenda I just mentioned might be elected.

In other words, a constitutional democratic federal republic might work.

And that can't have that.

We just cannot have that.

We can't have people in Congress going along with him.

So

all of those influential never-Trumpers who gave us Joe Biden, who swore that Joe Biden was vibrant, muscular,

alert, a moderate, good old Joe Biden, who gave us this crazy agenda that gave us Afghanistan, the Chinese balloon, the Ukraine Ukraine war, Hamas, destroyed deterrence,

35 trillion in debt now,

1.7 trillion deficit, racial animosity, DEI, open border, 17% higher prices in general since when he was elected, 30 to 40% higher in food, fuel, housing, et cetera.

1.9 mortgage goes to 7.2.

All of that they gave us.

Still,

they hate him much that they're willing to destroy the country to stop him.

They'll want more of this.

And that's what's scary.

It really is.

Yeah, and then the question again goes back to: does that marginal person, the person going both ways, the center person, want to have the Democrats stupid?

I'll just accept the immigration because they told me it's good.

I'll accept all the crime because they're going to get a chance.

Can I just finish?

Or are they more afraid of Donald Trump's eccentricities?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Donald Trump may not even be around.

Yeah.

He's going to be, I mean, Jack Smith is a lawless,

that's not an insurrectionary thing to say, but according to the Supreme Court, he is lawless because he's trying to take extra legal measures to speed up.

the process so he can beat an election for political purposes.

And now he's trying to d to strip Trump of his First Amendment rights to criticize or say whatever he wants.

And so

if he gets away with it and Fanny and all of these lawsuits,

it's going to be very interesting whether he's in jail or not.

And how can you

how can you

I mean, do you really think that a jury in New York, Atlanta, Miami,

and Washington, D.C., whether it's James or Willis or

Bragg or Smith, it's going to say, hmm, there's overwhelming evidence that there's nothing to this, so I'm going to vote to acquit Donald Trump.

No, it's not going to happen.

They're going to say there's overwhelming evidence that this is a sham, but I'm going to, I hate that SOB, and I like the person who's the prosecutor and the judge, and I'm going to convict him just for the blank of it.

That's what's going to happen.

So I don't know that answer.

Well, on that grim note, Victor Davis-Hansen, we are ending our last news roundup in 2024, but we will be on the weekend episode looking at

the good and the bad about 2023, and we're going to also talk a little bit about Hesiod's works and days.

So please join us this weekend for those two things.

So we'll have a little bit more on 2023 and what to look for in 2024.

So please come join us and thanks to our listeners.

We're very appreciative of the audience.

You didn't ask last thing, you didn't ask me about the EcoDiesel.

Oh, yes, that's right.

How is it going?

I have to apologize for my audience in a period and mood of exuberance.

I'd had a call from Stellantis.

Is that the name of it?

Mr.

Hansen, we have approved your

repurchase

invitation.

We're going to repurchase your vehicle.

We may even have to give you a discount on a new one.

And the process now leaves my office and goes to the

three weeks ago.

Silence, Nava, nothing.

So one of you are going to say, well, Victor, you got your truck, but no, I did not.

It's still sitting there with a cab off at Jim Manning Ram Dynuba, California.

Collecting dust.

Yes, so let's see.

That's four, eight.

It's in its 10th week sitting there after a five-week wait to get in there.

I'm at 15.

Is that right?

15 weeks without it, which comes on top of a prior four and a half weeks plus five weeks in there.

So that was nine and a half, 15.

Is that right?

Yes.

Nine and a half, 15?

Wow, that's 24.

That's

half a year I haven't had this truck and it's always the same.

Mr.

Hanson, we're working on it, of course, and the part is in Los Angeles, so it will be.

So I just, I have to apologize for my own.

I'm back to square one.

I have no truck.

You just added to the theme here that the companies can't tell you the truth and neither can politicians.

No,

the dealer won't be honest with me or is flummoxed.

And

I said to one of the people there, why don't you just take your mini echo diesels?

Could you even get the recall?

Because I've had a recall that says your cart, you know, print comes.

You should be advised it may be dangerous to drive your truck because of a defective fuel pump.

It's under recalls.

And that's been there for two years.

It hasn't gone out, but it doesn't matter because the turbo is out.

So it's sitting there.

And then I mentioned this to an employee there, and they said, I said, well, why don't you just take one of your trucks and take it off?

And then when you'll wait too.

We can't sell the trucks because they have no, they're under recall.

I'd look up the website.

They're all for sale.

Yeah.

So they must have all fit, they must have had all the parts come in for the trucks that are on sale because they're pretty good trucks if they work.

So I'm very frustrated.

I gave a false sense of optimism, but I've been crushed.

I'm back to Eeyore Square One.

Well, we're on the new year, so maybe 2024 we'll have something.

Maybe if you're the CEO of Ram Stellantis, just do the right thing and say, you know what, we created a truck that we guaranteed.

And you know what we said to you, Mr.

Hansen?

We said, you know, our five-year, 50,000 mile or whatever, 30,000, that is not enough for you.

You should buy the seven-year.

And it's only $2,200 or whatever it was.

Insurance.

Yes, I will do that.

So I have two warranties.

So my car is under two warranties, which are absolutely worthless at getting your car back.

And the car is paid for, the truck.

And I haven't had it for half a year total this year.

Yeah.

Here, buy a warranty that we don't have any parts to fix your trucks.

I feel like in the Navy,

I had the best truck in the world, a 2006 Tundra, you know,

big cat, double cab,

no computers, kind of a gas hog, no big V8, 4.7.

You took that truck, it pulled up anything that might have been only rated at 7,500 pounds.

You could take that, go right up, it never heated up.

I had it for,

I don't know, it's almost 18 years.

Nothing.

I gave it to my daughter.

They love it.

Why didn't I just keep it?

Yes.

Well, the Ram did have some good reviews on it.

I think you got a lemon.

I don't see how they can't just all come together and say, this is just a lemon.

Let's when I researched it, I thought, wow, Echo Diesel, Italian engine, let me look at it.

I've heard these great things.

I had

a brother-in-law who came by who was a wonderful man, a guy who was a mechanic, salesman, knew everything about cars.

He had an Echodiesel in his Jeep.

I said, Victor, you got to buy one of these.

And he was right.

He said, I have 250,000 miles, 30 miles the gallon.

I did, two years.

It was 20,000 miles of carefree driving.

And you had a listener also write you and say that he's had Echodiesels and

they're the best, so don't give up on it.

Well, I'm glad to hear that because I have other ones.

I have a very good friend who came by and said, Victor, I have two Echo Diesels.

He's a big farmer.

One sits there because it just breaks down all the time, and the other has been wonderful.

300,000 miles.

So

I don't know what I'm going to do.

They said they were going to repurchase it.

Maybe I was planning to buy a V8.

Yeah.

The dreaded, horrible.

despicable V8

that we all hate now because it's got so much power and reliability.

From Dodge Ram.

Yes.

I'm willing to do it from Dodge Ram.

If they're listening, I will buy you.

I'll buy, just give me what it's worth, and I'll turn around and buy and I'll be out of pocket if you just give me what it was worth minus 48 weeks of no use.

Yeah.

So I misled the audience that I was reaching a resolution.

I've been.

You feel bad about it?

I do.

I was exaggerating.

I don't exaggerate, but on that one I was.

I was so optimistic after talking to them.

Well,

we'll hope that 2024 has something different for you in the way of trucks.

And thanks to the audience for listening to us today.

Thank you, everybody.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we are signing off.