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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the man lucky enough to be the host, but the star and the namesake, the reason you're here, to listen, to learn.

That's Victor Davis-Hanson.

He's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Amar Shabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We are recording on

Saturday, December 2nd.

Victor and I are in odd circumstances.

He's in a bedroom somewhere down south.

I'm in the bedroom in my mother's apartment in the Bronx.

I'm sure you may hear the clatter of buses and maybe even a gunshot or two in the background

where I am, Victor.

So I'm sorry if that happens.

Anyway, lots to talk about.

You think the Bronx are wilder than rural Fresno County?

I'm curious.

No, I've been to where I am in this neighborhood.

That's okay.

I've been to your house and I would expect to see

Mel Gibson drive by in a Mad Max car.

So

it's going to get a little wild where you are.

Anyway, we have a couple of important things to get your thoughts on, Victor.

One is

the DeSantis Newsome debate.

Yes.

Henry Kissinger passed away, and there's some

political kerfuffling about Donald Trump and Black Lives Matter.

We'll get started.

Let's start off with the debate, and we'll do that right after these important messages.

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I'm back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Later on in the podcast, towards the end, I will talk a little bit, Victor, about your official website, The Blade of Perseus at VictorHanson.com.

And we have a lot of new listeners, and I'll be encouraging them to visit and to subscribe.

But right now, Victor, I guess it's the only thing needs to be said as a setup is there was a debate, the governor of California, the governor of Florida, it was a long time coming.

Was it consequential?

That's one question.

Does it matter?

And the second question, broad questions, to you.

Victor, having seen the debate, what were your thoughts about it?

What were your thoughts about DeSantis' performance and Gavin Newsom's performance?

Well, you know, I wrote in my new, I don't know what you call it, Jack, but I've never, as I said, I had never tweeted until my daughter, Paulie,

Pauline,

suggested that we revive that inner account that you and I used to use to, you know, just for ads and stuff.

So I've been tweeting.

I wrote a long tweet.

I mean, I give it to her.

I don't know how to do it.

She puts it on.

And I wrote about it right after the debate.

And

it was just a typical script.

And you and I have talked about it.

I talked about it with Sammy.

I said that Gavin Newsom would start out robust, swarmy, slick back hair, bleached teeth gleaming, turning around, bully you, you're this, you're that.

Turn around and look at him straight in the eye.

And that would look impressive, robust, muscular for the first, I don't know, 10 minutes.

But then he's an empty suit.

He's an empty suit and he has two albatrosses around his neck.

One,

he

was mayor and lieutenant governor and governor for 20 years.

So if there's any one person responsible for the highest electricity cost in the continental United States, the highest gasoline prices in the continental United States,

the highest gasoline taxes in the continental United States, the highest income tax rate,

among the lowest test scores, the most homeless people, the most poverty as a percentage of the population, I think except for Mississippi, but higher than West Virginia,

and half of all births on Medi-Cal.

and some of the worst freeways, the 99 near me, I think has the highest death rate in the United States per 100,000 miles driven.

It's him.

And then he

is loyal, apparently.

I say apparently, because I don't know why he's debating.

If he's loyal, there's no, but anyway, he's not going to run and he's going to defend the brilliant economic record of Joe Biden.

When everybody who's listening knows that they don't listen to a word that these propagandists tell us about the inflation rate, all they know is that when Joe Biden entered office in January 20,

2021, food prices, housing,

fuel, transportation, health costs as a bundle were about 38% to 35%

cheaper than they are now.

And they're paying another, anywhere from

$700 to $1,000 a month.

And interest rates were 1.9 on 30-year.

I just took a loan out.

I was lucky to get it around 6%,

which I thought is three times higher than what it was.

But so he has that, he was defending that.

And I had empathy for him because how do you defend California and Joe Biden?

And then he defended his cognitive ability.

He's hail.

He's he's robust.

You know, it was just a complete lie.

So after about 20 minutes, he went through all the canned clichés, all the memorized lines, all the braggadaccio.

And DeSantis just matter of factly, you know, in a much less robust but matter of fact,

just started to quote, quote, quote, these are the people who leave California.

These are where they go.

These are the people who leave Florida.

He went through all the data.

It was kind of,

in a way, it was unfair to DeSantis, I mean, to Newsom.

Well, it was unfair because he had nothing to debate, but Kennedy just, I thought he did a pretty good job.

But Hannity just lifted the Wall Street Journal.

Remember that comparison they had this week on the two, the disaster in California and the miracle in Florida?

And they just, he just went through this.

He put it up on the screen.

And what do you do?

So DeSantis just quoted that.

You shut down the economy, you ruined your economy, and yet you have no more deaths.

You have no fewer deaths per population than we do, even though Florida has a lot more older people per capita.

So

after about 15 minutes, the sheen wore off.

And he's like a firecracker that was loud.

And then, you know how they kind of are dead, they sizzle and nothing there.

So for the next hour,

all he could do is attack DeSantis, abortion.

But then he tried to attack him from the right, you know?

Oh, you follow Fauchu too much.

And that doesn't work.

I mean, come on.

Everybody knows that DeSantis is conservative.

So it was just ad hominem, interrupt.

kind of like actually it was kind of like trump's first debate and he he just interrupted and yelled and then uh

DeSantis replied, I think a lot of people felt that he could have been more animated and really destroyed Newsome

and replied in kind.

He got pretty tough.

I've heard people call me and wrote me and said, well,

he shouldn't have been arguing like Newsom or he should have been arguing more.

That tells me it was about right.

So the question is, it was a big win for him.

And what does it mean?

And I don't know that answer.

I think it really, if there's any takeaway from it, I think a lot of the talk that Newsom should be the nominee is going to dissipate.

Right.

And I don't know how we'll see if

weeks from now, DeSantis can translate that really good performance into a stronger showing in Iowa.

But

if Joe Biden had been on the stage,

instead of Newsome, he would have done even worse.

Yeah.

trump had some comments victor on on the debate i think he was i saw something i didn't read in depth but some

mockery of desantis again with his height or something i'm sure it all gets back to lifts in the shoes and that kind of kind of stuff uh any any any thoughts on on trump's uh uh public reaction to it What did

Trump, did he react to the debate?

Yeah, it was something about like he needed to stand on a soapbox.

I think it was a high, it was a hype-related crack.

You know, it's just the kind of thing that in a barn in one of the outer boroughs, you know,

it would be funny.

It actually has its funniness now on a national scene, but you know, kind of to me, kind of typical Trump.

I think Trump,

anytime

any Republican can debate the opposition, the generic opposition,

and sort of undo him.

It helps Trump.

And so,

and I know everybody's going to say, well, no, no, you want dissent.

No, it does.

DeSantis just systematically

dismantled this whole lie.

All Newsom did was lie.

He had to.

That's not true.

Oh, this,

but he couldn't just say,

I am from California.

I love high taxes.

He even lied about that.

Oh, there's not that many taxes.

He couldn't just say we like the regulation.

We like the high gas because people drive less.

We like the homeless people because we don't.

He actually said at one point that illegal immigration was a matter of empathy and you had to be empathetic.

So

I think Republicans and conservatives, I say more of these the better, because all they do is on a broad front

dismantle.

And I go back to the same principle that you and I talked about earlier.

We're basically down to three candidates, one way ahead, and two fighting for two.

I just want everybody to unite around the nominee.

I wish, and I

mean,

it looks like Trump's ahead, and

Trump would be magnanimous to say that I'm going to endorse anybody who wins because he would obviously think he wins, but it would also force the other two candidates to say, and I'm going to do the same thing.

But what I don't want to see is

if

DeSantis

were to win, I would not want to see the MAGA people get angry and sit out.

If Trump wins, I would not want to see the Haley people sit out.

And if it came down,

I don't think this is going to happen, but if it came down between Haley, whom I don't feel is conservative enough, versus Biden,

well, I would do what I did in 2008 and 2012 when I held my nose and voted for two people I didn't think were conservative.

Because had either John McCain or Mitt Romney been elected, they would have been better than Barack Obama.

And I voted against both in the primary.

So

at this late date in America, we don't have a lot of choices.

And

so that's my attitude about the whole thing.

And I understand Donald Trump's a way ahead.

And he's,

you know, when you see him on TV,

he's lost a lot of weight.

He's, and he's not, I know he made fun of DeSantis, apparently, but he seemed like he's more,

I don't know what the word is, determined now

to

get in there and do what he has to do and not do all the other stuff.

And everybody, I was asked this, the only reason I'm asking, I'm here in Palm Beach giving some lectures for the Hoover Institution, and a lot of people said, well, nobody would work for him.

And

I don't think that's true.

There's Robert O'Brien, there's Mike Pompeo, there's Devin Nunes.

There's all sorts of talent that they needed to, you know, for CIA director, DOD, you name it.

And

I thought Ron DeSantis did a really good job.

I really did.

I wonder, Victor, and we'll talk to you a little more about Trump and

his determination, and we'll use that as an entree into the Black Lives Matter Kerfuffle.

But back on the debate, I'm wondering now, Riffing here, if this might be helpful

to California politics, especially bringing out the,

I've seen it before, the poop

map of San Francisco, but I think it's pretty effective.

And I wonder if

DeSantis' takedown of Newsom, even if it doesn't matter, may not matter at the end of the day on a national level, if it might have consequences in California.

We just can't write off California, can we?

I mean, forever it's going to be, you know, Democrat supermajority.

Maybe this debate will

influence and inspire.

People have to remember that as late as 2000, George Bush was remember he and Carl Roeben advised him to campaign at the last moment in California in 2000.

And there was a time, we got to remember, if if you look at the last 50 years in California and you add up the governorships, I think

it's about even, and if you count Arnold Schwarzenegger as a conservative, he's not, but he's a Republican, then you got four,

you have four terms of the last, you know, you have Reagan and Dick Majin and Pete Wilson and Schwarzenegger is 32 years out, I think, out of the last 58 or something.

You just had the two Jerry Browns

for 16, and then you had Newsom for, you have 20.

So it wasn't that long ago.

And what happened, of course, is over the last 30 years, somewhere between 8 and 10 million left, and those were conservative voters.

And then we had the second highest number.

Well, we have the highest number of illegal aliens, and one out of every four.

Excuse me, it's higher, 27% of the resident population of California was not born in the United States.

And under our current immigration, 90% of these new immigrants come

from family reasons and they come from impoverished areas in China or Asia or especially Central America and Mexico, and they're constituents of the Democratic Party.

And then, of course, Silicon Valley warped the whole thing when you have $9 trillion of market capitalization and they warped the politics by funding the Democrats.

But this all hinged on 45% of the population is Hispanic, Mexican-American, Central American, et cetera, et cetera.

And they're all liberal, and they still are under the age of 40.

But because California, like all Democratic states, have so alienated the white working class, which is still,

I don't know, 35, 40% of California,

they have to depend inordinately on so-called minorities.

And that means 60% of the Hispanic vote.

And I think nationwide it's it's going to split 50-50.

And maybe in California,

a Republican someday could get 50-50.

And if they could, they would win again.

Because, you know, as I say, I live in a community where I usually don't see anybody other than Mexican-American for the entire day when I go into town or people come by the house.

And I've just noticed that

If I walked into a supermarket in my hometown, people didn't want to talk if they knew me or they thought they knew me.

And if I go now, the first thing they do is come over.

It's not to say, hello, I saw you on Fox or something.

It's hello,

go Trump.

You know what I mean?

Or

it's just overt.

Everybody there is angry.

And I asked them, I always am curious when I fill up a gas.

It's gasoline prices in California.

I had an echo, my Echo Diesel, by the way, it's on month three now, waiting for a turbo tube.

Wow.

So five months total out of two years, it's been in the shop.

And it's not, it's a great truck.

It just, they don't have the part for one thing.

But anyway, I was talking to a guy with a diesel pickup this week, and it was almost $6 a gallon.

He couldn't fill up $180 to fill his $30 gallon tank.

And when you look at housing and everything, I think the Hispanic community, and then when you put in the trans issue and the abortion issue, this Republican mantra that was completely bogus the last,

I don't know, 40 years, Hispanics are family values.

They're natural Republicans.

It's actually starting to come true now, but for economic reasons and some cultural.

So I'm confident in the long run that the Mexican-American community is going to step up and it's going to repudiate these.

leaders that are left-wing of the community.

These are people who are cultivated and groomed by the bicostal elite, and they go to universities and then they go work for liberal politicians and they represent Bay Area districts, but they don't represent the majority of

Hispanic people, Latino people in Salinas or Gilroy or Fresno or Merdera or Merced.

And we're starting to see that with conservative Mexican-American candidates.

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So, Victor,

what next?

Oh, yeah, Trump.

I was talking about Trump.

Trump and Black Lives Matter.

So, Donald Trump on, I guess it's Truth Social, he put this out.

Maybe it was picked up on Twitter.

By the way, I'm being attacked for keep calling it Twitter, Victor.

So someone told me, stop it.

And maybe I should pass the job on to a younger person and enjoy retirement.

So I'll call it X for the sake of this

crank.

Anyway,

on X and on social media, yeah, Trump

talked about being supported.

He got support by a founder or a leader of what was Black Lives Matter, I believe, Rhode Island.

And then he talked and kind of talked that I think would be off-putting to a lot of conservatives of, yeah, Black Lives Matter.

This is unfair to me to say because

I'm probably incorrectly paraphrasing it, but it came off as, yeah, they've done good things and a lot of them like me, and this is all great and groovy.

I personally found it quite off-putting.

Black Lives Matter is a socialist organization and

destroying America.

Yeah,

if you look at Phyllis Collars and her other two, it's actually a self-admitted communist, socialist, Marxist organization.

As I said, Black Lives Matter came to the fore after Ferguson.

But before that, it was a very strange group.

It was a group of three

non-gender-specific black women who were trying to advocate for lesbian rights and gay rights within the black community.

And then it was mainstream.

And then after it was mainstream with Ferguson and all the rest of the stuff,

then they cashed out, got all their money, and then the whole thing is collapsed.

It was collapsed because the defunding police, which was foundational principle of Black Lives Matter, led to a soaring crime rate that ended in a lot of deaths of inner city people.

So now it's discredited because its agenda destroyed a lot of lives.

And more importantly, the people who promulgated that agenda retired into semi-luxury with funds that were absconded.

And then all of the little satellites of it, Professor Kendi and his $50 million research center, da-da-da.

It was a grifting operation.

The thing about Trump is

he's not specific, but what he means is that Black Lives Matter means blacks.

And these Black Lives Matter

organizations that endorse him are contrary to the foundational principles of the organizations they lead.

So Donald Trump doesn't support Black Lives Matter with a glider poster.

Remember that?

Glorifying the October 7th airborne slaughter of Jews.

But he needs to be more specific and say that

I have new support in the black community.

And I think he's conflating Black Lives Matter and the Black community or the people who are endorsing him from Black Lives Matter are renegade apostates that the Black Lives Matter National, if there is such a thing, would disown.

But the question more importantly is,

why are black leftists starting to gravitate toward

Donald Trump?

One of, of course, is economics.

They were much better off, as everybody was, with low interest rates, low inflation rates.

And the unemployment for blacks before COVID was just as good or better than it is now, which is going down.

And then number two,

the social issues that bothers a lot of people, but especially minorities, the trans issue,

the radical abortion issue, because there's more, I mean, if you look at those statistics, and you and I have talked about that, what the black population would be if it weren't for half of all abortions from 12% of the population.

And it's kind of a

I don't even want to use the word for it, but it's been a war against black people, this radical abortion opportunity.

Oh, Jesse Jackson called it a genocide once upon a time.

He called it a genocide.

Yeah.

Yeah, I

exactly.

And so they also like the idea that he doesn't take crap off anybody.

So I didn't, you know, I thought that mugshot thing was sort of overplayed on Fox and, you know, that everybody's going to vote for him, who's a minority.

It was kind of, you know, the left said, oh, this is racist or something.

But I talked to a lot of people in my hometown, and it's not so much the mugshot, but it's the idea that

these wealthy white elites are going after someone and trying to destroy them

in a way that they feel is bullying.

And then they kind of project the man or the establishment doing that to Trump, what they did to him.

And I know somebody's going to say, listen, that's bogus.

He's a billionaire.

He's part of the establishment.

No, he's a renegade.

They hate him more than they hate anybody.

And that actually worked.

The $64,000 question is still the one that remains, and that is count the

trials and dates of Fannie Willis,

Alvin Bragg, Letita James, and Jack Smith, and realize that three of the four are not African Americans of the Black Lives Matter apostates or the Black community.

20%

supports Trump, but they're radical leftists.

And they will be trying these cases in Miami and Atlanta and New York and Washington that will have minority juries.

And at least three of the four judges so far are left-wing.

And there'll probably be the fourth will be left-wing.

So Donald Trump is going to go before

a left-wing jury with a left-wing judge and a left-wing prosecutor.

And yes, all of the charges are completely bogus.

They really are.

They would apply to almost anybody.

You know, speaking here, I drove by Mar-Lago.

Jack, the idea that that's not worth $100 or $200 million is ridiculous.

It's got water on both sides.

It looks like it's, I mean,

the idea that it's worth $17 million is a joke.

The front door is worth that.

So, I mean, that is bogus.

And the January 6th stuff is bogus.

And the files that he took as president are no worse or no better than Joe Biden, what he did with his files, with his Corvette when he was vice president.

Alvin Bragg,

you know, disclosure form,

Stormy as campaign, finance, it's all bogus, all of it.

Fannie Willis, the phone call, blah, dah, dah, dah.

So the point is,

that doesn't matter.

So we don't know.

We've never been in this territory and we can see what the Democrats are doing.

I still believe that, that they thought it would give them empathy for Trump.

He would be way ahead and get nominated.

And then just as he walks into the mousetrap of the nomination and gets it, then they clamp down and grab him.

And then he's gag ordered, house arrested, incarcerated, fined into bankruptcy, psychologically destroyed, material, physically destroyed, health-wise.

That's what their whole plan was.

And then at the last moment, it's sort of like that pathetic scene with George McGovern when Thomas Eagleton was declared.

Shock treatment was beyond the pale.

So they were looking for anybody.

Remember, Sergeant Shriver had to step in.

And that's what they hope the Republicans.

But I'm a firm believer not only in divine justice in the Christian sense, but also

the Greek version of karma that is nemesis and eubris.

And they better be very careful because

we don't know any precedents.

And Donald Trump may, in fact, get the nomination and may, in fact, be indicted, but he may still be able to campaign and be elected.

And they don't know any of any, we've never had this before.

And everybody said, well, we've never had a cook before.

No, we've never had a prosecutor in concert trying to destroy a candidate.

Never.

So we don't know what's going on.

And there are candidates, as I said, Haley and dissenters.

That's why I'm not angry.

You need candidates out there in case something happens.

And that's good.

But the idea that

they're going to destroy Donald Trump with these indictments in jail, we don't know if that's true or not.

We could be.

But he could,

and then when they say revenge, well, he's going to get angry and rage.

Your friend, Jack, Jack

Scarborough, what's his name?

Joe.

Joe Scarborough was saying, oh, he did all these things and he's going to do all these things.

That's just projection, as I said in a column.

The left is warning everybody about Trump rage because they know what they would do if they were Trump and they had suffered from them what Trump has.

They would get back at everybody.

I don't think he's going to do that.

He make what they, what we call clean house, a DOJ, they would call revenge.

They fire a bunch of left-wing prosecutors the way that Obama fired right-wing prosecutors.

Day one, right?

He did.

Hey, he fired people from the Battles Monument Commission.

Yes, he fired.

I got a letter saying, you know, as soon as he's elected, you will vacate.

And then I was on the American Battlefields Commission and

I was fired.

And then they didn't fill the position for almost a year.

So it was, they would rather have nobody than me.

Yeah.

To the victors go the spoils.

And I went to a lot, I went, I went to a lot of battlefield

cemeteries in Europe.

And I went to some in Italy and just to inspect them so I'd be knowledgeable.

I went to one in Tunisia.

I never charged the commission.

I never filed travel time.

I just,

if I was going overseas, I made it a point to see them.

So I was a.

You were also on the 1776 commission.

I got kneecap day once.

Yes, have been fired.

I have been summarily fired by the Biden, the Obama-Biden nexus.

Hey, Victor, this little section started out about Trump BLM and

actually, as you point out,

Donald Trump's

some degree of allure or increasing appeal to the Black community.

I just, I'm going to, I'm springing this on you, but while this is happening,

the,

I think, increasing

disdain in the Democrat caucus from Jews, or might be the case, is percolating.

I just saw this headline today in

New York Post, Dem Jewish Caucus Furor.

North Carolina Democrats voted earlier this month against

officially recognizing their Jewish caucus, plunging the state party into conflict and serving as a stumbling block for members of Congress in vulnerable districts.

The Tarheel States Democratic Party voted 17 to 16 against formally acknowledging the Jewish caucus.

This happened on November 12th.

This is

insane.

It's insane.

Yeah, so all these things like let's get Trump by court.

This is not happening in a vacuum.

It's happening while the Democrats are actually self-inflicting

themselves with

a reliable

block, once a political block, Jewish vote, and now

black votes seeming to seep away.

So, if you have any thoughts on that, no, I do.

I mean,

Anthony Blinken, Jack, reportedly in a close section with the war cabinet, the coalition war cabinet, when they said we have to destroy Hamas.

And by the way, the Hamas leader just said that we have no regrets of what we did on October 7th and we have a bigger operation on the horizon plan.

Okay, so just think of what he said and then think of these snotty-nosed kids on campus saying,

Palestine from the river to the sea, liberate Palestine.

What they're basically saying is we want another planned Hamas operation.

And the sick thing about it is if they were to break in again, and if they were to kill 2,500 Jews and decapitate them and macerate them and mutilate them, these same people would be ecstatic and protesting because they're amoral people and they can't see

the modern version of the SS when you see it.

And then you can see why they're

the political manifestation of this hatred is in the Democratic Party.

If you were a Jewish Democrat, which means 70% of them, and you were a donor to these causes, giving the Democratic Party vis-a-vis their foreign policy with Israel is like giving firecrackers to a child, gas to an arsis.

These people, you know, a needle to an addict.

And I

don't understand why anybody who feels strongly about Israel, whether they are Jewish or not, would have anything to do with this Democratic Party.

Anthony Blinken, as I said, just went over to the War Cabinet.

And when they outlined that they had to eliminate Hamas and to do it thoroughly and completely would require weeks, if not months, he said, I don't think you have credit for that.

What does that mean?

That means, I don't think you have our permission.

And our permission means 75% of your weapons that we give you.

And I thought that they,

the reason I'm curious about that, I thought they impeached Donald Trump because the Congress had okayed weapons, offensive weapons that he had requested that Obama Biden had denied at Ukraine.

And then he put a hold, but did not cancel, a legislative approved foreign aid package to Ukraine because he had the strange, strange, weird, where do you get that idea that the Biden family was utterly corrupt and had fired a prosecutor who put his nose into it.

They impeached him for that.

So let me get this straight.

$14 billion of aid

have been allotted to Israel by the Congress and apparently signed by the president.

And now you have the Secretary of State saying, I don't think you have credit.

Well, listen, Mr.

Blinken, are we going to impeach you because you're trying to use foreign aid that has been approved by the Congress as a lever for what?

Your political purposes?

You impeached Donald Trump because you said he was going after Joe Biden.

Well, what are you doing with that aid?

You are conditioning it on them obeying you so that you can pacify your Muslim constituency that you just apologized to

when Joe Biden said, I should have, I'm sorry, I should have believed Hamas's bogus figures.

And they're trying to do it before the election.

So it's really disturbing.

The fact of the matter is, Hamas promises, promises, promises, promises to kill more Jews.

And the only way that you're going to, a lot of people have written me, it's an idea, Victor.

It's an idea.

You can't kill an idea.

Yes, you can.

Do you think National Socialism in Germany is an idea now?

Do you think there's a lot of Marxists going around and say, let's bring back the Soviet Union?

No.

Even in China, do you think somebody said, let's bring back Maoism?

It's a right-wing dictatorship, really, to tell you the truth.

It calls itself communism.

But my point is, you can discredit ideas.

And if you let the Israelis do what they have to do, give them three or four months to destroy all of the tunnel, to hunt down all the perpetrators, and they know them now, the names, of the killers on October 7th, to eliminate all of the architects of Hamas, the people who process the money, who, whether they're in Qatar or Beirut or they're in Gaza, that is the people who go to Iran, come back, get the checks, deposit it, all of those people, the middle-level accounts, all of them, and get rid of them and then humiliate Hamas.

And when they're done, say to the Gazan people, this is what your support of these people have given you.

And here's the alternative.

We can get an international Middle East group of nations that can supervise the rebuilding with golf money, and you can have a beautiful state and you can govern it without amounts but if you want to keep doing this this is what your permanent status is going to be because we're not going to allow you periodically to sneak across and murder and rape and kill people and why wouldn't you be for all that why wouldn't you let them do that

and

i don't i it just you know if we had

If you had any Republican president right now, I don't know about Haley because I don't know her that well, but if you had DeSantis or Trump, and I think either one, I think, first of all, this would have never happened.

It would not have happened, right?

It never would have happened with Trump president.

And

they would have told Hamas,

they would have told Hamas, you're going to be destroyed, and they would have, so you better give up.

And they would have told the coalition government, take care of business.

The quicker you can do it is better for you and better for us.

So do it quickly.

And here's the wherewithal to do it.

But you are doing us a favor because these people hate us as much as they hate you.

And they've killed 30 American citizens and they've taken hostage 10.

Nobody talks about that.

Right.

Now, what's so sick about Jack is if you had an American special ops team and they went in there to get those 10 Americans out and they said, and they were fighting Hamas, I bet you these protests would be, in America, would be protesting against our own people and for Hamas.

That's how sick they are because they haven't said one word in any of these protests

about fellow Americans that were killed by Hamas.

Did Israelis kill Americans?

No.

Did Israelis take Americans hostage?

No.

Nobody talks about that.

Yeah, well, we don't feel any rage coming from the leader of the free world either about this

two dozen plus countrymen.

They don't care.

They don't care.

So,

you know,

I talked to an official in Israel

two years ago when I was there with this, actually, yeah, almost two years ago, a year and a half ago.

And he said to me, who will remain nameless, he was pretty high official,

he said,

you don't have to know the intricacies of the history, although it helps.

The protesters don't know anything, but he said the Trump, Trump, meaning the Trump administration, but perhaps Trump himself, when we went over there, we explained

what

the Golan Heights were, what the embassy in Jerusalem would mean, what the end of Solomania would mean,

what declaring the Houthis a terrorist organization would mean, what cutting off Hamas would mean, getting out of the Iran deal

would mean,

what

putting sanctions on Iran would mean, the whole list.

And they said that the Trump people and Trump, I guess, in person said, these are not just your interests, they're Western interests.

They're our interests.

So what's the problem with getting them done?

And he did all of those.

Nobody else would have done that.

He did all of them.

And the result was jake sullivan who despises donald trump so much that he was the architect of the alpha ping bank hoax remember that in the 2016 election when he was working for hillary and anthony blinken

the secretary of state was the architect of the 51 quote-unquote intelligence authorities that lied to the nation right on the eve of debate and the election that Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation.

So these are the people running our foreign policy.

But Jake Sullivan himself said, my portfolio,

national security advisor, right before October 7th, my portfolio in the Middle East is kind of boring.

Nothing going on.

It's pretty quiet.

I don't really worry much about it.

What was the subtext was,

I inherited what Trump did, and it's taken me three years to screw it up, and I haven't yet screwed it up.

I've tried.

I've tried to say the Houthis aren't terrorists.

I've tried to lift the sanctions on the Iranians and give them 50 billion to 100 billion of cash from order sales.

I've tried to get back in the Iran deal.

I'm still grinning my teeth and angry about the Golden Heights and the embassy.

I tried to give the money back to Gaza and I haven't screwed it up yet.

And then we had October 7th and he took him three years to screw it up, but they did screw it up.

Yeah.

And then came October 8th, Victor, and

the unbridled anti-Semitism.

Yes.

Well,

as we began this and conclude this little section,

the hatred of Jews has gotten.

So

much so that politically you can't even have a senior party democratic caucus anymore.

Yeah,

I was thinking about that.

If you and I did this broadcast on, I don't know, October 6th,

and we had said, I mean, it was going on before, but we had said the fall, you know, it's really weird how anti-Semitism is spreading around the country.

I bet you that will come a day, maybe in five years or something, that Jewish

people and, I don't know, libraries like Cooper Union, just take one example, will be afraid to go out.

They'll be trapped.

Or I bet you, Jack, it's getting so bad that the president of MIT will tell Jewish students to keep away from some areas that she can't guarantee their safety in.

Or I bet you where I work, Jack, there'll be a Stanford professor who will tell Jewish students as if he's some hair doctor in 1930s Germany to get on one side of the room away from the non-Jews.

And I bet you, Jack, you know, I hear all these things about Cornell.

I bet you there'll be a Cornell black professor who will say he's exhilarated if they ever kill Jews.

And

I think there'll be a bunch of pro-Hamas people or pro-terrorists that will crowd in, swarm the rotunda.

That crazy Talib congresswoman will go out and say river to the sea.

If I had said that or you had said that, they would think, oh, man, you guys are just so paranoid.

That is crazy.

And now we just sort of shrug.

Well, that happened.

Yeah.

It's going to to get worse.

It's going to get worse as Hamas keeps losing and people get angrier and angrier at these protests.

They're going to be shriller and shriller and shriller.

This Chicago Democratic Convention is going to be a nightmare.

It's going to be 1968 all over again.

On steroids.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yep.

Well, Victor, we have.

Time for one more chunk on this episode and

mentioned at the outset, we were going to ask for your thoughts about

Henry Kissinger, who passed away earlier this week at the age of 100.

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

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Victor Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State, man still in the saddle even earlier this calendar year, he was visiting China.

He passed away.

I'm two things.

One, curious about your broader thoughts of this man of some significant consequence of the 20th century, maybe even into the 21st a little bit.

And I'm also curious on a personal level if Kissinger had, if you had any interactions with him at Hoover.

I don't know if you did or didn't, but Victor, anything you'd like to say about this?

I met him once at the Hoover.

I did a ricochet paw test with Peter Robinson, I think yesterday.

And he asked me that.

And I think think it was either the Reston lecture or maybe it was another one I did for the Naval Academy where he came in the audience and

I talked to him just a second.

And then he was very interested as a realist in Thucydides.

And I wrote the introduction to the landmark Thucydides translation

edition.

And he wrote me a note when that came out, very nice note.

And then when I wrote A War Like No Other, A History of the Peloponnesian War, he wrote me a long note about that.

And then

I was at a

Northern California club, and he came in.

And that time he was in a wheelchair.

But maybe it was just because it was sort of rugged terrain.

And I walked by him, and

he was being swarmed by people.

And

so I didn't think he would.

And he, in that voice, said, I very much like talking to you about Thucydides.

So even though he'd just written me notes,

I was kind of appalled by all the negative about him.

And I know that

Reagan, the thing about him was he was only in power as Secretary of State or National Security Advisor under Nixon and Ford for eight years.

I think in that 12-year period, he had actual control of foreign policy.

But what's weird about it,

from 1980 until his death in 23,

and we're talking about 43 years,

and we're talking about late 50s and 60s,

he was probably the most influential foreign policy advisor in the United States without a portfolio.

I mean, George W.

Bush talked to him all the time about Iraq.

He gave, and I say, he gave Matthew Ridgway's advice to the Bush administrator.

I wouldn't go into Iraq and try to nation build because he was a realist.

But if you go in, the only thing worse than a bad war is losing it.

Don't lose it.

I know he was appalled about Afghanistan, and he gave advice to the Clinton administration.

They got mad at Clinton when he called them a few times.

I don't think Obama called him at all, but I know that Trump was on pretty good terms with him.

And he was one of these people who probably didn't like Trump, but he was a realist, and he understood that in

high-stakes geostrategic negotiations, acting erratic or enigmatic rather than obsequious and transparent is an advantage.

And that Trump had a certain style with Kim Jong-un

or with

the radical people in the Middle East or with Putin, that they didn't know what he would do at any time.

And that was of some value.

And then I wrote his memoirs.

I know that Peter corrected me and said, said, because he wrote them in longhand, but they're beautifully written.

I know that he had people who helped edit them, but everybody has a copy editor that's assigned to you.

So I thought they were really good, the three volumes, and I read them very carefully.

I got his latest book on leadership.

He's got a good chapter on Margaret Thatcher.

The right didn't like him, and there's no Ronald Reagan in that latest volume as a great statesman, because

he had, you know, he cut his teeth with Nelson Rockefeller and he came to notice because as an academic, he had written about

how to conduct foreign policy in the nuclear age.

He even had gotten really controversial in saying that, you know, you can use tactical nuclear weapons without advancing to strategic nuclear exchanges.

But the point I'm making is that he tried to talk about foreign policy in a new age in which you're dealing with two powers that have the ability to blow up the world.

So when Reagan came along, who was outside of the Nelson Rockefeller

Bush aristocracy and was a populist from California and was saying that his policy is we win and they lose to Kissinger,

that was an enigma.

I mean, not just mysterious, but probably

terrible.

And he, you know, he's a guy who didn't want to meet social nits.

And

I think the result was he got on the wrong side of Roman Weagen, although I think George Schultz knew him and liked him very well.

So then that was a 12.

Yeah, Bill Buckley, they were, if you could say, best friends, close to.

That didn't always translate into public agreement on things, but he did have his friendships and on the right.

Yeah, and I think that was the Wright's criticism that he was a realist when you needed an idealist to defeat the Soviet Union, build a big military, et cetera.

But

I think he joined that finally.

And then the left, of course, my God, they thought he was responsible for the genocide in Cambodia, the genocide in the Pakistani Bangladesh thing, the genocide in Greece,

Cypriots, the genocide everywhere.

And so they hated his guts.

And those obituaries, as I glanced at, were pretty unfair.

But, But, you know, Christopher Hitchens I knew really well.

And

I got in a couple of arguments with him about the trial of Henry Kissinger about Cambodia.

And even he,

I don't want to speak ill of the dead or to put words in the mouth of the dead who can't answer, but in my conversations with him during that period, 2006,

oh, maybe 2003 to 2009, when I talked to him, maybe twice a month.

And he was now kind of a neoconservative.

I don't know what he was, but he kind of retracted some of the things he thought about him.

And then William Shawcross, who wrote Sideshow,

which was an earlier version condemning

Kissinger for the bombing of Cambodia, he formally apologized to Kissinger and said that was, he understood the logic that these people were fueling the North Vietnamese.

they were using

cambodian territory and troops to kill americans and therefore they had to be stopped the i.e bomb and they couldn't and anyway the point is that and by the way william shallcross is a wonderful person his father lord shore shall cross was the chief british prosecutor at the nurenberg trial famously and he was a he was somebody who was a man of the left and then became a centrist or conservative and wrote a great book on the royal family.

And he's come to Hoover a couple of times, and I've had wonderful conversations with him.

He's really a nice person.

But my point is that

I think by the time he died, except for the hard left, he'd kind of transcended all of the left-wing, right-wing criticism.

And people kind of came to the consensus that

there was an American who

popularized or made the public aware of what what geostrategic diplomacy was and what is that?

You look at your opponent, you're trying to further your interests, but you would concede that they're trying to further their interests.

So you study, you learn about their culture, their history, and what they want out of you and why they want it out of you.

And then you find to what degree of that agenda that's antithetical, if it's China, Russia, whatever, to yours, that you could live with and what you could get in exchange for it.

And then you deal.

That's pretty much what Trump did, but without the sophisticated knowledge of what Kissinger is saying, you know, their culture history.

And then you come to a deal, and that disappoints people that you didn't get all of what you wanted.

And then he also popularized, I think, intersectionality.

And that means that

the world is a chessboard.

And when you get humiliated in Afghanistan, and you get humiliated by letting a Chinese balloon traverse your country, and you get humiliated by the Ukrainian invasion, that when you said you wouldn't do anything if it was a minor invasion, and you get humiliated when your president has to be helped at summits with foreign leaders, then it's logical that Hamas will go in and kill Jews without fear of American involvement and kill Americans.

So everything is connected where I don't think everybody said, well, that's obvious, Victor.

Come on.

We know that.

You know that because you have common sense, but these people don't.

So, you know, Blinken and Salt.

Oh, nothing wrong with you.

That was one of our great evacuations.

No, it was the worst military defeat, I think, worse than 1975 in Vietnam.

But so that's what his contribution was.

He was a beautiful prose stylist.

He dated a lot of of beautiful women.

Remember that?

And our generation remembers Jill St.

John, Ava Gobor, Liz Taylor, et cetera, et cetera.

His wife

once had a White House correspondence dinner, Nancy Kissinger and Pat Buckley, Bill's wife, and Barbara Walters were all

lecturing me about smoking.

I was smoking a cigarette.

That's my ties to the Kissinger family.

Did they all smoke?

They also, the weirdest thing is the week or so later, I was watching C-SPAN and they had retrospective on the 1976 Republican convention where Reagan came out and gave that terrific speech and kind of embarrassed Jerry Ford.

But they shot and you took pictures of the audience.

And who's in the audience?

Nancy Kissinger smoking a cigarette.

So, and Pat smoked like a chimney.

Victor, I'm curious before we end, you mentioned Christopher Hitchens.

You were talking to him twice a week.

What was the basis of that

relationship?

Just Just curious.

I don't quite know what the basis was of it.

That I think it was he had been orphaned over the Iraq war, and he had supported for

grounds of the Iraq war.

And I had,

and

it just turned out that we had dovetailed on one point or one central point.

I didn't get into the WMD.

What I said was, you've got to take Saddam out after 9-11.

And I was very clear about that.

So, what I mean by this is twofold.

One,

I thought that the Robert Kagan, Bill Crystal project for a new American century was completely insane.

That was Fareed Zakori, all those guys who in 1999 were pressuring Bill Clinton

to evolve beyond the no-fly zone vestigial policy from the Bush administration to take out Saddam preemptively, right?

That's what they were.

But after 9-11,

I looked at what the Congress had passed, bipartisan, overwhelming Democratic support, Joe Biden among them.

And they said there's 23 RITs.

Only three of them had anything to do.

with WMD, but it was the others were very important.

They had the architects of the first World Trade 93 bombing in Baghdad.

They that weren't incarcerated.

They had Abu Nadal.

They had every terrorist in Baghdad under sanctuary.

They had wiped out the marsh Arabs.

They were giving $50,000 bonuses to suicide bombers.

They had violated all the UN accords that had been left over from the first Gulf War about army.

They had wiped out, tried to wipe out the Kurds.

and you read those congressional writs there was a reason why only three of them were on wmd

i thought they had wmd and they had given it to syria before the tensions heated up so they could keep it i think that's true when we see what assad had apparently used it came from somebody but that wasn't the point so he had read that and he had felt the same thing that putting all your eggs in the w and b basket was a mistake but there was reason to get rid of them.

And so I was at the Naval Academy that year and he called me up and he wanted to talk about it.

And then he was intrigued that I lived on a farm and I wasn't part of the Washington establishment.

So when I went back, on two or three occasions, he came down to my farm and then he wanted to be associated with the Hoovers.

And he had in-laws that lived in Atherton.

So he came out every summer.

And we were very close.

In a weird way, he might have saved my life when I was in Libya and I had a ruptured appendix and there was nobody that could operate.

I didn't know what to do.

And I called my son, who was young then, and I just said, go to my desk and find any number.

and call that number.

And the only one there with no name, he called it, and it was Christopher Hitchens.

Wow.

Yeah.

And Christopher Hitchens made some calls to people in the government.

And the next thing I knew, when I woke up, I found a surgeon on my own who was an Egyptian in his pajamas at three in the morning.

And I was in an Iranian anesthesiologist with

ether.

And this was not a hospital.

It was a clinic.

And so they did it on a, you know, a kitchen table

with a Pakistani nurse who spoke English.

And they took a disruptured appendix out and they saved my life because there was gangrene because I had waited three days.

And they took out 10 inches of my colon, the maximum part you could have without a colostomy.

And it was pure black.

They gave it to me.

I brought it back and had a pathology in California.

I brought it back in a bag of alcohol.

But anyway, I was sitting there, and then all of a sudden, everything wonderful happened.

A doctor from Georgetown, who was in there, a Libyan American, and Gaddafi was reforming and trying to bring all the expatriates back with generous bonuses.

They were giving him a huge clinic and all sorts of technology.

And he came in with a suitcase that had

augmentin, Cipro,

and another drug for intestinal.

Because I had really bad perin tinitis and there was no antibiotics there and there was no painkiller.

So I had no painkiller, no antibiotics.

And on day two, he came in and

within 24 hours of taking this combination of three antibiotics and they had hydrocodin,

I had no pain and it cleared it up.

And that

came from a phone call from Christopher to a government official who then called, and there was no embassy, but they had called an envoy.

And the envoy in Libya, who was looking for an embassy,

called around and found this doctor.

And

he came into my room with the antibiotics, and that saved me.

Wow.

So

I owed him a lot for that.

Yeah,

I think we drifted apart over Obama, and he was under enormous pressure from the left.

They hated him.

And he had written a book, God is Not Great,

about Islam.

But it was actually, if you read that book, it was more of an attack on Christianity than Islam, which I kind of didn't agree with.

But I guess after 2009, 10, 11, 12, he drifted back to the Obama side.

And I still was friendly to him, but he didn't,

and he didn't come out.

He wasn't as friendly.

And then when I saw him,

he was, well, he had a, there was something wrong with him, and he thought he had been bitten by a spider.

He had, and I thought that it was more than that.

So he was limping around at Hoover, and I suggested that's not a black widow.

Because he said black widows are in cow.

I said they're everywhere, but they very rarely bite somebody.

And that is a

staph infection.

Because my son had had one like that.

And it actually was a secondary infection from what turned out to be this esophageal cancer that killed his father.

And he had always thought that he would live longer.

You know, it was very funny, last story.

He went up once to a club I was in, and

he spent three days, I'm not kidding you, drinking and smoking all day and all night.

And he had a whole crowd entertained.

He had stories from Oxford.

He had stories from all over the world.

He was drinking red wine.

He drank a fifth of hard liquor each night.

He was smoking.

There was a there, a good friend of mine at the time, and he said, Victor, you know this man,

he's killing himself.

And I said, you can't do anything.

And he said, I am a doctor at major university.

I won't tell you where it was, but he did.

So he got Christopher to go there.

Christopher was, you know,

he was happy to go.

This guy had said, you know, so they did everything, Jack.

They did blood tests.

They did lung capacity.

They did blood sugar.

You name it, 50 tests.

And I get a call from the doctor and said, Christopher has asked me to release these blood tests to you,

knowledge of them.

He wants to make a point.

He wants to make a point.

Right.

Because

I didn't drink burn.

I did kidney stones.

I didn't drink.

And I had this maths problem.

I didn't.

math to cytosis, so I didn't want to drink.

And he thought that was unhealthy.

He told me I didn't smoke.

That was unhealthy.

I never used drugs.

That was unhealthy.

Okay.

So the tests come back, Jack, and guess what they show?

Perfect blood sugar,

perfect cholesterol, no sign of inflammation, no sign of plaque, no sign of kidney problems, no sign of liver problem.

Everything was perfect.

And then nine months later, he got esophagic cancer.

So he wrote me a note and said, perfect.

Get it?

And it was like, live your life and relax and have conversation and don't just write or seclude yourself or read get out and enjoy life have a drink you know smoke a cigarette yeah and i wrote back

maiden agon in greek nothing too much

and uh

and anyway the point is that after after that he got very ill and i saw him in canada when he was very ill and i had a long talk with him we were speaking and i think it was some, it wasn't Winnipeg.

It was the other city northern north in Alberta.

But we had a long talk and we got along.

But I never really saw him the last year of his life.

And I think he,

oh, there was one other story.

I might have told you that very quickly.

He came once to my farm and he said, we got to get tequila.

And I said, I had some people over to meet him.

And I said, okay.

And he said, no, there's only one brand, Victor.

It's of all my travels.

And so I forgot the name of it.

And I said, this is Selma.

Come on.

So he said, turn it over to me.

And so I thought, you know what?

I'm so sick of this.

I'm going to

fix this guy.

So I took him to the most rugged, dangerous part of my hometown.

And I picked out a Mexican liquor store that no one spoke English in.

And I thought, you know what?

I'm going to have this Englishman prance in and demand this esoteric tequila, and they're going to give him the worst looks, hard time.

We'll be lucky to get out alive.

So I drive him to West Salma.

We go into this place.

It's pretty wild.

And in perfect mellifilous Spanish,

not a Mexican dialect.

I'm talking about classical Spanish that I could understand.

He says, I would like this brand of tequila.

Do you happen to have it?

And the guy says, what?

And I thought, ah, yeah, let me look.

So he says this in Spanish, and he looks onto the counter.

He brings up the most dusty old bottle you can imagine, had never been opened.

And Christopher buys it, and before we go out, he opens the top and he pours a little bit.

He asks the person for a glass and he has it.

me drink a little bit and he says see Victor this is what happens when you are a parochial a provincial you don't know the treasures in your own backyard.

It takes a cosmopolitan to appreciate that people all over the world have refined tastes no matter what their economic stature.

It was pretty funny.

He said this.

It was a gloating, but kind of an endearing.

So my read on Christopher Hitchens is

he had enormous ego.

He was very talented.

It's kind of an autodidact.

He had an Oxford bachelor's, but not an advanced degree, but I liked him and

I respected him.

Somebody asked me once, I was eating dinner with him, and they saw me in a restaurant.

And this person said, What's it like to go out and have dinner with him?

I said, It's like eating next to a cobra

because you never knew when he was coil and bite you.

Yeah, yeah, wow.

Well, it's fascinating.

By the way, his brother, Peter, is uh writes for anything.

I like Peter.

I like Peter Hitchens.

I don't think I've met him, but I like him.

I like him.

He's a terrific writer.

Yeah, he is.

Victor, speaking of terrific writers, you're one and terrific raconteur here and

elucidator of important issues that matter.

So thanks for all the wisdom

you shared today.

We thank our listeners, no matter what platform they listen on, and in particular those who do listen on iTunes slash Apple, who rate the show zero to five five stars.

Many people do that.

We thank those who take the time to do that.

And the average is 4.9 something, Victor, of course.

Some people leave comments on those platforms.

And I'm going to read two.

VDH is my preferred professor is the title of one.

Listening to the Victor Davis Hanson Show is like taking a free course in both world history and current events.

His depth of knowledge is incredible.

His recall is amazing.

And his views on current events are outstanding and deeply thought out.

This is a must-listen for me every week.

Thank you, Mr.

Hansen.

And that's from Bob Bronson.

And then one is titled My Favorite Podcast.

Victor is the only podcast that I look forward to.

His knowledge of history leaves me in awe every time.

I'm fifth generation, still living on our family dairy farm.

I can totally relate.

There was always work to be done, but looking back 63 years, I wouldn't have wanted anything different.

I too have a great family and great memories.

Thank you for sharing yours, Darlene McGinnis.

So thank you, Darlene.

Thank you, Bob.

Thank you, everybody else, who takes the time to leave your thoughts.

We deeply appreciate it.

Victor, thanks for all the wisdom you shared.

Those folks who have signed up for Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter that I write.

for the Center for Civil Society at Anfil, grazia for that.

I've got lots of nice notes from you folks that you're enjoying it.

You, if you haven't signed up for

dear listeners, go to civilthoughts.com.

It's free.

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Just give it a shot.

Give it a ride.

Thanks, Victor.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.