New Hostage Releases and GOP Contenders

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Hello, America.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Eli Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is our Friday news roundup, so we will look at the news of the week and we have lots on it.

Of course, we'll talk a little bit about hostages, a New York City Jewish teacher who supported Israel, and maybe a little bit about movies from the weekend, the Thanksgiving weekend.

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free so get a free subscription or come join us for a VDH ultra subscription five dollars a month fifty fifty dollars a year we would love to have you well Victor we've got lots in the news today and I thought maybe we would start with the hostages in Israel since we've they just got 12 more released today and it's Tuesday, so maybe there will be more.

But Israel has said that it is not going to continue the ceasefire beyond Sunday.

And I know that you recently wrote an article called What Were the Hamas Monsters Thinking?

So I thought maybe you could elaborate a little on that as well.

Well, they were thinking what they're doing right now, and that was

Or put it this way, if they had not taken the 240 hostages on October October 7th, does anybody out here listening think they'd still be in existence?

They would have been destroyed by now.

So they knew what they were doing.

They took as many captives as they could.

Supposedly, they had bounties on people who took them.

They got

extra financial incentives.

So we know what they're doing.

They're metering them out.

They have a large group, 20-something left, and then now it's shrinking, 12, 11, and then it's going to go down and down and down.

It's going to to be drawn out.

And what's the purpose?

What are they trying to do?

Two things.

They're trying to normalize in world opinion the pause that goes to a ceasefire that goes to the end of the war.

And then as soon as the end of the war is over, they come out of their tunnels and say, we beat the Israelis.

We've never killed, nobody's ever killed as many Jews as we have in one day.

Not Anwar Sadat, not the Assad.

We, we, we did it.

That's what they want.

And so, every day that the war is not waged to destroy Hamas, they are normalized.

Well, funny thing is, we're even talking about them as if they're a nation, a state.

They're not.

They're just a bunch of terrorists.

They're a terrorist SS clique.

Clique, I should say.

And so that's what they wanted.

They wanted to normalize their killing.

And now we have Americans negotiating with third parties with Hamas.

And

if Israel continues, they have to do this because of public opinion.

And at some point,

and I'm talking to you on a Tuesday, and we're going to release this, but on Sunday, the Israelis say they're going to go back to it.

Let's hope that in this hiatus, they have done intelligence work.

and they've used it for good effect and they know exactly where they are in the tunnels and they're going to blow up the tunnels, et cetera, et cetera.

But it's definitely harmed the Israeli effort to destroy Hamas, and that was the intent.

And now we have the President of the United States who said that his support for Israel was unshakable, apologizing to Muslim Americans because he said that the Hamas casualty figures, I should say fatality figures, were bogused, inflated, or he didn't, he doubted their veracity.

So why did he apologize?

Let's think a minute.

Did Hamas ever say anything that was true?

They said that the hospital was destroyed, 500 dead.

Was that true?

No.

They hit a parking lot, maybe 50 to 200, and they, I mean, Islamic jihad, complete lie.

They had BBC, CNN, Reuters, AP saying,

Israel's got to it's got to come through and validate their accusations that there's tunnels under the hospital.

There's no evidence that this was Hamas.

And now,

what what are they saying?

Oh, yep, sure.

Of course, bathrooms, kitchens, tunnels, hostage rooms, all prepared for October 7th.

They said, we didn't rape anybody.

That's against Islam.

We didn't mass murder.

We wouldn't, he had babies.

So all of that's been proven true.

So why did Joe Biden apologize?

I don't know.

Why do you think?

Because he's under pressure from one-third of his party that's lunatic, little hard left-wing, and they keep saying they're not going to vote for him.

I doubt that because they're going to get Trump elected and Trump would deal with them very harshly, believe me.

So

when you have fatalities in history and you're a historian, you want to adjudicate the

Katyn forest.

So for example, in World War II, 22,000 Polish officers were executed by the Soviets.

And of course, the Soviets said the Germans did it.

So how do you adjudicate that?

Well, you look at where they're buried.

Because if you can find the forensic evidence, that's what happened.

And they were proven to be, even though the Soviet officers who shot them used German pistols for that reason, but it was clear that the Soviets did it.

So they said 13,000, 14,000?

In an urban place, that's a.

I'll be crude.

I'll be

cruel.

Where are the corpses?

How do you dispose of 13 or 14,000 people?

Is there a crematorium?

No.

Do you see new cemeteries all of a sudden?

So the IDF was looking at some of the figures that they had released, and guess what?

Don't you think that as much as people hate the IDF, they would concede that they are killing a lot of Hamas people, i.e.

male, young males more than women and children?

And yet when you look at the breakdown for sex

and age,

it doesn't seem like there's

a number of

Hamas males.

In other words, they are counting

men that are older, older women, children, as if that is the majority.

But that's never as true when you have a war like that.

When we went into Fallujah, we killed

thousands of al-Qaeda.

Yes, we hit a lot of people collaterally.

So where are the bodies?

Where are the cemeteries?

Where are the names?

Where are the official death records?

There's nothing.

It's just Hamas.

And people like Bernie Sanders just quote it as if it's the gospel.

And

I think we're going to learn maybe a year from now, two years, they inflate it just like they lied about the hospital.

That's what terrorists do.

They lie.

They have to.

They don't believe in anything other than their own survival and cruelty and their political agendas.

Yeah.

Well, if if we can turn then to another cruelty, I know you saw the Jewish teacher in a New York City school who supported Israel and the students came out into the hallways in protest for

they were pro-Palestinian protests, but they were so violent that the teacher had to be locked in a room by herself till they could get a cop escort to get her out of that school.

And I was wondering,

those kids were so young they couldn't possibly have any understanding of what they were doing.

And so, what are your thoughts on the current state of education and what's going on in this?

Well, there were some 530 New York area schools.

And this Hillcrest School in Jamaica, Queens is what?

Almost at the bottom in math, language, English.

How do you know that?

Well, besides a statistical fact, look at what people were tweeting after they did this.

One person

said,

you're

cracker ass, you know, white cracker ass.

That means that was a reference to the teacher.

And then somebody said, you don't, you don't come in here and

break something and B-R-A-K-E.

I mean, all of the tweets were illiterate by the students.

So

the subtext is that about a third of them were African American, about a third of them were Hispanic, about a third of them were of Middle Eastern

origins.

Okay, so it was a marginalized person school.

And what have they been learning in that school?

They sure haven't been learning math or English or science or their test scores would be not at the bottom of all New York schools.

But they have been learning something.

And what is that something?

That something is that they're a victimized class.

And they suffer from white rage, white supremacy, and white privilege.

And therefore,

if a teacher

expresses a private opinion on social media, just a posting, they feel they have a right to hunt her down as if she's an animal.

Prey.

So they go through the hallways, they get on social media, they say they're going to riot, they tear out a sink, they destroy things, they assault people.

But had the teachers not rescued the fellow female Jewish, I think, teacher, they would have killed her.

And the police came in, and then, of course, Eric Adams does what Eric Adams always does.

He gives a sanctimonious rant: this will not tolerate, this isn't who we are, but

are they going to expel every student that's on that video that's chasing that teacher down?

No.

And so it's just another reminder that whenever institutions or individuals start to judge people on their superficial appearance, and they arbitrarily, in a cultural Marxist dialectic, say, you are on

the left and a victim, and you are on the right and a victimizer,

then they get an exemption to be as illiberal as they want.

So, all of these students, let's face it, they're racist.

They're utter racists.

They've been taught to be racist.

They've been taught to hate people.

of a different appearance than they are.

They've been taught from the Obama era on, the teachers who came out of that era, that there's an intersectionality of anybody who's not white, regardless of how much money you have.

You're all a collective with grievances against the so-called white teacher, supposedly.

That's how it filters down.

And then if you said to those students, you're racist, you're anti-they say, we can't, we've been told we're victims.

And so that's what's behind it.

And because the second thing behind it is not only do they feel empowered because they're victims, but they feel empowered because there's no consequences.

And there's no consequences when they're truant.

There's no consequences when they're late.

There's no consequences when they flunk.

This is part of the diversity, equity, inclusion triad.

And the second member of that triad is equity.

And so you have to

equal it out on the back end.

And so all of these students are not performing.

They would be flunked out or something would happen to them.

They would be disciplined.

They're not learning.

They're learning to hate.

And they feel they can do it because this is a white teacher and she is Jewish.

And they don't, if you ask any of those students, here's a map, you put on the map Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Gaza.

They couldn't do it.

No.

Not one.

If you said IDF, they couldn't do it.

If you said Palestinian Authority versus Hamas, they couldn't do it.

Can you explain what Hezbollah?

They couldn't do it.

But they did learn one thing that if a person is white, we can hate them and we can get away with it.

And that's going to continue and accelerate

until the culture says that's not acceptable.

Right now it says it is.

See,

we're in our Weimar Republic phase.

It's just no rules.

The whole culture is breaking down.

And now we're starting to harden.

We're getting into our National Socialist early phase where the National Socialists looked around.

and said, we can win an election or we can,

even though Hitler never got a majority vote, he normalized the idea that you could hunt down Jews and break things and attack them.

Well, we've normalized that.

Somebody said, Victor, don't be so overdramatic.

Okay, the MIT

president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology said, what?

There are certain places that you Jewish students shouldn't go.

It's not safe for you.

Just substitute black for Jewish.

So you're a president of one of the most prestigious universities in the world and you say to your African-American students, you know what, I can't handle it.

I just can't guarantee your safety.

So this place and this place, no blacks, because you'll get hurt.

And of course, Al Sharpton would show up and say, and he should show up, he'd say, well, why don't you make it safe for them?

But put in Jews, it's okay.

So we have a professor who clubs somebody with a megaphone, knocks him down, kills him.

No big deal.

We

have a, where I work, we have a professor that says, you Jews, get over there, leave your possessions there, learn how apartheid works in the real world.

He's on leave, he's suspended, he should have been summarily fired.

And so it's going on and it's escalating.

So this week they did what?

Yesterday they just took over the Manhattan Bridge.

They just stopped traffic.

On Good Friday, on Black Friday shopping day, they harassed shoppers.

At some point, people are going to say this.

You destroy our flag on Veterans Day at these riots.

You occupy our bridge and try to shut down traffic where there's ambulances and people have

real important trips to take.

Kids to school, kids home, kids not at school, their parents can't reach them.

You do all that.

You go into schools and you hunt Jews down.

And a lot of you are not U.S.

citizens.

You're here on student visas, our green cards, or your temporary residence.

And you're attacking our culture.

You're chanting from the river to the sea, genocidal, and we're just going to sit here.

Yeah, that's fine.

It's free speech.

It's fine.

Take out the Golden Gate Bridge for a few hours, just talk.

That's fine with us.

Oh, you know, Davis, if you want to go, say, hunt down Jewish children, if you're an instructor, fine, no problem.

If you're at UCLA and you want to put a pinata up at campus and you want to hit it with Netanyahu's face and say, not beat the Israelis, beat the effing Jew.

Can you imagine if somebody put a picture of Caesar Chavez and said, beat the effing

something, Mexican, they would be and should be expelled immediately.

So we're in a really weird situation in this country, and it's going to escalate.

And the question is, how long are people in the popular culture going to tolerate it?

But how do you stop it?

And how do you distinguish between what you should stop and expel students or stop on the bridge and what should be acceptable protests?

It's just the law.

It's just the law.

If they want to protest and they get a permit to walk down Fifth Avenue, fine if they don't commit any violence.

If they go into the White House wall, right in front of the White House, fine.

If they get on a statue and they put their fingerprints with blood on them or fake blood, no.

If you go to Brentwood and you get into some Jewish-American activist yard and you start throwing body bags, so-called body bags on his driveway or fake blood, no.

If you chase Jews at Cooper Union, you trap them in the library, no.

Just apply the law.

Because we do apply the

law, don't we?

I mean, Judge Duncan came to Stanford Law School and his speech was not only disrupted, but hijacked by a dean.

And the students yelled to some of them, I wish your daughters were right.

Okay, they disrupted something that's against the rules.

Nothing happened to them.

Had they been expelled from the law school, that would be the end of it.

Nobody would do it again.

That's all it would take.

If you took all the students outside hitting the windows, when they were told to stop and let Jewish students out of the library,

and you expelled them,

It would be the end of it.

MIT,

you say to Jewish students, you can't do this, you can't do this in this place, expel you.

And what did the president of MIT say?

But if we did that, they might lose their student visa and they might have to go home.

Well, that's what they want.

So if somebody's yelling about the glories of Hamas,

and radical Islamic culture in Gaza, well, go back there and develop it.

But don't do it from the embryo of the West.

Yeah.

And And so

everybody understands what's going to happen.

We don't want a hard corrective, dictator corrective, but we do want this, that people, the majority of the people who don't believe in all this, are going to finally say, no, Moss.

We're just going to enforce the law as it's written.

If there's a border and you come in illegally, and you reside,

you're going to have to go home.

And believe me, if you deported 10,000 people, you wouldn't have anybody come.

No, they would stop.

And

you would have a lot of people leave.

And that's all you have to do.

Just don't do anything extra-legal, just follow the law.

But they don't.

And everybody knows it.

That's why everybody's, it's, justice is not blind.

It's biased.

And that's why everybody's losing faith in the judicial system because they know that under diversity, equity, inclusion, once you make the statement that I have historical grievances against the majority generations ago, therefore I'm exempt from my illegal or racist behavior.

If you say, no, you're not.

Call me any name in the world.

Call me a child molester.

Call me anything you want.

It doesn't matter because I'm following the law and you're not.

So I think everybody's got to stand up according to their station and say, not this pig, no more.

Yeah, I think we're all craving a return to blind justice and a path away from this DEI stuff.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk about

Trump and the campaigns and those types of things.

Stay with us.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show and we'll be right back.

We're back.

Victor, so recently you had a tweet and I've been noticing this too and I'm sure our listeners have that the left is on a campaign to say that Trump is going to have his revenge should he be elected president.

And I was wondering your thoughts on

that campaign, that's why I tweeted about it earlier, but I was struck that

I watched a clip from Joe Scarborough.

I looked at all of his articles in The Atlantic.

I looked at them in the New York Times, Washington Post.

There's a common theme.

Trump revenge.

Trump revenge.

Trump rage.

He's rage.

He's planning.

He's doing this.

So

what accounts for that sudden spate of worry?

And I think there's three things.

Number one,

the polls, not the Republican nomination polls, just those, but the national polls and the state polls, which are the most important, by the way.

Places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Ohio, North Carolina, Nevada.

They don't show Joe Biden winning.

They show a generic Democrat maybe winning, but not Joe Biden.

And so they're worried.

And then they look at the corruption.

Hunter's going to be testifying.

They see that when you have checks that come to

the current president of the United States from his brother right after he gets an effusion of cash.

And he writes just a pathetic little loan repayment, that doesn't wash.

So the Bidens are circling the wagons, and then they're looking at the cognitive decline of Joe Biden.

When he finishes the speech, he can't speak.

Essentially, he can't talk.

But when he does finish his written speech, he doesn't know where to go.

He looks around.

Sometimes he shakes an empty hand that doesn't exist.

And he has this.

I mean, sometimes after I got COVID, I have kind of sore throats, but what if I just did...

That's what he does.

It's very sad.

I mean,

he doesn't have the lung capacity to articulate words or syntax.

Nobody knows what he's saying.

So they put all that together, and they think Trump could win.

And then the next thought they come, phase two, they said, but

we solved that problem.

We've got Fannie Willis with the phone call.

We've got Alvin Bragg with the

campaign finance.

We've got Letita James with the real estate overestimation.

We've got old Jack Smith with gag orders.

He's going to apply the law that he will never apply to Joe Biden about taking out as vice president confidential matter, but he's going to really sink Trump.

But they don't seem to be putting him in jail.

And so they're anxious.

That might not work.

He might be president.

And then we get to the real essence.

Oh my God.

Donald Trump might

do

to us what we surely would do to them if we were in his place.

And we know what we're capable of.

If he's capable of half of what we are, we're in big trouble.

We took the last three

FBI directors, maybe Ray too, but Mueller, McCabe, Comey, all lied under oath.

All lied.

And then we took Brennan and Clapper, all lied under oath.

We created a whole genre of retired generals who call the commander-in-chief contrary, the uniform, military justice, Mussolini, Hitler, liar.

Okay.

And then we took Anonymous and we gave him a platform, the New York Times, and basically he said that we're trying to obstruct the government from the inside.

And then we took the FBI and we interfered in the 2016 and 2020 election.

2016, we were paying

Twitter and we were working with Hillary and we were paying Christopher Steele to compile those lies and spread them.

2020, we got the FBI, CIA's intelligence authorities to swear what?

That the laptop, which was certainly authentic, was Russian disinformation, right before a debate.

And the FBI did its part and kept the laptop under wraps and nobody could look at it, even though we know now they knew it was authentic, and the CIA's extra

legal

former intelligence people, you know, national intelligence, they all lie.

And we know what Lois Lerner did.

We know what the IRS people did.

The whistleblowers have told us that, that when they had the goods on the Bidens, they were not allowed to further that prosecution.

So we know what Meredith Garland's doing.

He goes after personal enemies at school board meetings, Catholic masses.

Anything other than Islamic terrorists.

So they have weaponized every aspect of the federal bureaucracy, and they are afraid that Trump might do it.

Because the last time

they really got Trump, he brought in a bunch of crazy people, Omaroso,

the mooch,

people like that, that were easily caricatured.

And they said, well, we took out Mike Flynn.

We did everything.

We had Rosa Brooks writing in foreign policy that you either had to impeach him, declare him insane under the 25th Amendment, or get a military coup.

They did everything.

And Trump never reacted.

And they boxed him up.

They impeached him twice.

They impeached him as a private citizen.

They impeached him without a formal inquiry.

They impeached him without a special prosecutor.

They impeached him over a phone call on the idea that Joe Biden's family was not corrupt.

How dare you say they were corrupt?

So the point is, again, to finish,

They did everything they could to destroy his first administration, and it didn't work.

And then they tried to destroy him financially, culturally, psychologically, politically as a private citizen, and it doesn't seem quite that it's working because he's ahead of them in the polls.

And now they are writing and speaking that Donald Trump

might rage, and he might take revenge against them.

Now, I'll just finish this by saying, as I said earlier, they're afraid that he might do what they did, extra-legally use the government to go after his enemies.

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

He never did before.

But what they call extra-legal is radical legal change.

So this time, Donald Trump will come in if he were to be elected.

I think if Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis would do the same thing, they're going to have a plan that's going to shut the border and start deporting people.

And if people break the law from the Middle East here on visas, they're going to deport them.

And they're probably not going to let anybody come in here from Iran.

Somebody says, oh, Victor, people don't come in here from Iran.

The The Iranian ambassador to the UN, the former ambassador to the UN,

is at American university.

So is one of their top diplomats.

They do come in.

And he's going to do stuff like that.

He's going to open leases to lower the price of fossil fuel.

He's going to clamp down on crime.

He's going to have to, because his

constituency wouldn't have it any other way.

That's what they're worried about.

That he'll do something with proper channels and he won't do what they did, but they're going to say that if they were in his position, as I said earlier, they would do it.

Everybody should remember the whole ideology of the left.

It's very simple throughout history.

We are so morally superior to you because we believe in equality of result.

Everybody should be equal.

And equality is always more important than liberty and freedom.

And because we're morally superior and because our agenda is morally superior, we are entitled, indeed, we are obligated to use any means necessary.

Well, you mentioned that they censored Hunter's laptop through social media and called it misinformation.

In California, there are, and we have a very

left state,

they are worried about all of this misinformation that students are getting, and their use of social media is, of course, on the rise.

And so in California, the State Assembly and the Senate have passed a bill that all schools must have, quote, media literacy training.

And Governor Newsom signed that into law on October 13th.

And I was wondering your thoughts on the direction of California schools given this media literacy.

So if you look at eighth grade or high school test scores, California used to be in the top 10.

It's in the bottom 10 in the 40s of comparative test scores of public school systems.

So you would think that California is in a crisis, right?

That its public schools are failing.

So you would think they were going to have grammar and syntax and mathematics and history.

No.

They want to get social media and tell people that basically

you can censor the media because it's disinformation and misinformation.

And what would be the offensive expression that you would censor?

Fill in the blanks.

Anything that's DEI or trans or gay, anything,

you can't talk about that.

It's hate speech, it's racist, it's xenophobic, it's tribal, you know, it's protectionist, it's

restrictionist, whatever it is, and that's what they were doing.

And they don't, they forget nothing and learn nothing.

So we had the Stanford, where I work, the Stanford Internet Observatory, which just disclosed that they were doing that.

We had a Stanford vocabulary list that on campus you were supposed to use

the proper word.

You can't use migrant, you can't use patriot, you can't use America.

That's what they're talking about.

That's how this filters down in the here and now.

Sounds great in the abstract, and by intent it sounds great, but in the here and now, it's suppression of

free, conservative, traditional values.

Yeah.

And that's what they want.

And Stanford has been right, along with Silicon Valley, the two, the twin pillars of that.

And they did, along with San Francisco politics.

We put those three together in the 2020 election: Stanford Internet Observatory, Mark Zuckerberg infusing money,

Twitter censoring speech, working with the FBI as contractors.

That's the triad.

And

there's no dead name.

Yeah, there's no American Civil Liberties Union.

When I was growing up, they were kind of an oddball group.

They defended Nazis, they defended commies, they defended anybody, I think wrongly so sometimes, who wanted to be

free speech advocates.

Now,

they're on the side of censorship.

Yeah.

Well, since we're on current domestic campaigns,

the recent campaign, obviously, for the GOP, Nikki Haley has received the endorsement of Charles Koch.

He's one of the bigger campaign donors and groups in the GOP.

And Christie has vowed that he is going to continue his doomed campaign to the end, and he's not stopping.

And I was wondering what you thought about either of those things on the GOP campaigns.

Well, we're down to five, aren't we?

Did we have 11?

I think.

I think Christie's telling everybody, why should I drop out there?

We have fewer candidates around December December 1st than we ever have.

So I'm sticking in.

He's there for one reason.

He's a human torpedo.

So far, he hasn't been effective.

He might be, he might do better in New Hampshire.

But his sole purpose, according to him, not what I say, is to dog Donald Trump.

He's not been dogging him very well.

And his point, he thinks, is to take Donald Trump out.

And then either Haley or DeSantis will reward him with, what, Attorney General or something like that?

That's why he's in.

Ramaswamy is in because he's got a lot of money so he's bulletproof I don't want to use that term bulletproof but he can't be forced out because the donors turn on him right yeah he can wage a campaign pretty low level campaign but he then self-finance it so he'll stay in because he's a media obsessive

he's addicted to the media he loves giving interviews he's very glib he can out debate most people and he loves that attention where would he get that as a Silicon Valley magnet or an entrepreneur in China or whatever he's done.

So he's going to stay in.

So you're really down just to three:

Haley, DeSantis, and Trump.

And

Trump is way ahead, but people tend to forget that the people who win Iowa and New Hampshire don't always win.

Look at Joe Biden.

Look at Bill Clinton.

So it's very early in the race, and there's so many volatile,

there's so many volatile issues and considerations that we don't know anything about the legal morass that Donald Trump is in.

We have no idea how DeSantis will deal with Newsom on this debate coming up.

I think

he'll do very well.

That's my own biased opinion.

But that'll be something.

We don't know how they're going to get rid of Joe Biden yet.

They cannot get rid of Joe Biden without dealing with Kamala Harris.

If they deal with Kamala Harris,

they're going to be called racist sexist.

So

do you let Joe Biden win the nomination?

Because it's pretty late to put new names on the ballot, and then you just, what, ask him to abdicate and you pick Newsom?

What does Kamala Harris say then?

Do you have an open primary right now and get him to quit immediately and he's a lame duck?

And there goes your legislative agenda?

They're in a really bad place.

So, we don't know any of that, what's going to happen.

So, I think it's still

a volatile,

everything's up for grabs.

Maybe that's why Christie's staying in there.

That's why he's in there.

He strikes me that way.

Christie's thinking: Donald Trump's going to be 78.

Joe Biden is going to be 82.

Joe Biden is not going to be able to handle this.

Donald Trump,

Christie's saying, I'm a little heavy.

Donald Trump's Trump's a little heavy, I couldn't do what Donald Trump's doing at 78, therefore Donald Trump can't do what he's doing at 78.

That's how he thinks.

So he's just out there to be viable.

And

Ron DeSantis has the best record as an administrator, a governor, and getting things done and taking on the left.

But the donor class

feels that he's too conservative, the donor class.

And they like Haley because she's charismatic.

And they kind of like her rhino

elements within her.

I think on immigration, she'll be a Jeb Bush.

Yeah.

And so they kind of like that.

And

the weird thing about it is, if you look at her expenditures, you would think that they

would be directed, her campaign attack, her rhetoric, her speeches, at two people, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

They're not.

They're almost exclusively aimed at, and the money shows it, at Ron DeSantis.

So she's trying to be number two, and you can think, you can see her logic that

Trump may hate me now.

I'll come.

If I get really close to Trump, I win a couple of primaries,

and

everybody says it's impossible because he holds a grudge.

And the weird thing about Donald Trump, he does not hold a grudge.

That's what's weird about him.

He can be vindictive in speech, but he doesn't really punish people.

He didn't punish Anthony Fauci.

He didn't punish James Comey to the very end.

So my point is that she's going to go through the primaries and she thinks pick up a couple.

And then if Donald Trump is way ahead, and if Donald Trump evades

criminal liability in some fashion, then she's going to be vice president.

She thinks moderate woman, abortion issue,

I could be there, and he's 78.

Who knows what's going to happen?

Look at Joe Biden.

So Trump could, you know, that's 79 his first year.

I would be in a great

don't underestimate that.

People have said to me, that's impossible.

She doesn't like Trump.

Trump doesn't know nothing's impossible.

Ronald Reagan appointed.

Yes, he did appoint.

Are you an ambassador?

Yeah, a UN ambassador.

Okay, sorry.

And Ronald Reagan hated George H.W.

Bush.

George H.W.

Bush ran and said that the Reagan economic doctrine was voodoo economics.

And Reagan just bit his lip and appointed George H.W.

Bush.

And George H.W.

Bush should have continued the Reagan agenda and intensified it, but instead he said, you know, we're going to be a kinder, gentler nation.

Gentler, E.

R.

Kinder, ER, comparative, case of the adjective, meaning what?

That the man who allowed him to be president of the United States by picking him as vice president was not kind enough and was not gentle enough.

And yet they got along.

They had 12 years.

Well, just since we're on these campaigns, and as far as the Democratic campaign, I heard something very interesting on one of our conservative radio talk shows.

And they were talking about the problem for Joe Biden.

If you don't have Biden, you're going to have to have Harris and who could actually end up.

Newsom obviously is positioning himself.

And this is the interesting thing I heard: that they said,

according to polls, that's the impression I got, that Michelle Obama, if she stepped in at the last minute, some sort of last-minute backroom deal, that she could in fact win the election.

Do you believe that?

I believe that she would energize the Democratic Party for two reasons.

One, it would solve their black woman problem.

You can

dump Kamala Harris,

but not if you're a white male.

You can only dump Kamala Harris if you're a TUFR,

two arguments for diversity, and she has them both.

So that nullifies poor Kamala.

The second is she is a bridge between the radical Antifa BLM squad,

pro-Hamas wing, which is growing, and the doctrinaire left, the progressive establishment.

And somebody said, Well, what do you mean?

I'm talking about she's worth the $200 million.

She has four estates.

She's part of the establishment, the grifting democratic establishment.

That's what they all do.

That's what Hillary did.

That's what Bill did.

That's what Barack did.

That's what she did.

And she's going to fuse those two elements.

Yeah.

So the third consideration: will she do it?

And if she did it, would she win?

I don't think she wants to do it because she's got so much money and she's an icon and she loves going to Germany at $12,000 a minute and lecturing on diversity, equity, and, oh, as I said before, no equity.

How can you talk about equity when you're getting $12,000 a minute?

In Germany, it's in the economic doldrums.

So, yeah, she's...

She probably won't want to do it.

Would she

win?

No, I don't think she'd win a general election.

Everybody said, well, everybody loves her.

Everybody loves her in the Democratic leftist side.

But everybody remembers what Obama did to this country as well.

And they remember her, never been proud of my country.

Downright mean company.

Always raised the bar.

That whole litany of things that she talks about.

And so what she would do to Republicans is what Trump does to Democrats.

When they saw her, they would say, you know what, I I wasn't going to vote.

I'm voting.

Just like Democrats say, you know what?

I'm tired buying Trump.

Trump?

I'll vote against that SOB.

And that's what Michelle does.

She's a polarizing figure.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's take a break and then we'll come back to talk a little bit about the movies.

And

what else is on my list here?

Oh, Hunter, the Hunter rabbit hole.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

We're back.

You can find Victor on his social media.

He's at X at V D Hansen is his handle.

He has a page Hansen's Morning Cup on Facebook and then of course there is the

it's unaffiliated with us.

It's an independent Victor Davis Hansen fan club on Facebook.

And it's a bunch of people that work together to bring old and new things onto their feed.

And so it's a great page to follow if you want to look at some of Victor's old stuff as well as new.

So Victor, recently we, of course, Thanksgiving weekend is a big weekend for everybody to go watch a movie and just have some unwind time after their Thanksgiving dinner.

And the statistics are out and I know you've wanted to go see Napoleon.

And there's two things I want to ask you about here.

First off, Napoleon cost about 200 million to make and even though it was really broadly advertised it only made about 20 million and I know maybe

this weekend it only made 20 million this weekend.

Go ahead.

And

a couple of things.

I haven't seen it so I'm going to go to the Selma California theater.

But I have to go on a trip for six days and my last trip of the year,

of next year, I hope too, and until May.

But when I come back, I'm going to go to the local theater and see it.

But I've read a lot of reviews.

Andrew Roberts didn't like it, I think.

Oh, really?

Andrew Roberts, Napoleon the Great, the title in Europe, and then Pollyan.

I reviewed that for the TLS.

A very good book.

Although he has a very positive, Andrew has a very positive view of Napoleon as sort of a,

I don't know what, kind of a

classically liberal reformer.

Okay.

But when you say 20 million, they said that about a movie that was flawed.

You remember Kingdom of Heaven?

Yeah.

Ridley did that, Ridley Scott, that

2005.

It was kind of disappointing.

And he claimed at the time

that they cut 45 minutes or 50 minutes, I can't remember.

And it was really, and if you see that director's cut, I've seen it one time.

It's about three hours.

It's really good.

And since then, it's become a classic.

And it's made money.

And some of the movies that you don't, you know, like Robin Hood, I didn't think was a great movie.

But the more I liked it.

I did.

Well, I saw it.

My point is that I saw it a couple of times, and then I liked it.

And what I'm getting is all of his movies have legs.

Thelma and Louise, it just, it went out.

You know, the alien movies.

Blackhawk Down.

I didn't like Exodus, but I think Exodus made money.

So you can't judge

at the very beginning people think they have such high expectations.

And he's a very gifted director.

Gladiator, I mean, that was a brilliant movie.

So I have a feeling that Napoleon, if it's a Ridley Scott good production, that it will just keep earning money and there will be longer versions of it, etc.

My favorite is that Russian-English collaboration.

I think it was a Throad Steiger.

It was a brilliant movie on Waterloo.

It was called Waterloo.

It was just

something.

And then Tony Scott.

I mean, Tony Scott did two great movies, True Romance.

Tarantino wrote that.

And then Man on Fire.

That's another movie that everybody thought was too violent.

They thought it was too choppy.

They didn't like the way

the filming of it was abrupt.

And now it's a classic, cult classic.

Yeah.

Well, in defense of what you just said, actually, the international income from that movie was 80 million, with the international income.

So that bumped it up to 80 million.

So I suppose they might be doing well.

It will make money.

My second movie question is on Disney, and Bob Iger recently told his investors that he plans to, quote, quiet the noise.

around cultural issues because it's bad for business.

And I was reading the article on it and it said, oh, he made this disclosure so that they can't sue him, that he's put it out there that,

you know, that this stuff has been bad for business.

So if you're investing, then you're already investing knowing what's going on.

It's so ironic because his predecessor was putting his foot in the water.

And when Iger was on the sidelines after he retired, he was criticizing they should be more proactive on trans issues and DEI.

So they brought him back and he just destroyed the company.

Nobody wants to, nobody,

I don't know how you take it, it's like Bud Light.

You take these

million dollar, billion dollar brands, Target, and you destroy them because you try to force down the throat of the American people things that they don't want to have forced down.

And they want a,

I use that term sometimes, monastery of the names.

They want a place in their lives, their mind, that's just a sanctuary.

Monastery.

They don't want anything intruding to it.

They want to go to Target and worried whether these shoes fit their kid.

They don't want to see underwear with a little trap door on it and say that it's female underwear.

They want to, they just like to have a beer with somebody.

They don't want to be told that this beer is got this man dressed up as a woman who's giggling and trying to,

I don't know what, and they don't want an advertising.

By her own words, the advertiser who was the architect of that commercial said that they're going to get rid of their fatty image.

Well, they don't want that.

So they don't want, they want to just see Snow updated.

They don't want to see whether the dwarf was

a small person or not.

They don't want to know what pronouns was correct.

They don't want to know if

10 characters are, you know, 33% this, 21% that.

demographic.

They just want talent.

And it's

that that's what's so strange.

I don't know why they keep doing it because if they just let the market adjudicate or just let merit work, everything works out.

As I said before, you know, I think the most brilliant actor working today is Denzel Washington.

Even a bad series, kind of the equalizer, he makes that come alive.

Even in his older age, he's my age.

And there are certain things he did were just brilliant.

But he didn't need any.

Oh, he's an we have to have an African American.

No, he didn't need it.

Sidney Porte didn't need it.

They didn't need it at all.

James Earl Jones didn't need it.

So

why why do we do this?

I don't understand.

Just have equality of opportunity and let the market, let people decide what they want to do.

And they can't do that.

Just can't do it.

And they're ruining things.

If they don't stop the DEI woke, it's going to destroy the country'cause it's destroying meritocracy.

You can see that with college admissions, you can see it with college curricula.

You can see it with college grading.

You can see the caliber of people are starting to graduate from our elite schools.

Well, just to, I feel like I should help out Bob Iger here because he, in his disclosure to his investors, he did lose over a billion dollars on his last four movies.

So, just so we know that that's out there, and if you're investing in Disney, you know what you're doing.

Okay, Victor, the last thing is our Hunter rabbit hole, and back to Hunter again.

This is a very interesting thing.

He has said he will testify to James Comer's oversight committee, but he does not want to do it in a closed door interview.

He wants it to be in the public, you know how they do the public inter the public trial process.

He wants a show trial, so he wants to put the

questioners on trial.

And he thinks he can do it because he thinks he's a narcissist.

Look at those laptop pictures.

Take anybody, as a general rule in human life and culture, anytime anybody takes a selfie of themselves for other, unless you're, I don't know, telecommunicating with a doctor or something,

you want to show a pink eye or, in my case, a yellow tongue from long COVID.

But anybody takes a selfie of yourself

is suspect.

Anybody's convicted of being a narcissist when you take your clothes clothes off and do it.

So

he's not normal, and he thinks he's glib.

He thinks he's still young.

He thinks he's handsome.

He thinks he's a mover and shaker.

And he thinks he's going to go in there and turn the tables on them and have a circus and defend the wonderful Biden family, kind of like Joe Biden did before he became demented.

I'm just Joe Biden from Scranton.

You know, we're just my dad.

Oh, my dad used to tell me and all that stuff, hokey stuff.

And I think the committee is going to say, you know what?

We issued you a subpoena and we'll hold you in contempt and you're going to follow our rules.

I don't think anybody who was asked to go to the January 6th said to Lynn Cheney

and the people who ran that circus, they said, if you want me in public, I'll only go in private.

You want me in private?

I'll only go in public.

You don't get to choose.

And so

we'll see.

I hope they let him do it so we we can have a circus because his whole life is a circus anyway.

Well, I mean, I've had this theory about him a long time, and that is

that when you read, and I've read almost all of those emails that have been published in the laptop, and it's very clear that he has a deep-seated resentment against his grifter uncles and his dad.

Yeah.

And he says to his niece

and others,

not just no Asian as far, can you imagine a niece or cousin trying to procure women for him, and then they're both in racist fashion saying, no Asian prostitutes, please?

That's the kind of stuff that's on it.

But my point is

that

Mr.

10%,

at least I don't take half what dad does.

All of that resentment has been played out

when

you get the impression that somebody's told Hunter,

you cooked this grifting up, we just went along with it.

You're going to take the fall.

Because when he was facing an indictment from the DOJ before Merrick Garland fixed it with his weird special counsel,

his lawyers were going to call his own dad.

Remember that?

Hey, dad, you think I didn't, I might go to jail?

I don't think so.

I've made you rich.

So you might have to testify.

And then you'd think the last thing he would want to do to injure his father or his grifting family was to paint with his mouth or put a brush in his mouth, given his snorting and drug use and publicity and grifting.

And sure enough, he did these paint by numbers watercolors.

He did it with his mouth.

He publicized it.

They got grifting lobbyists to buy them.

And some of these guys actually got appointments to see Joe Biden.

Now, why did he do that?

Victor, you might know the mind of a Hamas monster, but you do not know the mind of a crackhead.

Well, I think what I'm saying is I know that he's a crackhead,

but you would think that Hunter, of all people, would say, nobody brings in any Coke into the White House.

I want every family member to empty their packs.

No.

I do not want anybody in this family, given the scrutiny we're under, to paint with your mouth and try to sell

sub-par art for access to dad.

I don't want anybody anywhere

taking pictures of the garage where all the secret papers were.

None of that.

So he's reckless.

He's capable of doing anything, anytime, anywhere with anyone.

There's a big old.

He's a guy that lost his laptop twice.

He lost his gun.

The whole family's that way.

The weird thing is, nobody's really discussed that.

The daughter lost her diary, and that came out about the showers when she was too old with her father.

Hunter's wife,

he tells his wife, his gun ended up in a bin near a school, right?

Illegally registered, we learn.

And his laptop was never claimed.

How can you have all of that information and never claim it?

And then the family.

In a couple of memoirs, we learned that Joe Biden, if it's true, when he was in his Delaware state, he used to swim with his little Speedo off.

And

female Secret Service detail did not want to be around him.

They didn't want to see Joe come out and give his million-dollar smile buck naked.

No, he was vice president.

And so Hunter Biden is taking pictures of full-funnel nudity

on the internet.

I mean, it could be easily accessed.

And then Frank Biden takes pictures of himself naked and it turns turns up on a gay porn site, right?

So once, maybe, twice, okay, but three of them?

Three of them?

It's like one laptop, okay, a lost diary, maybe, but a gun too.

So something is wrong with that dysfunctional family.

It really is.

Some strange pathology.

It's well, it's way beyond Neil Bush or Billy Carter or Roger Clinton.

Yeah, it sure is.

Or Donald Nixon, who is kind of a nice guy.

In terms of this selling influence, there's a big elephant in the room that I've been dying to ask you, and that is

what's the difference between Hunter Biden, and I apologize to your listeners because they may get mad at me for this, but the difference between Hunter Biden's selling influence and what Jared Kushner's relationship to the Saudis is.

Ah.

So, Jared Kushner,

when he was

assigned as a Middle East envoy, I guess that's the word,

for his father-in-law, in a way that Bobby Kennedy worked for JFK, let's say, he got to know the royal family of Saudi Arabia and people in the Gulf.

And those ties he nurtured.

And maybe he nurtured them for out of office.

Maybe he did something like Barack Obama bringing in Netflix discussions while he still got capital as president.

And then the moment he gets out of the president, suddenly he gets 50 million bucks, right?

So he was using the office

or the connections for his post

office career,

at which time he wouldn't be that important

as he was when his father-in-law was president.

But he might be important because his father-in-law might be president again.

So that's what they all do.

How did Hillary Clinton, who was flat broke, bankrupt in 2000, end up being worth a couple hundred million dollars?

How did Bill Clinton do it?

How did Barack Obama, as I said, do it?

How did any of them do it?

They used their power as either a vice president and you're coming back as president, or they cut deals or or they implied deals why they were in office?

Okay.

Is there any evidence that Jared Kushner said,

I tell you what, if you

give me control of a billion-dollar hedge fund or investment fund that I'll run,

then I will take it to my dad and I will get you in on the April.

No.

There's no evidence that Barack Obama did anything wrong.

There's no evidence that Hillary Clinton did anything wrong.

She had the uranium concessions of North America that she greenlighted as Secretary of State to the Russians, of all people, people she said were dangerous, while her husband was getting $500,000 from the mayor of Moscow.

Come on.

And they were giving money, all these oligarchs were giving money to that corrupt Clinton Foundation.

So those things are different from what happened.

Those things are shady.

I should say they're gray areas, because that's what Washington is.

It's just selling influence, and it's usually legal.

Okay.

But what Hunter did

is different.

He specified, from what we can tell,

while his father was vice president, he was going around the world and selling access.

His words, not mine.

I'm sitting here next to to somebody and you have not paid up.

And

Joe Biden lied about it.

On 11 occasions, he said he had no knowledge of hunters.

But Hunter was put on the barisma while his father.

So if Jared Kushner was put on a Saudi Aramco, let's just take a Ramco,

the older Ramco.

So they put Jared Kushner on there and they pay him $80,000 a month, let's say.

And then you start seeing payments

to

Donald Trump's nephew, Donald Trump's brother.

Yes, he hasn't done that.

No.

And I'm not trying to excuse any of it.

I'm just saying that Hunter and the Bidens are a special case.

It's quid, pro, quo.

Give,

you get influence, I get money.

China, and when the money comes from China, it ends up in the Biden, and there's tax consequences.

That's the big thing that nobody talks about.

There's money that came to the Biden family, 25, 30 million, that I don't think was fully taxed.

And you say, well, that's just a money.

No, that's how they got Al Capone.

If you don't pay taxes on it, some of us pay 55% of our income in taxes.

We don't like the idea that Joe Biden goes around the country and says, the rich have to pay their fair share.

meaning the middle class, but I don't.

So I have three homes because Hunter got all these checks for me and my brother wrote on the bottom, loan repayment.

That's the oldest stupid trick in the book.

It's not even a trick.

Well, I think he doesn't ask Comer to previously.

What did he say the other day?

We're searching for the loan documents.

We're searching for the papers.

We're searching for the interest charge.

They can't find anything.

The IRS goes after people like that.

I've known people that did stuff like that and transferred money.

And the first thing the IRS says,

if you loan somebody $1 million and they didn't report it as income,

then did you get it back?

And if you didn't get it back,

then it's a gift.

And did you pay 30% or whatever it is gift tax?

Or if you just let them use the money, did you pay interest?

Did they pay interest?

If they didn't pay interest, it's a gift.

So they tax everything.

Yeah, so they have certain points where they've identified that Hunter has crossed the line.

And one of them is that stream of money coming from the Chinese where Hunter ended up with 400,000 and his father 40,000 the 10% man and the call that Humphrey

that they have that Hunter said hey my dad's right here so if you don't pay me I'm going and then there was a one more I think I'll tell you what it is

so I'll just tell you what it is by putting your example of Jared Kushner.

So let's go back to the idea that Jared Kushner is on a Ramco

and he's been appointed there to get an inflated salary and he knows nothing about oil.

Yeah, and this is a hypothetical.

Yeah, this is hypothetical.

He knows a lot about finance.

He's not Hunter Biden.

No, he's not.

That's why he made his career, but he doesn't know anything about oil.

But let's say you put him on the oil company, right?

And let's say there's some kind of puritanical Saudi prosecutor who believes in Sharill.

I don't know what, but he's mad about the corruption he thinks.

So he goes to

the Saudi royal family and says, this guy is corrupt and I want to find the people who are paying this much.

And then Donald Trump comes over and he says, I'm looking at my watch.

If you don't fire that prosecutor by the time I go in, all those Saudi military deals, all that military aid, nothing.

I want him fired.

And then they do.

And then a few years later, Donald Trump's at a Council of Foreign Relations.

He says, son of a bitch, they fired him.

Yeah, that's what they did.

And they didn't do that with Cushman.

And they didn't do that with Obama.

And they didn't do that maybe with Clinton, but he got away with it.

But these people insulted our intelligence.

They were so blatant.

Same thing about the file.

I mean, gosh, vice president doesn't have the prerogatives of a president to take out classified material and Mar-Lago for all of the little FBI set-up photographs.

Remember, they took pictures of all these things as if Trump had just thrown them all over the floor.

But that garage, that Corvette, and you could just see all these boxes everywhere.

It was just a joke.

Jack Smith, where are you?

Why don't you get the other prosecutor to indict him?

Well, Victor, the very last thing I wanted to ask you, because I know I heard while you were talking to Jack, you guys were talking about the statistics that the Biden administration comes out with from the last month or two, where they can say, wow, inflation's gone down.

Wow, things are getting better.

And that it's bogus because if you looked at 2020 to now, you would see that there's been a huge increase in inflation and a huge loss in the status of the standard of living for most people.

And you said about that nobody is that stupid, but apparently the Democrats think that people, in fact, are that stupid and that they are going to be able to get away with saying, oh, our administration has done these great things in immigration.

I just happened to look the other day.

The support for Bidenomics is about 33% of the country.

Yeah.

And

the whole thing is a joke because we were coming out of COVID and there had been massive laid offs and business had been shut down.

And

the vaccinations, which initially, as we all knew, for maybe six weeks, worked.

They all worked for 96%.

They didn't tell us after six or seven weeks, it starts to wane radically, but nevertheless, they worked.

And I won't get into Pfizer, but in October, right before the election, Pfizer had announced they were going to tell us whether they worked and released the data.

And then guess what?

They decided to wait after the election because they didn't want to credit Donald Trump's Operation Warp Speed and give him a bump in key states.

Okay,

so it worked.

People got inoculated.

Joe Biden said, when I got here, nobody had been inoculated.

No, Joe, 19,

20 million Americans had been inoculated in 2020 in the last few months.

So he comes in, he starts to inoculate everybody.

And guess what?

The economy starts to restore.

People come out of the woodwork.

There's enormous demand.

And he didn't create jobs.

Just the jobs organically reappeared that had been artificially suppressed.

But he took credit for that.

And he took credit for GDP because it was a rebounding economy.

Anybody, an empty suit, which he was, would get credit for that.

But then he did a very stupid

thing.

He borrowed $4 trillion of COVID relief when it was was the wrong, people didn't need it anymore.

And more importantly, there was a huge pent-up demand to go out to eat, to go to the movies, to go on a cruise, to do everything.

And he created the worst inflation in 40 years, not since the Carter, the first year of Reagan, Carter era.

Okay,

that's what he did.

And

remember, some of the inflation indices do not count food and gas and rent.

But if you look at what really counts in a person's life, it's food, it's gas, it's your power bill, it's your health care cost, and it's your rent or mortgage payment.

And you look at that,

and I thought it was 25%, but I saw some data the other day on Fox Business where it's 35 to 40 percent higher than when he entered office on that basket of prices.

And

I'm helping my daughter buy a house, and I don't particularly like what I'm paying for interest.

I just took out the loan versus 1.9.

And that mortgage payment, I figured out, is $1,600 more a month now than it would have been had I bought it before Joe Biden was elected.

So

it's just a joke, and that's why everybody knows it.

He says, and what he does is

what he does is he looks at month to month.

And if it got any higher, people would not be, it's costing people about $700 more a month to live for their power bill, their food bill, their gas bill.

But if gas goes down a little bit from last month,

I've whipped inflation.

No, you haven't, you idiot.

You haven't.

Everybody knows it.

You're not stupid.

You say that, and that's what's bothering me: they're not stupid.

Apparently, the Democrats are banking on the fact that they are that stupid.

His rating now is 38% in one poll I saw today.

And the polls that were 42 are giving him an average of 40.

They'll be down in the mid-30s.

So nobody's buying it.

Nobody's buying it.

It doesn't mean that

if you look at the latest polls and the analyses from left and right, they're very strange.

They show that Donald Trump will beat Joe Biden.

No question about it.

They show that a generic Democrat will beat Donald Trump or come very close, but nobody knows who that is.

If you turn it on the other side, it shows you that a generic Republican,

i.e.

DeSantis or Haley, could beat a generic Democrat and beat Biden, but not Trump.

So what am I saying?

Trump can beat Biden, but according to the polls, Trump can't beat another Democrat.

But I don't know how they're going to get another Democrat.

They're going to have to because I don't think Biden's going to be viable.

And the fallout from that might be catastrophic for their cause.

But they're not fooling anybody.

Nobody likes this administration.

Nobody likes the border.

Nobody likes the crime.

Nobody likes the foreign policy.

Nobody likes the lying.

And I feel sorry for that John Kirby, that spokesperson that he kind of

said to Jean Pierre, Corinne Jean-Pierre, you're not going to, you know what?

Last time you even got close to Gaza, you said there was no anti-Semitism and you said Islamophobia.

So we're just going to shut the F up on Gaza and John Kirby's going to take over.

And he's doing it, and his biggest problem is

he wants to solidify the old establishment Democratic vote and mollify the new Democratic vote.

So what he does, he's schizophrenic.

He tells everybody that Joe Biden has a rock-solid support of Israel's right to defend itself and destroy Hamas.

However,

we should have a permanent ceasefire where we get all the hostages back.

And we have to be careful about civilian casualties.

And I'm sorry that I took, that I suggested that Hamas's casualty figures were exaggerated.

I'm so sorry.

I'll try to do better next time.

That's what he said.

No, you stumbled on the truth the first time, Joe.

You can't trust anything Hamas said.

Does anybody believe what Hitler said?

No, nobody believed what Hitler said.

People came by and they, Neville Chamberlain came back and said, waved a piece of paper, peace for our time.

And what did Hitler say about Chamberlain?

I see that guy again.

I want to jump on him in that stupid umbrella.

He was angry.

He hated him.

He lied.

He knew he was going to lie.

He lied lied about everything the German Nazi Party did.

Yes, but Stalin lied about everything.

The Democratic Party has the universities and the mainstream media and social media on their side.

And I think that through all of those avenues, they're still able to perpetuate the Hamas lie.

Well, not just Hamas, but the immigration statistics, economic statistics, etc.

All of those things that we look at and we listen to and we go, ah, that's just a big lie.

We know it.

But I think that out there in the average American mind, they are able to turn it, or at least they think they're able to turn it.

They have one thing going for them, and you're right.

They control the institutions.

And everybody says, well, you can go to Fox News or you can go to conservative websites.

Yes, Epic Times, all that, that's true.

But what they really do with the dominance of foundations and K-12, schools of education, academia, professional sports, NBA, NFL, Major League Baseball, Hollywood, sitcoms, social media, Silicon Valley, traditional media.

What they do with all the permanent state,

most state employees and federal ones are all left-wing.

Yeah.

Okay.

So they create a culture that if you oppose it, then you're a loser or you're a racist or you're this, just a vague culture.

And then everybody wants to be like.

So, when you're going to a cocktail party with your friends, if they still exist,

or you're going to go talk to a class, or you're going to go in a room of professors, or you're going to be a bunch of, you're a young person, and you go out at a bar with a bunch of people,

if you

question that leftist progressive project, it's socially unacceptable, even though it's a minority of people.

So, why does that happen?

Because the majority of people,

and they're pretty brilliant people, for all of that echo chamber, they don't buy it and they're the majority.

But

they're not interested in politics.

They have to work.

They get up every day.

They're not professors with their summers off and lifetime tenure.

They're not movie stars.

They're not foundation people.

They're just working and they're religious and they care about their families.

And so the result is that they don't get activated.

You're making my argument for me.

So they are going to listen to the lie.

They are going to maybe believe the lie or they're not going to care about whether it's.

You say they.

No, the majority of people don't.

But the point is that they don't exercise their majority powers.

They don't vote fully.

They don't give money to candidates fully.

They don't get galvanized.

The left gets up in the morning saying, I'm going to spend every moment politicizing and weaponizing everything I can.

And then they go to bed at night and said, I surely didn't do enough.

I'll do better tomorrow.

The right gets up and goes, I'm so sick of all this crap.

I just want to live my life and be free and secure and prosperous, help my friends and family,

worship my God, help my community.

But not the left.

It's like Sauron's lidless eye, man.

It never closes.

360, 24-7.

Yeah.

Well, with that image of Sauron's Lidless Eye, we are way over time here, so we're going to end this podcast.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show, and we thank all of our listeners.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

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