Administrative Waste and the Right-Wing Arena

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, the namesake, the man you want to hear from.

That is Victor Davis-Hansen.

And he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in history at Hillsdale College.

He has an official website, The Blade of Perseus.

You will find it at victorhanson.com and we'll talk more about why you should be going there and why you should be subscribing towards the end of this podcast.

We will begin this podcast, Victor, if you don't mind talking about

one of those great American military men, General Michael Hayden, who kind of has a problem with patriotic Americans.

And we'll get your thoughts about him

and then this massive slush fund at the Biden Energy Department,

some stories about

college campuses and particularly Catholic college campuses, and maybe some other things.

We'll get to all these right after

these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor, this particular episode is

a week after Thanksgiving, but Thanksgiving, and we're recording on Saturday, the 25th of November, by the way.

But General Hayden, Michael Hayden, who was one of the signers of the 51 signers of the Russian hoax intelligence letter, et cetera, he is a general.

And we still, as Americans, think our military leaders are patriots and they think well of Americans.

But he put out a tweet comparing some woman with a, you know, American woman with a flag.

Whatever, just a patriotic image, although she looked kind of

deplorable.

Yeah, yeah.

She had all the traits of being deplorable, Second Amendment and love of country, right?

And compared her to a woman from Hamas

and saying they were equal.

This is a

man, he's not a general anymore, I don't think.

I mean, he's a retired general, but still, he's very prominent.

He's always on MSNBC or CMN, etc., and he's denigrating

your

America, America-loving American.

I just, I guess we shouldn't be shocked, but I still am.

Your thoughts?

I don't understand the guy because

he was a Bushite.

And to get appointed as the director of national intelligence, and then I think he was CIA director,

he was a gung-ho.

You know, it's we're not doing anything wrong at Guantanamo and Enhanced Interrogation and Predator.

I mean, he was

all into the post-911

unapologetic war on terror.

And then

he made the necessary adjustments when the George W.

Bush administration ended.

And then he completely lost

his mind when Donald Trump came.

So he got onto Twitter.

And

remember, he said that Donald Trump's

border policies, which were inherited from Obama, he used the same facilities that Obama had created for detention of families.

He said that they were similar, analogous to Auschwitz, which is the reductio ad hitlerum.

You never do that, but he did.

And then he came in last month.

You remember when he said Tommy Tuberville, the senator, had put a hold on Pentagon promotions due to the use of Pentagon dollars to fly people to states where they could get abortions in the military?

He said that he should be removed from the human race.

And I think Tuberville reported him for that.

And then he doubled down and said he had no apologies for it.

And he stood by what he said.

And so he has a history of doing these things.

And my only

concern is twofold.

And that is, does he have a security clearance?

And if he does, why does he have?

He's had a stroke and he's obviously unhinged and he's unapologetic.

He shouldn't have access to the nation's secrets, number one.

And number two, there used to be something, and I know this is a dead horse that I beat, but there used to be something called the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

And

Article 88 suggested that a person who was a retired, high-ranking officer, whether in active service or on the retirement roles, pension roles, subject to recall in times of national emergency, should not disparage, denigrate the president, the vice president, or leading cabinet officials.

Well, he did that during the Trump administration, and there was absolutely no repercussions, as there's no repercussions for anything anymore.

But I don't know what his problem is.

I give him the benefit of the doubt that he's either got,

I think Senator Trouberville said he had an alcoholic problem or he had a stroke.

I don't know what it is, but he's another person

that joins a long list of Trump derangement syndrome sufferers.

And there's a lot of people in the military who felt that a senior statesman, let's face it, Jack,

when you get a $200,000

pension and you're a four-star general or an admiral and you retire, and you usually retire in your early 60s,

then there's a whole lucrative board memberships and defense contracting for defense lobbying.

It's very easy to, with your pension and your consulting fees and your board memberships, to make one or two million as long as, dash, as long as

you understand that the washington bipartisan permanent administrative state pentagon bureaucracy corporate boardroom is center left and you have to make the necessary adjustments if you're going to have a lucrative post military career so all of them all of them that are prominent weigh in on contemporary politics, often in violation of Article 88.

And they attack the press.

They don't do it now with Joe Biden, but if you took their criticisms of Donald Trump, that he is non-composment,

that he is

not fully in control of his faculties, if he's merial,

if he's prone to aberrant behavior, and therefore it's legitimate to attack him.

Then you look at Joe Biden, who doesn't know where he is, whose family is facing serious corruption charges, who doesn't seem to be able to keep his eye off or his hands off or his breath off young girls,

then by their very criteria, they should be

subjecting

Joe Biden to the same type of vituperation.

Of course, they don't, because it was never about

any serious worries about Donald Trump, at least his administration, as it actually occurred in the flesh, but more about virtue signaling and performance arcing arting their liberal fee days for career enhancement.

It's that simple.

Mildly curious,

did Hayden ever

participate in anything

with Hoover, with the military strategy groups that you've overseen over the years?

I'm assuming no.

I have a lot of generals on them:

General Mattis, General McMaster,

Admiral Ellis, Admiral

Roughhead, and

they've all been professional.

They've all been

very good.

They've written for our online magazine Strategica.

And

no, he never was asked to join, nor would he have joined had I asked him.

And so

No, he's not been there.

We have people, I didn't ask people, you know, like Leon Panetta or something.

We didn't ask overtly political people.

We did ask people that are edgy only because in that particular group, I did not want to have an echo chamber.

So when you go into those meetings, you will see people across the political spectrum.

And on the right, even, there's not unanimity.

There's people who are neocons, paleocons, neo-isolationists, interventionists, pro-Israel, anti-everybody.

And so when you go in there, there's all sorts of different views coming from all different sides.

And

how frequently do these happen, Victor?

Once a year?

They used to be twice a year, but because of COVID, it was very difficult.

So we're going to go this, we're going back after next, this year.

We have one in March of this coming year.

And we fly about 30 to 40 people out.

And then we have about 20 resident people at Stanford that participate.

And they are retired generals, retired admirals, retired politicians, historians, you know, Andrew Roberts, Neil Ferguson, that type of caliber, Barry Sprauss.

And then we have, as I mentioned, officers that participate.

We have diplomats that participate.

We have senior fellows at Hoover that participate.

We have authors.

I try to, given the theme, which this year is proxy wars.

So I'm getting experts on the Middle East, on Ukraine, et cetera.

And last year's, I think, was one of our best because we had a distinguished expert on Ukraine that it gave some information that was stunning to both supporters and opponents of

the massive aid that we're giving Ukraine.

And his prognostications at the time of right during the spring offensive when everybody was gaga that it was going to go to Moscow, basically, given the new supplies that were arriving, he cautiously

was pessimistic and said the problem was manpower, that they don't have the manpower.

A quarter to a third of the country have left.

They've suffered somewhere around 200,000 casualties.

Russia is deliberately trying to bleed them.

And they're having problems with recruitment, enlistment, and they don't have the wherewithal to go reclaim Crimea and the Donbass as originally intended.

And that was shocking to a lot lot of people there.

And some people opposed it, some people agreed with him.

But I thought he was an excellent presenter.

I won't mention his name because we have a rule that

we don't talk about.

It's off the record, so we don't mention the people's names that participate.

I just mentioned people in the group.

I won't tell you whether they participate in that conversation or not.

But the group, the military history group is public knowledge.

It's on the Hoover website.

So a person can learn.

The only rule that we have is that you can't mention people's performance or talk or what they say in a closed meeting.

There's no media allowed.

No recordings are allowed.

And the result of that is candor that's amazingly helpful, I think, to politicians and diplomats that sometimes attend.

Yeah.

By the way, foreigners, I try to get people from foreign countries, and they're always amazed at

how well they're treated and the access they have to top analysts, generals, etc.

And we have people on active service that attend as well.

By the way, I'm springing this on you.

I just saw this headline.

Again, we're recording on Saturday.

You mentioned Ukraine.

I saw some headline.

I think it was on John Solomon's, you know, justthenews.com, which is the

technical home of this website.

Something about that the Germans and the and the Biden administration seem to be making headway with Ukraine in coming to a negotiation table with the Russians.

I'm not sure how true that is or not, but if

any quick thoughts about where that conflict is at this point, Victor, if you want to share them, if not, we'll move on to our next topic.

Well,

I think a lot of people, both

in the militaristic working group and outside, outside essentially said that

in March, by the fall or winter, that is right now,

what is happening now would happen.

In other words, it had never been, let me just summarize what my feelings were, but I think they represented the consensus finally after a day of heated discussion.

It had never been the agenda of Barack Obama once he did not react to the absorption of the Donbass in Crimea and had not been the agenda of Donald Trump and had not been the agenda of Joe Biden and had not been the agenda actively of the Ukrainian government to reclaim every inch of the Donbass in Crimea that had been annexed illegally from the Ukrainians by

Putin.

And the reason that was, was they felt that that would require a level of operations, strategic decision-making that would incur an inordinate response from Russia, number one.

And number two, the history of those disputed areas made it hard to make a case that these had been internally Ukraine.

In other words, they were borderlands that had been used for political purposes during the Soviet Union.

For example, Nidikita Khrushchev, who was born near the Ukrainian border, had just for jurisdictional purposes and just to placate Ukrainians, had allowed the Donbass to be part of Ukraine and the Crimea as well.

And therefore, they had not been an internal part of the province of Ukraine that had been absorbed completely by the Soviet Union.

And then in addition to that, after World War II, Joseph Stalin refused to give up

areas that he had taken of Poland, which consists of about 25% of western Ukraine today.

That was Polish for a thousand years, Polish-speaking, Roman Catholic.

And he said, no, I'm not giving it back.

If you want the territory, you take it from East Prussia.

So we took it from East Prussia, and we ethnically cleansed 13 million Germans.

And by the way, no German today in his 90s wiggles his key and says, oh, this is my keys to my apartment in Danzig.

I need it back.

It's not going to happen.

And yet those were real refugees.

But so were the Poles that were kicked out of Ukraine.

And then that was made for the last 80 years.

Western Ukraine has been Orthodox Ukrainian and part of the Soviet Union until 1992.

And then the other problem was that Crimea, when the Soviet Union fell, declared itself an independent nation for two and a half years.

And then Ukraine took it because it was afraid that if it didn't take it, it would be absorbed by

the new Russian Federation.

So given all of those realities and given that in those areas under contention, there were 70% Russian speakers and no one really knew to what degree they were disaffected.

And given the orange,

all these different political things, the American president just said, you know what?

They told Putin, don't go any further and we're not going to go fight over it.

That was a de facto.

Obama gave it away.

And we can see why when we had that hot mic at Seoul,

South Korea in 2011, when he said,

I guess it was 2012 in March, when he said, tell Vladimir that if

he gives

me space, I will look at missile defense, meaning if he doesn't go into Ukraine or doesn't act up, then I will dismantle missile defense and we'll all be happy until I get re-elected.

This is my last election, he said.

And that was what he did.

And then, as soon as he was elected and a year and a half later, Putin kept his bargain and he held off and then he and then he invaded and

Obama gave him space

and he took what he was and that was why it wasn't the agenda.

So

what I'm getting to is that most people

thought that

when Ukraine had that heroic defense of Kiev and was now fighting on the borderlands, the idea that a country that had been 40 million, that was down to 29 million, was going to take on a country of 140 million with 10 times

the GDP and 30 times the territory and four times the population, even with the most sophisticated of Western arms, and they were going to go on the offensive against what was appearing to be

a Maginal line of tank traps and mines and fortifications and artillery death zones was going to be really impossible to do.

And a lot of people, when we talked about it in March, said, I don't think they should do this.

I think they should dig in and go on the defensive.

And it will be sort of like World War I, where there's no man's land, but the Soviet, the Russians will not be able to go beyond the Donbass and Crimea.

And then we can negotiate, and the negotiations will be maybe institutionalize what Vladimir Putin stole in Crimea and Donbass.

In exchange, he has to withdraw to all Ukrainian lands prior to 2022

in February 24th.

And then in exchange, we get to,

we will arm Ukraine to the teeth to create deterrence on their part, and they pledge not to be part of NATO.

And that was the basis for a peace deal.

And I think that's going to happen.

I do.

Well, Victor, we're going to

switch back to the Biden administration and this massive amount of money

it has.

I do mean massive, for

political payoffs or energy.

We're going to get your thoughts on this right after these important messages.

we're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor,

the other day,

Kim Strassel, who I know you know and know well, she was, I think, a Bradley Prize winner, and that's not the only reason you know her.

She's a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

She had a really, I think, important piece titled The Biden Energy Slush Fund, a $400 billion

pile of cash.

I said billion, dwarfing most private, quote-unquote, green investment vehicles.

And she talks about,

I hope I'm pronouncing his first name right, Gigar Shah,

who

he runs the Energy Department's loan office, loan programs office, and he has $400 billion

to

hand out in loans to, of course,

politically approved green companies.

We remember she makes note of this in her piece that

this is a staggering.

We have inflation.

Why do we have inflation?

Because of government spending.

We have this.

We need money for this or that.

But so much of it is parked in this department.

And

I'll finish babbling by saying for an administration

that has

severely harmed

American energy.

Here are your thoughts about this piece, Victor.

Well, obviously, it shows you the power of the administrative state.

This guy's not elected.

And yet he's control of a lot of money.

Number two, he doesn't have the money.

We're running a $1.8 trillion annual deficit.

We're going to be up to $35 trillion in debt.

We're just borrowing, printing it.

Just issuing T-bills, federal bonds to back it up.

And the interest rates exploding.

So, the service on that debt is larger than the Pentagon budget now.

And so, we don't have it.

So, he has no business spending money he doesn't have and especially trying to tamper or to favor in a crony capitalist fashion left-wing people who say they're for alternative energy.

And then, three,

there's a lot of, I mean, what I don't really think this whole energy thing is quite what we're told.

We're told that it is all for EVs, for example, and we're going to get rid of the combustion engine.

But when we start to look at it realistically, there's not enough chargers.

And I'm speaking to someone whose wife drives a Tesla, so I'm not prejudiced against Tesla.

I think it's a great car.

I like Elon Musk.

That's why we bought it.

But the point I'm making is that there's not enough chargers and convenient places to go 330 miles as advertised easily.

And the cars are very, very heavy.

And so they get in accidents.

It's like a torpedo.

They're a third heavier than a combustion engine car.

And

they go very fast,

enormous accelerators.

They can be in the hands of people.

I was driving yesterday home.

It seemed like everybody was cutting in and out of traffic.

On the 99 was in a Tesla.

In addition to that, they tend to burn when they get in wrecks more, believe it or not, than

a car with

a tank full of gas.

And where's the energy going to come from?

If you're going to go all electric to stop down,

to tamp down or to stop

emissions, when you realize that almost all of the emissions coming out of the tailpipe of a gas-driven car are not toxic after they're treated, but the problem with them is supposedly heat.

So you're going to have a car that doesn't

generate heat.

So therefore, you can't burn coal to make electricity for the batteries.

You can't burn natural gas.

You can't burn oil.

Then, and hydro is now static.

In fact, in California, as I said earlier in the podcast, we're taking out dams.

We're not building new hydroelectric dams.

So the only place you can get the electricity to power this fleet is nuclear because solar and wind shut down a lot at nighttime.

And that's when people come home and want to charge their Teslas.

So what do you do?

And somebody in the California legislature floated the idea, well, maybe we're going to be energy short, so maybe you plug in your Tesla and we'll have a device that we steal your, I don't mean steel, but we suck back the electricity that's still in your car.

And then the next day when the solar panels are working, you can recharge it.

So that shows you how desperate it is.

And so the whole green project is not working.

We knew it wasn't going to work.

There's going to be a solution, and that's a free market solution where people, as gas gets higher, people are trying to use hybrids or trying to find new types of transmissions.

You can't buy a V8 basically in a half-ton pickup now.

They're all going to six-cylinder turbos.

I had one as I keep haranguing on a diesel that the turbo blew out and it's still in the shop at four months in the shop.

So

I think the free market is going to deal with this somehow, but this idea we're going to get a bureaucrat, he's going to borrow a bunch of money and he's going to lavish it on alternate injury or green projects, mostly in defiance of the rules of free market.

profit and loss is just nuts, especially when we're sitting on a bonanza of

natural gas and oil.

And we used to be the

foremost architects of nuclear power.

And there's already discussion that fusion is on the way and we could have fusion power, small mini plants everywhere.

It would be very safe,

very efficient.

So

I just don't think these people who get degrees and they think they're professional bureaucrats, Mayorkas is another example, Merrick Garland, they don't have expertise.

They don't in the field.

I mean the field in which they're specialized in.

And they shouldn't be given such powers.

Well, there seems to be

something innately evil about them, if I may say so, because

if you stick to energy, there's no question that the more energies that's available, the less poverty there is

across the globe.

And

to suppress energy is is to increase poverty.

It's it's well you should go you the answer to that is go to an area where the per capita income is $16,000 and it's 95%

minority community, i.e.

where I live and go to the closest service station to where I live and see how what happens.

Do people come They just pull in in their new car and they stick their credit card and they go out?

No.

They park their car, they go go in and they give them 30, 50, 60 dollars.

And then they come back to their car and they put in a quarter or a third of tank.

And then they look at their wallet and they think I might have a little bit more.

And then they go back in and give them another $20.

In other words, they don't have the money to fill up their car.

And they're metering it out because gasoline runs between $520 and $6, and diesel runs between $5.50 and $6.10 or $6.20,

and they can't afford it.

And the idea that they're going to turn, and you know, they buy a used car for $20,000 on term, and the idea that they're going to buy a Tesla at $65,000 is a joke.

If they did buy it, they don't have the money to charge it.

So, yeah, it affects power people.

It doesn't affect people where I work in Palo Alto, believe me.

They think it's great, high-price energy, but not for the majority of people who are poor.

And the thing they don't get is when you're putting that kind of money, so you've got a 20-gallon tank in a car and you're putting,

you know, $120 in it when you fill up,

then that's money you don't have for food, that's money you don't have for clothing, that's money you don't go out to eat, et cetera, et cetera.

And it's completely unnecessary.

It's completely unnecessary because California is sitting on the Monterey Shale Basin.

It's got, I think, that still has the fourth largest reserves of oil in the, and we're importing oil from the Saudis, we're importing natural gas.

From Alaska, we're importing coal-generated electricity from, I think, Utah.

So just so we can say we're a renewable state.

But it's so expensive for the poor, and they don't care about the poor.

We've already talked about that.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's talk about a little positive news, and that has will do with some colleges.

Two things I think they're positive anyway.

Not necessarily related, but

first of all, there are places where lunacy is not happening on college campuses, and that's community colleges and

trade schools where you don't find

protests of the Israel-Hamas

war.

I guess people are going to school to try to learn a trade and to

advance themselves somewhere.

So they're very different environments than we find at the elite institutions.

And then, unrelated, but still a college story, is

piece

by the College Fix, which love the College Fix.

Our friend John Miller founded it.

Great stories there every day.

And it's about the rise of quote-unquote faithful Catholic colleges, which, because they're faithful, are seeing booms in enrollment.

And

I think, you know, it's not like, well, Hillsdale is not a Catholic college, but I think some of these places like Thomas Aquinas, Belmont, Wyoming Catholic, they're tracking Hillsdale because they're giving good educations.

They're honest about what they're offering.

They're not woke.

And frankly, they're affordable.

I just did a quick search of, picked out three colleges.

Thomas Aquinas charges all in $40,000 a year, room board education.

Hillsdale,

$45,000 a year.

Look, those are more than you'll pay at a state college, but still, compared to other private colleges, Amherst, what do you think Amherst is a year all in?

80, 90,

88,000.

Imagine that.

$88,000 a year.

Anyway, Victor,

what?

Your kids going to come out better educated or more arrogant and ignorant?

Yeah.

Anyway, a good, good, good trend on the Catholic college front.

Interesting thing to note about what's not happening at community colleges and trade schools.

Any thoughts about these things, Victor?

Well, we know what trade schools are.

They tend to have a little older, not always, but I think the age of students is a little older.

They tend to be commuter colleges and they're there to learn a skill and the skills and the labor short economy are well compensated.

So

they have made a conscientious decision, do I want to go in debt for $30,000, do a lot of courses online and learn how to be an accountant or a plumber or an electrician?

Or do I want to go, I don't know, say $60,000, a quarter million dollars in debt for a sociology degree and be unemployed or be like AOC or be a barista.

No, they don't.

And so they're serious people and they don't have time to go scream to, you know, genocidal chants like From the River to the Sea.

But you put a lot of wealthy upper-class kids, plus kids that are on scholarship at these

institutions, and you isolate them from society at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Wesley, Wellesley,

Gryn Mawr, you name it, Oberlin, and keep them away from the general public, and you get a left-wing faculty, and the courses are therapeutic with studies, that is, they're deductive,

and there's an echo chamber of 95% of the faculty are the same political persuasion, then you have what you have.

disaster that we're witnessing, this scab that's been torn off, and we're looking at this putrid wound.

But the trade schools don't have time.

And and the Catholic, you know, if you go to a St., I spoke last year at St.

Thomas Aquinas

and

I mean,

it was like, I'm not trashing schools that I'm associated with, but if

you leave Stanford University's campus and you go to Hillsdale or you go to St.

Thomas Aquinas, it's a different world.

It's just a different world.

Nobody's going to be chanting from the river to the sea.

Nobody's going to be screaming at this and that.

And the faculty senate's not going to do this and that.

No faculty member at Hillsdale is going to take kids out to a bridge and shut it down a commuter and get 70 people arrested.

They don't do that.

And

when you go there, they're perfectly safe.

You don't block your bike even.

Nobody's going to accost you.

There's no Cleriac notice that, hey, by the way, there's a suspect seen on campus doing the following.

It doesn't occur.

So

they're being looked at by people.

Their biggest problem, to be frank, Jack, is that

the upper-class bicoastal

so-called white professional who put an enormous amount of investment in their child's education at a prep school or at a charter school and did their, you know, for their junior year or something, they went for a semester to Africa and helped drill a well or something something for their college essay, or they got a sat camp.

That doesn't apply anymore.

They don't want them.

And so, even though they're left-wing,

their Frankenstinian monster that they killed is devouring them, and they don't know where to put their kids.

And they're looking at places like St.

Thomas Aquinas and Hillsdale, pepper dying.

And the problem is: do you let all those

wonderfully prepared kids into those schools?

And if you do, do you lose your conservative traditional brand?

And that's a dilemma for them.

But the fact that their liberal parents are considering those schools is a

repudiation of their whole ideology because they created these types of universities.

So what everybody doesn't understand is if the university says, Jack, in 2018, that to get into Yale, you have to have

1550 on the combined set, and you need a 4.3 with a rigorous advanced placement course load in high school.

And you have to be to have gone to a competitive school.

And we're going to let in students demographically

by their race.

So 67% or what?

Then you're going to, and these are necessary to do Yale type of work and to get a Yale degree.

And it works.

And then suddenly suddenly you take that standard and by 2021, two and three, you trash it.

That standard didn't mean anything.

We were delusional.

SATs don't mean a thing.

Comparative GPAs don't mean a thing.

It's all about DEI and all this.

Okay.

And then you let in students.

Well, what happens?

As I keep hitting that drum, you either inflate or you change the curriculum and water it down or you be called a racist.

So a lot of turmoil and unhappiness on campus today is that with the new admissions, open admissions, that these elite universities have allowed people that according to their rules, not yours, Jack, not mine, but according to their rules would not have been admitted four or five years ago.

And the old rules were in existence because they felt that they were in competition with each other.

So they wanted the greatest number of people who were successful as alumni, who could donate, who gave them, I don't know, recognition, Nobel Prize, future Nobel Prize people, future Rhodes Scholar, whatever.

And now they've destroyed those standards and they've used a different set of criteria for admissions and they don't know what to do.

And that makes students very angry, very, very angry.

because they feel that they were admitted and their admission was a guaranteed success in the curriculum.

And now they look at the curriculum and there's some old guard faculty who still have standards and they can't meet those standards because they were not trained properly in high school.

And employers know that once you get into an Ivy League school, they do not flunk you out very easily.

It's easier than a state college to get through.

And when they graduate, they're not prepared very well.

And we're in a

transitionary, very exciting, but depressing period where the employers are starting to notice for the last two to three years that the quality of graduate is not what it was.

And if that were to continue, the deserved prestige of that institution is not warranted.

And that's, it came to me, you know, I had three children and One of my children went to a UC campus and was a history major.

And one of my children transferred to a California State University campus.

Very different.

And the state college

child of mine took mostly multiple choice in history.

And I never gave one multiple choice in my life.

But all the courses were things like history of the British Empire,

Plaginets,

Plantagenet Kings,

uh

renaissance europe the enlightenment in western europe stuff like that uh the civil war revolutionary america and my other child at the uc campus had classes like

the american native american genocide harriet tubman great figures of the women's emancipation this kind of stuff and they were all essay jack all essay which i always thought was superior.

But guess what?

The one child who could write pretty well and was writing these essays according to the ideology expected, and the other child who was just boning up on facts, dates, periods without, you know, he, not that he could not write well, he was a very good writer, but he was not tested on that.

When they both graduated, I would ask them about history.

And guess what?

The one child got a better education at the state college by far.

By far.

And the essay on the therapeutic curriculum and weaponized courses was not a way to train somebody in history.

And that just radically changed my own thinking.

And

so, what I'm getting at, I guess, poorly is that just because you have this cattle brand name that you get branded with and it's supposed to be equivalent to prestige doesn't mean it will be.

It's sort of, I mean, institutions change.

so the fbi say if you say today that you're an fbi director you're not going to get the esteem that you did 40 years ago if you say to somebody um

i work for um

i don't know i'm the director of national intelligence that's not going to be as prestigious as it was before right if you say wow i'm an exciting guy i i work in new york city i live in new york and i work in washington i That doesn't seem to be such a great thing anymore.

Institutions can lose their luster.

If you look at the NBA franchises, you think, if you look at the attendance, 30 million people watched an NBA playoff 30 years ago.

It's like four now.

And look at the Oscars.

I got the Oscars.

Who cares anymore?

Does anybody know who got the Oscar?

Does anybody know what was best?

That used to be an event of people's lives.

You know, oh, is this play?

Is this, you know, is Lawrence of Arabia going to be best picture?

And wow, Peter O'Toole.

But nobody cares anymore.

And so you can destroy your reputation is what I'm saying.

And it can happen very quickly.

And I think what's happening as we're watching this, and October 7th was like another catalyst, as was the George Floyd reaction to George Floyd, is that

you're going to meet somebody in five years who's, you know, know 21 and he's going to say i have a yale ba and you're going oh my god if i hire this guy he's going to be trouble in the workplace he's going to be pampered if his candidate doesn't win the election he's going to want cookies and a teddy bear to hug

he's going to want a safe space he's wanting a racially segregated green room or something i don't want that

and he's not going to know what to do if i hire him in a law firm and i put him out in my contracts division, a legal aide knows more about contracts than a, you know, a Yale graduate in contracts.

He's just, it's just a lose-lose.

I'm not going to hire him.

I'm going to go to Brigham Young or I'm going to go to Texas AM and hire somebody.

And so that's what's happening.

And I don't think they understand what's happening.

They think it could never happen.

It's like people, you know, in 1946 saying the British Empire, the sun will never set on it.

Come on.

It's Britain.

We won World War I and World War II.

No, it's over.

It's over.

There is such a thing as a British Empire is over for good.

And that's the same thing with the Ivy League elite prestige.

It's over.

And unless you have some crazy nut like John Silver or S.I.

Hayakawa or somebody comes in and says,

I'm going to save the university, but I don't see that happening.

Well, you did write a piece, and this is now, let me pitch a little Victor's website, victorhanson.com, The Blade of Perseus.

Recently,

can we save Howard Universities?

And Victor, you don't throw in the towel, but to save them, and we're not talking about saving Hillsdale or Thomas Aquinas or Belmont or Abbey or et cetera, but it is

a Herculean task to save your

run-of-the-mill, a very expensive university.

And

I encourage our listeners to visit the website, find the piece.

At the end, you do give prescriptions, which you've discussed before on previous podcasts.

One of them I do like

is that the

has to do with the student loans.

And you're right, we must demand that universities' endowments back their own student loans.

And

you think that what happened, that

the students,

is it Penn or no?

It was Cooper Union.

You think that these students at Cooper Union were given loans by Cooper Union to come and they owed $80,000 if they defaulted, Cooper Union would be out of that money?

Do you think they would be chasing Jews and trapping them in the library?

And you think Cooper Union would allow that?

Or put it this way: if Stanford University had to pay income tax on their endowment income, do you think they would have as many administrators and administrative staff as they do students?

I don't think so.

That would cost them $2 billion right there with the tax liability.

And do you think if we apply bar standards that just because you go to a university and you get a law degree from Harvard doesn't mean you can practice law unless you pass the bar?

And we said just because you got a BA doesn't give you a BA degree unless you pass just a minimum competence test, like an SAT to make sure we're all in the same playing field, all 5,000 colleges.

Do you really think that these students would have the time to go out and destroy stuff and, you know,

hit a pinata again and again and say, hit the Jew at UCLA?

I don't think so.

I think they would realize that they could lose the $250,000 investment because they don't know anything and they'd study a little bit more.

And do you think the faculty members

If they didn't have tenure, do you think a faculty member at a university would go into a protest and hit a guy over the head with a megaphone and knock him down and kill him?

I don't think so.

And so if you,

there's things you could do if you had an exit test or your tax endowment or you got the universities to back their own loans or you got rid of tenure as we know it.

And we all know, it's like Livby said, we all know the medicine and we feel it's worse than the disease.

The endowments get me, Victor.

And I work from Amphil, American Philanthropic, and we help nonprofits with fundraising.

We help nonprofits, some of them with endowments and capital campaigns.

And you are on the board of a very important

conservative philanthropy, which has an endowment.

But for these colleges,

And actually

for a lot of institutions, the endowment becomes the priority, protecting it, growing it, as opposed to spending it for people gave the money to help real people,

to help students

why is it important that Yale or Harvard have a $35 billion endowment to for perpetuity why not use that money to have free tuition so you know for example why

and and and back on the student loan stuff by the way if if if um

if amherst which i mentioned before with the 88 000 tuition had to back the student loans they would not be charging 88 000 a year Oh, they wouldn't.

And

if you also, I also suggested another reform that all of these universities, even the multi-billion dollar private, count on billions, especially the research universities, billions of dollars in federal funds for research, mostly in science, medicine, et cetera, but not always in the humanities as well.

If you told those people

to get federal funds, you're going to have to agree to

honor the Bill of Rights.

So on your campus, there's going to be free speech.

And if you have people who are invited and you will not protect them from voicing their opinions, i.e., if you have Judge Duncan and he goes to Stanford Law School and one of your administrators hijacks his speech and takes over and reads from a pre-written, pre-prepared text and you have students in the law school that yell out, hope your daughter is raped and drive him out, and you violated the free speech canon of the First Amendment.

We're not going to give you any money.

Sorry, we're going to cut you off.

And if you have a student and somebody says, I accuse you of sexual harassment, and you don't offer that student a right to defend himself or herself, and you don't have transparency in the hearing, and you don't allow evidence to be collected.

as a person would be accorded in a general trial, then we're not going to give you money.

And I think if you just just did that, you would have a just a sea change in the way that the universities function.

And because, and if you said to them, you know what,

the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts forbid segregation and housing on the base of race.

So if you have your black theme house and your brown theme house and your Asian theme house and all of these theme houses, and you do not let somebody in from a different race that wants to participate, you can have a theme house.

But if somebody is not black and wants to live there, or somebody is not Native American wants to live there, then you're a violation of the Civil Rights Act and we're not going to give you federal money.

Same thing applies to your separately racially segregated graduations and safe spaces.

You solve the problem.

Universities know what they're doing.

Their whole premise is not transparency.

Their whole thing is we're going to go under the radar and we're going to be on the offensive.

So we're going to accuse everybody in society of being racist and sexist and xenophobic, and that way they won't look at what we're doing because we are the racist.

We are the segregationist.

We are the elitist.

We are the money gougers.

We are taking teenagers to the cleaners and they're signing away their lives on

detailed loan application that they would never.

be subject to if they bought a car.

They would have 20 pages of warnings about

all of the financial liabilities they've incurred, but not when they come to a university.

And so we could do it.

We all, everybody has different ideas, but I think that

the other, the other thing very quickly is there's something wrong with this cursus of norm that you go to undergraduate.

And then you get interested in a field and you're pretty good at it.

And then the professor says, you could go to graduate school and then you graduate at 20, 21, 21 and you go and get your PhD.

It used to be 25, but four years now, probably seven or eight.

And then you go out at 29 and then you go right to a campus and then you're 40 years old in your tenure and you look back at your life since 18 and you say, you know, you've been 22 years in a campus.

You don't know how to fix a car.

You do not know how

to start a gasoline, I don't know, generator motor.

You don't know how to grow your own garden.

You do not know how

a corporation works.

You do not know anything other than this little embryo that you've been tucked into,

this placenta of the university culture.

And you're kind of a dysfunctional citizen.

You don't understand people who are not like you, that don't have bachelor's degrees, which is half the country.

You have no idea what the white working class is like.

And when you see them, you only see them in this age at 18 to 21, that they're not fully developed individuals.

And you're the faculty member, but you don't see the real America.

And therefore, you blast it in the abstract.

You have all these theories about it.

You're all in a group speak orthodoxy.

It's not healthy.

And we need to get people from different walks of life that come in and teach.

And some business schools do that very well.

They get business people who actually say, this is how you form a corporation, etc.

And you don't have to have the bankman-freed parents as law law professors.

You really don't.

Just those types of people.

And so I think we're getting, we don't get a cross-section of America.

And these people are hot house plants,

especially the more elite we go.

And, you know, when you look at, I really saw it when

the Russian collusion thing, when

Robert Mueller formed his dream team.

Remember that?

They kept calling them the dream team.

I think Max Buch called them the hunter-killer team.

They were the all-stars, and they kept talking about their BAs and their JDs, where they were from, and their titles they'd had.

And they were just going to go through and destroy Donald Trump.

And then he had these, they were really snickering.

There's this Ty Cobb, who, by the way, is no Trump supporter, you know, Hamilton mustache, old guy, you know,

he's just old, he's out of it.

And then they, Jay Sekholo, some activist, he doesn't know anything.

And then that couple from Florida.

And they beat them.

I mean,

they just beat them in the court of law, every type of injunction or admission.

And Robert Mueller's dream team found nothing.

They imploded.

And the Trump legal team, which was just ridiculed because they didn't have the proper Ivy League credentials, and they just soared.

And it really tells you that

that's what keeps the country going are these people with practical experience.

And I'm not making fun of these universities.

I know there's very great teachers there at these universities and they're still there.

But the problem is you have to hunt them out and they're in a minority now and they are beleaguered.

And the general culture of the university is not

conducive to learning.

It's not conducive to being a good citizen.

It's not conducive to being a tolerant individual.

It's just the opposite.

Conducive to walking on eggs.

Yeah.

And you know, the schools of education that teach our teachers and our administrators, there's this article in the, I think it was in the, was it in the Bronx or the Queens, Hillcrest High School in New York, where one student, a teacher just on her private social media said, I stand with Israel.

She went into her class.

She was almost killed.

I mean, physically, they were trying to physically assault her.

She had to run in and lock herself in the principal's office.

These were her own high school students.

Who created that culture on campus?

What type of educational philosophy allowed those students to think they could do that?

Which teachers had inculcated those values in them?

And where did they get those ideas but from the schools of education?

So it has consequences.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we're going to wrap up the show with your thoughts on some conservative,

I don't want to call them pundits, but prominent conservative social media personalities and contre-temps over their stands on the

Israel-Hamas

war.

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

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor,

wow.

Oh, I'm looking at Powerline.

You love Powerline.

I love Powerline.

Scott Johnson.

I like all of them.

Steve Hayward, all of them.

John Mernarch.

Scott, I know

more than most.

Scott came on a national review cruiser too.

He's the sweetest guy.

I mean, he has a piece here from the other day.

It's titled Candy Man.

And this has to do with Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro,

Tucker Carlson.

It's kind of now interwoven controversy amongst these three.

And Candace Owen works for, in part, for Ben Shapiro.

And she, here's, let me just read this quickly.

Scott's no, no fan of any of the, well, Ben Shapiro, maybe.

Candace is apparently

bidding to expand her market while otherwise exposing herself as something of his words, ignoramus.

A cat has her tongue on precisely whom she was talking about in the tweet below.

And here's the tweet.

Candace Owens did this on early November.

No government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide ever.

There is no justification for a genocide.

I can't believe this even needs to be said or is even considered the least bit controversial to state.

Scott Johnson continues, it makes perfect sense to me that Tucker Carlson served as the medium for Owens, Candace Owens, explication of her message, such such as it is.

She was on Tucker's Tucker interview, I think, the other day.

For some reason or other, Israel leaves Carlson cold.

He prides himself on keeping cool about Israel's ordeal.

So, Victor, you have Candace Owens,

you know, giving it to Israel or not condemning Hamas and going out of her way to not condemn Hamas and its protests and kind of

equalizing Israel and Hamas, Tucker's,

as per Scott, coldness, and then

Ben Shapiro getting into it with Candace Owens about her attitude.

By the way, I didn't even mention Megan Kelly has been a war for Candace Owens also very publicly about her stance.

So, Victor, I don't know what I'm really asking you.

This is, I do know what I'm asking you, your thoughts about

any of this and how it is healthy or harmful to the general underlying cause that you and I.

I don't mind criticism.

I don't mind back and forth.

I know all these people.

Candace Owens Leswell.

I think I've met her once.

I've had dinner with her husband.

I know Ben Shapiro somewhat.

I know Tucker better because I've been on his show a lot.

I've talked to him.

I've been interviewing with his new venue.

So I know all of these people to some degree.

So I'll just start in order.

So Candace Owens,

my only, I agree with her in a lot of stuff that she's done.

She's done a lot of good, but she's still very young.

When I was 34, I mean, that's an adult, but I didn't, I said some stupid things, no doubt.

So when she, in that posting, when she said that

no government has a right, didn't she say to commit genocide or something?

I remember what that, so when she says genocide, you know, that's genos,

and that means killing Kedot, the root kill, wipe out a whole population.

So we know how that works.

We saw the Holocaust, we saw the Armenian genocide, we saw what's going into.

When you want to commit genocide, you don't drop leaflets and say

that there is a bombing attack coming and our target is onto your hospital.

And please leave the hospital because, even though if you're not going to bomb the hospital, if you're going to commit genocide,

you don't say to your soldiers: if you do what Hamas did and you rape and you behead and you mutilate,

you're going to be subject to military justice.

If you're going to commit suicide, genocide, then your civilians scream for the genocide.

In other words, instead of saying from the river they see,

they'll say, cleanse Gaza of all Palestinians and kill them.

They're not doing that.

So, what I'm trying to say is, all she had to do is be empirical and look at historical examples of genocide and say, does it fit to the

Israeli retaliation?

Then she should also note that on October 7th, when 12 to 1,300 civilians were mutilated, killed, decapitated, raped, Israel had not responded.

But the world,

the pro-Hamas world was

exhilarated.

I'm just quoting a Cornell professor said that.

So she should ask herself, why was the world exhilarated that at a time of peace and holiday on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur surprise attack, people went in and slaughtered civilians in their beds.

That, and then they're chanting that they like

that.

And by the way, when they just released some hostages and they had them in ambulances going out to Egypt, the people on the street who are so innocent were screaming and yelling at them.

Just as they did with the captives and just as they mutilated corpses in the streets of Gaza and just as they tagged along to go into Israel to kill people.

So I don't understand what she's saying.

I really don't.

And

when you mentioned this, I looked at this tweet.

I can't believe this even needs to be said or isn't considered the least bit controversial to state.

There's no justification for a genocide.

Well, what does she think from the

river to the sea means?

What is that?

And does she have any idea of the 900,000 Jews that were ethnically cleansed or faced execution who had been there for centuries in Damascus, in Beirut,

in Baghdad, in Cairo, in North African major cities.

They were all ethnically cleansed after the 47, 56, 67, and 73 wars.

Does she have any idea about the Armenian genocide?

So I don't understand that.

And I guess I didn't understand her support for Kenya West.

I didn't, because he was an anti-Semite and she befriended him and defended him.

So I guess I am, but I've never been, you know, I've never been up on Candace Owens.

I've never said, you know what, she's a Tom Soul or Shelby Steele in the black community or any community that I want to follow.

I just felt that she was a young, impressionable

former liberal that had become conservative.

I welcomed that, and that she had called to account some liberal hypocrisies, which I thought was helpful.

And that was it.

I didn't expect any more.

And then

we get to Tucker.

Tucker's view, I don't think, is anti-Semitism.

I met him, he's not anti-Semitic.

His view is this:

that at this late date, the United States does not have the wherewithal or the resources or the attention span or the moral authority to get involved in

the internal affairs of Ukraine or Israel or anything,

because as he pointed out, 100,000 people are dying on fentanyl and nobody seems to care.

There's 8 million people, et cetera, et cetera.

So in that worldview, he's saying that it was a tragedy.

What happened?

I don't think that was the right word.

I think Scott's right about that.

It was a murder.

But that's his view.

And that applies to all these different places.

And I think that came partly out of,

I had talked to him when he came to Stanford, and he was, like me, supported the Iraq war, and he was very disillusioned about that in Afghanistan.

I think that suggested to him that we, when we support regimes abroad or we get involved, it doesn't work.

We should be fortress America first.

That's what his view is.

But unfortunately, when that applies to October 7th,

it doesn't really, I don't think it takes into consideration if you're going to be a neo-isolationist or a neo-American first or whatever the term you use,

the particular history of Israel and the Jewish people just doesn't take consideration.

Here we are 80 years after the Holocaust, where 6 million people were slaughtered, and you have a regime that, unlike the SS or the Gestapo people, or the Waffen-SS or the

murderers at Auschwitz, who tried to hide their crimes, they tried to destroy the because they were so

assured that that the world would go after them for what they did.

These people are taking pictures of it and downloading it and broadcasting it because they are assured that the world will be on their side for killing Jews.

So in some ways, even though in terms of magnitude, they're not comparable, but in aims and agendas, the October 7th murders are worse.

So I think in that case, Tucker should recognize that we support Israel because it's the only constitutional system among 500 million people in that area, that after the Holocaust, there was nowhere safe for Jews, that they had a 3,000-year history in the Middle East, and they were pro-Western.

And they lived in a very tough neighborhood.

And their enemies wanted to annihilate them, kill them.

And they had done that all during the 1930s and 40s.

And the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a die-hard Nazi adherent.

And people

in Egypt during the 67 war came right out of the Third Reich and were advising the Nasser government.

And there had been a long history of Mein Kamp and kill the Jews among Arab communities that even

predated the creation of Israel.

And so that was the history.

And so I guess that criticism applies.

It's a different case.

So I was upset about all of it.

And

I think Scott was pretty correct.

And then the final person, I met Charles Kirk.

I like him.

I spoke at his group.

But he says that

defaming Israel, Charlie, he mentioned this

Scott Shapiro's article.

I'm looking at it now, Jack.

Charlie Kirk floats the theory that Netanyahu let

Hamas slaughter Jews to consolidate power.

Well, that is ridiculous because in the long political career of Benjamin Netanyahu, never has his hold on power been so tenuous, even when he was out of office, because he is the man at the top.

And according to the rules of constitutional governance, if you're the man at the top and you are surprised, you can't even blame your intelligence, da, da, da, da.

You get blamed for it.

And what you have to do is rectify that immediately.

So if you're George W.

Bush and you're there at 9-11 and you get caught and they just kill, murder 3,000 Americans, then you better galvanize the nation.

You better go to the ground zero.

You better say the whole world's going to hear from you, from us, and you better go out and try to destroy that Taliban, which he did.

And if you're Franklin Roosevelt, and your team has moved the 7th Fleet from San Diego and you've put it out there

and it's exposed at Pearl Harbor and you've clamped down on that and you're creating tensions and they attack you, then you better mobilize the country and win the war.

And that's what he did.

Of course, in all of these cases, Jack, they accused George W.

Bush of knowing that this was going to happen.

They accused FDR of knowing that it was going to happen.

They accused Harry Truman of knowing about the Korean War.

If you look at each one of those cases, you could argue they were complete laxities, misjudgments, naivete, idealism.

The same thing with Netanyahu.

Netanyahu got surprised because he felt the tempo of the country and the pressures from Europe and the United States were that the Abrams Accord you should buy into, it'll change the whole mosaic.

And you're so affluent now, Israel, and so successful that if you have 20,000 Gazans working in

the kibbutzes in southern Israel, they'll see the prosperity, they'll learn agriculture, they'll want to emulate you, they'll have the Hesiotic good envy.

And when he consulted the mostly left-wing

generalship and Mossad, they assured him that that impression was correct.

The whole country, the last two years I've been there, was in a...

upbeat, optimistic, confident mood that their sheer success had been so great

and their cities were so utopian almost that people in the general area had finally come to their senses and said,

we're going to try to make Singapore and Gaza.

We're going to try to work.

And that was a fatal conceit.

And they all suffered from it.

And we do the same thing on 9-11.

We did the same thing in Pearl Harbor.

And that happens to constitutional societies.

It just does.

But the idea of Charlie Kirk that he deliberately, somebody came to him, and that was the idea the Egyptians said they're going to, well, they hear that all the time.

They're going to do this and they're going to do this and they're going to do this.

But the idea that he said, ah, they really are going to do this and I'm going to let 12,000 people be butchered so that I can get more power, he's not stupid.

He knows if even if you're cynical and you believe he's capable of that, you know that that happens, he's going to be out of office unless he goes nuclear.

Stalin would have been capable of that.

Mao would have been capable of that.

I've heard that a lot, by the way.

I've heard that a lot by conservatives.

I have.

It's just appalling.

Well, we discussed, I think, two or three episodes ago, Victor, that, you know,

America's own policies related to Lebanon over the course of 20 years helped blind

Israeli intelligence.

Well, what happened,

I'll be frank, is the Biden administration has a lot of culpability because when they came into office, they did the following.

They started attacking the Israeli government.

They tried to get back in the Iran deal.

They lifted sanctions and gave billions of dollars that went in the coffers of Hamas and Hezbollah.

They said the Houthis are no longer terrorists.

They started to talk about ransoming hostages in Iran.

And they started to interfere with

the politics of Israel as they did during the Clinton administration.

And they were anti-Lukou.

They were trying to pressure the conservatives and the government.

They did that.

And what they did is they gave a signal.

When you couple it with the Chinese balloon and you couple it with the Russian hacking and you couple it with Joe Biden saying that he wouldn't object if Russia made a minor incursion into Ukraine or we'll get Zelensky out the first week.

Or you look at what happened in Afghanistan.

They destroyed the

impression of American deterrence.

And then they pressured Israel to give concessions, concessions, concessions.

And people in Tehran and people in Beirut and people in Gaza City came to the conclusion that if you now struck in a decisive blow and you, for the first time, you went into Israeli territory and you mass murdered, the Israelis would be so shocked, these postmodern new generation of Israelis, that they did that.

And the world would sympathize with you and say, you know what, you're only a savage because they made you into a savage.

And the United States wouldn't do anything.

We'll see whether those assumptions are correct.

I think they were wrong.

For the first time in the life of Hamas, they have taken the gloves off of their enemies.

And the enemy, I think right now, the Netanyahu government understands

that if you have the worst day of killing Jews in a single day since the Holocaust, that no left-wing, right-wing, centrist, moderate,

you name it, prime minister of Israel has any choice, any choice but to unload and destroy Hamas.

And Joe Biden better wake up because he's got the greatest array of U.S.

power.

that we've seen in 20 years, those two big carrier groups and the associated ships.

And they have Iran thinking they're not going to do anything, and they are embolding Iran.

They've got a big fat target out there, and they are hitting Americans in Syria and Iraq, and we are feebly responding.

And somebody in Hezbollah and Iran are going to make a fatal mistake.

And we're going to wake up one morning and somebody's going to shoot a rocket at one of those carriers.

And when that happens, they won't be in control of events.

Joe Biden will have to respond, or he will face a greater degree of outrage than any present and recent memory.

And when he responds, it will not be good for Hezbollah

or Tehran.

I don't think the Iranians understand that

there's no restraint anymore.

The Europeans are not going to call up Biden and say, please don't hurt the Iranians.

The Russians are going to say, yeah, we get drones from them, but if you want to take them out, go ahead.

We don't care.

We don't like them.

Price of oil will go up for us.

Chinese are going to call, they're going to call us up and say, well, if you want to get rid of them, go ahead, but don't interrupt the sea lanes and make sure we get oil.

The Europeans are saying we're more afraid of them than you are.

And the Assaudis and the Egyptians are going to say, well, what took you so long?

So there's nobody out there that are going to weep to get rid of that regime.

And so what would they do if the Iranians start sending missiles and stuff?

They will take out all of their military bases.

They will take out their entire nuclear apparatus.

They will take out their power grid if they have to.

They will decide to what degree of collective punishment is valuable and what's counterproductive.

Do you want to, and they will really do a blow.

And if the Iranians sends their agents

to commit terror, then they will double down and do it again and again and again.

And they have the power.

And Iran can't stop it.

And China and Russia and Europe won't stop it.

So the Iranians are on a tight wire and they don't even know it.

And they should be very careful about what they tell Hezbollah and what their radicals say they're going to do to us.

And if that happens, believe me, if Hezbollah attacks American assets in a major way, or Iran does, there's not going to be any American that's going to tell Mr.

Netanyahu, well, you have to have another pause.

People should remember something that after 9-11,

George W.

Bush said, didn't say, I feel really bad.

We went and carpet bombed Tora Bora, and there must have been a lot of civilians that unfortunately be killed.

And we did take out the Taliban with strategic strikes, but there was thousands of collateral damage.

Nobody talked about it, but there was.

There was, because that was a time of existential war.

And that's what we'll be in, and Iran will be the big loser.

And nobody will shed any tears.

They are the most despised, unpopular government in the world.

Everybody knows that.

Everybody's afraid of them.

And everybody acts as if they, you know, they can, they can have normal relations with them.

But privately and secretly, they despise them.

They despise them.

That's why the people in the streets deserved the support.

They did.

Barack Obama.

I'm not talking about the Iranian people.

When Obama came into office, that green movement had a million and a half people in the streets of Tehran.

They were ready to overthrow that corrupt, hideous government.

And Obama thought, oh, wow, these are a bunch of neoconservative Iranians.

And I invested my presidency into reaching out to these Shia Muslims and creating a Shia crescent that included Tehran and Damascus and Beirut and Gaza City and would play off the Israelis and the Saudis and don't upset my apple card.

That's his attitude.

So he did nothing for, I think, 12 days.

Then it was a meek.

And And then when we had a very sophisticated drone that wandered in, shot down, people said, Barack, blow it up, blow it up, that we verse engineer it.

And they did, and they got a little boost in their drone industry.

He didn't, his whole presidency was to empower Iran.

I don't know if it was from Valerie Jarrett or what it was, but they had a

sick, unhinged

soft spot spot for Iran.

I don't mean the Iranian people.

I'm talking about the Iranian theocracy, the murderous theocracy.

Yeah.

Well, the flip side of that is a detesting of Israel, but we've discussed that before.

Hey, Victor, we've gone over

over time here, so we're going to wrap it up.

Thank our listeners for joining us today.

And thank you, Victor, for all the great thoughts you shared.

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