So Many Outrages and Some Wisdom
In this episode, Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler discuss foreboding Sierra snowpack, the matrix of the Democrat's scandals, Asians and Jews in the Democratic Party, billions to Afghanistan, and DeSantis-Trump divide.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Listen and follow along
Transcript
When empires debase their currency, citizens who hold gold survive the transition.
That's not opinion, it's documented fact.
Trump's economic warning isn't speculation, it's pattern recognition.
The same signals that preceded every major currency crisis are flashing now.
Unsustainable debt, foreign nations dumping our bonds, and central banks hoarding gold.
But Trump's also revealing the solution.
The IRS strategy he's used for decades is available to every American.
It's how the wealthy preserve their fortunes when paper currencies fail.
American Alternative Assets has documented this strategy in their free 2025 wealth protection guide.
It shows exactly how to position yourself before the turbulence Trump's warning about arrives.
Call 888-615-8047 for your free guide.
That's 888-615-8047 or visit victorlovesgold.com.
The patterns are clear.
Make sure you're on the right side of them.
Hello, ladies.
Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.
I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star and namesake.
Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.
As is always the case, there are a ton of things to talk about.
But I think, Victor, our listeners, I know I would, and I think our listeners would like to hear your take on these two Hunter Biden-related stories: one
regarding the whistleblower at the IRS, and the other regarding the revelations about who conspired to create this list of 51 genius national security people to claim that his laptop, his infamous laptop, was a Russian hoax.
So, Victor, there are ramifications from that.
These revelations, some of the leaders of the Biden administration, their fingerprints are all over these two scandals.
And we will get your thoughts on this, Victor, right after these important messages.
Like you, when I bought my last pair of shoes, I looked for stylish comfort and beautiful engineering.
And that might make you think Italian, but if you're buying sheets, it should make you think bowl and branch.
The colors, the fabric, the design.
Bowl and branch sheets are made with long-lasting quality, offering extraordinary softness to start and getting softer and softer for years to come.
Bowl and branch sheets are made with the finest 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave.
Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become even softer with every wash.
Plus, bowl and branch comes with a 30-night worry-free guarantee.
I've been sleeping like a baby in my bowl and branch sheets, which keep me cool on those hot summer nights, and they're the perfect place for sunrise and morning coffee.
So, join me.
Feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with Bowl and Branch.
Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bowl and branch.com/slash Victor.
That's Bowl and Branch.
B-O-L-L-A-N-D
B-R-A-N-C-H dot com slash Victor to save 15% off and unlock free shipping.
Exclusions may apply, and we'd like to thank Bolen Branch for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
So you just got back from summer vacation.
Maybe you might have even had to book two rooms because of your snoring.
Some vacation, huh?
Snoring can be an underlying cause of high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and even memory loss.
Here is my advice.
If you want every night to be a true vacation, you need to get yourself Zipa.
That's happy Z spelled backwards.
Zipa is a doctor-designed mouthpiece that not only moves your jaw forward, but is also the only device with a patented tongue seat belt to keep your airways open and the snoring away.
The snoring can stop as soon as the first night.
Zipa was proven in a 600-patient clinical trial and sold over half a million units.
From now until the end of October, show your family you actually care by purchasing a limited edition Pink Zipa.
Not only will you save $10,
but Zipa is on a mission to raise $50,000 for breast cancer research and they will donate another $10,000 to the Susan G.
Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
Go to zyppah.com and use the code PINK or text Victor to 511-511.
Put your snoring on a permanent vacation and help a worthy cause with the snoring device we trust by visiting ZYPPAH.com and use the code PINK or text Victor to 511-511.
Remember, Zipa is happy Z spelled backwards.
Text fees may apply, and we'd like to thank Zipa for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.
We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.
Victor, before we take on Hunter One, the whistleblower
controversy, just curious,
our listeners care about you and everything about you, your farm and
your house up in the mountains there, where we've heard before you've had just an insane amount of snow, unimaginable, I think, unless you live.
Record, record never had more.
Yeah, so how's you were up there this
you're just back from there?
What's the situation?
Well, my wife and I went up there, and
it's now,
you know, it's almost May 1st, and usually there's no snow, but I would say in the courtyard, there's 15 to 16 feet.
And I would say that in the side of one house, there's 15 feet against the house.
And it's, it's Sierra cement, so it's frozen solid.
And you, when you try to use a snowballer, you can't dent it.
You have to take an axe.
And then I would say on one other side of the house,
I dug a little bit, but it was over the windows.
And now the windows didn't break.
We had a really good
roofer integrity roofing of uh clovis and
he i i just after the fire a lot of the shingles got warped so he put a fiber a fiberglass pad and then he put 50-year prudential presidential uh shingles that helped because
uh anyway long story short of you those who live in the snow uh got big ice bridges and the water starts to melt it was 60 degrees yesterday The water goes underneath the snow, it hits the edge where there's ice, and then it backs up, unfortunately, underneath the shingles.
And so, even though I had that fiberglass pad, there was some damage into the bathtub.
Luckily, it was dripping in the bathtub, just stuff like that.
And we dug, my wife and I dug for two or three hours, and then being 69 and
recovering from a microscopic V
and what happened in the hospital, I kind of pooped out at 7,000 feet.
And
so I think it's the worst is over.
I hired some people who will remain unmentionable to dig the roof.
And what they did was unfortunate because I wasn't up there.
And when you dig a roof that had 12 or 15 feet, you always start on the sides.
You know what I mean?
Right.
Yeah.
By the eave.
And then you dig up so then the water can drain down.
What they did was they started at the top and threw the top
snow onto the eaves.
So then they quit, they never came back and finished the eaves.
So what happened was
I had about five feet of snow on the top half of the rope, but maybe 15 on the eaves.
And that started to buckle the eaves.
And
Query Incorporation, a builder in Fresno is a phenomenal builder, and they had built it.
I'm giving a plug for them.
I believe Allison Quirin is a wonderful person.
Their whole family is wonderful.
They're from Reedy, California.
And they really built
a wonderful house in 2006.
They used four by sixes for the studs and they used scissor trusses.
It's going to withstand 20 feet of
it.
It's rated at almost 300 pounds per square foot.
And there's a lot of damage up there, Jack.
We drove around and there's some condominiums that are just flattened.
You know, when one deck on the upstairs goes, it goes down on the second deck and then it goes.
And then when they go, they pull out stuff from the wall.
And then there's two or three cabins that have just exploded because the pressure on the propane tanks, they either disconnected the fittings or they put so much pressure in the tank that it
was too much for the inside of the house and it spun a leak and then the houses filled up with propane and blew up.
Oh my gosh.
So it's, I feel that if I can come out of this with $10,000, $20,000 of damage to fix maybe,
I've got, I'm very lucky because Chad, the owner of
Integrity Roofing, is a good friend of mine and he's very fair.
And he's going to go up and check the entire roof and fix what has to be done.
I have one eve that upstairs that collapsed.
And again, that would not have collapsed except when they dug the roof.
They threw all of the snow onto these eaves.
And they should have, as I said, if they were going to not do the job as contracted, they should have done the eaves first and then left the pitch because, you know, that would have forced the way that scissor truzzes work, it would have forced one side or the other, would have pushed inward rather than down.
And then as it melted, it would have gone down the sides.
But instead,
They took that off.
And then you can see what I'm saying.
When you have a pitched roof and you have weight on the eaves, it starts to buckle up.
And then the water couldn't get out.
So, what happened is there were literally lakes of water sitting on that roof as it started to melt, and it couldn't get through the ice 15 feet.
And then, of course, the guy also hit the garage door, and the garage doors ruined.
Oh, my gosh.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
I didn't really laugh.
Yeah, well, I want to say that.
I'm like, stop.
I'm not going to mention any names, but
when you have somebody to do the driveway, and he hits the garage door and knocks it off the track and dents it and screws up the sensors and then the
and it doesn't work anymore, just every little thing.
One of the weird things is though we finally excavated the front, it was about 15 feet over the and as soon as we got it clear, all the bricks on the facing, you know, like a house with a brick facade, right?
Just it just fell over.
The ice, I guess, had so
it had so
crystallized the mortar that the ice was holding it in place.
And when we took, when we got the snow and the ice chipped the ice, it just fell over.
It just like a whole wall just fell out.
That was
all.
So, Victor, if we have fire doesn't destroy your house, then yeah, fire.
I was very lucky.
I was very lucky.
All the fire did was sort of some embers here and there.
They didn't light the roof.
They just sort of melted the adhesive.
So when you walk up there, when I walked up in that roof, every time I walked, a shingle would fall, every footprint, the shingle would come out.
And then it was a composition roof.
So they, as I said, this guy did a wonderful job.
He saved probably the house.
But I was very lucky because the house is not designed to shed snow.
because there's nowhere to put it.
And so the theory is you get a really heavy-duty engineered roof and then you can hold the snow on top of it.
But this was a record, so I feel blessed because if this rode out, this snow, it'll never collapse because
there'll never be a lear like this.
I have one water follow-up before we get to Hunter Biden, and if just let's keep it contained.
Has the water, which has to go somewhere, right?
The snow melts has to go somewhere.
And going
for all I know, the vast majority of it will flow out into the bay thanks to the delta smelt.
But are the aquafires in California, then what you rely on in the Central Valley, have they been
re-energized?
Yeah, so what's happening is this, that there is so much snow that they are letting it out at full blast in the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers.
They're not saving it.
We don't have the storage for it.
because they canceled all the reservoirs.
And they're delighted about that, the environmentalists.
They're laying 10, 12, 15 million acre feet.
But
this is three times a normal year.
So then the rivers that feed into the San Joaquin and the Sacramento can't feed in.
And they're going back to their old ancestral drainage.
And what is that?
Where we live, it's the largest freshwater lake west, west.
of the Great Lakes called Tulare Lake.
And it's huge.
It was one of the, it's a natural phenomenon.
It was not very deep.
It was 20 or 30 feet.
But it goes all the way from, let's say, Corcoran almost down
into Kern County.
It's a hundreds.
And what's happening now is the Cowia and Kern
and Kings River are starting.
They can't store it.
So there's nowhere for it to go, literally.
We're not into peak sea.
We have about 50 or 60% of the snow still up there.
And it's going into Tulare Lake.
And there's 250,000 acres of the richest farmland in the world because it was on an ancestral lakebed with all the you know the accruing shellfish and fish and and sediment and it was it's it's just notorious or famous i should say for its productivity but it's got a hundred thousand acres underwater and there's a huge fight and i want to be very careful of what i say because i don't want to prejudice one side or the other the ba the j g boswell corporation farms about 150 000 acres in that area And they have kind of the choice land, right?
It's at the lower, the bottom of the lake bed, obviously, is the richest.
And
that's their productivity.
But the problem with that is that that's where it fills up first, right?
Because even though the lake has disappeared and there's houses all over it and farmland, if you go from the area, you can see that it's still kind of like a dish-shaped, you know, gradual
low spot.
Well, what's happened is in fights over these levees that were there for emergencies, the bottom didn't fill up.
The shores did of people that had never been flooded before.
And so if you're on the Boswell side, you say, look, we have levees and we use them.
And if you're on the other side, you say, yes, but That's contrary to custom, practice, and tradition because you're at the low spot.
You benefited from the most fertile soil.
But come on now, when the water comes in and you you build a castle around your
fortification around your rich farmland, then the water is going to hit up against those levees and then go and flood the shore, which was never really flooded in a normal flood year.
And now, so that's the fight that's going on.
There's a lot, you know, these, there's these
other farmers that no one expected, they were higher on the lake bed and they never thought in any stretch of the imagination
they would be flooded.
And they're just desperate to bring out tractors and equipment and
everything
because they're being flooded.
And there's a town just
18 miles away Cork run, maybe 22,
and it's in danger of flooding.
And so it's kind of like a slow-motion design.
Everybody knows it's coming.
Beautiful 80 degrees today, but you look up and they see when you go up to the Sierras at 7,000 feet, the snow is melting.
And you think, well, I said I still have 15 feet.
You think, well, this is manageable.
And then you look above, and you can see in the distance the high Sierra, and that's above Kaiser Peak, all the way to Mount Whitney, and that ranges from almost 11,000, 12,000 feet, all the way, you know, tier to the crest above Mono Lake, all the way to Mount Whitney, 14,000.
Then you say, oh, my God.
We're just living in a bubble.
The first 7,000 feet of the Sierra is nothing.
We thought that's where people are, but the high country, the wilderness country that's hard to get to is where the snow is really heavy and it hasn't even melted.
Wow.
And I don't think it's going to melt.
I don't think my particular little house at 7,200 feet will be free of snow until August.
Well, if you got a 15-foot block of ice, that kind of makes sense.
It'll take a while.
Well, Victor,
let's talk about Hunter Biden now.
Let's not talk.
Let me propose something and you talk.
We have two Hunter Biden-related
stories
related, of course, to his infamous laptop.
So the first one, we have an as yet named IRS agent.
He's a supervisory special agent who has filed for
whistleblower protection.
He's written to various committees and officials, both Republican and Democrat, House and Senate side,
saying essentially the oversight that he's involved with of Hunter Biden's laptop related to the IRS, and he is an IRS agent, has been,
there's been political operations that have prevented him essentially from doing his work.
And then it's come out.
that there was an unidentified senior government official who's been behind this, you know, delaying tactics and obfuscation.
And that happens to be none other than the Attorney General of the United States, Merrick Garland.
So that's one hunter thing.
The second hunter thing
is that Michael Morrell, a longtime national security person and top level,
testified before Congress and admitted that he and Anthony Blinken were the two people who put together the letter from the 51 national security experts back
before the 2020 election saying Hunter Biden's laptop was a Russian hoax, a Russian influence in the election, et cetera, et cetera.
But he admitted, yep,
we were involved, we put it together.
And I don't know that he admitted that we knew it wasn't a hoax.
But here you have Anthony Blinken, now the Secretary of State, as being someone who was very involved with a thing, which a few days after that letter came out, Joe Biden, in a debate with Donald Trump, said, this is a lie.
So, anyway, Victor Hunter, and we have the two of the most prestigious government officials, the Attorney General and the Secretary of State, with their fingerprints all over this
laptop, which still has not gotten anyone prosecuted for anything.
Victor, your thoughts.
Yeah, I mean, it's even worse because
so we have
this theater, and there's a lot of actors in it on stage.
The one thing to keep in mind is that Hunter Biden plays a sick game with his father.
If his father was rational, he would be nowhere near that guy.
He's a crackhead.
He's a pornography person.
He's a wastrel.
Okay.
But he's now, I mean, he went to Ireland to shepherd Joe around.
And when you read some of
the email correspondence that has been released, you see this angst on the part of Hunter, that the big guy, that Mr.
10%,
that he has all of the benefits of selling his office as vice president and the potential for him to be a president someday, but without getting his hands dirty.
Whereas Hunter,
I guess he's trying to
intimate that maybe the sheer corrupt nature of what he's doing has so coarsened him that he's into drugs and prostitute.
I don't know what it is, but he's very bitter that he says that he helps the niece, the cyst.
All of these people are beneficiaries of his dirty work, and yet they keep their hands clean.
So he's very angry.
And Joe won't, he won't separate from Hunter because he knows if he does, Hunter is going to spill the beans.
It's a very strange, sick relationship they have.
Okay,
that's one element.
And that explains Hunter's centrality and all of these scandals.
The other thing to remember is as we're looking at these scandals,
we are investigating Donald Trump with these, and I'm going to say it, these Soros-financed prosecutors.
Letita James for overvaluating his real estate.
That's a joke.
Georgia for a phone call where he said, I need to find 15,000.
He didn't say, get me them.
He just, in a context of there's a lot of fraud going on, surely you can verify 15,000 votes and find the necessary margin.
And they're going to try to impeach, try to prosecute him for that.
And then we have, of course, Alvin Bragg.
Okay.
Given all of that, here's the real scandal.
In 2016,
Jake Sullivan, who was working for Hillary Clinton and had a long relationship with Joe Biden,
he was trying to become national security advisor, which he did do under Biden four years later.
He was intricate involved with Sussman and all the rest of the people to try to promulgate and spread and disseminate this steel hoax.
So he tried to affirm by manipulating the work of a foreign,
I guess we'd call him hire.
It's against the law to hire a foreign national on a campaign.
And that fact must explain why Hillary Clinton transferred money with a DNC paywall, a Perkins-Coe
paywall, a Fusion GPS paywall.
But Jake Sullivan was integral in those machinations.
Now we fast forward
four years.
And as you said,
this
information comes out on the laptop.
Under has lost, what, three laptops?
And he leaves one with his
laptop.
We pair a person.
The person sees it.
It's shocking.
He makes a copy.
He calls the authorities.
The FBI puts a lid on it.
and the
FBI, who is hiring Twitter at $3 million a year as their contractor, sends the word out.
Probably the CIA, that's other government agency that's mentioned in the Twitter archives, and they say squash it.
And they spread the word
around that incestuous group of bankrupt Silicon Valley grandees, and they squash the story.
But that's not enough, squashing it, because it's leaking out through the New York Post, miranda devine especially okay so they go to the next step and the next step is the former deputy director of the cia mike moral he wants to get back to be cia director right
and anthony blinken is now working with jake sullivan jake sullivan didn't get his national security post for all of the skullduggery he did with the dossier so he's pivoting into the biden campaign And Anthony Blinken wants to be Secretary of State.
So he calls up the former director of the CIA.
And I get the subtext is obvious.
Would you like to be director of the CIA?
But we don't know proof of that.
But that's the subtext.
And he says, can't you get your guys to say this is Russian disinformation?
And Morale then says, yeah, now he's testified that he did it so they could win the election, right?
And so he calls up the two most corrupt people, I suppose, in Washington, both confessed liars under oath.
James Clapper, who lied and said I gave their least untruthful answer when he was caught, and John Brennan lied about surveilling Senate staff computers and collateral damage on
assassination missions on the Pakistan border.
And they said, yeah, and they get these 50 left-wing people and they all sign, but they have this little
phony little caveat.
It looks as if this is likely.
In other words, they use the subjunctive and optative moods so they can say, Well, we didn't say it was.
We just put it out there, you know,
which is bogus because they all went on television and said the opposite.
They said it was.
And so
now we know, thanks to Jim Jordan and these other Republicans, and I think everybody owes them a debt of gratitude.
People said, Kevin McCarthy's not up.
He's up to the job.
He's done done a wonderful job.
And these guys are really bringing things.
And it's also a reflection just how bankrupt these Democratic representatives are.
They knew all this, and they kept it quiet and snuffed and smothered because they controlled the subpoenas and the majority of these committees.
So now we're in this Orwellian situation.
Think about it.
Where Trump is investigated for trying to influence an election
when we know
that Jake Sullivan did that with complete impunity in 2016,
who is now the National Security Advisor, and the Secretary of State did it in 2020.
And according to a conservative poll, that fact of Russian disinformation was
persuasive to a lot of independent voters who said, you know what, if I had have known it was really Hunter's laptop and that stuff about Joe Biden was accurate, I wouldn't have voted for him.
So that may have been much more likely to affect an election than anything Donald Trump did about a phone call, because
it didn't have any result at all.
I mean, they didn't find the votes.
It had zero results.
These things did have a result.
So that's all half of it in that windy explanation.
Then you bring up the IRS and
We have an IRS whistleblower.
And of course, whistleblowers, remember
Lieutenant Colonel Venman, who corrected Devin Nunes when he said, I'm Lieutenant Colonel Venman, sir.
And we now we know he's what, an arms dealer who's trying to profit from his Ukrainian ties and get larges from the federal government as the middleman to transfer the weaponry to
Presidential Medal of Freedom also?
Yes, he did.
I think he did.
I think he did.
And he was the person who
communicated, because he was on the phone call to the whistleblower.
Remember the thing about the whistleblower, Eric Caramella?
He had no knowledge at all of anything.
He didn't hear anything.
It had to come from Vinman.
And then he and Vinman
corroborated, collaborated, I should say, with
Adam Schiff, who denied once again his one millionth lie and said he had no knowledge of this.
And they cooked up the whole impeachment thing.
And so
this whistleblower now is public enemy number one.
They've just gone from lionizing and deifying whistleblowers to say, this is horrible.
And he says that he has information that shows that there was culpability on the Biden family.
And by the way, Jack, it would be very easy to find out.
All you have to do is get the brother and the niece and the sister and Hunter's and Joe's tax returns and then calibrate, just subpoena their checking accounts and see the lifestyles they were living and see if the income that they reported would substantiate or sustain that type of expenses.
I don't think it would, given Joe's three homes, that he, the only time he ever made any money
when he wasn't in government, he's been in government for over half a century, was just those that period from when he left 2017 until he was inaugurated in 2021.
I know that he tried to aggrand, he was a grifter, but he couldn't have made all that money in just that small time.
The point is that
this whistleblower is trying to suggest that there was a file that was incriminating and it was making its way up through the federal prosecutorial levels and then it was stopped.
by an unnamed official who speculation said it could be anybody, could not be anybody other than Merrick Garland.
And then, as you point out, this is a person who went under oath and assured everybody that he had no influence whatsoever, that these were independent trajectories.
And if they found anything,
the law would be followed in its fullness.
And that's not true.
So he basically, if this is true, then he misled or lied to Congress under oath.
And he's a Eric Colder wingman, so to speak, as Eric Colder said he was to Barack Obama.
So I think this is very explosive, but there's a final wrinkle to it.
About 60% of Democrats don't want him to run.
And
I
think,
given the Democratic cynicism, that there's going to be an effort in the party to allow this to go forward.
And by that, I mean there are going to be some grand deal in a year or six months from now where Joe quietly says he's not going to run, and then there's not going to be any charges brought by Merrick Garland.
It's my hunch, because they can't win with him.
And
they can't win with him unless Trump is nominated and him reached for 18 months, which is their plan.
But they're very worried because DeSantis, as you just mentioned, polls higher than does Trump.
And this is...
Well,
I think I mentioned that before we went on, and we'll talk about that towards the end of the end of the program about the trump v DeSantis but uh yeah
nothing's nothing is certain in this world politically but you do have Biden Biden defeating Trump in a poll but but Biden losing to DeSantis in the same poll so yeah
um
so Victor anything about Blinken
and his
nefariousness and any broader thoughts.
We've talked a lot in
these past podcasts about.
You know, I'm upset that he does stuff like this.
Got to remember that this mentality, these people, there's a certain type of person who grows up in an affluent
environment in the bicoastal areas, and they feel, I'm not just saying it's blinking, it's all of them.
And they feel they have to go in the proper, what the Romans call the cursus of norm.
You go to a good undergraduate, you go to graduate, then you start working with politics, you evolve into Wall Street or Silicon Valley, you make a lot of money, and you define yourself getting into the highest levels of government.
You fly overseas on a private plane, people, dignitaries meet you, you say things that people listen to, but it has nothing to do with confidence.
or nothing to do with, they don't care about that.
Because this guy, Blinken and Sullivan, went to Anchorage in March 2021 and they sat there while the Chinese insulted them.
They called them hypocrites.
They said they were rape.
He didn't do anything.
And then, you know, we had John Kirby just the other days talk about the logistical success.
And if it was such a success, why are Blinken and Sullivan suggesting that it was Trump that did it?
Why don't they say, well, it's a great success?
John Kirby said, that's what we did.
We got everybody out of Afghanistan.
We tried to do it on the 20th anniversary so we could have a 911 celebration,
but they don't.
They want it both ways.
It was an utter humiliation.
It was the
I look at Afghanistan, unfortunately, I don't, this pains me to something like the Battle of Manzikur,
where the Byzantines were obliterated and they never quite recovered in the mid-11th century, or the Battle of Mohawks for the Serbians.
It's a tragedy, or it's Waterloo for Napoleon.
We reached the peak point in American power, and that crystallized our decline.
The very idea that psychologically, emotionally, materially,
we would just run from a bunch of terrorists, abandon our friends, abandon Americans, get 13 people killed.
retaliate by hitting innocent civilians, leave a billion-dollar embassy, leave a $300 million retrofitted base, $50 billion
of sophisticated weapons that are being disseminated all over the globe.
And then we had the audacity to call that a success.
And I think that was the nadir of American power, and we haven't recovered.
I don't know.
I mean, civilizationally, Rome, the Byzantines,
every...
the Greeks, everybody has ups and downs.
So we're going to need a renaissance to get back up there.
We did before with Reagan, but that renaissance only lasted 12 years.
And then we went back to this quasi-socialist international globalism under Obama.
And I don't know.
I'm very worried about the country because
I feel like we're in a socialist revolution that we don't even know we're in.
When you look at
just this week, these little insignificant tidbits that in California, they're going to add anywhere from $50 to $150 on your power bill, depending on your income, with nothing to do with your actual usage.
In other words,
if you have a small business or you have a job and you make money, then you pay more.
But if you're a complete failure and you fail, you pay less.
And the same thing with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, that your credit score hurts you.
So
I guess the logic is go out and declare bankruptcy a couple of times, screw people over, be a total mess like what caused the 2008 meltdown, and we'll give you a loan at cheaper interest.
Scrimp and save.
Don't buy a new car.
Don't put a pool in your backyard, but make your mortgage payment regularly and get a good credit score.
And you know what?
You'll pay more for your.
That is socialism.
There's another article.
Go ahead.
I'm just going to finish.
There's a good article.
I think it's in City Journal about the destruction
of Jewish participation in Ivy League schools.
It's just shocking that based on the merit system, which was in reaction to prejudicial bias in the 40s and 50s with the advent of the SAT and the rating of high schools to calibrate GPA
and a pure merit system, then 3% of the population was up to 20% or more in these Ivy League schools.
And that's just an anathema to diversity, equity, inclusion.
And now they're going back, back, back.
They're going to go down to almost nothing.
And it's weird because a university like Stanford has been bragging that they've investigated the
anti-Semitic bias in admissions of the 1940s and 50s.
And they've been demonizing all these dead administrators.
The present administrators are saying, oh, my God, but Stanford is very transparent.
We're going to apologize.
And they're doing the same thing.
The same thing that they're blasting the dead for doing.
And so
it's socialism.
There's a university socialism, there's an electric power socialism,
and there's socialism everywhere.
We don't call it socialism.
We call it reparations or redistribution or diversity, equity, inclusion.
But it's basically taking things from one group of people and giving them to another by an elite
that is never transparent because nobody would otherwise support this and they're never subject to the consequences of their own ideology.
Victor, I was not trying to interrupt before, except to add on
something else related to California.
Let me tell you one thing about that and one thing about Ivy League.
The California thing was I saw some article about a target store in San Francisco, and now absolutely everything is behind lock and key.
I mean, I would have thought, well, at that point, like Walmart in Chicago, which we talked about last week on one of the podcast episodes, it's just like, we're done, we're out of here.
But to see commerce have to be so you can buy a stick of gum at Target in San Francisco without now someone having to unlock it.
I mean, that's just how
declined.
And the other thing about now on the Ivy League stuff, this is something I thought we maybe could have gotten to in some of the more recent episodes, but just we ran out of time.
And this is a story.
Here's the New York Post from last week.
yale blasted for hosting controversial french political activists accused of anti-semitism during passover this is this woman was uh
hoira budel dadja that she's
she's a french academic and they invite her during passover to attack jews this is yale So uh on the on the uh anti-Semitism.
You know, this is very funny because not funny, but
I don't quite understand.
I know that the Jewish American vote has been going very slowly,
Republican and it's up to about 35%
now.
But what I don't understand is
if you identify
incidentally even as a Jewish American person, you should realize that this entire diversity woke
include is aimed at you.
And they get a complete pass
with anti-Semitic attacks on campus if the person is considered a protected marginalized person and it manifests itself in hate crimes because if you look at the two FBI statistics and they're again they don't like to report them and most law enforcement agencies now feel it's politically incorrect or unwelcome to send their data to the FBI.
And I think in a year or two, they won't have any data.
But of what we have most recently, the two groups that are being open season upon are Jews and Asians
by other people of color, because the so-called white tyrannical majority is underrepresented.
It's about 68% of the population.
It commits about 55 or 45% of the reported hate crime.
And so what I'm getting at is at some point, Jewish Americans should realize that whether it's the hatred of Israel on campus or it's the blatant anti-Semitism of people like Ilian Omar or the squad or Rashid,
another representative,
Representative Presley or whoever they are, Hank Johnson, all of these people, the Black Caucus expresses it all the time.
And I mean, after all, Barack Obama had a smiling picture with the greatest anti-Semite of our age, Louis Farrakhan, that
you're targeted by this particular group, this left-wing new Democratic Party, and it makes no sense, unless you're just trying to give money for quid pro-quo concessions, solendra-like concession, to give them any money because you're fueling a monster that hates Jews.
And I don't think they understand that.
The other explanation is that we're now four or five generations into the Jewish diaspora, and there's an increasing number who
are not
observant Jews intermarried, or
they feel that support for Israel is a career liability, whether you're in the media or government or
academia.
So they have divorced themselves from their quote-unquote Jewishness, which is fine.
I mean, I'm not Swedish.
I have divorced myself from my Swedishness in a way.
Or my grandfather, my other grandfather's Welshness, I don't identify.
That's fine.
But whatever it is, if you're a observant Jew and you see that you're proud of your Jewish heritage and you identify in various aspects with it, then you should realize that this new Democratic Party is not the party of Bill Clinton or JFK.
It's warring against Jews.
And it's warring about denying them admission and giving their spots that they've earned to other people who haven't according to traditional criteria.
It's manifested in hate crimes.
It's manifested in interracial crimes.
And it's manifested all over campuses.
I mean,
gosh, I walked from my apartment on Stanford to the Hoo Institution one day, and I looked up, and here were these posters all over campus about Ben Shapiro's visit.
And they had a can of raid, be gone, you know, be gone,
be gone, Ben.
I mean, it was really deliberately trying to channel the idea of gassing Jews by using bug spray pesticide.
And after all, Zygon B B was the precursor to organophosphate pesticides.
Right.
In fact, we expropriated a lot of the farbon technology in the petrochemical industry in the 1940s and 50s.
So those earlier things like
parathion, et cetera, were derivatives of zygon.
I used to spray stuff like that, and it smelled pretty dangerous and deadly.
But my point is that it's just fascinating how the Democratic Party wars on Asians, it wars on Jews,
and
it's identified with the very, very wealthy, and yet they're able to have this veneer of progressivism when they're not.
They're reactionary.
They're neo-Confederate.
And that's what's so strange about it.
Yeah, especially on the Asian front.
I was at some museum in New York a few months ago, and they had a whistle on
a wristband, scrunchy wristband.
I'm like, what the hell is this?
And it was
some symbolic anti-Asian, not anti-Asian, but
fighting
anti-Asian prejudice.
But it emanates from the left.
But it's amazing how the left tries to co-opt what they're engaged in themselves.
You know,
we're in favor of you Asians, even though we're the ones that
are in insidious ways, not so insidious ways, particularly with these
high school,
gosh, in Northern Virginia, the kids who
are Asian generally,
who cannot get the national merit awards because they're being suppressed
by
the school bureaucracy.
Why?
Because they're Asian.
I was reading NBC News.
I was just thinking about the other day, and
there was a headline that said something like, anti-Asian hate crimes go, I don't know, 330% increase right
and so and then it said blacks remain the greatest target of hate crimes
and so the point is that you're supposed to think that Asian and blacks are being attacked by whites but when you actually look at the data
the greatest the greatest perpet perpetrator of hate crimes are black Americans and their most likely target are Asians but you can't find that anywhere in the story.
And when you see a lot of Asian leaders, they don't want to talk about it because it's an intersectional crime of Hispanics and blacks mostly against Asians.
And they want to find some guy from Texas or Georgia who's an ex-Klanner or something to fit that narrative.
And
there's not enough perpetrators of that profile to satisfy their ideological demands and needs.
And it's such dishonesty.
That's why I think people are so sick of the...
Bill Maher said something the other day in this context.
It was really earth-shattering.
He said, I don't understand why black celebrities are not talking about the
murders of black people that can range
9,000 to 10,000.
And so we had this poor African-American kid that went to the wrong house and some paranoid 85-year-old white guy, 85 shot through the screen door and wounded him terribly.
And that would be terrible.
And everybody wants that person to be subject to the full extent of the law.
I do.
Can't have a civilization where you knock on a door and you get shot for it.
But the point I'm making is that he was deified by the administration.
But my point was this,
that
that was one person who was shot.
It wasn't eight to 10,000 who were murdered, dead, dead, dead, that no one talks about.
Right.
And they won't talk about it.
And, or it's almost, I mean, there is a, there's something called karma in the world.
There really is nemesis.
I don't know what it is.
But when no sooner had Joe Biden and Kamala Harris tried to demagogue this tragedy than
this six-year-old white girl was shot, her father was shot in the back.
Her mother was shot in the elbow.
Her father may die by a crazed African-American who shot them for,
I mean,
a soccer ball or a basketball went across his lot and nobody talked about it.
Nobody talked about it.
And she's not going to be invited to the White House.
So what I'm getting at and what Bill Morrow is trying to say is that
the elite
use
certain aspects of interracial violence or violence in particular that's predominant in a particular group group to make claims against the majority as racist to further their own careers, but they will not talk about
the slaughter of African Americans by other African Americans in big cities in which they have the tightest gun control laws in the world, because to do that would say that there are problems within the African American community that leads to inordinate violence that's not found in comparable communities, A, and B, that gun control must not work because these have the strictest gun laws in the world.
And three,
this is happening mostly in big cities in which the police chief is African-American.
There's an inordinate amount.
I mean, inordinate in the sense of not wrong, but disproportionate considered the demographic and the general population where you have black city councils and black mayors.
And they're not prosecuting.
We're not prosecuting.
They're sort of like Letita James or Alvin Bragg or this woman in Georgia who are African-American sorrows-funded prosecutors.
They all are in cities in which there's inordinate crime and they're not, as we brought out in the hearings in the case of Bragg, they're not going after people who are suffering from career criminals, but they're going after their nemesis, Donald Trump.
Go after Donald Trump and the white elite community canonize you.
You become famous.
You can become successful politically.
Go after African-American predators that are killing innocent African-Americans, and there's no win in it.
And that's what's really sick about the whole thing.
Yeah.
Well, you and I will discuss the crime, and you mentioned Bragg and some other things on the next podcast we record, Victor.
I think it's really important what's going on and getting your views on that.
But we have to take a break here.
And then when we come back from the break, we're going to stay with the aforementioned Blinken and aforementioned Afghanistan and get your thoughts on some testimony in Congress by the
Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
And we will get to that right after these important messages.
If you're like me, you have a lot of product on your bathroom counter.
Well, I have found the secret serum.
And it's Vibriance Super C Serum.
The ingredients in this one bottle can replace your day creams, eye creams, night creams, neck creams, wrinkle creams, and even dark spot reducers.
Made in the USA with the highest quality ingredients, including vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, vitamin B5, and vitamin E, Super C Serum delivers noticeable results.
Simplify your skincare routine, get a healthier complexion, and minimize minimize wrinkles and age spots with Vibrance.
I just began using Super C Serum last week and I love it.
My skin feels so much better, soft, moist, and fresh.
And by the way, it smells beautiful like the orange blossoms outside my kitchen door.
Give it a try and you'll love it too.
And if you don't find it better than your current skincare routine, you'll get a full refund.
Go to vibrance.com/slash Victor to save up to 37% off and free shipping.
That's Vibrance, V-I-B-R-I-A-N-C-E,
vibrance.com slash Victor.
And we'd like to thank Vibrance for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.
We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.
Want to remind our listeners that Victor has an official home on the internet.
It's called The Blade of Perseus.
And if you type in victorhanson.com, not Victor Davis Hansen, Victorhansen.com, that's how you get there.
And when you get there, you'll see links to all sorts of appearances, Victor's books, Victor's articles.
You will not be able to read some of the articles, though.
They've got a little black box around them.
They call Ultra.
And those are pieces Victor writes exclusively
for Victorhanson.com.
You should be reading them, though.
So subscribe.
It's really quite affordable.
$5 gets your foot in the door, $50
for the year.
It's discounted.
If you are a fan of Victor's writings, you have got to subscribe.
So that's the Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.
While I'm mentioning websites, the official home of this
podcast is John Solomon's justthenews.com.
If you're on Facebook, check out VDH's Morning Morning Cup.
Victor himself has a page.
Go see if maybe he'll friend you.
There's a group of friends not officially associated with
Victor.
It's called the
Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club.
That's on Facebook.
And if you're on Twitter, VD at VD Hansen, that's Victor's handle.
So
Victor, John Sopko
is the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
It's called CGAR.
And he testified before Congress last week.
So two things I think are important.
One,
he issued a report, and I just saw the report.
I haven't read it.
You may have read it, Victor, but it's quite critical of the
arc, the long-term arc that he says from four administrations leading to the,
I don't think he called it a debacle, but he certainly implied it, the debacle of the withdrawal under the Biden administration.
Sticking with the Biden administration, though, he says, in order to do his work, you know, if you're an inspector general, Victor, in any agency, you come knocking, you ask, you get, you know, I want that paper, I want that document, I want this.
Not with this regime, you don't.
Right.
No, not Anthony.
So he was quite critical of the State Department for
obfuscating or delaying or just not cooperating.
And also USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
One other thing, Victor, and then please
share your thoughts.
He said that America has already given over $2 billion in relief for hunger, et cetera, in Afghanistan.
And there's another over $3 billion.
I believe it's mostly U.S.
money that's going to come through some European cabal.
So in total, over $5 billion.
I think think it's eight since we left, too, and all military and civilian assistance.
Well, and all of it going where?
Not to people.
Exactly.
So, Victor, your thoughts on all these.
Well, I mean, he's an Obama appointee, and he was outraged that
the Biden administration is stonewalling it.
And while he was doing this, John Kirby was claiming that this was a great success,
getting out.
So, what he's basically saying is there's about 175,000 Afghans who were joined at the hip with us militarily, politically, economically, and they were trying to work in Kabul mostly for a viable
Kabul government.
And we abandoned them.
We left with no provision to get them out.
And they're targeted by the Afghans and there's some American contractors as well.
And
in our guilt, our idiocy, we decided: well, we're going to give money to help
a transition, and the Taliban will look at that magnanimity as kindness to be reciprocated rather than weakness to be punished.
And that's exactly what we did.
We poured billions and billions of dollars in, and it did not go to the people
to whom it was intended.
and whom we abandoned, and whom we are now going to have to, I guess we're going to have to bring in about 200,000 people from Afghanistan after we spent probably aggregate of 8 billion
after we left the billion dollar embassy and the 300 million dollar base and the 50 billion.
I don't know why we just don't say that's enough.
There's that.
And just bring them out.
I don't understand that at all.
And it's now we know that some of the equipment is being sold.
And
we know that the Taliban are reverting.
There's stories this week that they're reverting back to their terrorist haven roots, as everybody knew they would.
And that's why we went in the first place.
It's just an utter disaster from A to Z by the administration that we don't get shocked about anymore.
Because if you're going to get shocked about it, you'd say, well,
Victor, they've let in 6.5 million people across the border.
We're never going to recover from that.
They've swamped our social services.
They've created,
you know, 10 Fresnos since they become here, and we're never going to get over it.
They destroy the border.
No, that's not important.
They destroyed American energy independence.
We used to tell the Saudis or the Venezuelans or the Iranians or Russians, do what you want.
Doesn't bother us.
We're going to get up to 15, 16 million barrels of oil.
We're the biggest oil and gas producer.
We're working on nuclear.
We're working on fusion.
We're going to do all.
We don't need you.
And now, please, please get us some money before the midterm.
Give us some oil.
That's what they're doing.
And so it's hard to get outraged because there are so many outrages.
I've never seen anything like it.
It's like a total system's collapse.
It reminds me of the Mycenaeans.
Nobody understood how one day they were there and then this whole intricate system just collapsed over a 40-year period, maybe 50, or maybe the volcano that destroyed Minoan Crete.
This is like a volcano, or maybe the Great
Plague that almost destroyed Justinian's Constantinople.
But it's something like that.
This administration, it's deadlier than almost anything I've seen, deadlier than COVID, that's for sure.
Then you hear stories, you know, Victor, as you mentioned before, you know, the pullout just,
of course, increases China's
power and China's...
desires for hegemony of the whole the whole world.
And there's some story comes out the other day.
I mean, China's advancements in weaponry includes in space and how it has a you know lead.
It's going to knock out our satellites and all this.
That's the whole point.
They're creating satellite eaters.
That's the whole point.
They see we see space half militarily for satellite to protect the U.S.
and half Star Trek explore the universe, right?
Remember when Jerry Brown ran for president, protect the earth and explore the universe?
Well, he was onto something.
That's always why Americans, the adventure, the frontier, frontier, the final frontier, that was the theme of all of Hollywood and LA movies about space.
It was this idealistic
exploration, not the Chinese.
They don't care about that.
They have one point, and that is how do we gain further advantage on Earth by going to space?
And we hear whether that's mining asteroids are interested or setting up some kind of base on the moon or developing satellite killers that they can enact suddenly and wipe out all of our satellite that's what they're in for and
again
given what they did in anchorage given what they did at the wuhan lab given what they did with the balloons right over our strategic sites what does it take for this administration to get outrage are they so compromised that flight we saw with Hunter and Joe on Air Force II and the money that has accrued to the Biden, is that the problem?
Or is it wider?
And that is that our grandees from Zuckerberg to Bill Gates to Michael are so heavily compromised by their Chinese investments that our elites just can't rally around
an American effort to see what these people are like in China, this Communist Party.
I don't know, but it's like we're just shrugging and say, you know what?
We just want to talk about transgender athletes.
That's what we're interested in.
And we want to make sure that commercials have X percentage of this particular group.
And we want to cancel people out.
That's what we're into.
We don't care about China or world dominance by the Chinese.
It must not be much.
It reminds me,
I stick to the Byzantines because I've been reading about that.
It reminds me of a lot of Christian communities that, you know,
Once they saw the Ottomans coming in and they knew that they had no more confidence that they could resist them in Eastern Europe or in Anatolia, they just sort of shrugged their shoulders and said, Well,
it's better to have
the Ottoman sultan and the Pope's tiara.
And so we'll just convert.
Or if we don't convert, we'll just live as second-sack-class citizens and give our biggest 12-year-old to the Der
Sherme, and he'll be a Janissary, and our pretty little girl will go to the harem and we'll live.
Maybe they'll have powerful lives.
They'll remember where they came from and help us someday.
But that was the attitude of resignation.
This is kind of a resigned idea.
Yeah,
we tried in the 90s and 2000s.
We were pretty strong, but we were
an unjust society.
We're an amoral society.
We're just not up to it.
And our military, it's now just a social organization.
Get with it.
Hey, you guys.
get over it.
It's over with.
It's just kind of a social organization.
Mark Milley's a Princeton graduate.
Come on.
And he's out there looking for white rage and reading Professor Kendi.
And that's what we're going to do in the military.
We're just not up to defending the South China Sea from Chinese aggrandizement.
Afghanistan, yeah, it was embarrassing, but we're out now.
And Ukraine, you know, we'll just be proxy wars.
We'll give them all they want.
We don't really care if some of us siphoned off just so they weaken Russia a little bit and leave us alone.
That's the kind of attitude that you see leading from behind.
We're not exceptional.
Started, again, everybody remembers all started with Barack Obama.
His only regret was that when he started this woke revolution, he had to work within existing democratic channels.
And his advisors had told him, follow Bill Clinton.
He got reelected because he was able to feign the idea that he was a moderate.
So that's how Obama got re-elected.
And now he's very regretful because he cashed in.
He looks back and he says, oh, my God, this non-composment Biden has outlefted me.
And he's got a bigger left-wing legacy than I do.
And he says to Michelle, wow, he's doing kind of things that are kind of nutty.
Like he's making people with bad credit rating get better loans or
he's letting all the criminals out.
We wanted to do that.
We didn't.
We better go out
in the foyer or somewhere at Martha's Venyard and hold a press conference how racist America is.
Or maybe when next time when we're in Hawaii or we're in Devon David Geffen's lot,
Yacht will give another talk about how horrible America is just to get back in the game.
Sort of back in the game, not completely back in the game because
Barack Obama doesn't want to get back in the game.
Yeah, out hustled by a geriatric ice cream eater is
kind of
must sting terribly.
Have you noticed that once we started seeing Joe Biden eat ice cream?
Did you see that study that came out the other day that ice cream's good for you?
Yes, I did.
I've always believed that myself.
So that was that was no accident.
All right.
We have time for one more quick topic, and we'll, and that will be Trump versus DeSantis.
And we'll get Victor's thoughts on that right after this final important message.
We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.
Hey, quick plug from what I do: civilthoughts.com.
That's a website.
Go there.
What are you going to do when you get there?
You're going to sign up for Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write comes out every Friday.
What do I do?
Dear intelligent American, I find 12, 13, 14 really good, worthwhile, interesting articles I've come across in the previous week.
Hey, here's the link.
Here's an excerpt.
Why am I doing it?
I don't know.
I got nothing better to do.
I think you'll enjoy it.
Lots of people are signing up.
They are enjoying it.
It's not transactional, totally free.
No risk.
CivilThoughts.com is published by the Center for Civil Society at amphil.com, where we really want to strengthen civil society.
Victor,
Trump versus DeSantis, I got to say, if I could capsulize in a barroom, what's Trump doing?
Well, he's saying that Florida sucks because of DeSantis, essentially.
He's been a lousy governor, et cetera, et cetera.
That's maybe too crude, but he's going after him.
And
DeSantis, push him back a little bit.
Well, if you don't like it here, you know, we'll help you move out of the state.
I don't know, Victor, if it's
how troubling this is, how
politically going to be able to do that.
I don't think DeSantis is at Rudy Giuliani territory in 2016, where he waited and waited till the primary, he skipped the first primary.
So he hasn't announced yet.
He will announce probably sometime in May or June, I imagine.
And then I think you'll see him.
He's going to have to go.
He's going to have to hit back.
How he hits back is very important
because he needs that base and Donald Trump knows he needs that base.
And Donald Trump, in some of his truth social tweets, has threatened to leave the party or not leave the party, but saying that DeSantis will never get the MAGA supporter.
And that's kind of a bailed threat.
That would be as if DeSantis deliberately ran a commercial and said that, you know, or he tweeted out that Trump was not going to get the swing voter that he got in overwhelming numbers, say, in Dade County.
So
he's going to have to finesse that.
And
I'm being neutral now, but if I were DeSantis, I would run commercials to the effect that Donald Trump
wasn't faithful to the base.
And I would say, you know, he's attacking me about, he doesn't have to say he's attacking me, but he ordered the lockdown.
Now, he was under the influence of Fauci and Burks, and he had really no option politically at that point because we didn't know much about COVID, but he extended that lockdown, not DeSantis.
And he really pushed the Operation Warp Speed.
I think the vaccinations did save lives, but he found himself into the vaccination big pharma lobby where there was no second thought.
And they betrayed him because
Fitzer deliberately withheld information that the vaccination had a viable record of efficacy against right before the election.
You remember that?
They said they were going to announce in October.
They didn't.
And then they announced, I think, six days after the election.
So that Donald Trump.
It was a big FU.
It was.
And Donald Trump had been very good to them.
But the point is, had Donald Trump fired Fauci and Burks and disassociated himself with Big Pharma and pressed therapeutics
and vaccinations, but
not to say that, not to fall into the fallacy that vaccinations were going to prevent everybody from being infected or being infectious.
And without mentioning side effects for young men, to take one example, that's a vulnerability.
And then there are clips of Donald Trump talking about with Feinstein and others.
Well, I don't know if he's directly with Feinstein, but echoing the Feinstein position on assault weapons.
He says, I can just do it.
And so what I'm getting at is if,
and
I think Donald Trump's
He was under pressure by a lot of Kenya West, but I think the release of a lot of people under the excuse they were just minor drug offenses, they let a lot of people out of prison during the COVID thing that were not just minor drug dealers.
They had previous violent records
that were let out of federal prisons.
So, my point is that if Trump presses that, I think DeSantis will probably go back and say to his base
physical
integrity, he ran up a trillion-dollar deficits before we got into
COVID.
Cancel Obamacare.
McCain, he didn't have the votes.
McCain stopped that.
Gun control, he was,
you're going to see stuff like that.
And then you're going to see Donald Trump suggesting that he's not MAGA.
But
either one of them,
put it this way, the dilemma that we're looking at is
DeSantis cannot win the general election unless he has the Trump mega base.
Trump cannot win the general election if he's nominated unless he has that ability to do what DeSantis did in Florida, which he hasn't shown he has, that is win suburban voters and more minorities than he did.
He did well with minorities compared to Mitt Romney, but he needs more.
And then we have this dilemma.
You mentioned this poll, and that's generally when you talk to people, they will tell you that they think DeSantis can beat Biden, but that he can't get the nomination, or that Trump will get the nomination.
And that will delight the left.
And then they're going to, as I say, bleed him with a thousand cuts so he's not a viable general election candidate and he's going to lose.
But all of that said, it's very, very early.
And I think the polls mean nothing right now.
And we'll see.
It won't.
We hear all these rumors.
And this is very interesting, Jack, that all the people in MSNBC and CNN, CNN, I've been watching them just here and there and reading their websites,
they are giddy
about Donald Trump.
They are echoing Trump's attacks on DeSantis and sort of saying that Trump is running from the left, that he won't dare cut one entitlement, that he is reasonable on guns,
that he's much more reasonable on abortion.
And so that's one thing.
The final thing is that I think you're going to see DeSantis, he's going to have to, but I think he's going to pivot from the war with Disney and the abortion issue because
the donor class and the swing voter, they don't like what Disney's doing.
They think that DeSantis has made his statement.
It's a principle statement.
He's opposed, but he's not going to use that as a campaign theme that I went after Disney, I went after Disney, given the amount of money that goes in the Florida economy from Disney, even though they have a toxic
aspect about them.
I think he made his point, but it's not a winning thing to keep haranguing that.
The other one is the abortion issue.
I agree with the abort, what he's done, but
he's going to have to,
I think it went, did it go to 15 to nine weeks?
I think six weeks.
Six weeks that
you can have an abortion for rape or incest for the first six weeks.
I think that's,
I think that's.
Anyway,
it's pretty soon.
You might not even know you're pregnant.
Yes.
So
that is something that
he's going to, if they're going to, he's going to have to make the argument for that better than he has.
Right.
That life is a life.
But you just don't do that and then be hammered by Trump, which he's hammering him on.
and so uh
the thing about
also there are the secondary issues compared to the civil
civilization collapsing around us am i going broke yeah you know so these are talking about yeah we're that's what what should be desantis be talking about about five things he should say
donald trump did a wonderful job and by 2019, but it took him two years to learn the ropes and the judiciary and his own people were opposing him.
I'll have a Pentagon.
I'll have a Homeland Security that doesn't oppose me.
And if they do, they're going to be fired.
I'm not going to have an anonymous in my administration that leaks.
I am going to finish the wall.
I guarantee you, I'm going to finish the wall.
I don't care who pays for it.
I'm going to tax, he could say, I'm going to tax remittances.
I will find a way to help the Treasury, but I can't promise you who other than we are going to pay for it.
But I will promise you I build the wall.
I build the wall.
And I can promise you that there's not going to be any catch and release.
There's not going to be any refugee status once you come across.
And if you came across recently, you're a criminal or you
are on public assistance, you're not working, you're going to go back immediately.
And that's what he should say.
And then he should say, you know what?
Donald Trump did a very good job on promoting gas and oil, but he did it in such a way that could be reversed very quickly by Joe Biden.
We're going to streamline the Keystone.
We're going to use our new majorities.
We're going to win to make sure Anne War cannot just be reversed by Fiat.
We're going to
promote fracking and horizontal drilling.
We're going to see this as a bridge to fusion energy or whatever.
And we're going to be energy independent.
And then he's going to have to say,
we have a crime epidemic.
When I am president, I am not going to interfere in the legal system.
I am not going to let out people who have been sentenced under our judicial system en masse.
And we are starting to learn there are consequences from dealing fentanyl or crack cocaine.
And even the marijuana epidemic has had toxic consequences.
And I'm not going to let anybody out.
And we're going to
elect Democratic governors and when, excuse me, we're going to elect Republican governors.
And when those governors under their constitutions have the right to remove a prosecuting attorney, they're going to remove them.
And I'm going to remove federal prosecutors who will not enforce the law.
And if he would stick to crime, energy, the border, and the economy, and he should say, you know what, we're in a stagflationary mood.
And whether you're George Bush or whether you're Barack Obama or whether you're Donald Trump or whether you're Joe Biden, there is a pattern of borrowing trillions of dollars that we do not have.
We're not going to do that anymore.
We're going to gradually go back to normalcy.
And he's going to have to get a new head of the Federal Reserve and get rid of this idea of zero interest rates.
But if he sticks to the economy and crime and the border and energy and foreign affairs.
Don't tread on me.
You know, no better friend, no better enemy, no optional military engagements where our
national interests are not directly affected.
He will win.
But
if he gets in these cul-de-sacs with Disney, abortion,
and
tit for tat,
he's not.
And so he's got to concentrate on the big issues.
And then more importantly, Donald Trump is a genius, political political genius.
People underestimate him.
He has a,
I don't think he dislikes DeSantis.
I don't think that he's even sincere.
He just has a strategy that he's going to destroy him right now.
And he's going to say any and everything.
It's back to
what he said the other day about Bill Barr, that he was slovenly, right?
Right.
And he makes fun of people.
And his point is to destroy them and take away their credibility.
And he's trying to do that to marginalize DeSantis and strangle them in the cradle right now.
And if DeSantis is not strangled, then he will develop as a full-fledged candidate and the political landscape will favor him.
But he's got to survive this period and get the donors and everybody raising him money.
One thing he should do is that he's been much more successful than Donald Trump in winning conservative big donors, but he's going to have to have a popular tone where he floods your email.
I open my email.
I won't be out Jack, but I get eight Donald Trump things.
Yeah.
I know.
Well, he's raising a lot of money more so, and he's got to do that.
And I think Donald Trump, if you're somebody are saying, well, Victor, you said you're going to be neutral and you're advising DeSantis.
Well, if I were to advise Donald Trump,
I would just say to myself, I lost the popular vote twice.
I know that it was rigged.
I believe
Trump says, I know I was rigged.
But the point is, Donald Trump did not win that critical 2% to 8% swing voter.
And he could win them because they're worried about the border.
They're worried about crime.
They're worried about gas prices.
They're worried about inflation.
And they're worried about foreign affairs.
And they're worried about woke and what it's doing.
And he needs to talk about those issues.
This is what I did.
This is what I will do even better.
I'm more savvy now.
If he just stuck to that,
it would be very difficult to beat him.
But when he gets into this round de sanctimonious and slovenly Bill Barr, and then he, you know, ugly this person, horse-faced stormy,
he's not going to win that 2% to 8%.
Right.
Right.
Well, it is about likability.
And it's kind of hard to like someone who just talks about himself most of the time.
But anyway, Victor,
we've got to close out this episode.
Not too long.
Your wisdom.
No, no, not too long.
Just I'm sure many people would
be happy to hear you talk for several hours.
Typically, at the end of the show, we thank everyone for listening, no matter what platform you're on.
And sometimes we always read all the comments we get on various platforms, in particular iTunes/slash Apple.
But
I do want to put one thing up here today to close out the show.
It's an email I got from Dr.
David Harris, who writes,
it's regarding Sammy and Victor's discussion on artificial intelligence.
And he writes this, I just had to make this one comment.
If the people who are programming AI also work for the government, then there is nothing to stop them from installing AI in place of a government that is faltering.
In other words, it may seem quote unquote wise to allow AI to run a failing country because it would seemingly make better decisions than human beings.
Now, that's scary.
Love the show.
Love all three of you.
Sincerely, Dr.
David C.
Harris, PHT.
Thanks.
Very well.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you, Victor, for all the wisdom.
Every time I go down, when I'm, you know, I go alone over there to Palo Alto and Stanford and I go to different restaurants.
I'm by myself.
And every time I'm there and I see one of these guys talking, and I'm thinking, this guy is going to create a robot.
This guy's going to create a paragraph.
It's scary.
It really is.
It's like Terminator.
And because they're going to transplant their values and their ideology into artificial intelligence.
Yeah.
Well, everyone, run out and get your double gauge.
That's what we're going to need sooner or later.
Well, we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.
Thanks for listening.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.