Dicey Endeavors: Building the Panama Canal and Peace in Europe

Speaker 1 Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. This is our Saturday edition, where we look at something a little bit different in the middle segment.

Speaker 1 This week, Victor's going to be talking about the building of the Panama Canal in the early 20th century. So, we'll take a moment for that.
In the middle,

Speaker 1 we have lots of news, and I know that we're going to return to the Ukraine because, as is true with the Trump administration, lots and lots of news is coming out.

Speaker 1 And since we last talked, there have been lots of of changes on the Ukraine scene. So we'll start with that.
Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Speaker 1 Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Speaker 1 Victor is the Martin Annely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaker 1 You can join him at his website, victorhanson.com, and it is called The Blade of Perseus. Come join us.

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Speaker 1 $6.50 a month or $65 a year. So, Victor, we've got a lot going on in the Ukraine.
And since we last talked,

Speaker 1 what's come out about the Ukraine is that the United Russia's rhetoric is starting to be that they are winning and they're going to be victors in this, or Putin will be victors.

Speaker 1 And this is just prior to having talks in Saudi Arabia. Trump, as well as putting pressure on Zelensky, particularly about having elections, so he looks like a democratic ruler.

Speaker 1 And Zelensky apparently is not going to show up for the talks in Saudi Arabia. I don't know whether he's been banned from them or not.

Speaker 1 I saw a story that said he was banned, but he said he wasn't going to go anyways. And I was wondering your thoughts on these recent developments.

Speaker 2 Well, that's a lot. I'm here again in Palm Beach on the road.
That's why we have,

Speaker 2 we're not in our little Salma Farm studio, which I miss. But I hope this will work.
We want to be timely and not miss a production.

Speaker 2 Look, everybody is upset. Let's just start about what the Brew Haw is about.
Donald Trump said two things that got everybody upset. He said that Zelensky started the war, A,

Speaker 2 and that he was a dictator. Let's start with B first.

Speaker 2 A dictator would be classified as someone who is not legitimately elected or did cancel

Speaker 2 further audits on him by election. So

Speaker 2 Zelensky canceled a scheduled election. Zelensky outlawed most opposition papers.

Speaker 2 He outlawed most opposition parties.

Speaker 2 And he suspended much of habeas corpus. What do I mean by habeas corpus? It's you may have the body.

Speaker 2 It's a Latin term to mean that a person cannot be arbitrarily arrested without being formally charged under a body of law.

Speaker 2 And he is taking people right off the street and kind of impressing them into the army. He's going after dissidents, etc.

Speaker 2 So he's very sensitive, as is the American and European left, because one of the arguments that you have to accept to supply Ukraine to the hell is it is a beleaguered democracy

Speaker 2 and it's attacked by an autocracy. If you blend that, then you lose the marginal

Speaker 2 moral superiority of Ukraine, and that's what he's worried about. And I'm not sure he's an absolute dictator, but there are, it's true, there is truth to what Trump said.

Speaker 2 Trump is also trying to suggest

Speaker 2 that he started the war. That is ridiculous on the front of it, because we all know on December, February 24th, Obama,

Speaker 2 excuse me, on February 24th,

Speaker 2 Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine for a third time. After

Speaker 2 2014, he wined the Donbass in Crimea.

Speaker 2 In

Speaker 2 the Crimea once, then he went into the Donbass, and then in 2022, he tried to attack Kyiv and the borderlines.

Speaker 2 Why would Donald Trump say that

Speaker 2 Zelensky invaded first?

Speaker 2 Do you have any ideas, Sammy?

Speaker 2 I do.

Speaker 1 I have any idea. Oh, you got me there.

Speaker 1 Everybody knows that Russia invaded it.

Speaker 2 Let's just go through the alternatives, okay?

Speaker 2 Number one, he is trash-talking, art of the deal, trolling Zelensky.

Speaker 2 For example, does anybody listening believe that Trump was going to invade Panama or

Speaker 2 buy Greenland or absorb Canada and make it the 51st state? No.

Speaker 2 Those ridiculous

Speaker 2 statements

Speaker 2 jump-started a discussion, a negotiation. And what was the result of that negotiation?

Speaker 2 Denmark is now arming to the teeth and has sent a billion dollars in aid to Greenland. Does anybody believe it wouldn't have done that? If Trump, it would have done that if Trump had kept silent?

Speaker 2 And does anybody believe that's a bad thing? Two,

Speaker 2 Panama got out of a horrific deal with China that was trying to encroach and basically break the spirit of our agreements with Panama not to have a foreign power, in this case an enemy of the United States, have a prominent role in operating the canal.

Speaker 2 Okay. Does anybody believe that Panama would have got out of that? No.

Speaker 2 Without Trump's art of the deal rhetoric? Does anybody believe that's a bad thing they got out of it? No.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump said he wanted Canada to be the 51st state.

Speaker 2 Does anybody believe that that's going to happen? No.

Speaker 2 Does anybody believe that Trudeau would have put a billion dollars and thousands of officers on the northern border to stop drug importation and illegal had Trump not said that? No.

Speaker 2 So what he is saying is, I'm going to say all kinds of crazy things, dictator, you invaded. And that's going to affect you.
And it's going to remind you something.

Speaker 2 And here's what he's trying to remind him. Mr.

Speaker 2 Zelensky, This is not 2022, when you were a world rock star comedian in a t-shirt that captivated the world because in a heroic defense of Kiev you obliterated a Kiev

Speaker 2 Russian attack on Kiev. Everybody saw it.
They were just hysterically happy. You were touring the world.
You were the rock star.

Speaker 2 But Mr. Zelensky,

Speaker 2 that wasn't the end of the war.

Speaker 2 History shows us that Russia does not fight well at the beginning of wars, especially if it's way away from its borders, like in Afghanistan or Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905,

Speaker 2 or invading way distant Poland in 1919-21. However, if it's fighting right next to its borders or inside Mother Russia, ask Charles XII or Napoleon or Hitler what happens.

Speaker 2 They all think they're going to win, and then they're ground down.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 your country, Mr. Zelensky, has only 30 million at most of its 40 million population.
They've left.

Speaker 2 The Europeans talk a great game, but they will not give you the wherewithal. They won't even arm according, there's still nine of them of the 32 nations that didn't meet their

Speaker 1 2%

Speaker 2 requirements.

Speaker 2 They want us to arm you and be the primary supplier and protect them at the same time while they trash us and we're supposed to ignore our border, our domestic needs to defend your border and Europe's borders.

Speaker 2 And yet all you do is trash us. You've been trashing me.
That's what he's trying to convey.

Speaker 2 So he's also saying another thing. Well, maybe you didn't start the war this time,

Speaker 2 but in March you went

Speaker 2 and negotiated with the Russians under the Turkish auspices. And there was rumors that you were offered a negotiation.
I know your people didn't want to negotiate.

Speaker 2 You thought you were going to win the war.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 you could have negotiated a better deal when Russia was not doing well than you will now when Russia is doing very well. So you missed the boat.
That's another thing he's telling him.

Speaker 2 He's telling him a third thing.

Speaker 2 Mr. Zelensky, I am of the school, whether you like it or not, and whether the left in America likes it or not, that in 2014, Mr.
Yanukovych was a pro-Russian elected government. Yes, he was unpopular.

Speaker 2 Yes, he was shady, but they all are shady.

Speaker 2 And he was elected. And the Obama State Department and people like John McCain, Victoria Newton, they all pressured the Ukrainians to reassert themselves against this Russian influence.

Speaker 2 And he was skeptical, the president, who was elected, of

Speaker 2 Ukraine drifting into the EU orbit and the NATO orbit. Why?

Speaker 2 Because he was afraid that Russia, who he had kindly feelings for, would invade and say, we're not going to let you capture the breadbasket of the old Soviet Union and turn it into an EU-NATO country right on our border when we have millions of Russian minorities.

Speaker 2 And they ignored that. And so they,

Speaker 2 then what happened? They had a coup, a revolution,

Speaker 2 insurrection. Leps got all kinds of words for that.
And they put in Mr. Porschenko, a pro-Western person, and then later Zelensky.
But they did remove an elected government.

Speaker 2 That was a provocation. That's what he's talking about.

Speaker 2 And so these are the reasons that he thinks that he can trash-talk art of the deal troll about who invaded first and who didn't. And he's trying to make it ambiguous.
And Trump is very angry,

Speaker 2 Sammy. He's very angry.
He's got reason to be. Think about it.

Speaker 2 Russia invaded under George Bush in 2008 in South Assatia and Georgia because Bush was weak because of Iran and Afghanistan. He invaded in 2014 under Obama.
He invaded in 2020.

Speaker 2 He did not invade under Trump. Trump told the world that.
So Trump down is on record that Russia invaded in 2022. He's not denying it.
He just said, well, maybe you invaded or started it.

Speaker 2 But he knows it because he brags that he didn't invade under his regime, but he invaded on all three. Three out of the last four presidents.
So Trump is saying, look,

Speaker 2 he didn't invade. This wasn't my problem.
I inherited it. And I inherited it because you, Biden, like you, Obama, like you, Bush,

Speaker 2 appeased, appeased, appeased Russia. I didn't appease him.
You were the ones that thought up Russian reset. You were the ones that went to South Korea and had the hot mic.

Speaker 2 Tell Vladimir that if you give me space in my last election, I'll be flexible on missile defense. Okay, so Putin delayed invading, so you got elected, Obama, and you got rid of missile defense.

Speaker 2 That would have been very critical right now. So Trump is saying, wait a minute, world, I'm going to shock you.

Speaker 2 I sold offensive weapons to Ukraine. Obama didn't, and Biden was not going to until the invasion.
I told the Germans not to approve Nordstrom II, not to go through with it. I was press in.

Speaker 2 They made fun of me when I did that. I bullied NATO into rearming, not Biden, not Obama, not Bush.
I was the one that got out of an asymmetrical missile deal with Russia, not Biden, not Obama.

Speaker 2 I was the one that killed the Wagner group.

Speaker 2 You talk about me being Russian asset or puppet. I killed over 300 Russians in Syria that attacked our forces.

Speaker 2 I was the one that killed Baghdadi. I was the one that killed Soleimani.
I was the one that bombed the crap out of ISIS. I did that.

Speaker 2 So I was tough on Iran and I was really tough on Russia. I flooded the world with cheap oil and almost bankrupt.
And what did I get for that? I got, oh, he's a Russian puppet. He's an asset of Russia.

Speaker 2 The people who were assets and said, I looked into the eyes of...

Speaker 2 Vladimir Putin and I saw Kendrid Soul or something got invaded in Georgia. The people who pushed the red reset button in Giva got invaded.

Speaker 2 And the people like Biden who refused to sell offensive weapons or said, well, I will react to a Russian invasion of Ukraine, depending on whether it's a major one or not. And who said, Vladimir,

Speaker 2 Barack Obama said to you about the cyber attacks, cut it out, Vladimir. And I say to you, keep hospitals off your attack list.

Speaker 2 And then I also said the first week in my strong support of Ukraine, hey, Mr. Zelensky, you want to help Goffer right out of there?

Speaker 2 So all of that is driving Trump crazy. And now he's the one that has to settle a war that the other ones caused.

Speaker 2 And when he was tougher on Russia, and they're talking about him as lax on Russia, so he's got to get a deal, and he knows that he's boxed in. If he keeps giving aid,

Speaker 2 then the war is just going to go on. Unless he gives a lot, lot if he increases the aid,

Speaker 2 then the MAGA base says, wait a minute, you said we weren't going to get involved in optional wars. If he cuts off the aid, it'll be absorbed like Afghanistan and he will be blamed for it.

Speaker 2 So he's angry that they don't give any. So the only way he thinks he can get out of it is to negotiate with Vladimir Putin.
But he doesn't have much to work with.

Speaker 2 And that's what he's telling Zelensky. You're not winning the war.
You're losing the war. And you're being ground down.
And now you want me to keep what? Feeding this losing cause?

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 he's very angry, and he's trying to tell Putin,

Speaker 2 look, we're not going to ask for the Donbass back. We're not going asked for the Crimea back.
Obama didn't ask for it back. Biden didn't ask for it back.
I didn't during my first term.

Speaker 2 So go tell the Russians that you institutionalized that theft.

Speaker 2 And whether we like what John Bolton says or anybody else,

Speaker 2 it's not going to be a NATO. Ukraine, it's not going to be a NATO.

Speaker 2 Europe doesn't want it in NATO if you talk to them privately. They don't want to have to fight a Russian nuclear power over the Donbass or something.
We don't want it in NATO.

Speaker 2 Russia doesn't want it in NATO. I don't even think Ukraine wants it in NATO.

Speaker 2 So why lie and say we have a card to play called NATO? Because

Speaker 2 Putin's looking right at us across the poker table and says, Bluffen, Bluffen, you don't even believe it.

Speaker 2 So, what he's saying to Putin is: get out, get back to where you were on February 23rd of 2022. We won't put them in NATO.
We will get, we'll lift the sanctions.

Speaker 2 You can tell everybody you stop getting them in NATO, but let's just stop it. And I don't know if that's going to be enough.

Speaker 2 I think that Putin's going to say, well, I'm a little bit further west than I was on February 23rd. So if we make a DMZ, it's going to be here and not back there.

Speaker 2 And we're going to try to tell, no, you've got to get back there. And while Ukraine is not in NATO,

Speaker 2 it's armed better than any other NATO power, Mr. Putin.
In fact, if you look at the 32 nations, the one country you would not want to fight is Ukraine.

Speaker 2 It's got a bigger army, a more veteran army, and better weaponry than Germany or France or anybody. So there's where we are.

Speaker 2 Well, Peter, I would, oh, go ahead. Oh, well, we had a

Speaker 2 question. Yes, yes, you can ask a question.

Speaker 2 And then we should go on as you answer, if I answer the question, I was asked to write a comment just today why I'm on the road by the free press about an exchange between J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance, and we'll get to that, Neil Ferguson, over this issue.

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Speaker 1 So join Factor and the Victor Davis Hansen podcast who they are sponsoring. So Victor, my question is this, since I get a question here,

Speaker 1 all of this is coming at the same time as

Speaker 1 Russia's rhetoric is ramping up about them winning. Isn't that making it a little bit difficult for Trump to get a peace settlement?

Speaker 1 I mean, if I were Trump, I'd feel like telling Putin, shut your mouth for a second and let's see if we can get it done with the Ukraine.

Speaker 2 Trump's problem is that every time he tries to show reasonableness, and I mean, how does reasonableness define?

Speaker 2 Biden appeased Putin and he called him a killer. Obama appeased him and called him names.

Speaker 2 The Obama strategy was to go over there, appease him, do reset, and when he didn't want to do reset and become an EU-like Western democracy, then try to overthrow his government by talking to dissidents and stuff, just like they do with Netanyahu, just like they did in Ukraine.

Speaker 2 We have a bad problem, as we saw from USA. There's a streak of cultural imperialism on the left that we're going to put these wonderful LGBTQ green energy woke DEI

Speaker 2 big government left-wing utopian values on Ukraine, on Russia,

Speaker 2 on everybody.

Speaker 2 And it doesn't, we even tried to make Greece accept, as I said, you know, Greek marriage, I mean, gay marriage. So

Speaker 2 the problem is anytime he tries to seem reasonable to Putin, Putin thinks, ah,

Speaker 2 he can't keep giving aid, he can't stop aid, and he can't continue as he is. So I'm in the driver's seat because you look at the battlefield, I have worn out the Ukrainians.
So

Speaker 2 in traditional classical strategy, Trump would then tell the Ukrainians, here's some hypersonic missiles, here's some drones, hit some really important targets. You like that, Vladimir?

Speaker 2 Because we can keep doing that. But he doesn't want to do that because he doesn't want to start all the killing over again.
So he's trying to find ways to convince.

Speaker 2 And there are different ways he can do it. He can say, you're going broke.
You say you're not, but you are.

Speaker 2 But you know what? If you stop this war, we're going to elite all the sanctions. We might even invest in Russia.
And you think China's your partner?

Speaker 2 Any country that is underpopulated with rich, huge territories that's near China? And I can give you two good examples, Vladimir: your country and Australia.

Speaker 2 They are very vulnerable because China thinks they can bully them and take stuff from them. And

Speaker 2 they're going to do the same thing to you. And so there's a natural alliance, Vladimir, if you wake up and it is Europe, Ukraine, the United States, and you

Speaker 2 in a very tense Ribbentrop, Molotov, non-aggression pact. I don't want to use that horrible German name, but that's what we're talking about.
A non-aggression pact aimed at China. So

Speaker 2 that's what they're trying to do.

Speaker 2 In this whole

Speaker 2 mess,

Speaker 2 and you know, see, so just to sum up, Trump is mad because he just said he's a dictator, he started the war, and they all went nuts and say he's selling out, he's a traitor.

Speaker 2 And this brought in a big Twitter war.

Speaker 2 So, my colleague, whom I admire and I like dearly, Neil Ferguson, wrote

Speaker 2 on a tweet,

Speaker 2 this is not what George H.W. Bush did when confronted with Saddam Hussein in 1990.
He said, this will not stand.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 And I cannot believe that conservatives would see another Republican president appeasing Putin and calling

Speaker 2 siding with Russia. That drew a furious response from another person that I know less well.
I've met and highly admire and like, J.D. Vance.

Speaker 2 And he said that

Speaker 2 this was

Speaker 2 the currency of globalism and moralists. Moralistic garbage.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 And he said it was an inappropriate. Let's just start because I think everybody can be enlightened by this argument.

Speaker 1 Wait, one more thing he said. It was historical illiteracy, too.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, let's get to that first. I tend, Neil's a great historian, but I'm not sure he should have used the George H.W.
Bush. You know why?

Speaker 2 It wasn't quite this will not stand.

Speaker 2 First of all, in her memoirs, as I recall, Margaret Thatcher said, don't go wobbly.

Speaker 2 Then she repeated that in Aspen. You remember when

Speaker 2 she met Bush face to face? George, this is no time to go wobbly. And that was in response to Bush saying, oh my, I don't know, I don't know.

Speaker 2 Am I ahead of public opinion? So it wasn't this will not stand ever. He had doubts.
Number two,

Speaker 2 Neil, come on, you know that better than I do. That

Speaker 2 being at the start of a conflict in the Middle East, which was basically a proxy war between Kuwait, which was our friend, and the former Soviet puppet of

Speaker 2 Saddam Hussein, who really was a paper tiger. We had seen what he did when he went into Iran.
He had been fighting for 10 years and never got more than 100. He was losing that war.

Speaker 2 So when you say that shall not stand,

Speaker 2 it was pretty easy to do that because we could obliterate Iraq. But this is different.
Trump

Speaker 2 was not there at the start of this war. He inherited it.
He's He's in Medius Rebus. And it's not a war between a paper tiger, Saddam Hussein, and a defeated,

Speaker 2 first of all, Ukraine is not Kuwait. It's a huge power.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 Saddam Hussein, it's not Russia. It's a nuclear power.

Speaker 2 It might have 500 more nukes than we do, maybe 7,000.

Speaker 2 So you're asking Trump to jump into a war that he did not inherit with a vast nuclear power, with a dispute over a former Soviet republic that has been going on and has probably killed already, or wounded, or missing, or captured a million and a half casualties.

Speaker 2 And you're saying that that's the same thing when George Bush said this will not stand? That was pretty easy to say that, given our military and all. So it's not, he was right.

Speaker 2 There is an apt historical

Speaker 2 model. I wish Neil had mentioned it, and maybe he will.

Speaker 2 And it is the 1939

Speaker 2 winter war. Let me remind everybody, Fatilsa Stalin wanted key portions of Finland.
He had just signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. He had seen Germany swallow up Poland.

Speaker 2 He saw the United States was not going to get in the war. It was isolationists.

Speaker 2 He knew that France and Britain were soon to be targeted by Germany and they might fall, and he could get away with anything as Germany's partner. So he told Mr.

Speaker 2 Mannerheim, a brilliant, ferociously brave,

Speaker 2 we want to take 10% of fall. And if you give it to us, maybe we can live with you.
And Mannerheim thought about it, just like the Ukrainians did. And he said, no.
And the Ukrainian government said,

Speaker 2 the Finnish government, and they fought. So for November, and December, and January and February, they fought incredibly fiercely.

Speaker 2 They killed, wounded, or captured 400,000 Russians, this little Finnish army of a nation of, what, 3 million people?

Speaker 2 And then, guess what? Just like I said about the Russian army on its borders, it steamrolls people. And so Joseph Stalin said, hey, I don't have any war going on.

Speaker 2 Get everybody over there and get them these new tanks and artillery and rockets and let's just crush this upstart. And so they started to do that in late February.

Speaker 2 and they would have annihilated the Finns. And so finally the Finns said to Russia and Stalin, I tell you what, that 10%

Speaker 2 or 9% and Stalin said, well, I want a little more now. Okay, but take it.
Take our borderland. But we're going to fight you if you we're going to be autonomous.

Speaker 2 And Stalin said, you know, you guys fought pretty well. I stole what I want.

Speaker 2 And you and what happened?

Speaker 2 So for the next 85 years, despite World War II, when they were on the German side, Van Finland had a reputation of being fierce from that war, and they deterred the Russians.

Speaker 2 The Russians never wanted to go in there again.

Speaker 2 And they had been expelled from the UN, the League of Nations, excuse me, in 1939 for invading.

Speaker 2 And Mannerheim was the version then of Zelensky, only he was a real hero. He was a much greater man than Zelensky was.
And so that is a model I think that Neil and Vance could

Speaker 2 agree on. That Ukraine did what Finland did.
It fought magnificently, and it's going to have to give up some territorial concessions, but it can deter Russia because of the huge damage.

Speaker 2 It's killed more Russians than Finland did. Okay.

Speaker 2 The other thing,

Speaker 2 then Vance went down and said, Neil, there's five things that you're forgetting. Number one,

Speaker 2 Europe won't arm.

Speaker 2 It's basically on arm because it wants to attend to its domestic social equity green project, and it wants us ultimately to defend them, whether defined by the greater portion of NATO contributions or our nuclear shield that has protected them since World War II.

Speaker 2 And you know what? We can't afford it. Look at you.
You ask us to defend your borders in Europe, and you ask us to defend Ukrainian. Who's defending our southern border and our northern border?

Speaker 2 So we're going to attend to that. And we've got China over there.
We've got allies that, you know, no offense, Europe, no offense.

Speaker 2 But if you look at what Australia is doing, what Japan is doing, what South Korea is doing, what Taiwan is doing, they are rearming, and they're real allies, and they are going to help us deter China.

Speaker 2 Why don't you do like they are?

Speaker 2 And they don't just tell the United States, you do this and you do this and you do this. They actually arm or rearming.
That's another point he made.

Speaker 2 And then another point he said, this isn't in our interest. We do not want China to be on the same team as Russia.

Speaker 2 And we don't want to exhaust all of our artillery shells and our javelin stocks and give it all over here while you guys sit there and give all these big promises and don't come through.

Speaker 2 So it's not in our interest. It's not in our interest to see all these people killed.
It's not in your interest. It's not in Russia's interest.
It's not in Ukraine.

Speaker 2 Why don't we talk about humanitarianism for a while? You're utopians. Nobody in Europe or in the United States left ever says, God, this is a horrible thing.
Maine killed ruined lives for nothing.

Speaker 2 And so he made a whole five-point point

Speaker 2 to Neil. Neil replied again today.

Speaker 2 I haven't really read it.

Speaker 2 But the main main thing is

Speaker 2 Selena Zito made a good point when she said you have to take Trump

Speaker 2 figuratively, but not literally. You know what I mean? He says things

Speaker 2 that are intended to win an argument or to get a better deal for his country. But if you look at them as gospel, then you're going to go crazy.
And that's how he operates, whether you like it or not.

Speaker 2 And, you know,

Speaker 2 when I wrote the Trump book, I read, I don't know, four of the Art of Deal books. It's always go into a room, bluster, say crazy things,

Speaker 2 get your opponent unstable, demand a 90% advantage. You're going to work out,

Speaker 2 and then bicker back and forth. And when you get to the magical number you wanted, 53%,

Speaker 2 then you say, oh, my gosh, you've taken me. And then you walk out and everybody goes, hey, Mr.
Trump, on that building deal or that high-rise, you just obliterate. And then you say, oh, no, I didn't.

Speaker 2 I was just worn out by that brilliant negotiator. I got taken.

Speaker 2 Now, maybe to your kids, you go, ha, ha, ha, I got what I wanted. But you don't cut, you don't make fun of your opponent because you might have to

Speaker 2 deal with him in the future. That's how he's doing this with Putin and Canada and Greenland.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, Jr.: And I guess that's what my question is: is Putin's making it very hard to

Speaker 1 allow Trump to make Zelensky feel like he's won when his rhetoric is, oh, China is just taking everything in these Saudi Arabian talks. They're winning the war.

Speaker 1 So he's just making it difficult for Trump. And so I'm curious how it will all come out in the end.
And

Speaker 2 I'm sure you want to.

Speaker 2 Well, there is a fine line. It's a tightrope he's walking.
He's trying to tell Zelensky, you know what you're doing? You put on that stupid little green t-shirt, and then you tour the world, and

Speaker 2 everybody thinks you're this utopian, and then you start making demands. But I know you,

Speaker 2 and you're losing, and your European friends that you love

Speaker 2 are not there for you, and the me that you hate

Speaker 2 have to be the only one there for you. So you better straighten up and don't tell me that you're an equal with us because you could draw us into a nuclear war with Russia.

Speaker 2 That's what you could do, whether you like it or not, whether it's your fault or not. And then he's saying something else.
This is very important, everybody.

Speaker 2 Here it goes, Sammy.

Speaker 2 He's saying this.

Speaker 2 I have a long history with Ukraine.

Speaker 2 In 2016, when I was running for president, your ambassador wrote an op-ed saying that I was to be defeated. That is extraordinary that Ukraine interfered in our elections.

Speaker 2 Second,

Speaker 2 Hillary Clinton created a dossier

Speaker 2 with

Speaker 2 allegations go, some people in Ukraine giving information along with the Russians to lie about me and destroy me.

Speaker 2 in that election and then take away 20 months of my term under the Mueller investigations. If that wasn't enough, after I fought you all and was exonerated, Mr.

Speaker 2 Alexander Venman, who bragged that he was offered the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense job two or three times, cooked up an impeachment against me, and he violated classified rules and disclosed a private talk he listened into with Mr.

Speaker 2 Zelensky, and Mr.

Speaker 2 Zelensky probably had something to do with this, and then got Eric Selimela, who never heard the talk, and the three of them went and lied about it, but met with Adam Schiff, and they cooked up this impeachment that further destroyed my first term.

Speaker 2 And it was all over my warning to Zelensky, given the corruption under your nose of Joe Biden and his family and his son and your barisma, I don't know if I should.

Speaker 2 delay congressionally approved aid. And he did

Speaker 2 okay it. And it was offensive aid in a way that Obama's and Biden was not.
And there was a third thing he's thinking. Take a deep breath.
In September of 2024,

Speaker 2 Biden is off the ticket, but everybody is worried that the joy campaign of Kamala Harris is not working very well. It's sputtering.
So people think, how are we going to win Pennsylvania?

Speaker 2 It looks like that Elon Musk and all these people, Charlie Kirk,

Speaker 2 they've registered all these Republicans.

Speaker 2 I know what we can do. Let's go get Zelensky and make him come over here and we'll show that we are for Ukraine and Trump's not.

Speaker 2 And so they call up Zelensky and say, hey, we got a C-17. We're going to fly you over to Pennsylvania right in the heat of the election, the swing state that's going to determine who's going to win.

Speaker 2 If you get Harris, you get all the aid. But if you don't get Harris, you get El Trump.

Speaker 2 And Zelensky said, okay, fly me over there. And then they said, well, we got to land you at an iconic Scranton because that's where old Joe Biden came from.
And we'll get Josh Shapiro to meet you.

Speaker 2 We'll get all the Democratic team and we'll escort you with a secret service like you're a head of state. You are.
And we're going to take you to

Speaker 2 a munitions factory making ammunition for Ukraine.

Speaker 2 And you're going to see all these blue-collar voters and you're going to wink and nod and say, it's because of your government under Joe Biden, i.e., Harris, that you have a job and you're sending shells for me.

Speaker 2 But, but, subtext, subtext, if you were to vote for, he didn't say this, but here's what he was saying, and he had other surrogates say it, if you vote for Trump, they'll probably shut this down, and you'll be out of a job.

Speaker 2 That was complete election interference. So, don't give me anybody that Zelensky is not interfering in U.S.
elections, and they have been for a long time, and Trump knows that.

Speaker 2 He's no friend of Putin, because I can tell you that if you go after the Wagner group and kill them, and you raise sanctions, and you flood the world with oil, and you try to stop the Nordsom pipeline, and you arm

Speaker 2 Putin doesn't like that.

Speaker 2 But this has caused a lot of problems, and now Trump has, let me think, he's got Neil Ferguson, he's got my entire Hoover institution angry at him, he's got Mark Levin, whom I really like and respect angry at him.

Speaker 2 He's got

Speaker 2 Tom Cotton, whom I really like and respect.

Speaker 2 And he's got some of the Democratic people in the Congress. And he's got all the left going crazy.
Now,

Speaker 2 if this is like Denmark and Panama and Canada, maybe some good will come out of it. That Zelensky will be shocked.
And he went like this to him. And Zelensky goes, Oh my god,

Speaker 2 he's right.

Speaker 2 I am losing the war, and he's the only guy that can save me, and I'm telling him what to do and where I'm going to be after I've tried my best to make sure he wasn't president.

Speaker 2 What the hell am I doing? Excuse me, the language. And so that's what he's trying to do.
Now, what's going to happen? There's one key

Speaker 2 arbitration point. The whole thing is going to hinge on one thing:

Speaker 2 we are going to tell them

Speaker 2 no NATO for Ukraine. We're going to tell them no Crimea for Ukraine, no Donbass for Ukraine,

Speaker 2 lots of money and arms for Ukraine.

Speaker 2 And for you, Putin, you get to have Crimea that you didn't institutionalize in the past. You get to have Donbass.

Speaker 2 You get to have no NATO for Ukraine. You get all the sanctions lifted.
You can come into a detente with Europe and the United States. You can sell gas and get rich again to Germany if you want.

Speaker 2 But Ukraine is going to have a DMZ. It's going to be armed.

Speaker 2 And here's the point that they're going to fight over. But you have to crawl back 60, 70 miles, some places 30, 40 miles back to where you were on February 23rd.
We cannot reward that invasion.

Speaker 2 And I don't know how they're going to split the difference. Maybe they're going to say he's going to have to go a quarterback or a halfback, but that's what everything will hinge on.

Speaker 2 And Vladimir Putin knows, he can talk really big that he's winning the war, but

Speaker 2 he knows if the war goes on another year, there's going to be somebody going to try to remove him because the Russians are in deep trouble.

Speaker 2 I mean, I'm not saying like the left is they're broke and they can't make it. They're selling oil like crazy and all that, but when you have to bring in North Koreans and you have to

Speaker 2 you know, do what Ukraine is doing,

Speaker 2 go down the street and pick people off the street and get empty your prisons and then find old T-34 World War II tanks and parks and get them out.

Speaker 1 Come on, and you killed off the head of your own Wagner group.

Speaker 2 That's a problem.

Speaker 1 All right, Victor, let's go for a break and then we'll come back after these ads to talk about the Panama Canal and the early 20th century building of it. Stay with us and we'll be back.

Speaker 1 Welcome Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. So the Panama Canal is recently much ballyhooed and built by the United States.
And so I'm anxious to hear about that monumental.

Speaker 1 You know, I was thinking last week we didn't say one thing about that

Speaker 1 Russo-Japanese war and that it was one of the main events that led to the Russian Revolution as well. And we forgot to mention that.

Speaker 2 So I want to be sure.

Speaker 1 Like, why are we talking about it? It did do that. So anyways, back to the case.

Speaker 2 It did. And it did two things.

Speaker 2 I'm glad you mentioned that. When they heard that they had lost the Pacific Fleet and the Baltic Fleet, and they had been beaten by, in racist terms, so-called inferior Asians, the people went crazy.

Speaker 2 And I mean, especially the aristocratic landowning class that was the support for Nicholas.

Speaker 2 The same thing happened, though, in Japan when the government came back and said, we've negotiated a peace treaty. They said, what? We never lost a war.

Speaker 2 We should have got the Sakhalin Islands at least. We should have got all this stuff from Russia.

Speaker 2 We have a border we could have taken in Manchuria and stuff and Korea, and you gave it away after we blew their entire fleet out of the water. This is insane.
So they both had revolutions after that.

Speaker 2 And unfortunately,

Speaker 2 the militarists got the upper hand.

Speaker 2 Panama, I mentioned it in the Art of the Deal. The idea with Panama was that in the age of clipper ships

Speaker 2 and hybrid steams, it had taken an extra two or three months to go around Cape Horn.

Speaker 2 If you look at the map, there's that bulge, you've got to go all the way around South America to the Cape, then you've got to go in that Straits of Magellan or somewhere through there, and then you've got that bulge as you come back up.

Speaker 2 Even in the age of 30, 35 knot ships, it takes about eight or nine days, and it's bad weather and it's risky. You go through there's two or three places that people had looked at.

Speaker 2 Nicaragua had a place,

Speaker 2 a narrow strait that had a lake in it. There's parts of Mexico that might

Speaker 2 I think Mexico is even now dreaming of putting a high speed rail across their narrowest border with Guatemala so that you could have cargo ships just slide the cargo off to another cargo ship.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 the best one was Panama. So the guy, Mr.
Lesseps, who had created the Suez Canal successfully when nobody said he did it, and he did it without any locks,

Speaker 2 and it was about 100 miles long.

Speaker 2 They drafted him. He made a big corporation in Europe, mostly in France.
And in

Speaker 2 1880, he started in Panama to build it, pretty much where the canal is. And they discovered two things very quickly.

Speaker 2 They were not financed by a government

Speaker 2 and they didn't have a capital and the whole thing collapsed. Number two,

Speaker 2 they didn't understand what caused malaria and yellow fever, mosquitoes.

Speaker 2 So they lost about 40,000 workers in this fetid area, especially when you're taking out dirt and it's raining every day and you have these stagnant pools everywhere. They didn't understand that.

Speaker 2 And number three, there was no way in the world, given the uneven elevations between the Caribbean and the Atlantic, that you could just go like that.

Speaker 2 It would have to be something like the ridiculous Corinth Canal, you know, you see in Greece, how deep it is.

Speaker 2 It's carved way, way down there and it's very narrow because they can't they didn't want to have locks between the Gulf of Corinth and the Aegean. But the result is that ships, you know, they're level

Speaker 2 when they go through and

Speaker 2 there's slight rises in elevation, but they had to cut so deeply that the sides fall off and everything.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 the United States then decided that they wanted to cut these months in the early stage of steam and sail.

Speaker 2 So they went to Columbia. There was no Panama.
And they say, we would like to deal with you. And Columbia said, said, no, no.
And then we, you know how we are.

Speaker 2 Teddy Roosevelt got gunboats and said, look,

Speaker 2 we're going to stage a revolution. And we said, it's unfair that the Panamanian people should have national aspirations.
And so we said, rebel. They rebell.

Speaker 2 Then we sent the Marines in, and they said, no, Colombia, they're free now. And we gave some money for Colombia to pay them all.
We usually do that, you know, in those days. We didn't just take it.

Speaker 2 We paid them a nominal sum. Not nominal, nominal, several million dollars.
And then we started. And luckily, we had some, Mr.

Speaker 2 Finley, I think his name was, a Cuban-American, and Walter Reed, the heroic Walter Reed.

Speaker 2 And they went down and they said to the engineers, and we had some brilliant engineers, you've got to get rid of all the mosquitoes. And they said, this is crazy.

Speaker 2 And they did all these experiments and they proved that it was mosquito borne. And so they drained all of the water.
They used toxic chemicals and sprayed all the stagnants. They issued

Speaker 2 mosquito nets. They built

Speaker 2 new housing off the ground so water wouldn't seep in. They put screens on all the windows.
They had inspectors and trucks with spray, and they sprayed everybody.

Speaker 2 And they told everybody to wear repellent. And the result was that in 10 years from

Speaker 2 1904 to the completion of the canal, they went from the French losing 40,000 people to they only lost about five.

Speaker 2 Mostly, I think Trump was incorrect to say we lost thousands. They were mostly foreign workers from the Caribbean.
And then

Speaker 2 another thing they did that was really important, they looked at the French equipment. They bought it and they said it's junk.
So they went to U.S.

Speaker 2 factories and said, we want special trucks, heavy-duty rail tracks,

Speaker 2 and steam shovels. And they built these on-spec huge machines and transported them down there.
They bucked up the railroad so they could get rid of the thing.

Speaker 2 And in 10 years, they built the

Speaker 2 canal. It's about 52 miles long.
They created an artificial lake, Galgoon, I think its name is.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they have locks at the entrance and the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Speaker 2 And they created this canal zone, and they had autonomy there according to the treaty.

Speaker 2 Everything was hunky-dory for 40 years. It worked perfectly.
Panama was a backward country that was getting rich, and then the post-colonial period happened.

Speaker 2 In 1956, remember the Israelis, the French, and British

Speaker 2 landed

Speaker 2 troops and tried to take back the Suez Canal because crazy Abdel Nasser had nationalized it and had not paid the British for it. and the canal interest, the private interest.

Speaker 2 And they were afraid that he was going to cut off all access, and he threatened he would, for Israel, so that Israel could not have any trade going out of the Mediterranean into the Indian Ocean, and they were afraid all oil imports from the Middle East.

Speaker 2 And so they invaded, and then they would have taken it back. And then Dwight Eisenhower, of all people, turned on

Speaker 2 the British, and he said, no. you're not going to do it.
We'll get out of NATO. We have to.
And he stopped it. And it collapsed.

Speaker 2 And there was a big worldwide jubilation that you could stand up to the old European imperialist. And so at that point, Panama came to us in 1956 and said, look,

Speaker 2 your president stopped a indigenous,

Speaker 2 I guess Egyptians are indigenous, a European effort to take back an indigenously appropriated canal on their territory.

Speaker 2 So if you're not going to be a hypocrite, you were on the right side of history there, on the right side, you should concede and give us this.

Speaker 2 And we said,

Speaker 2 I'm not going to do that.

Speaker 2 You know, we had to fix the locks of the U.S. Missouri.
We had it in World War II that every battleship could make it through. The Missouri went through with like two inches on either side.

Speaker 2 So we said, no, no, no. And there was all this upheaval.
There was rioting. And that I grew up in the 60s and

Speaker 2 early 70s where all you saw was Panamanians rioting in the canal zone. And they called them, I don't know what they call them, zonies.
They were all these, it wasn't just American zone.

Speaker 2 It was hyper-Americanism. Fast food, beautiful lawns, indigenous health, lifestyles that were just so in contrast with the mess of a third world country.

Speaker 2 So then Jimmy Carter came in and said, this is intolerable. So in 1978 and 1999, he had a treaty.
You can read it today. It's very, very long.

Speaker 2 And it gave autonomy after 20 years, 1999, and that we would train them, we would prep them. They would get to have these beautiful buildings, the canal zone.

Speaker 2 They would enlarge one of the locks so that large

Speaker 2 container ships could come through, and they did.

Speaker 2 However, there were provisions in there that the United States could intervene if a foreign power sought to disrupt the special relationship between Panama and the United States, and if, in military terms,

Speaker 2 we did not have primary access to it, and if Panama were starting to give favoritism for particular countries. Okay.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump comes in and says, you guys signed a thing with China in 2016. I'm looking at the five foreign interests.

Speaker 2 And, oh, I see that the two ones that, the only two that really count, the container ship ports, wow, one is at the Caribbean entrance and one is at the Atlantic Ocean.

Speaker 2 And they're both from a phony Chinese Communist Front

Speaker 2 Hong Kong Company. And you think we're going to sit there while China now builds a bridge, is going to modernize it, and he's it's full of spies and you guys have Chinese signs all over Panama City?

Speaker 2 You know exactly what you're doing. This is an enemy of the United States, and they would not tolerate us doing that.

Speaker 2 And so he said, we're going to take it back under the treaty.

Speaker 2 It was absurd that nobody wants to go down there and die in Panama, but it's also absurd that China would be de facto running that.

Speaker 2 And then they had all of these Americans that are on the canal board for Panama and saying things like, Trump is crazy.

Speaker 2 It runs wonderfully. The Chinese have done so much.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Trump was ultimately right about that.
And to get them out of that treaty was smart.

Speaker 2 And I don't know if he needed to say all the things he did, but without saying all the things he did, I'm not sure they would even listen to him. And so that was the history of the canal.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it ended up like Canada and Greenland. Trevor Burrus, Jr.:

Speaker 1 Did that have a detrimental effect on South America broadly, since all those ships were no longer going down and hitting the ships?

Speaker 2 No, not South America. It had a detrimental effect on three countries,

Speaker 2 Argentina and Chile down at the Tierra del Fuego. Both of them, remember, have that border right at the tip of the Cape Horn.

Speaker 2 That was very lucrative because

Speaker 2 when ships

Speaker 2 all along the coast of South America, they would come in for water and fuel.

Speaker 2 But when they got down there,

Speaker 2 the weather was so terrible that often they would have to stay there for weeks at a time or days at a time, and they had hotels and industry to house hundreds of ships. Second, when they made the

Speaker 2 turn, the Falkland Islands, everybody said, why is the British ship? Well, the British were there with facilities, coal, and other things that they could help ships in need as they turned the corner.

Speaker 2 So the Falklands suffered, and Argentina and Chile suffered.

Speaker 2 And the people who were kind of against it was the Vanderbilt consortium that had made a railroad through for the gold rush and right after the gold rush, I should say.

Speaker 2 And that was very lucrative, that you could take a train from Atlantic to Pacific and there would be ships waiting for you. They took that railroad and beefed it up.

Speaker 2 Part of the canal says that the United States will not negotiate with Nicaragua or Colombia or Mexico to make another canal.

Speaker 2 There's people who said that the spot in Nicaragua

Speaker 2 or even Colombia might, even though it's longer, it might be better because there's a a way to do it without locks, you know, make a big but I don't think anybody's ever going to do it.

Speaker 2 And part of the problem is that the United States, although

Speaker 2 you know, there's about,

Speaker 2 I don't know, 2,000 or 3,000 ships a day that go through there, or maybe more.

Speaker 2 If you do the math, maybe it's

Speaker 2 it might even be up to over 10,000 of them a day. It's just packed.
And 75% of them are American-directed ships, either American-owned or going to an American port.

Speaker 2 But the military got around it when they started making super carriers that wouldn't fit, you know.

Speaker 2 They basically have an Atlantic, and they did that in World War II, Atlantic and Pacific Pacific Fleet, and North Fork and San Diego, and then in Pearl Harbor, that they're separate, and they don't have to go back and forth as much.

Speaker 2 But a lot of U.S. ships in World War II, and I think to a certain extent today, are designed to be narrow enough to go through.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you would think they would make that a priority.

Speaker 1 Well, Victor, let's go ahead then and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about Cash Patel's confirmation, and then maybe a little on Hague Seth and the military.

Speaker 1 Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Speaker 1 Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. You can find Victor on his social media at X.
He is at V D Hansen, and on Facebook, he is at Hansen's Morning Cup. So come join him there.

Speaker 1 We're also on YouTube and on Rumble and Spotify now. So you can find Victor on all of those for a video version of his podcasts.
So come join us.

Speaker 1 Well, good news.

Speaker 1 Cash Patel was confirmed, but what a struggle and what so much rhetoric against Cash. I thought he was an excellent choice given his background.
But what are your any thoughts on this

Speaker 1 good news?

Speaker 2 I knew it was going to be tough. I knew that Susan Murkowski, Murkowski and Susan Collins would vote against him,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 that made it close.

Speaker 2 51-49, that was it.

Speaker 1 Mitch McConnell voted for him, so that was good.

Speaker 2 That was Mitch McConnell voted for him, and I think Mitch McConnell did not want to go out. He's not going to run for re-election.
He did. I know that everybody dislikes him.

Speaker 2 He's the most unpopular politician of either party in polls. But there was a once a great moment where he was able to engineer

Speaker 2 in a way that was not just punitive. He got got Merrick Garland not confirmed because it was the Biden rule.

Speaker 2 He brilliantly said Joe Biden is a blowhard, and he said in a lame duck administration, they cannot just pick

Speaker 2 a

Speaker 2 nominee when the opposite party has control of the Senate. Joe Biden had said that.

Speaker 2 And they had stopped the Brit, and so he turned it around and said, you're not going to appoint Merritt Gard, and they stopped that.

Speaker 2 Can you imagine if that guy had been on the Supreme Court given what he did as DOJ, Attorney General? So that was really good what he did. And so I don't think he wanted to go out being hated.
So

Speaker 2 he turned around and he didn't require J.D. Vance to come back and break the vote.
And he also knew it wouldn't make any difference anyway. He would only get more abuse.

Speaker 2 He's not up for reelection. Collins and Murkowski, she believes that under that weird ranked voting system, that she can always finesse a victory in Alaska with a minority support of voters.

Speaker 2 And Collins, I don't know if she wants to run again. They all want to run again, but she thinks she can't win in Purple Maine by being too conservative.

Speaker 2 But he's confirmed, and people were ⁇ the argument against him was that the people that needed to be fired had been fired before he got there, so his fingerprints weren't on the firing.

Speaker 2 That might be true or not, but they needed to be fired.

Speaker 1 He suggested that he was behind it nonetheless. The Democrats were saying that.

Speaker 2 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, well, the Democrats are angry because they implemented a DE why the rank-and-fire FBI agents are wonderful agents. They're professional.

Speaker 2 They understood that their eighth floor in Washington with the likes of Robert Mueller, followed by James Comey, followed by Andrew McKay, followed by Christopher Wray, were politicized and not politicized in the sense of just being aware of politics, but left-wing orientated.

Speaker 2 And had all of them were revolving. I mean, Andrew McCabe's wife was a beneficiary.
She ran for office in Virginia. She was a beneficiary of Clinton money PACs.

Speaker 2 Comey had come out of Lockheed as general counsel. I mean, they were all knee-deep in the corporate political world.
And Cash, he has some corporate things, but he's not anywhere near where they are.

Speaker 2 And more importantly, he knows that you don't raid the home of an ex-president to go in and take

Speaker 2 14,000 documents because you say there's lots, a trove of classified, and then you find 102, which is 0.007

Speaker 2 of all the things they carted away. Then you don't take the documents and spew them all over the floor like this is how Trump actually did it.
And then you don't come armed with props.

Speaker 2 They all came armed with like little files that said secret on it.

Speaker 2 Then they took the files that were classified, the 102, they threw them on the floor, then they pulled out of their briefcases secret and put them on each one. So we saw that as a stage photo out.

Speaker 2 And then they went through Melania's underwear. They just, they didn't need to do that.
And he had been negotiating with them a long time. And why?

Speaker 2 And I know that people that I respect, like Mike Pompeo at one point, and I think it might have cost him a position, and the Trump administration said, although he condemned the raid, he also said, well, Trump didn't comply.

Speaker 2 Well, they all have arguments about presidential papers.

Speaker 2 Joe Biden took more papers for a longer period of time in less secure places and more of them, and was considered a feeble old man and should not be prosecuted. So come on.

Speaker 2 But Trump was worried that some of these papers were evidence of what they had done to him,

Speaker 2 classified, and he did not want them to go to the archives because, given what he'd seen with the deep spate, he thought that they might disappear.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I guess he could have made copies, etc. But

Speaker 2 there were paranoias on his part what might happen. And he had surrendered most of them without any raid.
And so the people who did that,

Speaker 2 the people who were informants at the January 6th when Christopher Ray stonewalled that, there were people the people, remember McCabe and Lisa Page and

Speaker 2 Peter Stroesik had had this thing. Don't worry, Andrew will take care of him and making sure that Trump doesn't win.
That wasn't just three people. That was the prevailing view of the FBI in 2016.

Speaker 2 Comey coming in on those Obama,

Speaker 2 last Obama sessions where he was saying, you know, we've got an informant, Christopher Steele, da, da, da. And remember,

Speaker 2 they paid Christopher Steele. There were people,

Speaker 2 James Baker, who was the chief counsel of the FBI, he rotated into the old Twitter where his salary magically ballooned to $7 billion, while he got FBI agents to work with Twitter to censor the news of the authentic laptop.

Speaker 2 FBI may have been involved with

Speaker 2 Mike Moral

Speaker 2 CIA interim director, who cooked up with Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State to be soon. They cooked up the 51 intelligence authorities.
What we forget about that when they said that this was

Speaker 2 Russian project, they lied

Speaker 2 that it wasn't authentic. Winknaw has all the hallmarks.

Speaker 2 I could say something like, if I have a kidney stone, I could say, I have all the hallmarks of having a kidney stone, but I didn't say I had one. And that's what they were doing.
And then

Speaker 2 on top of that,

Speaker 2 the FBI had the laptop in their position for more than a year. They'd done every forensic study on it.
They knew it was legitimate. They talked with the CIA.

Speaker 2 So the CIA had called them up, no doubt, and said, hey, we're going to lie about that laptop.

Speaker 2 And somebody in the FBI said, well, if you lie about it, we're not going to have to, we can't release the truth that it is authentic. And all those porno pictures and Mr.

Speaker 2 Big Guy and 10% and all that incriminating stuff, it happened.

Speaker 2 So it was corrupt. I could go on.
Remember that was a retrieval service for the Biden family? Oh,

Speaker 2 Ashley Biden lost her diary where she said she took showers with her dad too long.

Speaker 2 Uh-oh, James O'Keefe wanted to buy it or was so told he could buy it. Let's go get him in his underwear at 2 in the morning and humiliate him.
Oh,

Speaker 2 the teachers' unions don't like parents talking about gay LGBTQ stuff in their libraries. Let's go monitor them at school board meetings so they shut the F up.
That's what they were thinking.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and they were very corrupt. And so

Speaker 2 they've been fired.

Speaker 1 They went in and fired, hacked out all these guys before Patel got in.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 1 do you there were things that Cash said in his

Speaker 1 hearings that I was wondering about. For example, he said that he didn't think it was necessary for FBI agents to get warrants to do wiretaps.

Speaker 1 That was the thing that I thought was the most, what I thought was, whoa, that sounds pretty crazy to me, but I don't know, maybe it isn't. And then

Speaker 2 I think that's, there are cases in which that is true.

Speaker 2 And, but part of the FISA courts

Speaker 2 is a way, and the FISA court system now is totally disreputable after what we saw with Kevin Kleinsmith forging documents and Homey lying that they didn't use the steel dossier, which they did to get a warrant on Carter Page

Speaker 2 and Papadopoulos.

Speaker 2 He's going to go after culpable people. He has to.
But the key point will be

Speaker 2 what he'll face is:

Speaker 2 Are you going to set a precedent that you're going to examine the political

Speaker 2 leanings or beliefs of FBI agents? And the answer has to be no. But are you going to set a precedent that if you are an FBA

Speaker 2 agent and you break FBI rules for political purposes, you are going to be fired. And the only way I can enforce that is to fire the people who did do that unequivocally.

Speaker 2 And that's what the difference is. And I think he will fire

Speaker 2 more people.

Speaker 2 He said also, he said he was going to move the headquarters of the FBI out of Washington. I wish he would do that.
That That would help.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, let's go ahead and then turn to Pete Higseth.

Speaker 1 He's in the news as well and some good changes in the military. And one of which, the big thing this week is that he's going to require, I think he said, 8% cuts

Speaker 1 of the military budget. And he's going to expect his departments to do it each year, cut a little bit back from what they're spending.
And I'm glad that we have at least one agency.

Speaker 1 I wish they'd do that across the board.

Speaker 2 But they're going to do it a lot. But you've got to remember, I mean, that's $60 billion plus in the $880 billion budget.
So

Speaker 2 a lot of

Speaker 2 Northern Virginia people were going to have to sell their home and move out and get a job in the private sector. But what would be those projects?

Speaker 2 He was going to get rid of the green energy division that says you have to use biofuels at $28 a gallon or something for naval ships. He's going to get out of the DI people.

Speaker 2 He's going to get out of the abortion stuff. He's going to get all of those social issues he's going to get out of.
He's going to get rid of,

Speaker 2 I don't, he's got a good argument. If you look at the number of generals and you look at the ratio of generals per enlisted men and the size of the force, we are not in a wartime situation.

Speaker 2 You can make an argument that historically we're overrepresented by very expensive four-star generals, three-star generals. So that's going to be a big change.

Speaker 2 There's going to be other changes that are going to be more controversial. He's really, I think they're going to say that if you're going to be a

Speaker 2 he's going to reestablish the idea that if you are an officer who retires and you want to take the civilian task like Austin and Mattis did,

Speaker 2 you're not going to be a waiver of the Congress. They're going to try to stop that, I think.
You can't go right back as a civilian, even though you're on a military retirement.

Speaker 2 I think he's also, from what I've understood, he's reminding everybody if you're going to be Mark Milley. Mark Milley was pardoned, by the way, so he's free.

Speaker 2 But if you're going to be Mark Milley and call up freelances and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, you have no chain of command responsibilities or requirements. You can't do that.

Speaker 2 You're an advisory. You cannot disrupt the chain of command.
If you do that, it's treasonous. It really is, to tell everybody, talk to me when I get an order

Speaker 2 or you get an order from Trump, talk to me first and I can countermand it. And then I think if you're a retired officer,

Speaker 2 you can't have a military where retired officers of the four-star with enormous prestige, much of it earned, nevertheless calling Mussolini or Hitler-like or a liar or should be removed sooner than later.

Speaker 2 Auschwitz, all that stuff. And I can name the names ad infinitum.
There's 10 of them, 12 of them. You can't have colonels writing op-eds saying that Trump should be escorted out of the office.

Speaker 2 You can't do that. You can't have Pentagon lawyers.
I mean, it's a free country, but we had Rosa Brooks saying that, you know, we move him by the 25th Amendment, 11 days into office in 2017.

Speaker 2 Well, we've got to get rid of him. 25th Amendment, too long.

Speaker 2 Impeachment, too long. Military coup? Oh, I can imagine that.
I can go for that. So that whole atmosphere has got to change.
It's not good. It's not conducive.

Speaker 1 Well, Victor, we're getting close to the end, but I thought that this weekend a very important thing to mention about the war in Hamas and the hostage exchange.

Speaker 1 And that is that they had a hostage exchange of the Bibis family. The two babies were killed and also the mother.
And Hamas has returned, supposedly returned them.

Speaker 1 The babies, of course, have been returned, but they found that the body of the mother was not actually the mother. And so Mrs.
Biebis did not make it home in this hostage exchange. And

Speaker 1 it shows you a lot about Hamas

Speaker 1 and the sort of disrespect that they have,

Speaker 1 both for the process and for humanity. It's just terrible.

Speaker 2 Well, even I guess their medievalism, even I shouldn't say medieval, that's unfair. I'm a big fan of medieval Europe, so it's a slur on medievalism.
I don't mean that

Speaker 2 their barbarity even shocked, when you have to shock, if you're a radical Muslim and you shock the Grand Mufti and the United Nations both, then you must have done something beyond the pale because they tolerate anything.

Speaker 2 And they got all of these terrorists out and

Speaker 2 by

Speaker 2 they never told anybody that this family was dead. So they didn't know anything about them.
They knew the whole time they were dead. And so they were trading bodies for live terrorists, number one.

Speaker 2 And then they showed no respect for the deceased.

Speaker 2 They put the coffins on display and they had a Hamas rally with these cowardly men who have been hiding in tunnels under civilian protection, under civilians getting shelled in hospitals and mosques where they

Speaker 2 sneak around tunnels. Then as soon as the Israelis back out, they get back out in their camouflage, but they wear masks and they're big, tough guys

Speaker 2 boasting about dead babies. And then

Speaker 2 they've obviously done something. Why would they not have the body?

Speaker 2 I don't know what they did to her, but they may have tortured her or worse, and they did not want to release that body, so then they thought they could fake the Israelis.

Speaker 2 Do they really think the Israelis

Speaker 2 think like they do? Do they think the Israelis have a level of technology that they do?

Speaker 2 And what they're doing is

Speaker 2 they are destroying the left wing's argument that they are a persecuted, romantic people and that Hamas

Speaker 2 hijacked the people of Gaza. And what they're showing, when you see these crowds of the Gaza people cheering it on

Speaker 2 and happy,

Speaker 2 And you see how they facilitated this when they took the prisoners on October 7th, they're acting the same way. And apparently this group of prisoners was not taken by Hamas.

Speaker 2 They were captured by freelancing civilians that tagged along to rape, kill, murder, and steal.

Speaker 2 Put it all together, and it really reflects terribly on the whole Gaza project. And I think people what they're going to do is

Speaker 2 at some point, the Israelis intelligence is going to look at all the hostages that are back

Speaker 2 in custody, all the hostages that are theoretically missing, dead or alive, call in all of their Gaza informants, all of the people who are sitting in jail, many of them who are informants, and come to a consensus just how many prisoners are still alive versus how many of those people still have to be released.

Speaker 2 And I would not want to be a Hamas leader. Anybody who is in the Hamas leadership leadership right now

Speaker 2 can be identified as a dead man walking, because as soon as these hostages are released,

Speaker 2 and that's why they're releasing dead people, okay, they want to prolong and prolong and prolong it. But at some point the Israelis are going to say, enough is enough.

Speaker 2 We might even have to lose hostages. But every single person on that stage, they're going to find out who they were and they're going to kill them.
They really are.

Speaker 2 They've done it already with the apparatus of Hezbollah and Hamas. And that's why you don't hear who the new Hamas leaders are, but they'll find out who they are.

Speaker 2 And all they're doing is giving ammunition

Speaker 2 for public opinion is now going way in Israel's direction.

Speaker 2 And why we allow I hope Donald Trump has a travel ban. I know a lot of you are going to say that's unfair.

Speaker 2 But when I see the people of Gaza cheering this on, and I see all the hatred of the United United States in that area of the world, and I see people in Detroit cheering on Hamas and Hezbollah flags, and I see that on campus,

Speaker 2 as part of this restoration, this Thermidor reaction to Roguespierism and the Jacobins, we really do need to say, you know what, we take you literally.

Speaker 2 You do not like us, and you should stay in places that you love and not come over to places you hate. So you're not going to come to the United States under any circumstances.

Speaker 2 And if you're here on a student visa or a green card and you break our laws, you're going to go home. And I think that would make a big difference.

Speaker 2 And then we should get back to assimilation, integration.

Speaker 2 Once we close these borders and you have a static population, and once you change the idea that you're not going to indoctrinate children and tribalism and how awful this country is, you can unleash popular culture, as crude as it is, and the government civic and the school's civic education.

Speaker 2 And if you're not pouring in a million illegals a year or two, you can finally get back to a multiracial but single culture America.

Speaker 2 But not when you have open borders and you let in two million people and you indoctrinate them that they have grievances the moment they set foot into the United States by reason of their DEI status.

Speaker 1 Well, Victor, I know that you're on a really hard end here, so I'd like to thank you and our audience.

Speaker 2 Were you going to ask about Representative Crockett, I thought?

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, I was, but we were really late.

Speaker 1 But if you would like to answer, she had a crazy interview on The View where she was making accusations that Trump will take money from people, you know, especially the old planes will continue to fall from the sky.

Speaker 1 And Sleepy Joe would have been a better person to have in the position than Donald Trump. And I was wondering, Crockett's machinations, what you thought.

Speaker 2 Well, she's very intelligent because she looks at the squad-type crazies of the black community or the DI community, and she says Maxine Waters over the hills. She's like 86.

Speaker 2 And Representative Bowman, who did the fire,

Speaker 2 he's gone.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the guy who said that Guam was going to flip over,

Speaker 2 too many people stood on the wrong side of the island. Representative, what's his name? He's gone.
So they don't really have a powerful,

Speaker 2 hard-left, inflammatory voice. But they do with me, and I'm going to say stuff.
But what she doesn't understand, I think, is

Speaker 2 when you see 26% of the black males voting for Trump, the Hispanic vote almost evenly divided, Native Americans, maybe 45% for Trump. Asians, maybe 40%.
Jews, maybe 40%,

Speaker 2 more than any other Republican. First guy to win 20% of the popular vote since

Speaker 2 George W. Bush in 2004.
What am I getting at? People are sick of that tribalism. So when she stands up, and I went and looked at some of her speeches in Congress that are on YouTube, she always

Speaker 2 kind of like Whoopi Goldberg.

Speaker 2 She puts everything in racial, and she always says kind of the same thing as a proud black woman. You ain't going to talk to me that way.

Speaker 2 She and Marjorie Terry Green and all that. But what I'm getting at is at this point in our history, we're sick of that.
We know where it goes.

Speaker 2 The DEI woke tribalism and self-identification of your superficial appearance. It goes nowhere.
It gets people very angry.

Speaker 2 And I think we're coming to the point now when 30% of the population are DEI or minority, so they claim, we don't even talk about intermarriage, that the country won't work with people like hers verbiage.

Speaker 2 So she's going to get increasingly tagged for what she is. She's really a racist.
A racist is a person who believes that people who look like herself,

Speaker 2 oneself, are morally superior, genetically superior than other people based on their superficial appearance. So anytime she says, as a black woman, I think she's going to get a lot of criticism.

Speaker 2 And I think she's going to get a criticism from the black community. I think they're getting sick of it as well.
They see where it leads. It leads to a Chicago or a Baltimore or a Los Angeles.

Speaker 2 I just say that because Karen Bass tried that when she came back. She said, I was appointed to go to Ghana as a black woman,

Speaker 2 and then she had all of her surrogates that this is racism. And now she's reduced to blaming the gay fire chief because the gay fire chief didn't tell her,

Speaker 2 don't go to Ghana. It's Santa Ana winds, and everything's dry.
Nobody told me. Everybody's sick of that.
Don't use race. And I think Crockett is 10 years behind

Speaker 2 the times.

Speaker 1 She's not as smart as you think she is.

Speaker 2 No, and she starts yelling and screaming. I know the average Hispanic or black male

Speaker 2 just tunes her out. I know very liberal people.
I won't mention their names. They're listening very liberal.
But when they hear that stuff,

Speaker 2 as a proud black woman, you know, I'm a black woman, I'm a black woman, they're just saying, I don't want to hear it anymore. It goes nowhere.
It just leads to animosity. And

Speaker 2 as the white population and minority term shrinks, their obvious questioning is, and it's already started, is

Speaker 2 if do you believe in proportional representation or

Speaker 2 do you not? If it has to be mandated, then look at the post office or the NBA or the NFL. They're merucratic, supposedly, but they're overrepresented by African Americans.

Speaker 2 But why go into the English department and say there has to be this many African Americans when you don't do it in the much more prestigious and lucrative NFL when you say only merit count?

Speaker 2 So it's so, it's so, there's such a disinquilibrium now that people are sick of it. And you can see that with really

Speaker 2 important African-American figures like Mr. The quarterback Hurts, he said, I didn't want to get into that.
Because he knows that meritocratically, he's superb. He doesn't have to get into that.

Speaker 2 Everybody's sick of it. So I imagine that

Speaker 2 she's going to be a voice because there's no other voices that age, and she's going to get double down.

Speaker 2 But she should go look at Whoopi Goldberg and all of those,

Speaker 2 a lot of them are DI

Speaker 2 voices.

Speaker 2 Harris Faulkner, almost by herself, is getting a greater audience than they are. And they're on a major network with all those resources.

Speaker 2 And that's free to watch. You cannot watch Fox.
You've got to pay to watch Harris Faulkner. And she's got a bigger audience.
Why?

Speaker 2 Because she's a sophisticated, brilliant black woman, beautiful black, sophisticated woman that can, on her own merits, repartee with anybody, out argue, and she never mentions the fact she happens to be incidentally black.

Speaker 2 And those people are mediocrities, and they have to do it all the time. And most people then would rather

Speaker 2 I I'm a viewer. I would rather pay forty dollars a month and watch Harris Faulkner and brilliant commentary.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, oh, I didn't really she's black. Or I got to be told every day by Hoopy Goldberg that

Speaker 2 about the Holocaust

Speaker 2 revisionism and black this and black that, and then hear inane silly things. And I have and even though it's free, I'd rather pay for something else.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 Crockett is an anchorism, an ossification, a calcification.

Speaker 1 All right, Victor. Well, let's go ahead and end the show and thank our audience.
And thank you once again for the wisdom today. It was quite a discussion, especially of the Ukraine.

Speaker 1 And I really thank you for that and the Panama Canal, too.

Speaker 2 Well, I hope I give a great,

Speaker 2 I shouldn't say great. I never give great talks.
I hope I give a good talk to them. I have to prepare now.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 We'll let you go. Thank you very much.
This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we are signing off.

Speaker 2 Thank you, everybody, for listening. Much appreciated.