A Swing and a Hit: DOGE and Diplomacy

Speaker 1 Did you know that parents rank teaching financial literacy as the toughest life skill? That's where Greenlight comes in, the debit card and money app made for families.

Speaker 1 With Greenlight, you can send money to kids quickly, set up chores, automate allowance, and track spending with real-time notifications.

Speaker 1 Kids learn how to earn, save, and spend responsibly, while parents have peace of mind, knowing smart money habits are being built with guardrails in place.

Speaker 1 Try Greenlight risk-free today at greenlight.com/slash wondery. That's greenlight.com slash wondery.

Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. This is our Friday news roundup, and lots of news for the week.
Lots going on with the Trump administration, of course.

Speaker 2 So we'll get to Doge and Trump's Ukraine policy, et cetera,

Speaker 2 when we come back from these messages. Stay with us.

Speaker 3 Ever notice that everyone always wants more of a good thing? More rewards, more savings, more special offers?

Speaker 3 Well, when you become a new member of the Shell Fuel Rewards program, that's exactly what you get. More.

Speaker 3 Join today to save 10 cents per gallon on your first bill, 20 cents on the second, and 30 cents on the third. Then enjoy everyday savings afterwards.
Want more?

Speaker 3 Then head to Shell where members get more. Offer valid from 421.25 to 1231.26 at participating shell locations.
Offer must be redeemed within 60 days of registration. Limit 20 gallons.

Speaker 3 Restrictions apply. Visit fuelrewards.com slash join25 for more information.

Speaker 4 This episode is brought to you by Progressive Commercial Insurance. As a business owner, you take a lot of roles: marketer, bookkeeper, CEO.

Speaker 4 But when it comes to small business insurance, Progressive has you covered.

Speaker 4 They offer discounts on commercial auto insurance, customizable coverages that can grow with your business, and reliable protection for whatever comes your way.

Speaker 4 Count on Progressive to handle your insurance while you do, well, everything else. Quote today in as little as eight minutes at Progressive Commercial.com.

Speaker 4 Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, coverage provided and serviced by affiliated and third-party insurers. Discounts and coverage selections not available in all states or situations.

Speaker 2 Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Speaker 2 Victor's the Martin and Nilli Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabusky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaker 2 You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com. It's called The Blade of Perseus and it's got lots of material for ultra subscribers and the subscription is $6.50 a month.
or $65 a year.

Speaker 2 So please come join us there.

Speaker 2 Victor, how are you doing today? I know you're on the East coast

Speaker 6 as everybody can see i'm in i'm not home i'm in naples florida

Speaker 6 and i'm in a hotel room and i'm at the bradley foundation meeting and i have to go to speak to a scott atlas event so i'm kind of i brought a carry-on on the plane and i'm trying to get my computer it's on a pillow my microphone i bought kind of a

Speaker 6 Ad hoc is what I'm saying today, but I hope it works.

Speaker 2 It'll work just fine. No worries.
So, Victor, just very quickly, we just recently had that jet turnover. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the Toronto airliner that came in for a landing.

Speaker 2 What happened? We're having so many air crashes and air incidents, I guess I should say. But I would thought

Speaker 6 I would like to disagree with you. I just saw statistics that in the first 30 days of administration, there have been no more, except for the number of killed because of the

Speaker 6 Delta crash at Reagan, there has been no more number of accidents on average than any other administration. The other misinformation is that Chuck Schumer, of course, is

Speaker 6 blaming Donald Trump.

Speaker 6 And that's very hard to understand how he can even imagine that when the plane took off fine from an American airport and it went into

Speaker 6 Canadian airspace. So if there was, and we have no idea whether there was or not,

Speaker 6 and it doesn't look like it, an air traffic controller lapse, it would be Canadian, not American. If there's any lapse, it looks like it's maybe,

Speaker 6 maybe, maybe. I want to be very careful because I don't want to jump to conclusions, maybe a pilot error because they have released this morning views of the plane as it was coming in.

Speaker 6 And you get the impression for an area that is in harsh weather and snow on the ground with ice, the plane came in very, very fast. And it didn't look like maybe the wind was

Speaker 6 the culprit and it wasn't the pilot, but it didn't look like

Speaker 6 it was slightly, the nose slightly up. As you know, as planes come in like birds, they come in like this and then they kind of go like that.

Speaker 6 there's a light touch on the front wheels. It looked like the nose was too far down and the front wheels took all of the absorption.
And they just, not that they were at fault, but they just crumbled.

Speaker 6 And when they crumbled, one of the wings then hit the ground and broke off, and then that allowed it to go on its side.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 if there's anything, there's pilot error. And if there's any pilot error, whether that has anything to do with the much broadcast

Speaker 6 DI hiring, I don't know. I just know that of the major airlines, they have adopted DI.
And most notoriously,

Speaker 6 United Airlines about three years ago broadcast to all of us and the public that 50%

Speaker 6 of all its new pilots would be selected on the basis of DEI as well as other criteria. So I don't know what's going on.
I flew here in rough weather to Dallas.

Speaker 6 It was pretty bad. It was foggy and rainy, and it was fine.
And then on the way back to take off here,

Speaker 6 I flew into the Naples. It was very sunny.

Speaker 6 There does seem to be a little tentativeness about everybody, though, the air travel business in general. I just noticed that everybody's on edge.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 our plane circled once or twice the ro runway, and I don't know whether that was just to take extra caution.

Speaker 6 But

Speaker 6 it does seem that

Speaker 6 but Donald Trump has not removed

Speaker 6 air traffic controllers in the tower. That's another point that was falsely alleged by Chuck Schumer.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay, Victor, let's go on then to a lot that the Trump administration is doing. So Doge is out looking, and its targets are the big things that Americans are worried about because they're sort of,

Speaker 2 what do they call that, entitlement programs rather than discretionary spending. And that's the Social Security Administration and the IRS.

Speaker 2 And Elon Musk has come out to say that there are millions of people over the age of 100 that are receiving checks.

Speaker 2 The IRS seems to feel that there's going to be a bunch of layoffs this coming week and that the Feds fired a large part of the

Speaker 2 I think it was the Fed, just federal employees last week, just to show a few of the things that the advice of Doge seems to be getting done.

Speaker 2 And I was wondering your thoughts on Doge's progress so far with all of this.

Speaker 6 For example, Mr. Bove, the deputy attorney general, was supposedly going after his enemies.
But when you look at, see, that's what they're saying, they're going after enemies.

Speaker 6 But when you look at the people in the FBI hierarchy or the DOJ that are supposedly innocent and they're nonpartisan, they have a whole record of being punitive.

Speaker 6 As far as Eric Adams goes, that was the contention point that the indictment against him was dropped by the

Speaker 6 Trump acting DOJ and Pam Bondi. And then the question arises,

Speaker 6 why was he indicted at the time he was indicted by the Biden DOJ?

Speaker 6 And the obvious answer was, is he bucked them in a loud fashion on dumping illegal immigrants into Manhattan, and he was no longer on the team. He had been very, very adamant.

Speaker 6 Remember those films where he was film clips where he was welcoming illegal aliens with bottled water?

Speaker 6 And then he saw that it was a multi-billion dollar boondoggle. And when he saw that, he was outs.
And so they were the ones that were politicizing him.

Speaker 6 I don't know if he's guilty or not of taking Turkish money in exchange for quid pro quo favors, but I do know that the Biden administration would have not indicted him for that had he not fallen out of favor.

Speaker 6 So, when Trump, the media blares that he is removing DOJ attorneys or inspector generals, he's looking at people who have had a history of partisan and selective indictments.

Speaker 6 On the Social Security and Medicare, this is not like USA. This is very delicate.
That is a third rail.

Speaker 6 So they have to make the argument. And we don't know if a person is 100 or 120 and he's still in the system,

Speaker 6 we're not sure whether he's actually getting money or not or he's getting information. So they have to be very careful.

Speaker 6 But they have to get the information out to the public that they're not trying to cut Social Security benefits, but they're trying to save them by tightening up requirements that have been been abused.

Speaker 6 One of the ones is that, and we see it in our local area, that people say that their children are dyslexic and they have trouble reading, and then suddenly

Speaker 6 they're eligible for full Social Security disability payments. And that's been, if you look at the numbers of

Speaker 6 minors or

Speaker 6 young adults that haven't been, I mean, they don't have serious disabilities and yet they're getting them. They have to be very careful how they explain that to the public.
There's going to be,

Speaker 6 and the IRS, they have to be very careful. They have to go after people in the IRS, like the lowest learner types, that have a history of selectively auditing.

Speaker 6 Why was Pete Hexeth audited just days before he was nominated?

Speaker 6 That is...

Speaker 6 you know,

Speaker 6 it reminds me of I talked to some prominent conservatives once on a forum and I asked if anybody had been audited.

Speaker 6 And they all raised their hand. This was during the Obama years.
And I had been, I think I mentioned that, I had been reporting, speaking religiously.

Speaker 6 In fact, I think my actual tax rate's been between 55 and 60 percent. I live in California.
13 percent is the top

Speaker 6 rate.

Speaker 6 With payroll taxes, Obamacare taxes, California, and federal income tax. I was paying 60 percent.
I did not write off anything. I didn't write off my office, my car, anything.

Speaker 6 I was so paranoid that they would go after conservatives. But I asked all these people, and they had all been audited.
And then all of a sudden,

Speaker 6 I don't know, about six months later, I got a letter from the IRS said that you have inadequately reported your speaking income, which wasn't a lot, but I had been religiously reporting it. But

Speaker 6 I had been reporting it under an agent who

Speaker 6 gave me a W-2 for all of them put together. In other words,

Speaker 6 there were W-2s sent to that agent who had got the check, deducted whatever the percentage was to me.

Speaker 6 And I had to hire my accountant, and he couldn't get through anybody. And finally, he tried to explain to them, you were counting as income Victor's individual speeches himself.

Speaker 6 before he got an agent as in past years. And now you're counting also the income report that he reported from the agent.
So if he got $5,000, you're charging him for $10,000.

Speaker 6 And there was no discussion. They just said you're going to pay a point and a half interest every month.

Speaker 6 And then after he finally got through, I get a form letter. Please disregard prior.
You are no longer in error, and there will be a refund for your interest payment.

Speaker 6 And that's what they do. And then they say that they're professional, and they're not.
Of course.

Speaker 6 So there's going to be two big things you have to be careful about. One is the Defense Department, and one is the IRS, and one is the

Speaker 6 Social Security and Medicare, especially. They've got to go after people who have done things wrong and not just be punitive.
And they have to explain it. Explain it, explain it, explain it.
I think

Speaker 6 the press secretary, she's doing a very good job. My only suggestion to her would be

Speaker 6 at certain times, I would throw back the question to these hostile reporters. What is the alternative? What is the alternative? We're running $2 trillion debts.
Where do you want to see the

Speaker 6 hike? We're already paying 38%

Speaker 6 income tax, and in many states it's 12% or 13, it's 50%.

Speaker 6 We've already said you cannot write off the salt tax more than $10,000 a year.

Speaker 6 What do you want to do, all of you? Because you always say you want to cut waste and sprawl, but you never do.

Speaker 6 So tell me exactly what you want to do other than just raise taxes to 60 or 70 percent of a person's income and destroy the economy. She needs to do that.

Speaker 6 And increase. Because there is no alternative.

Speaker 6 There is no alternative.

Speaker 6 No. If we just went back to the budget pre-COVID 2019 of six years ago, we'd be fine.
We'd be fine.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, I would like to welcome back one of our favorite sponsors, Hillsdale College. Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses.
That's right.

Speaker 2 More than 40 free online courses. Go right now to hillsdale.edu/slash VDH to enroll.
There's no cost and it's easy to get started. That's hillsdale.edu slash VDH to enroll for free.

Speaker 2 Hillsdale.edu slash VDH. Learn about the works of C.S.
Lewis, the stories of the Book of Genesis, the meaning of the U.S.

Speaker 2 Constitution, the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, or the history of ancient Christian church with Hillsdale College's free online courses. Personally, I enjoy Hillsdale College courses.

Speaker 2 The Second World Wars, taught by Victor Davis Hanson and Hillsdale President Larry P. Arne.
This free seven-lecture course will help you to understand this massive and complex conflict in a new way.

Speaker 2 It will give you a clear picture of why the war was fought and how the Allied powers ultimately triumphed in order to save the West from a new form of tyranny.

Speaker 2 The course is self-paced so that you can start whenever and wherever. Go right now to hillsdale.edu/slash VDH to enroll.
There's no cost and it's easy to get started.

Speaker 2 That's hillsdale.edu slash VDH to enroll for free. Hillsdale.edu slash V D H.

Speaker 6 I'm going to be there on March as I said.

Speaker 6 I'll be in Hillsdale on March 5th to give a talk on World War II film. If anybody wants to listen to it, three best.

Speaker 2 You have more than that, right? You have more than the Second World Wars. Don't you teach the end of

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 6 I have an online course that I taught in a conjunction with Paul Ray on the Peloponnesian War. I have an online course

Speaker 6 on the Second World Wars, number two. I have a third one about the dying citizen that talks about the challenge to citizenship and why it's eroding.
And then I did a mini one on

Speaker 6 the end of everything.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 I think I'm going to be asked to do another one soon.

Speaker 6 I'll be there on May 5th, as I said, is also on May 10th, I'm giving the graduation.

Speaker 6 I was very honored that the senior class voted to ask me, so I'll be doing that. And then in the first week of September, I'm there for my annual visit.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, I want to turn and stay on Doge for just a second because there was an interview on CBS's 60 Minutes of two people from USAID, or so they presented themselves as such, although one of them was a contractor and not an employee.

Speaker 2 And that is Christina Dry, Dry was the woman that was being interviewed. And they were presenting a

Speaker 2 case of this is unjust. These workers are losing.

Speaker 2 She didn't make the case for valuable jobs, but said they were losing their jobs and their livelihood and it was all Doge's fault.

Speaker 2 And so CBS, the whole interview, obviously was trying to

Speaker 2 give a black eye to Doge itself and Elon Musk. And I was wondering your thoughts.

Speaker 6 Well, I don't even think they were employees. I think they were contractors.

Speaker 6 So they were, I mean, they were misrepresenting their status. They were contractors.
Contractors usually have a much more volatile

Speaker 6 tenure. The thing about all of this is the federal workforce is so inured to the idea that they're sacrosanct.
They have no idea what the people who pay for their salaries are like.

Speaker 6 It came home to me when I left graduate school for five years. I farmed.

Speaker 6 And one year I remember, as I've said, I went to the Federal Land Bank and the old crusty loan officer looked at all of my books and he said, well, as much as I can see, given your losses farming, you paid about $25

Speaker 6 an hour. for the hours you work.

Speaker 6 You like paying to get on your old tractor and sit in the sun and disc all day? Because that's what you did.

Speaker 6 And then I looked at my Social Security for five years and my income net to me as a salary. There were three of us and we each took a little hours.
We paid ourselves $6 an hour. I made about $6,000.

Speaker 6 So then I go to Cal State Fresno and I start part-time, part-time, full-time after third year. So I'm sitting in a lounge.

Speaker 6 My first third year, I was so happy, $21,000 a year and medical benefits, four classes to teach. I was writing a a book.
And here, I will not mention anything about the person talking.

Speaker 6 He is now deceased. But it was a 60-ish professor, and he was

Speaker 6 angry. And I was making 21 and had already published one book and was publishing another.
He had never published a thing. He was a nice guy, but he was saying

Speaker 6 that

Speaker 6 it was so unfair that he'd only got a 2.5%

Speaker 6 step increase. And I just politely said,

Speaker 6 well, we only work 30 weeks a year.

Speaker 6 And I said, you come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and you teach a night class, and then you teach, so you're home Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Yeah,

Speaker 6 I'm working,

Speaker 6 you know, that stuff. I'm working, preparing classes.
I'm correct. I said, I do that too, but I also farm.
And my point is, he,

Speaker 6 I tried to say to this lifelong who had never worked in the public sector, I tried to say, do you know what it's like not to have a check in the mail?

Speaker 6 Do you know that a guy with a pizza parlor or a truck driver, he has no idea.

Speaker 6 There is no some oz behind a screen that writes him a check.

Speaker 6 He doesn't know whether he's making money or he's not making money until he looks at his books at the end of the week or into the month or the end of the year.

Speaker 6 For all he knows, everything is up there. He doesn't know how many people he can have a great day at the pizza parlor and 100 people can come in.
He can have

Speaker 6 two people, but he had to stay there for 10 hours. But one day he'll make $8 an hour, the next day he'll be $100.

Speaker 6 That is the uncertainty that most people have.

Speaker 6 And to just act as if you have a God-given birthright to these jobs. And then most people who are on salary, they go into their office.
And if they're late or they do something, the boss fires them.

Speaker 6 And there's no appeal. They're gone.
Jamie Dimon, the head of, as we talked about,

Speaker 6 Morgan Chase Stanley, is that what it was? Yes. He gave a big rant about how angry he was about this, of these

Speaker 6 employees that were not coming in and had a sense of entitlement, how he was going to stop it. So, my point is that a lot of these federal workers

Speaker 6 can go back into the private sector, and I think they will see what a great thing they had.

Speaker 6 But I'm not, I'm not,

Speaker 6 I don't get the idea that they have a lifetime tenure, and it's, you know,

Speaker 6 not when so many people have such a tenuous day-to-day existence. I'm sorry, but I'm more worried about the people who have to pay their taxes.

Speaker 2 Well, let's now then turn to Donald Trump, and he's done something extraordinary this week, earlier this week, and that is to hand the Ukraine a contract

Speaker 2 that agrees to American

Speaker 2 rights to resources in the Ukraine to the tune of about 50%, if I'm understanding things right, which is a lot of Ukrainian resources and a lot of money. And Zelensky is, of course, shocked.

Speaker 2 And he's so shocked that, first off, he's not going to sign this contract. And second, he's refused to go to Saudi Arabia for the talks on peace with the Ukrainian country.

Speaker 6 So Donald Trump wants some rare earth concessions.

Speaker 6 If I was Zelensky, I'd sign it because that would get a huge American company on the ground in Ukraine, and it would give income to Ukraine.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 you would get other if it was secure and there was peace, you'd get other foreign investment if a big American company was there. But it it's not the key issue.
The key issue is

Speaker 6 that Zelensky has taken $200 million. He says he doesn't know where some of it is, but we think we've given him $200 in military and economic aid.

Speaker 6 And we don't have a strategy from the Biden administration. Nobody knows what the strategy is.
I think I do know. It's something along the line.

Speaker 6 We're going to give Zelensky enough money so he is not going to lose, but we're not going to give him enough munitions

Speaker 6 to

Speaker 6 win the war because the war is unwinnable, because Russia has four times the population, 10 times the GDP, 30 times the territory, but we're going to give him enough not to lose.

Speaker 6 And the strategy, and this is not my strategy, this is the Biden previous administration strategy. And we don't really care about what happens to Ukraine.
It's lost a quarter of its population.

Speaker 6 Its infrastructure is destroyed. They have 600,000 dead, wounded, and missing.
And if anybody says that, Victor, that is a horrible thing to say. How unfair.

Speaker 6 You please quote me chapter and verse where a Bill Kristol or John Bolton or Joe Biden said, this is a human tragedy, that all of these people are dying. I haven't heard any of that.

Speaker 6 No emphases at all. So the strategy seems to be, let's not worry worry about Ukraine.
Let's give it enough so it doesn't lose. And it teaches Putin a lesson.

Speaker 6 And let's bleed Putin white so he never tries to do this again. We didn't get him on Russian collusion, disinformation, the alpha ping caper, but this time we're going to bleed Putin white.

Speaker 6 And in fact, we have. He's probably lost near a million dead, wounded, and missing or captured.
So that seems to be the strategy.

Speaker 6 And nobody ever asked themselves who we're now criticizing Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal never asks itself.
Nobody ever says, how did we get into this mess?

Speaker 6 We got into this mess because in 1989, Hillary went to Geneva and pushed a red

Speaker 6 jacuzzi button. And the people around here are now the fiercest critics of Donald Trump.
And what did she say? She said she was going to have a reset, translated wrong, by the way, in Russian. And

Speaker 6 the whole premise was that awful George Bush who got us in Afghanistan and Iraq, that cowboy, he,

Speaker 6 you know, he was okay when he looked in Putin's eyes and saw a good kindred soul, but he was so mean, he really clamped down on Russia when they went into Ossatia, and he did it.

Speaker 6 That was the idea. So we're going to do the opposite.
We're going to reset. And then they just appeased him.
What did appeasement mean? It means,

Speaker 6 oh, Assad has

Speaker 6 maybe WMD. Mr.
Lavkov, can you and the Russians please go back into Syria after 40 years of hiatus? We don't want to deal with Syria and Assad and all this and WMD and killing.

Speaker 6 Just come on back into the Middle East as our buddy. And that's what...
John Kerry did. And then it was, oh, you have an asymmetrical treaty.
Oh, all right. And then we had an ambassador.

Speaker 6 I won't mention his name. He's a colleague of mine at the Hoover.
But then at the same time, we were resetting.

Speaker 6 We said, and you know, Vladimir Putin, we really do know you deep, deep, deep, deep inside. Would like to finish the interrupted vision of Yeltsin, that you're going to become an EU like Russia.

Speaker 6 And you don't object at all that Ukraine now is moving. And then you know what he said? He said, screw you.
He didn't just say, screw you. He said, I don't want any of your Western.

Speaker 6 Do you think we've ever had a Western elected official in Russia? Do you know anything about the Tsars, the commies, or us? We don't like that idea. We're dictators.

Speaker 6 So we don't want, and we do not want your social, cultural, you know, LGBT, all that stuff.

Speaker 6 So that got him really angry. that he turned out, looked at their magnanimity as weakness.
So then they went in in 2014, they said, We're going to have a great revolution.

Speaker 6 Victoria Newland, John McCain. They all went in there and they got rid of Yankovich or whatever his name was, and they put Porschenko in, and this was going to be an EU.

Speaker 6 They started selecting who was going to be the government. This is going to be an EU

Speaker 6 project, NATO project. And Putin, you know, he's 2014, he looked at these guys and he said, they are pressing me, they are pushing me,

Speaker 6 and

Speaker 6 last time I went in during the Bush administration, nobody did anything to me when I went into Ukraine and Ossatia. And these guys looked at my invasion and they blamed Bush, not me.

Speaker 6 So I'm going to go into the Donbass in Ukraine and just take them. And we'll see what this bunch does.
So in 2014, he went in. You know, Obama said, well,

Speaker 6 they went in the Donbass and Crimea.

Speaker 6 Well, let's give him some jail. Oh, you know,

Speaker 6 give him an offensive weapon. No, he can't

Speaker 6 do that.

Speaker 6 You know,

Speaker 6 he gave me space for two years. You remember the hot mic over there and solved? And I said, tell Vladimir I need space for two years, and I'll be flexible on missile defense.

Speaker 6 So I got rid of all the missile defense. I appeased them,

Speaker 6 and they didn't invade for two years. I got re-elected.
That's what his attitude was.

Speaker 6 And so then we had Donald Trump and Donald Trump said no moss. And for four years, unlike the Bush administration and the Obama administration, he went nowhere.

Speaker 6 Then, and by the way, Donald Trump did green light offensive weapons. And what did he get for all that? He got from Clapper or Brennan, you're an asset, you're a puppet of Russia.

Speaker 6 And you thought, well, he didn't go anywhere under Mr. Trump, the puppet and the asset.

Speaker 6 And Yenye said Russian collusion, Russian disinformation. He's communicating with Putin, with his bank, the ping, ping, ping, all this nutty stuff.

Speaker 6 And then the next thing we know, Donald Trump, hey, Mr. Trump, the Wagner group is attacking a small installation in Syria.
Kill the SOBs. That's what we did.
Mr.

Speaker 6 Trump, we've examined this missile treaty, medium-range missile treaty with Russia. They're cheating.
Get out of it. Mr.
Trump, Mr. Trump, we've decided that that this percentage of oil is.

Speaker 6 Let's flood the world with cheap oil and bankrupt the SOB. Okay?

Speaker 6 Mr. Trump, Mr.
Trump,

Speaker 6 the oligarchs are starting to proliferate. We need more.
Yes, give them more

Speaker 6 sanction. That's what he did.
And

Speaker 6 Putin didn't go anywhere. And then he leaves.
And what did Biden do?

Speaker 6 No javelin, you

Speaker 6 So he canceled them. And then they said,

Speaker 6 Mr. Biden, President Biden, we're worried that Putin might be on the move again.
Well, he's hyper-war.

Speaker 6 Tell the American.

Speaker 6 Keep some hospitals at least off his target list. Well, Mr.
President Biden, that's not deterring him. What do we do if he invades? Well, it depends on some a major invasion or not.

Speaker 6 Then he invades. Then they say, well, what do you do about the offensive weapons that Trump has already signed and when he left office? After all, we're an administration that doesn't impound things.

Speaker 6 We may have impounded the wall funds, but that was a mistake. So

Speaker 6 what do we do with all this approved offensive action?

Speaker 6 And then they said to him,

Speaker 6 Well, he's invaded. What do we do?

Speaker 6 Get Zelensky. I'm from Avalon.
We'll get him out of there. And that was what we did.
Now, all of that is suddenly turned into Trump's fault right now.

Speaker 6 And that is absolutely crazy. They had no strategy.
What is it? Let me just go on this rant and finish. What are America's strategic aims there? So we know what we should be doing.

Speaker 6 Number one, we do not want to get into the middle of a European theater war. We do not want ground troops.
We do not want to get in a war with Vladimir Putin. This is on Europe's doorstep.

Speaker 6 Number two, we want the Europeans, nine of the 32 NATO countries have never honored their 2% pathetic military expenditures of GDP. We want them all to make the 2%.
We'd like to see three or four.

Speaker 6 They have an economy about 10 times larger than Russia, the EU, and the NATO countries. We want them to rearm, and we want them to help Ukraine.
And we want that not because we're leaving NATO.

Speaker 6 We want them to do that because they and us are threatened, as in World War II, by a rising Pacific belligerent, not Japan this time, but China.

Speaker 6 And we need to use a lot of our forces to deter China from,

Speaker 6 what, being aggressive with Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, and the Philippines. That's what we want to do.
Number three,

Speaker 6 we would like to save the Ukrainian people. We do not want him to absorb all of Ukraine.
We do not want to see 600,000 more dead, wounded, missing, and captured. This is a humanitarian.

Speaker 6 So we want a ceasefire.

Speaker 6 And to achieve a permanent peace, there is no way that any president, past or present, ever said they were going to give the wherewithal to Ukraine to militarily invade Russia and take back Crimea and Donbass.

Speaker 6 We're going to just say, you know what? This was the worst disaster of your tenure, Putin. You're unpopular.
You've got over a million dead, wounded.

Speaker 6 But you can go give the bone to the Russian people and say, you've got to institutionalize institutionalize Crimea and the Donbass, which we were never going to get back anyway.

Speaker 6 We're going to have a DMZ along the February 24th embarkation point, just like South Korea, North Korea. You go back on your side of it.

Speaker 6 We promise it will not be in NATO, and we're going to, it's armed now to the teeth. So if you ever try it again, you're going to have another million cash.
That's what we can see.

Speaker 6 And finally, as I said earlier, we want to break up the Chinese, Russia, Iran, North Korea Nexus. That's very easy.
That was nothing, nobody ever did that under Obama.

Speaker 6 Nobody ever did that under Biden.

Speaker 6 And that's what Trump is, I got from a kind of a well-known person wrote me and said, you know, basically, and all, he was basically saying, how dare you not criticize Trump? He's selling out.

Speaker 6 And I guess what he meant by selling out is that Trump and Hegseth have announced that we're not going to get back the Donbass and Crimea, and we're not going to put them in NATO.

Speaker 6 And I'm saying to myself,

Speaker 6 so you're going to sit across, you're Putin and I'm and I'm Zelensky, you better watch out, or we're going to go into NATO.

Speaker 6 Putin says, you don't want to be in NATO, and NATO doesn't want you to be in NATO. You know what's going to happen.
You'd have to fight me right now, and none of those countries would fight me.

Speaker 6 So just drop the pretense.

Speaker 6 We're going to get back the Dombas. You're not going to get back the dome bass and cry, man, you can't even get me back to where I was.
Come on, get real.

Speaker 6 I'm not going to use that as a negotiating point. That's where we are.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 I don't know.

Speaker 6 It's just amazing to me how the left who talked endlessly about Palestinian collateral damage and all of the

Speaker 6 excesses of the Netanyahu dictatorship and all of this stuff and during coming out of Vietnam, all of a sudden

Speaker 6 you say to them, well, Mr. Zelensky has canceled all the opposition parties, the press, habeas corpus, and scheduled elections.
He's a dictator. Oh, no, no, no.

Speaker 6 There's a lot of collateral damage with these drones and missiles that they fire back, just like the Russia. Oh, no, the collateral damage doesn't matter.

Speaker 6 Don't you think we should have a ceasefire like we had imposed on Mr. Netanyahu? Oh no,

Speaker 6 that would destroy the momentum. They have a complete set of different rules that they apply to Israel.

Speaker 6 Ceasefire, you got to be democratic and schedule an election. We're going to try to overthrow your government when that happens.
And

Speaker 6 you have to be careful of collateral damage, etc., but not with Ukraine. And it's kind of there, something is wrong here when you don't care about the people of Ukraine and to get a peace.

Speaker 6 And I think it has something to do in a nebulous way with the left's obsession with Putin.

Speaker 6 And they think that the destruction of Putin, using the Ukrainians to destroy Putin, will be the final...

Speaker 6 I know this sounds fantastic in the sense of mythical or crazy, but they do think it'll be the final lever that they didn't have after Mueller's investigation collapsed, after the 51 intelligence authorities collapsed, after their beloved Christopher Steele collapsed.

Speaker 6 They finally think they have a way to punish Trump Putin. And the irony, of course, is that

Speaker 6 Putin fared worse under

Speaker 6 Trump than he did any of his appeasers.

Speaker 2 Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about Hamas and their hostage deals with the Israel and the West. Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Speaker 7 Hi, I'm William Googe, a Vuri collaborating professional ultra runner from the UK. I love to tackle endurance runs around the world, including a 55-day 3,064-mile run across the US.

Speaker 7 So I know a thing or two about performance wear.

Speaker 4 My go-to daily short is the core short from View.

Speaker 7 It's perfect for my daily run in the gym, strength training, or even when I'm taking a day off, relaxing, doing some stretching, and recovering the best way I can.

Speaker 7 Check them out by visiting viewery.com slash William.

Speaker 7 That's V-U-O-R-I dot com slash William, where new customers can receive 20% off their first order, plus enjoy free shipping in the US on orders over $75 and free returns.

Speaker 7 Excluding supply, visit the website for full terms and conditions.

Speaker 8 With the state of today's economy, it's more important than ever to invest in products products that last for years to come.

Speaker 8 As the seasons shift and get cooler, make sure your closet is stocked with durable layers that stand the test of time from American Giant.

Speaker 8 American Giants' clothes work harder and are wearable season after season.

Speaker 8 Their greatest hoodie ever made is made from the highest quality materials that are cut and sewn right here in the United States. So you're investing right back in your local community.

Speaker 8 Choosing American Giant means taking a stand for American manufacturing and hardworking Americans, something other mega corporations corporations don't care about.

Speaker 8 From fleece to knit, all in a range of colors for versatile daily wear, American Giant delivers everyday pieces designed for everyday life.

Speaker 8 Feel the difference of quality made-to-last clothes from American Giant. Get 20% off your first order with code Staple20 at American-Giant.com.

Speaker 8 That's 20% off your first order at AmericanDash Giant.com with code STAPLE20.

Speaker 2 Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor has a,

Speaker 2 is on social media. His ex-account is at VD Hansen.
So please come join him there or on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

Speaker 2 So Victor, speaking, I mean, you went into Obama and he had all sorts of red lines. Donald Trump put up a red line for Hamas to get the hostages back last Saturday, and they didn't manage to do that.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 Trump's red line is failing.

Speaker 2 But I was wondering your thoughts. They have promised six hostages this Saturday.

Speaker 6 As a general rule, I don't believe in red lines

Speaker 6 by anybody.

Speaker 6 And that was a thing on the hotel I'm in. I'm sorry about that.
So when Obama gave a red line and said, if I see WMD moving around, you know, I'm going to do, he didn't do anything.

Speaker 6 Trump said that he was going to stop the war and the first day, you couldn't stop the war the first day. That was a rhetorical excess.

Speaker 6 When he said that by noon on Saturday, I knew what was going to happen.

Speaker 6 They were going to meter out some hostages to get by that deadline, because they did believe that he was going to unleash the IDF or they were going to bomb or something.

Speaker 6 But in general, you shouldn't give

Speaker 6 any red lines. unless you plan to

Speaker 6 meet them. And usually Donald Trump was pretty good.
When he said he was going to do something to Solomania or Baghdadi, he did it. When he said he was going to bomb the SHIT out of ISIS, he did it.

Speaker 6 When he said he was going to corral Iran and maximum pressure, he did it. So he's got to be very careful because the MAGA people, the MA agenda, they don't want to get into

Speaker 6 on the ground in Gaza. They feel it's a hellhole.
They can't stand Hamas. They just want the Israelis to take care of it.
And so what is he going to do to get the hostages?

Speaker 6 I mean you can bomb the rubble more, right? Or you can send special forces to take out the Hamas,

Speaker 6 what's left of the Hamas leadership, but all they would be doing is asking the Israelis who they are. The Israelis know much better than we are.

Speaker 6 So basically you're saying to Netanyahu, do what you want.

Speaker 6 And maybe that, maybe he should, but then as Netanyahu knows that he has restrictions. It's not Hamas, it's public opinion, the hostage family.

Speaker 6 And Hamas, why is Hamas metering them out? Because let's be honest, they have killed a lot of hostages. The ones that have survived have said they were beaten, tortured, starved.

Speaker 6 It's kind of ironic to hear from the UN and all the leftists how starved the Palestinians are. And every time I see a picture of Hamas people or Palestinians in Gaza, they look pretty well fed.

Speaker 6 And when I look at the hostages, they look like Holocaust victims. The only people being starved were the hostages.
But they don't have a lot of hostages. They've let some go.

Speaker 6 I don't know what they say, 80 or something.

Speaker 6 I'm under the unfortunate impression that a lot of them are dead. So in their mind, you're going to do this for over years.
So you let out one, and then you just say,

Speaker 6 The Israelis did that. They broke this.
They violated that. And that goes on like you're buying a rug from them.
And then maybe in three months, they let another one out.

Speaker 6 And then they've got it metered out so they can maybe survive two or three more years until the new Hamas people are armed and they're back at it.

Speaker 6 And at some point,

Speaker 6 an Israeli leader is going to have to say, you know what, this is,

Speaker 6 I'm going to have to stop this. And not all the hostages are.
He's going to have to try to rescue them. But he's going to have to go after the Hamas leadership.

Speaker 6 Unless they want this to continue. But you can see what it's doing.

Speaker 2 Victor, I would like to take a moment for our sponsor, Field of Greens. A delicious glass of Field of Greens daily is like nutritional armor for your body.

Speaker 2 Each fruit and vegetable was doctor-selected for a specific health benefit. There's a health heart group, lungs and kidney groups, metabolism, even healthy weight.

Speaker 2 I love the energy I get with Field of Greens, but most of all, I love the confidence.

Speaker 2 Even if I have a cheat day or a hamburger or a pizza, more likely with me, I can enjoy it guilt-free because of Field of Greens.

Speaker 2 It's the nutrition my body needs daily, and only Field of Greens makes you this better health promise. Your doctor will notice your improved health or your money back.

Speaker 2 Let me get you started with our special discount. We got you 20% off your first order.
Just use code Victor at fieldofgreens.com. That's code Victor at fieldofgreens.com.

Speaker 2 And I have replaced my daily vitamin with Field of Greens, and it is working as they say. I feel very energetic, much more so, and my mind very clear.
I don't know, I take lots of supplements, but

Speaker 2 it's been really good for the last few months. So that's Field of Greens.

Speaker 2 Victor, let's turn to Germany. And

Speaker 2 there was a recent 60 Minutes piece, once again, I don't know why I'm into the 60 Minutes pieces, but that German law enforcement is conducting raids on homes of people that are guilty of hate speech.

Speaker 2 And 60 Minutes went along with them, and they seem to be celebrating this invasion of homes on the basis of somebody insulting another person

Speaker 2 on the internet.

Speaker 2 They said the Germans that were representing Germany said that it was worse to, it's not allowed to insult in public, but since that's not a long-lasting record, insulting somebody on the internet is worse.

Speaker 2 And so they are arresting and generally fining people, but you could also be sent to prison in Germany. And it just sounds a little reminiscent of

Speaker 2 cracking down on speech in general, the end of free speech in Germany, which is a dangerous question.

Speaker 6 They've never had none of the European countries, I mean, they invented free speech in the European Enlightenment, or maybe you could say the Greeks did.

Speaker 6 They had a word for it, isagoria, that you had an equal opportunity to speak out in the assembly. But

Speaker 6 the thing about it is they have no First Amendment, they have no Bill of Rights. So they have

Speaker 6 consistently, and they, I'm including the UK here, they consistently censor

Speaker 6 speech. And what they call hate speech is just speech that they don't like.
What do I mean by that?

Speaker 6 So if you're a German and you say, I'm tired of all of these crazy immigrants that come in my country, I want to deport them all. They have no business here.

Speaker 6 And you get angry, you're probably going to be cited.

Speaker 6 If you are a Muslim and say, death to Israel, I want to kill the Jews, they're not going to do anything to you.

Speaker 6 Probably not. And so everybody knows that.

Speaker 6 Or if you want, if you're going to go across the street and yell, please don't get an abortion to a woman going to abortion, you're going to be in trouble.

Speaker 6 If you go to an abortion, anti-abortion office and you say, how dare you take a woman's right away, you're not going to have anything done to you. That's exempt.

Speaker 6 So that's what we're talking about, and that's what J.D. Vance was talking about.

Speaker 6 I think a lot of people, and by the way, the 60 Minutes clip that I saw, they were admiring admiring what Germany was doing they want to do it here too and they have been doing it here they remember the FBI everybody worked with Facebook they worked with Facebook and they worked with Twitter to make sure that none of us got the message

Speaker 6 three days before the last 2020 debate and about 12 days before 14 days before the election that Hunter's laptop and all of the incriminating references to the big guy, Mr.

Speaker 6 10%, paying his utility bill, all of the cocaine use, all of the nudity, all of that. We were supposed to think the Russians did that.

Speaker 6 And the FBI was insisting social media, Mark Zuckerberg testified to that effect. That's what they like.
That's what they like.

Speaker 6 And they do not want a freewheeling, open society.

Speaker 6 And so that was what J.D. Vance was saying.
He's saying, how you people, you know, you keep saying that Russia, Russia, Russia.

Speaker 6 Well, yeah, I don't like Russia either, but you're employing the same tactics. And we can't get along with you and defend the West when you're eroding it.
And again, it's what he was doing.

Speaker 6 He was telling not just MAGA and not just those ministers, corrupt though they were. He was telling the people and the populist parties of Europe, You are on the right track.

Speaker 6 Secure borders, legal only immigration, rearming, deregulate, detax, more personal freedom. And if you were to do that, we would be closer than ever, because that's what we're trying to do.

Speaker 6 And the Biden nightmare that we lived through is now your ongoing nightmare. You haven't gotten rid of it.
And that is what got them all so angry.

Speaker 6 Misinformation. And the other thing about Germany, they've never had free speech.
The Weimar Republic had restrictions. Anybody, if you were Hitler in 1932,

Speaker 6 3 or 29, I shouldn't say 32, go back to 26, 27, 28, you couldn't speak. They went after you.
And maybe that was good.

Speaker 6 Or maybe the idea that you were outlawing Nazi speech made him into a martyr and made him neat to hear because it was so edgy and outlawed. And when Hitler took over, he did the same thing.

Speaker 6 He outlawed all speech except, and

Speaker 6 they labeled with German terms that were equivalencies, disinformation, hate speech, Jew speech, all that stuff.

Speaker 6 You'd be much better off just opening it all up and letting people say as whatever crazy things and hoping there's enough of us in the marketplace of ideas to stop it.

Speaker 6 Unless somebody gets on and says, I want to kill that person or I want to overthrow this government and this is how I'm going to do it. But that's not what we're talking about.

Speaker 2 Yes. They seem to be on to a case in Germany where a politician was insulted, they said, online for four years, and then he got shot in the head.
And so that was their central impetus.

Speaker 2 But they didn't really prove that him getting shot in the head wouldn't have happened without.

Speaker 2 I mean, it might have happened anyway because people were not.

Speaker 6 The same people do that don't care about other people being shot in the head. They're mad because not they're mad that the wrong people got shot in the head.
And here in the United States,

Speaker 6 I nor any other Trump supporter said we should outlaw what they're doing to Trump.

Speaker 6 But when you have Trump's picture as Hitler on the New Republic cover, and you have ex-generals for four years calling them Mussolini, Hitler-like, Auschwitz-like, and you have

Speaker 6 members like Kamala Harris and Joe Biden of the highest levels of government calling them a fascist, then some kind of crazy guy out there

Speaker 6 like Mr. Crooks or whatever his name was is going to think, you know, if I shoot him,

Speaker 6 I can think of two things.

Speaker 6 The Secret Service seems pretty sloppy. They don't probably like him any more than I do.
And I'll be famous because I will kill Hitler Trump. Did we say that we should outlaw that? No.

Speaker 6 What we're saying is people who say that hate speech should be discredited and humiliated.

Speaker 6 Boycott them, do anything. But you don't need to make a law against that.

Speaker 6 I have never in my life said that any politician, and I think most people out there haven't either, was Hitler.

Speaker 6 And Obama got, you could make an argument that some of the things Obama and Biden did with Lois Lerner in the case of

Speaker 6 Obama or Donald Trump weaponizing the FBI came very close to what a fascistic state would try to do and the selective prosecution or asymmetrical prosecution of certain people.

Speaker 6 But they weren't Hitler. Hitler was somebody who, you know, caused 70 million deaths in the Holocaust.
So

Speaker 6 anyway,

Speaker 6 Germany has a tendency,

Speaker 6 it's not going to work.

Speaker 6 Why do people do this, final rant? Why do they have hate speech? Because it's an indication that they are unpopular and they're failing.

Speaker 6 If the German government was popular and German, like let's say,

Speaker 6 I don't know, not Merkel, the pre-Merkel

Speaker 6 Helmut Kohl, 12 years as chancellor, everybody liked him. The German miracle was in full blast.

Speaker 6 Merkel is the one that blew up the German economy, the German culture, the German reputation, and her hatred of Trump, among other things, and her open borders and her insane Green New Deal.

Speaker 6 That woman will go down in history as the worst

Speaker 6 German chancellor. And no, she wasn't Hitler.
But my point is this is they are insecure. And why are they insecure? Because they have created a Germany

Speaker 6 as I said earlier, it's like the Morgenthau plan of World War II, where you were going to make Germany by coercion after the war. The U.S.

Speaker 6 Treasury Secretary said we should turn them into a pastoral state, you know, and deindustrialize the ruhr. And that's what they're doing.

Speaker 6 So their energy costs four times more than it does in the United States. Their fertility rate is 1.4.

Speaker 6 They let in 16% of their population is not born in Germany. They do not assimilate or integrate as well as we do.

Speaker 6 They have let in, percentage-wise, a higher number of illegal immigration than even Joe Biden did.

Speaker 6 Their companies are increasingly non-competitive. They lie about their percentage of GDP they spend on defense, but it's about 1.5.
It is not the two, and they know that.

Speaker 6 And other countries who welch out on what they owe say, look at Germany. It did, so we can.

Speaker 6 So they are failing. They're failing.
And they had exactly no

Speaker 6 zero GDP growth a year ago. And this last year, they may have a slight in 2024.

Speaker 6 A year and a half ago, they had none in 2023. Negative economic.
Negative.

Speaker 6 This year, they may have a slight. So they're failing economically, socially, culturally, politically, militarily.

Speaker 6 And everybody's trying to tell them to wake out of their slumber, deregulate,

Speaker 6 cut taxes, start using natural gas energy and nuclear energy, get cheap energy again, close your borders, integrate people,

Speaker 6 have legal-only merocratic immigration.

Speaker 6 People are leaving. I used to be everybody was just leaving Britain, but we had a job at the Hoover Institution.
We had 900 applicants for a junior fellow, and I...

Speaker 6 I could not believe how many brilliant German scholars and historians were applying. I mean it.
I mean,

Speaker 6 and then I looked

Speaker 6 and you looked at in all fields, political science, economics. Silicon Valley is the German elite is starting to leave.
And that's hard because Germany is not a

Speaker 6 it's not close to I mean it is closer than I suppose

Speaker 6 to

Speaker 6 English than it is to Spanish.

Speaker 6 It's not a Romance language either, but it's a difficult language and a lot of Germans have trouble vice versa Americans learning these languages and yet they're over here And we don't have the same relationship we had with Britain.

Speaker 6 We were enemies of two wars with Germany, and yet here they are, and they're fleeing the United States.

Speaker 6 If Donald Trump is successful and he deregulates and reduces taxes, and he gets three, not, he won't do it right away, but if he gets three to five percent GDP growth, and he closes the borders and makes merucratic immigration, you will see a

Speaker 6 wagon train from Europe. And unlike Biden, he will not discourage them because they are not the right color or religion or background.

Speaker 2 Well, Germany, the way you describe it, sounds like what the plans that Pol Pot

Speaker 2 had for

Speaker 2 Cambodia or even Mao in China, get rid of the intellectuals and turn everybody into peasants and put them out in the countryside. And Germany seems to be doing it without a Pol Pot.
pot. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 6 That whole Biden-Merkel mentality, Obama, I mean, we lost $5 billion. I think Ford alone lost almost $5 billion on this EV mandate.

Speaker 6 And it was even worse over there with Porsche and Audi and BMW and Mercedes and Volkswagen. It was just mindless when they were producing basically zero emission,

Speaker 6 beautiful automobiles that you could only argue were polluting because they were producing heat, but not toxic fumes or chemicals. And

Speaker 6 then by their same policy of forest management here in the United States, we were letting, in California, we were letting more carbon into the atmosphere with all these huge fires every summer than all the cars in two weeks or three weeks combined did.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the same thing.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about Egypt and the settlement after Hamas is gone from the Gaza Strip. Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Speaker 2 Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Speaker 2 Victor, so I actually had planned this earlier, but Egypt, if we turn to the ending of this war in the Gaza Strip and the final collapse of Hamas, which is all Israel is going to be happy with.

Speaker 2 Trump's been encouraging Middle Eastern states, and Egypt, of course, has stepped up.

Speaker 2 But I'm a little skeptical about Egypt helping the Gaza Strip back into the modern world since they were the ones that were helping Hamas with all sorts of weapons coming through that Sinai region, that border.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I was wondering your thoughts on this Egypt.

Speaker 6 Well, they had control of it prior to the 67 War, and they felt that it was an open source.

Speaker 6 Remember, this is very controversial, but

Speaker 6 prior to 1947, there was nobody named Palestinians. Those were Arabs that were living in now what is Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and they...

Speaker 6 as the state of Jordan was formed, became Jordanians.

Speaker 6 They weren't Egyptians.

Speaker 6 And then

Speaker 6 after the 67 War,

Speaker 6 after the creation of Israel and some left

Speaker 6 and went into Jordan

Speaker 6 and Egypt, then they began to become radicalized. And the Jordanian government did not want to deal with the West Bank, and the Egyptian government did not want to deal with Gaza.

Speaker 6 So they declared their hands free. And

Speaker 6 that process of creating former Jordanian or Egyptian Arabs into Palestinians was formalized. And now all of a sudden there are Palestinians.

Speaker 6 And those countries do not want to get involved there because they're very radical, they're Islamicist,

Speaker 6 and they're connected with the Muslim Brotherhood in some ways that Sisi and Egypt fought.

Speaker 6 So when Trump says, well, let's clear out all the rubbish, what Trump is basically saying is, look, get all the wealthy Arab countries in the world, and we'll provide the security.

Speaker 6 And you bulldoze all this rubble, get rid of the tunnels, and then it's right on the Mediterranean.

Speaker 6 And you make just in antiquity, you know, Gaza was one of the wealthiest cities in the Roman Empire, that whole area of the West Bank. Let us then

Speaker 6 make a Dubai or something, international capital, and then we'll only let people back in who are non-terrorists. We will have border passport control.

Speaker 6 We will give preference to Palestinians, but we will not let everybody back in who has a history of work.

Speaker 6 That was the idea. And, you know, Egypt and

Speaker 6 Jordan want no part of it because they have restive populations in their own countries. And so now Egypt is massing tanks on the border in Sinai, kind of saying to Israel, maybe we'll replay this.

Speaker 6 I don't know why anybody would take that credibly because they're dependent on the goodwill of the United States. One of the things Trump did when they went after USAID was,

Speaker 6 I think, immediately put off limits so you can't touch it, the $2 billion or so we give Egypt. And we do a lot of other things in favor of Egypt.
We give them intelligence, satellite intelligence.

Speaker 6 We back them up militarily.

Speaker 6 So the idea they were going to attack Israel,

Speaker 6 they would fare worse. If you look at the militaries, the last time they met in 73,

Speaker 6 Egypt has

Speaker 6 vis-a-vis Israel has become much weaker. Israel's much stronger.
So that would be a one-day war, and they're not going to do anything. But

Speaker 6 the bottom line is they don't want to get involved with it. And I don't think the plan is going to work because it requires too much lift from the United States.
I wish it would.

Speaker 6 I wish that you would rebuild this. I think if you

Speaker 6 ask a Palestinian living there today in the rubble, and you got the Hamas revolver away from his head, and you said you won't be identified, and you put a tent around him and said, What do you think?

Speaker 6 with a voice disguiser, he would say, You mean you're going to build a nice apartment and it's going to look like the Paris suburbs or Dubai? Yeah, count me in,

Speaker 6 but not publicly. It's

Speaker 2 no, and it's Egypt could never help to.

Speaker 6 it reminds me the first time I went to Israel, they were demonstrating, as I said, along the Sharon's walls trajectory.

Speaker 6 And Sharon came up with the idea that they were going to go around key areas of

Speaker 6 Jerusalem that they needed

Speaker 6 and East Jerusalem, including the Israeli, it was de facto Israeli, but to concede

Speaker 6 an approximate

Speaker 6 commiserate level of territory they were going to carve out from 67

Speaker 6 Israel

Speaker 6 that no one had ever disputed after 47 to the Arabs. So when I was driving along, my driver, we drove all along this very long drive along the

Speaker 6 proposed final parts. I said, wow, these people are really angry at the Israelis.
They stopped traffic and they're all demonstrating. It was up near, as we got near the Galilee area or northern,

Speaker 6 and he said, well, what do you mean? I said, well, look at they're all protesting. They're angry.
They want to get,

Speaker 6 you're going to put them on the wrong side of the wall. And he said, yes, we are.
The wrong side.

Speaker 6 But what do you think the wrong side is? I said, well, Israel said, no, no, no, no, Mr. Hanson.
You have it all wrong. They

Speaker 6 just roll down the window. And so he said something and he spoke Hebrew and somebody came over and said,

Speaker 6 yeah,

Speaker 6 we don't want to be with Arafat. We want to stay here and get, it's peaceful.
We have good schools. We get pensions.
We have government jobs with the Israeli government.

Speaker 6 But if you told somebody that on a campus today, they'd think you were crazy. While all this is happening,

Speaker 6 in Colombia, we're still starting to see some of these demonstrations. There was a park in...

Speaker 6 I don't know if it was at Queens or Bronx or someone, and violent pro-Hamas demonstrators went right into a traditional Orthodox Jewish community and started trying to provoke them, get in fights, etc., etc., etc.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 I think that's a very unwise idea if I were them, because we have already established the principle in the United States that the United States government, when there's a demonstration that it doesn't like, like January 6th, that they take all their security cameras and then they do all of their voice

Speaker 6 photo reconnaissance or recognition, picture recognition, and they start indicting people and they'll go through all of those violent.

Speaker 6 If they see anybody who is starting to provoke a fight or use violence, they will correlate that individual's name with their visa status. And if they're not a U.S.

Speaker 6 citizen and they were committing a crime, then they're going to be deported. And

Speaker 6 it seems obvious to me that that's what they're going to do. And that will create deterrence not to do that.
You don't do that when you're a guest in somebody else's country.

Speaker 6 It's fine to demonstrate, but not violently.

Speaker 6 Not violently. And,

Speaker 6 you know, we had a,

Speaker 6 I led tours, you know, and once we had a very good friend of mine, a wonderful person, that somebody ran up and said a policeman was talking to him in Germany.

Speaker 6 by a cathedral and somebody had insulted his wife and he had scuffled, I think it was with a Palestinian protester in Germany.

Speaker 6 And so I walked over to talk to the police person.

Speaker 6 But my polite suggestion was that if you were in someone else's country, that you withstand the provocations and not reply in kind because you're a guest there.

Speaker 6 And that's always worked well for me, and I've been in a lot of countries, and I've lived almost three years abroad. And

Speaker 6 the cardinal rule is always the prime directive to use Star Trek terms the prime directive is never never

Speaker 6 attack the law enforcement or the laws of your host because if you don't like them you can leave and I lived under a Greek dictatorship

Speaker 6 the Papadopoulos regime and then the Ioannides and they were pretty awful 73

Speaker 6 74, then the socialist Pasoch that were pretty awful.

Speaker 6 So you don't ever criticize and say that you know better what your host should be doing. You just never do that.
And by the way, mentioning Greece,

Speaker 6 a friend wrote me and pointed this out, and I looked at it. USAID had for years

Speaker 6 in Cyprus, in Greece, been trying to force down American cultural values through left-wing

Speaker 6 Greek and American fronts like LGBTQ

Speaker 6 and forcing the Greeks to accept, even though the polls were very much against it, gay marriage, for example.

Speaker 6 And so some of you who are very angry and say that Trump should have no business with USAID, I know you don't believe in cultural imperialism, but that's what USAD was... AID was doing.

Speaker 6 It was taking a left-wing, unpopular agenda here at home, and it was tying it to money with a carrot and a stick, and it was shoving it down the throats of traditional Christian and Islamic societies.

Speaker 6 It really was.

Speaker 6 It was the worst aspect of American imperialism.

Speaker 2 Well, the last thing, Victor, I wanted to talk about was that the British Prime Minister Starmer has said that he's willing to put British troops in the Ukraine if necessary.

Speaker 2 But what I was wondering with this is not so much whether they'll do it or not do it, not on my edge of my seat about that, but whether or not the Europeans, as the Americans step back from so much influence in NATO and expect the Europeans to step up and work with each other, I think the Europeans don't really trust each other and they don't really trust that they can work in an alliance together that's equal, that they're always sort of afraid each other's going to

Speaker 2 stab the other behind their back, you know. So I was wondering,

Speaker 2 what do you think about that?

Speaker 6 Well, first of all,

Speaker 6 I don't know how you'd get them over there. They don't even have any lift capacity.

Speaker 6 I don't know if they have any C-17s, but I'm being kind of facetious, but their military is hollowed out. And then you have the British public would not stand for losses.

Speaker 6 They would say, like we would,

Speaker 6 So, Mr.

Speaker 6 Prime Minister, we're being invaded by people from the Middle East and all over Europe are coming into our country, and you will not defend our borders, but you want us to go over and die for somewhere near the Donbass.

Speaker 6 Are you insane? We're not going to do that.

Speaker 6 And so that's not going to happen. Putin knows it's not going to happen.
Zelensky knows it's going to happen.

Speaker 6 What they want to do is send a thousand troops over there, British, so then we get embarrassed and humiliated and say, okay,

Speaker 6 and we'll send the 101st airborne or something. That's not going to happen.
It is not going to happen. And remember, there used to be

Speaker 6 certain

Speaker 6 unspoken codes or themes of these alliances or these unions. So the founding principle of NATO,

Speaker 6 at least in the mouth of its first NATO High Commissioner, was

Speaker 6 Lord Ismay. He was a very brilliant British general, maybe more administrative than battlefield tests, but he was really a smart guy.
And he said the purpose of NATO was three things:

Speaker 6 keep Germany down, down,

Speaker 6 keep Russia out, and bring America in, keep America in. And it worked very well.

Speaker 6 And that was manifested in the fact of the peculiarities that the United States, even though it's called North American Treaty, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, finds itself in places like Serbia, right?

Speaker 6 It's not very close to the Atlantic fighting as we did under Clinton. And Germany was never, Germany was divided, but it was never allowed to have atomic weapons, nuclear weapons.

Speaker 6 So only France and Britain got them. So Germany was down.
And Russia during the Cold War was out. That's the purpose of NATO.
The purpose of the EU

Speaker 6 was,

Speaker 6 they didn't say it, but it had

Speaker 6 two directives. Number one,

Speaker 6 make sure the United States,

Speaker 6 i.e., NATO, subsidizes our defense. Whether you're a EU, EU countries are almost the same as NATO, but not quite.
But we're not going to defend ourselves and we're not spending any money on defense.

Speaker 6 The United States will cover for us. And number two,

Speaker 6 guilt trip,

Speaker 6 weasel out,

Speaker 6 vague, coerce Germany to give us stuff,

Speaker 6 to write off our debt, to have asymmetrical trade, and then tell Germany,

Speaker 6 well, look, you have to have

Speaker 6 very few tariffs on our agricultural goods, our raw products, and then you have to let us charge tariffs on your stuff, but in order to pay you back for that,

Speaker 6 you've got to have 4% or 5% on American imports into you, but they can't have any against you because we'll call them cowboy, selfish, imperialists, creeps, horrible things.

Speaker 6 And that's what the EU was. It was subsidized by the United States military and it was economically subsidized by Germany.
And now Germany went nuts.

Speaker 6 It went absolutely crazy under Merkel and this array of little putians who are now govern it. And so what are they destroyed their energy sector?

Speaker 6 They completely destroyed the idea of a German family and they have no fertility. They destroyed their borders.
They let in people who hate them, violent people from the Middle East.

Speaker 6 They're bankrupt. They can't afford it.
They did all that. It was all self-inflicted wounds.
And that meant the whole EU is in crisis. So the EU,

Speaker 6 when you look at the founding date, whatever you look at the six nations that talked about being the EU out of the common market, or you look at the nine or ten ten that said they were EU in 1998.

Speaker 6 Every year almost from 1998 up until we have about 30 now, they added nations to the EU

Speaker 6 and population. So they should have had bigger and bigger GDP.
But every year vis-a-vis the United States, it's kept 50 states,

Speaker 6 their GDP grew.

Speaker 6 smaller compared to ours. It grew, but at a smaller rate.

Speaker 6 So now two countries that were about the same, two continental systems that were about the same in 1998, the United States is 60 to 70 percent larger its GDP than the EU. So it is a mess.

Speaker 6 And yes, they don't like each other and

Speaker 6 they like German money, but if you German,

Speaker 6 I don't know how to say this. I know, Sammy, I think you're of German extraction, so I have to be careful.
But as a European said to me once,

Speaker 6 I'm not making this up. He was in Greece, though, he said, if it wasn't for their money, we wouldn't like Germans.

Speaker 6 And if they don't have money, they're not going to be a popular people in Europe. And they don't have money anymore.
And they can't subsidize everybody.

Speaker 6 So,

Speaker 6 and if you're British and you can't provide order, calm, discipline, the British system of professional ethics everybody looks for.

Speaker 6 You go to London, it's the nicest, most ordered place in the world. If you don't have that British

Speaker 6 civilizing input into the EU, what good are you? Because it's not a very strong nation.

Speaker 6 And if you don't bring its civilizational devalues and which are under assault, so all of the contributors in the EU, each according to their station, is not participating.

Speaker 6 And who is going to subsidize Ireland and Spain and Greece and Italy when they don't meet their economic targets as far as debt ratios.

Speaker 6 And Germany's not going to be able to keep doing it. It's broke.
And Britain,

Speaker 6 I don't know what happened to Britain. It's out in outer space somewhere, just drifting along.
You hear all these weird things about it. It doesn't seem to have free speech.

Speaker 6 It doesn't have due process.

Speaker 6 It doesn't have a military.

Speaker 6 It's just

Speaker 6 the mayor of London is insane. It seems like they hate the British.
Yeah,

Speaker 2 it's a child sex ring to continue without.

Speaker 6 They seem to be ashamed of their British, their own history.

Speaker 6 And then you look at the other place, France is France. I mean,

Speaker 6 their biggest

Speaker 6 they're just doing everything. They're like the Dutch government.
They're doing everything they can to destroy democracy in the name of saving it from conservative right-wingers.

Speaker 6 So the whole idea, it's all unraveling, and then they blame Victor.

Speaker 6 Usually when they're having trouble, they always blame Victor Orban and say it's Victor Orban's fault. And that's what Americans do.
It's Victor Orban.

Speaker 6 But then when you look at Hungary, it seems to be functioning better than their countries.

Speaker 2 While you were talking, you reminded me of something. Trump seems to be turning to tariff policy to rely on income in a sense.

Speaker 2 And it seems like a return to the 19th century because that's all the federal government had was tariff policy. They didn't have an income tax.

Speaker 2 But in association with that, in our modern day and Trump turning and leaning on tariffs, you know, partly, as you've suggested, just to influence diplomacy, but perhaps also to make money.

Speaker 2 The Doge has suggested, and this is my last thing, that perhaps there will be $5,000 going back to each taxpayer, which would be really cool, but I'm not sure.

Speaker 6 $5,000 to do one again.

Speaker 2 Return to taxpayers once they've found all this waste and fraud in the government.

Speaker 6 I wouldn't return anybody. I would pay down the debt.

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 6 he owes it like $100,000.

Speaker 6 What is everybody? Everybody seems confused, but this is where we are, everybody. This is what Trump is trying to do.

Speaker 6 A,

Speaker 6 he is trying to maintain the 2017 tax cuts that come up for expiration and renewal with a very shaky two-person and maybe with an election or two, three-person margin in the House, and he wants to expand those tax cuts, maybe from, I don't know, 38 to 36 or something, our capital gains cuts.

Speaker 6 And he knows that if he does that, his revenue for six months to a year will fall as companies say, wait a minute, are you serious? This is not going to be revoked in a week? Okay,

Speaker 6 I will invest. And they know that if he does that, then

Speaker 6 the economy will have greater revenues, like it always does when you're tax cut. But in the meantime, he's got to get over this huge deficit and debt, deficit that Biden let.

Speaker 6 So, what does he have to do? He has to cut over a trillion dollars.

Speaker 6 And there's only about 20% of the budget, the $6 trillion budget he can look at. And he can't eliminate everything.

Speaker 6 Unless he looks at defense, $880 billion, there's got to be stuff in there that are DI

Speaker 6 and

Speaker 6 junkets. And he can get rid of that.
you know, high-priced weaponry that didn't work. So he can find some in that.

Speaker 6 But he's got to cut enough money so that the deficit shrinks and bondholders in Wall Street look at this and say they are on the right trajectory.

Speaker 6 Tax cuts, more revenue will come in next year, and the cuts will mean less expenditure. So, but you've got to sell it politically.
And the left does not want it to happen for two reasons.

Speaker 6 One, it wants Trump to fail so it can be elected in 2026 and 28. And two,

Speaker 6 its main source of political strength is the 3 million federal employees. They really think, I mean, they're in key states, like

Speaker 6 there's a lot of them in Virginia, Maryland, et cetera. They make those states blue or purple at least.
And they like the idea of spreading this largesque to their supporters.

Speaker 6 90% of all the federal workers are left-wing, and some things like the media or legal profession, they're all left-wing.

Speaker 6 And NPR is a good megaphone. PBS is, even Voice of America, all of that was left-wing, and they don't want to lose that.

Speaker 6 So they're going to make up things as they go. They're going to say you can't impound approved dollars.
And that almost says,

Speaker 6 even if the Congress passed a law, and even if the law is being executed as was never intended, and even if people are stealing, because

Speaker 6 they approve the money, you can't cut anything. And if you can't cut anything, you have no control over the operation of the program.
So, Mr. Trump, we're in a constitutional crisis.

Speaker 6 You have to make sure that you approve and ratify and support wasteful spending and fraudulent spending because Congress approved, that's not going to work. And that's what they're doing.

Speaker 6 And we know that they impound money, as I said, to stop the wall money and to impound money from Ukraine like Biden threatened as vice president. They do it all the time.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 he's going to have to fight, fight, fight for all of this. He only has four years.
But because he's not up for re-election, as he was last time, he's liberated at the same time.

Speaker 6 So he can say, as he did on Hannity's interview, that MSNBC is the home of just awful people. They're just terrible.

Speaker 6 What if you're a reporter and you hear that? You know?

Speaker 6 And that's what they do.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, we're at the end of our show today, and we want to thank our audience for listening and you for all the

Speaker 6 nice hotel room somewhere

Speaker 6 somewhere in Naples, Florida.

Speaker 2 And you've got lots of business to do this afternoon, I understand. So we're

Speaker 6 a lot of business at a meeting today, two or three meetings.

Speaker 6 All right. I've got to go to Palm Beach and speak, and I got to get home.
I want to get home as quickly as possible. I'm 71.
I don't like leaving my farm.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, back to the house.

Speaker 6 You'll get there.

Speaker 2 hang in there all right we'll be talking to you later this week thanks to everybody this this is sammy wink and victor davis hansen and we are signing off

Speaker 5 with fall in full swing more moments call for more comfort mac weldon's got all the essentials for comfortable easy to layer clothes designed for cooler days and timeless style you can count on their new ace line inspired by their best-selling sweatpants combines everyday comfort with long-lasting and effortless looks not flashy just classic always in in style, and made from the world's most comfortable performance materials.

Speaker 5 Fall into comfort with Mac Weldon's Ace Collection. Go to MacWeldon.com and get 20% off your first order of $125 or more with promo code MAC25.