Sammy Wink (9:04)

Yeah.

Victor Davis Hanson (9:05)

And I think the Iranian people will say, well, you know, we don't like the west maybe, or we don't like Israel, but if we're going to spend $100 billion to supply these terrorist organizations and make us an international pariah, we'd least like to win. We're losing. We blew it all. They blew it all up in Gaza, they blew it all up in Hezbollah, they blew it all up in Syria, they're blowing it all up in Yemen. Heck, they're even blowing it up in Tehran. So these people are not just evil our leaders, but they're incompetent and they give our money away to be blown up by democratic nations that are fighting against terrorism. So I don't think that's a long term sustainable proposition in this change. Middle East.

Sammy Wink (9:56)

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Victor Davis Hanson (11:45)

We don't really know the motivation of this Saudi terrorist. He's been there for, I don't know, 20 years. And he claimed that he went to the west, in Germany in particular, to be an apostate, in other words to be an atheist, not to be a Muslim anymore, more which would get him killed in Saudi Arabia. And he was pro Western. But that narrative wasn't coherent in itself because he attacked a Christmas celebration because he's an atheist, he hates all religion, but he hadn't really expressed the same antipathy for Christianity that he had for Islam. So it's incoherent. We're not getting the full story. He may well just be somebody who felt that he had been betrayed by the west. They had been brainwashed. He went to the west thinking he was going to energize or fuel or double down on his anti Islamic beliefs and he reacted in a counter fashion. And maybe now he's a Muslim again, who knows? But the point is they knew he was on the radar screen. They had a 17 year old attacker at almost the same time. And then you see throughout Europe these deliberate demonstrations at Christmas time. There was one in Britain where people with Palestinian flags, immigrants, resident aliens, students from the Middle east got on scooters and they just kind of swarmed into Christmas crowds. So my point is this, think about the sustainability of this. You're a Western society, you've had a historical rivalry with Islam. The entire 500 million person Middle east does not work. It is misogynist, sexist, gender, apartheid, autocratic, largely anti Semitic, anti Western, dictatorial, theocratic, doesn't allow free expression, nothing in the Bill of Rights anywhere in these countries. And people feel that that leads. It's not even a free market economy in most of these places. That leads to no economic security, physical security, cultural freedom, freedom of expression. So they want to go to the West. The west then has lost confidence in its value. So it doesn't want to impute or to assimilate and integrate these groups. They come and they stick to their religion or their cultural upbringing and they don't do as well as other immigrants and they create blocks. And the Western idea under DEI and yoke is who are we to judge that our society, which they want to join and rejected their own, is any better? So we are going to let Our immigrants do whatever they want. Well, whatever they want is an increase anger at their inability to excel in these societies, number one. And number two, the self realization that they don't want to go back because to go back is to go back to the hellholes of the west bank or Egypt or Syria or Iran or whatever the country is. So then in this schizophrenic mode, you can't square the square. I hate. I hate who I am because I like all the Western comforts. I like to be able to protest on behalf of Hamas. I like to be able to have a brand new $10,000 scooter motorcycle. I like all of this. But I feel guilty that I like it because these people are decadent. They have pornography. Women bathe topless at the beach, they fornicate, men hold their hands. They have these gay marriages. I don't like all this. So I'm going to attack it, but I'm going to only attack this stuff. And I hate Christianity. I'm only going to attack it with one qualifier. Please, please don't send me back home. I don't want to go home. I want to be a Muslim in a Western country with the protective embryo around it. I do not want to be a Muslim in a country that expresses the logical trajectories and consequences of Islam. And that was the mentality that we saw on September 11th. That's the mentality Israel saw on October 7th. What is the remedy for it? I think you should ask Donald Trump that question. I think Donald Trump is going to say, and it's going to be a model for Europe. He's going to say, if you come over here and you go to Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Cal State, and you break our laws and you protest and you chase Jews into libraries and you occupy bridges and you shut down government offices, or you trash the president's office or you desecrate a veterans, we're going to charge you and we're going to cancel your student visa or your green card. You're going to go back home and get your whole life's wish. You get to go back with people of, like, religion and like values. But we are not going to put up with you coming over here and disrupting our way of life while you're parasitical on it. In other words, you want our freedom, you want our prosperity, you want our security. So then you can act against it. We're not stupid. Freedom is not a suicide pact. And so I think you're going to see and I think Europe is going to look at that. And by the way, Europe does not do as well as we do. The Arab American community has a higher per capita income by the second generation of citizens than does the so called white community. I don't know what the difference between white and Arab is, but our statisticians apparently do. So the point is they prosper here and Dearborn, Michigan is doing very well. But if they don't share the values of religious tolerance, if they don't share the idea that the secular jurisprudence of your nation prevails over religious doctrine and Sharia law, then I don't think that if they break the law, they should go home if they're not citizens. And I think Europe's going to look at that and say we can do that too. After this attack that you mentioned, the alternative for Germany, that party that everybody secretly thinks has answers, but the failed Christian Democrats and Green parties in Germany and and their equivalents elsewhere demonizes a Hitlerian 1930s movement that this is going to after the Reichstag fire, it will take power. Although there's nothing Hitlerian within that party. The leader of that party and that party in particular has risen to the most popular party in Germany because it promises that whatever happened this week in Germany won't happen again. And they feel that they can deport people who are not German citizens.

Sammy Wink (18:52)

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about Israel. Stay with us and we'll be back.

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Victor Davis Hanson (19:53)

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Sammy Wink (20:05)

Welcome back. This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show. You can find Victor at X. His handle is VD Hansen and he's on Facebook. Hansen's Morning Cup. So please come join us him there. If those are your social media outlets, he's also on True Truth Social and that isn as well, Victor. So Israel, There was a 60 Minutes segment that interviewed an Israeli. I'm going to assume that he was deep in the IDF because he knew everything about the walkie talkie and pager bombing. And it was an extraordinary interview. I don't like to usually sell 60 minutes because he said that this whole plan had been 10 years in the making. And then I thought also that Leslie Stahl asking the Israeli if he was worried about the morality at the end was interesting as well. So your comments on either of those things or the interview in general?

Victor Davis Hanson (21:11)

Well, if you were an Israeli and you digested October 7th, it wasn't just that 1200 people were massacred and slaughtered. There were two other force multipliers of that horror. One was we had seen things on screens and had firsthand accounts of things that are medieval. So they were beheading people, they were mass raping and shooting the woman, killing her, murdering her as they raped her. They were putting babies in ovens. They were torturing people, number one. And they did all of that to the glee, to the glee of people on the west bank and in Gaza. So when everybody says the poor Gazan people have been hijacked by Hamas, no, they voted one time, as always happens, and you get elections one time. And they did vote for Hamas and they had a high degree of support after October 7th. And had Israel not replied in the way they did right now, Hamas would be lording over the Middle east and they would say we are the paradigm to follow. But that didn't happen. So Israel said this is an existential attack on us and if we have another one, we are going to lose our nerve. We are going to, we're going to unravel. This is a trauma. This is a holocaust like event. More Jews were killed on October 7 than any day since the days of Auschwitz. And we're not going to let it happen. And we're going to go after every single person who did it and every single person who shields them, whether they're in hospitals or mosques or schools on top and whether they think, you know, I have an apartment building, Hezbollah put a big missile in it. It's not my fault. Well then get out. It is your fault. So that's what they did. In the mind of Leslie Stahl's morality, if the victimize replies against the victimizer to try to reestablish deterrence. So that the victimizer doesn't do it again and doesn't do it to the helpless and innocent elsewhere, then they're culpable. They have to be perfect to be good. The original victimizer doesn't. They just have to have some cause that they can mouth. So that was the comment, the editorialization that kind of sabotaged her whole interview. Otherwise, it wasn't too bad what the Israelis were saying, and I think these people were likely from either IDF intelligence, as you said, or from Assad is once we created this dummy company and once we had third parties who didn't know that it wasn't genuine sell pagers, and once we figured out that they were going to be big and to operate them when they text warning, they would have two hands. And we had calibrated the size of the explosion so it wouldn't kill bystanders in almost 99% of the cases, that was a time bomb. And we didn't know when we should use this time bomb. But think of the thinking behind it. The Israelis were saying, Hezbollah is considered indomitable. You can't attack them. Lebanon is the graveyard of foreign countries. You can't go in there. So they had kind of an escape clause. They said, we're going to go in there because we have this sleeping time bomb. And we didn't know when it would come in handy. It's handy now, and if we don't use it, we'll lose it. So 10,000 pagers in theory had that device in them. I don't know how many went off.4 or 5,000 followed by the walkie talkies, often at funerals for the people who were in charge of the pagers. And it was very insidious, if you think about it very abstractly. They took out all the people who were organizing on this communication change to destroy Israel. Number two, they didn't just kill them, as the guest said on 60 Minutes, they maimed them. In almost all cases, I think there were 30 or 40 deaths. So the person then it really taxed the Hezbollah health care system. Number three, it identified everybody who was a Hezbollah terrorist or abettor of terrorism, including the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, who I think lost parts of both hands. And he's in this ridiculous situation where he's on the camera with bandages. Well, why do you have bandages on your hands? And then fourth, where were they when these. So you have terrorists and terrorists do what terrorists do. They conduct terrorist activities and where. What do they do? They go to places where you conduct terrorist activities. And when you Let these devices off. A large percentage of them are conducting terrorism in terrorist places like apartment buildings where they're in charge of looking at the inventory of missiles headed toward Israel, or open field farmhouses and barns out in the country where there's drones. And they have tasked individual Hezbollah lieutenants to make sure that nobody comes in and tampers with their offensive arsenal. So when that goes off, the Israelis know exactly where they are because they have, they have electronic surveillance of their own machines. And so not only did they take out the hierarchy, then they followed that with about three weeks of intensive missile and bomb attacks. And they took out most of the Hezbollah arsenal, the dreaded hundred thousand missiles. It was a kind of a US State Department mem. You can't talk about his Hezbollah. Look at those pictures. These are not Hamas. These are not the Palestinian authorities. Look at these people. This is not like the Egyptian army. These people are absolute killers. Look at the way they march. Look how big they are. Look how angry they are. And they have 100,000 missiles. It's just an insolvable problem. No, it's not solved. Israel solved it. And now when they don't have their terrorist partner in Syria and Iran is broke, and I don't think Iran's going to be able to say to Hezbollah, we're going to give you another, I don't know, 100 billion, and we're going to have to cut off all our gas and oil and electricity for our own people to subsidize you. And by the way, I don't know how we're going to get it there. Israelis are going to shoot it down. If we try to fly it in, they're going to sink us. If we try to come in by sea, we have to go to the ports where the Russians protected our ships and then smuggle it in through. Oh, wait, we can't. There's no Syria, and the Russians are going to leave that base. So now there's just one final question, and that is what Israel going to do with Iran? And I think they're debating two or three things. Well, we have the ability now, we've proven, to take three or four hundred jets in successive waves and destroy all of their nuclear facilities. It might take a week, it might take 10 days, but they can't stop us. So why don't we do it? A, we're not sure if they have a nuclear weapon and they're intimidating us with that mystery that, you know, we don't want to be intimidated. But if they have a nuclear weapon and they keep acting like they do. So we have to. They're waiting for the intelligence. Number two, they don't quite know the timing. Is it better to do it with Joe Biden asleep at the wheel? Kamala Harris doesn't know. There's nobody in charge. We'll just go ahead and do it. But maybe we need the United States to protect us from China and Russia. So should we do it on Trump's watch and then kind of maybe endanger Trump's Maga Jacksonian agenda? And then number three, if we were to do that, would it help or hurt the Iranian people? Would they rally to the side of the theocracy, or would they say, good take out. We don't want nuclear weapons. We hate these sobs. We're glad you did it. And these are known unknowns, and they don't quite know the answers yet, but they will soon.

Sammy Wink (29:24)

Yeah. Well, let's turn to the Ukraine. It seems now that Donald Trump is the elected president, or the president to be the elected president to be. Putin and Zelensky are both talking about peace negotiations. And in fact, in Foreign affairs, which is a journal, a political journal, they had a interesting title to an article, A Pathway to Peace in the Ukraine. And I was shocked because we haven't seen that kind of a title or optimism anywhere up until Donald Trump's election. And the article, of course, said that Donald Trump has to be realistic and patient, that the Ukraine has security concerns and deterrence it needs to worry about, and Russia has territorial security concerns as well. And the big thing, of course, is should NATO be on the ticket in the peace negotiations for Ukraine or not? And after reading that article myself, I felt like they're pretty much saying, saying, leave the Ukraine out of NATO because Europe is just not going to work that way. But I was wondering your thoughts on this current.

Victor Davis Hanson (30:39)

We've discussed the parameters. I wrote two or three essays about it. I think even the bipartisan Washington Nexus believes that there's a plan. So you start with a premise that there's 1.3 to 1.7 dead million men missing, Ukrainians and Russians, and the infrastructure of Ukraine is about ready to collapse, and of a country of 40 million, maybe 12 million aren't even there. And they can't draft people either because of resistance or they need them in the economy. So the army is very skilled, but it's not growing, it's shrinking. So everybody wants some kind of end to this madness. The battle of Stalingrad, from August of 1942 to when the 6th army under General Paulus collapsed in early February of 1943, cost about a million dead on both sides and wounded. And we are getting very close. If we have not already exceeded that, we have exceeded the Battle of the Somme in World War I on Europe's doorstep. Nobody wants us to go on this kind of Bidenesque idea that I'm going to give them all these weapons, but I'm not going to quite get them enough to win, because that would be very dangerous. He doesn't have a plan to end it. We're just fueling this war so that they don't lose. But the dead and wounded and the destruction of Ukraine accelerates. Everybody said the sanctions would bankrupt Putin by now. He would have a coup. He would have mass defections. Hasn't happened yet. He's got 145 million people. Ukraine's got 30 million left. He's got 30 times the area of natural resources. He's got 10 times the economy. And he's being fueled by Turkey, Iran, North Korea, but especially China, and wink and nod with India. So it's not Iran. Put it this way, Ukraine is not going to militarily defeat Russia. The only way it could if NATO and the United States gave them the types of weapons that would threaten the homeland of Russia in the way that Khrushchev did to Cuba by giving them the ability supposedly very quickly to launch a nuclear strike against the United States or even a conventional strike. And John F. Kennedy said, that's intolerable, and we'll go to defcon1 if you do that. So I don't think they're going to do that. So the outline is Russia tells the Russian people, the Russian hierarchy. Vladimir Putin says, well, we were going to lose the Donbass in Crimea. And so I went in there, and they have been ours in the Crimea since the 1780s. And the Donbas was always Russian. And Khrushchev, just for administrative purposes, allowed there to be a correction. And by the way, Ukraine exists as Ukraine because we stole it from them. We invaded Poland in 1939 and took the eastern third of Poland. And we didn't give it back because we wanted Ukraine to be Russian. So they lecture us on borders, borders, borders, borders. The western one third of Ukraine country was Roman Catholic, Polish speaking. And in 1945, even your friends Churchill and Truman said, we can't get it back, Poles. So you've got to go in and ethnically cleanse all of those damned, excuse me, darn Germans. And 13 million of them walk back from East Prussia and Pomerania and that's the Poland of today. So the point I'm making is everybody knows the borders are fluid and his historical claims back and forth, irredentist agendas. Who knows which has the purest of the contending parties. So Putin's going to say, we say, Tomph's going to say to Vladimir, you get to have Donbas and you got to have Crimea. That's why you went to war, to institutionalize what you stole. But we want you to go back to the embarkation point of February 24, 2022. In exchange, we will make a DMZ and Ukraine will not threaten you and you will not threaten Ukraine. There's other considerations, Vladimir. We will not put them in NATO, but they're not going to disarm as you've suggested. They're going to be armed to the teeth. If you want to go back in, you're going to the next time find even a better arm. It took them a year and a half to be armed in the way they are. They are armed like that. So if you try to go back in, you're going to meet a level of opposition that didn't aggregate until maybe the second half of the war. They're ready now. It'll be the graveyard of Russia. You'll just start it again. But they will not be in NATO. So you go back and tell the Russian people, only Vladimir Putin institutionalized Crimea and Donbas. Only Vladimir Putin went to war to show you that Ukraine would not be part of NATO. And Vladimir Putin, out of this catastrophe, was able to forge a strategic relationship and pull China into our camp. And then Ukraine says, well, what do we get? Well, you get Ukraine. You saved it out of your heroism and you were never going to get Donbas and Crimea back. Besides all the historical arguments that tended to make those Russian majority speaking areas. And by the way, Crimea, after the end of the Cold War, for three years, I think from 89 to 92, was an independent country. And it was just a question, would you steal it before the Russians stole it and you stole it before they did, otherwise it was independent. The Donbass was even more disputed. But Vladimir Putin took that under Barack Obama and he kept it under Donald Trump, and he expanded that under Joe Biden. Biden when he attacked Kyiv. But going back to those three administrations, not one said it's the position of the United States to regain the Donbass and Crimea for Ukraine by force. We didn't say that. So we say to Ukraine, you saved your country. You were never going to get Back Donbass, you're going to get all of his arms and Europe and the world will help rebuild your country and you'll have a demilitarized zone and maybe you can outweigh Putin and maybe you'll be more stable than Russia. Then Left on said, we just won't talk about how we got into this place and whether or not prior administrations under secret protocols, particularly the Obama administration, had given Ukraine the impression that they would be part of NATO and that the United States would determine how liberal and democratic would be elected People in Ukraine and the EU together with the United States would force changes upon the Ukrainians they may or may not have liked. I'm talking now about the shadow events of 2014, 15 and 16 when the government was overthrown in Ukraine, Ukraine. And then finally we won't talk about whether it's wise to put NATO right on the border of Russia. We've got to remember one thing about the Russian mindset. They were invaded by Charles xii, they were invaded by Napoleon, they were invaded by Hitler. Yes, they won all of those wars. But the strategy of Russia to survive is not to use their army against a Western power after they're invaded. It is to retreat and devastate and destroy themselves almost to the point where they're non existent so that the attacker runs out of supplies. They did that with Napoleon, they did that with Hitler. So they, after World War II, they stole all of those independent Eastern European countries. They lied about everything and, and they broke every agreement they had made at Potsdam and Yalta and they created the Warsaw Pact and the Warsaw Pact then was liberated and we gave them, I don't know, messaging that it would be like Finland and like Austria, it would be non aligned. And then we put many of them, if not almost all of them into NATO. And so now that NATO in the case of many of these countries, and I support that because they have historical vulnerabilities against the Russians. Now NATO is at the doorstep of Russia and Russia believes if they ever got in a continental war, they would have armies right on their border as Hitler did and Napoleon. They wanted some buffer zone. So I think in the case of that historic reality, we don't quite realize that now we're not talking just about Eastern Europe, we're talking about a country inside Russia where over 3 million Russian citizens died in World War II against the Germans. And Crimea itself was 100,000 Crimeans were killed in the siege of Crimea when von Manstein, an army group south besieged the city. So the idea that Ukraine then would follow Eastern Europe. This is the first time that a part province of the old Soviet Union and the tsardom would go into an alliance against Russia. And I don't think that's going to be possible. So the best we can do now is stop the killing, have a dmz, keep it out of NATO, give it enough weapons to deter Russia, try to give them a bone that that he can have. Donbas and Crimea they were going to get anyway and then break up this nexus of China and Russia.

Sammy Wink (40:41)

Yeah, Victor, let's take our last break here and then come back and talk a little bit about Trump's intimations about countries beyond our borders. Stay with us and we'll be back.

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Sammy Wink (42:14)

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. So Victor Trump has been making noise about reclaiming the Panama Canal from China is the implication, although the link is a little bit more complicated than that. And that also he wants ownership of Greenland and then to buy it from Denmark. So I was wondering your thoughts on those two things.

Victor Davis Hanson (42:38)

Well, let's start with Greenland, the easier one. Greenland is almost a continental sized country and it's nominally controlled by Denmark, which is a tiny, minuscule country and it's getting a warmer climate. It was called Greenland because of the earlier stage of global warming. You read the Nile saga or you read all of these Icelandic sagas. In that period, there was a strip along the coast that was sort of like Europe. And that may happen again. But the point I'm making is it's full of natural resources. In World War II, the US had bases in Iceland and Greenland because that allowed them to control from both sides of the Atlantic against the U boat threat. So it's a strategic piece of real estate. And the Chinese and the Russians have made it clear that they are violating at times their international waters. They go from international waters into Greenland's waters and Denmark cannot do anything about it. So Trump comes along and says, he didn't say this is the subtext. He has his advisors and they said, you know, China is trying to encroach on western territories and they're going into Greenland now. And they see an anomaly in world history. A little tiny country with sort of a post modern colony going back to, I don't know, the 9th or 10th century idea. And this is not sustainable. This is not tenable because they don't have the wherewithal protected and we are protecting it on NATO, so we might as well own it. But he's not going to go invade it. He just trolls the Danes and trolls the Danes and trolls the Danes. And Greenland already has an independence movement, so they may want to get out anyway. So what he's now injecting himself in and he's trying to draw the attention to, hey, Denmark, why don't you give us a break and give us a little praise? Because our fleet and our military that anchors NATO keep Greenland safe and free and you don't. And in name, really, it's been a protectorate of the United States, not you. You don't have the wherewithal to protect it. So from time to time I'm going to remind you about that so you don't get on your hind legs and trash Trump all the time when we do. So much for you. Now as far as Panama, the same theory holds. Remember that people had said that we stole the Panama Canal free and clear. We had a coup at the turn of the 19th century. In the 20th century, we got a puppet government. We went down there and we spent in today's dollars hundreds of billions of dollars. And there were deaths many of native laborers. We created the Canal Zone. It was an independent entity within Panamania, Panamanian sovereignty. And we connected the east and west coast. The Panama Canal was created so that the eastern part of the United States could communicate with the western part, even though there was a transcontinental railroad, heavy shipping, and it worked wonderfully. And then there were these nationalist movements in the 60s of decolonization. And this was reinterpreted by the Panamanians, even though it was well run. And no other country had been more magnanimous than the United States. But the idea of Yankees there and this beautiful Canal Zone amid a sea of poverty, da da, da, da, da. Jimmy Carter gave it back and there might have been violence. If he's not. Trump comes in and says, you know what? You people in Panama, your Marxist government, you're a fraud. You are not obeying the letter of the law. We were to be given preference. We are paying your jacked up prices. You have invited the Chinese Communists in or our existential enemy to operate the canal. They are operating it and redoing it in fashions that reflect their strategic purposes and agenda, which is anti American. So I'm supposed to sit here and say that you're an independent sovereign nation that honors the letter and the practice of the Canal Treaty which we gave you. And I'm not going to do it anymore. I'm just going to troll you. I'm going to troll you nonstop. I'm going to troll you until you return the Panama Canal to its original intent. It was a method of the United States communicating from coast to coast with, by sea and to facilitate commerce and military security with some of our warships that can fit through it. And you violated that. I know you're a sovereign country, but you have no historical appreciation or magnum of the magnanimity we gave you. And then he's also. The subtext is. And by the way, when you had another autocrat who was sending drugs to our country, Manuel Noriega, we went down there and we took him out with a very small force and we tortured him. By making him listen to Barry Manilow music.

Sammy Wink (47:56)

That's right.

Victor Davis Hanson (47:57)

As we surrounded his house. And we're capable. We have singers that are even worse than Barry Manilow and we're. We're going to violate the Geneva Convention.

Sammy Wink (48:06)

We do.

Victor Davis Hanson (48:07)

And we're going to make you listen to, I don't know, Jay Z, a.

Sammy Wink (48:11)

Bunch of rap singers.

Victor Davis Hanson (48:12)

Yes. When Kane west and Jay Z get done with you, you will hand it back. So he's trolling them and he wants the left to say that he's an imperialist. I think part of this is Trump. People understand him. I mean, do I always approve? Does Sammy approve? Do you approve when he has A video of an obese, empathetic Chris Christie eating McDonald's as the sky is full of drones bringing more Big Macs to him. As if it's the Chris Christie Air Force that supplies him with his voracious appetite or shows pictures of him on the beach.

Sammy Wink (48:55)

I think they expect us to lose our humor when we looked at those things, but it's hard. Donald Trump understands human humor.

Victor Davis Hanson (49:03)

He does. And. And he's trying to act irreverent and he's trying to be funny. And yes, it's not sober and judicious. Yes, he doesn't bring the same gravitas as George H.W. bush did. But that being said, for all of his randy behavior, he did not do what Bill Clinton did. And he brought that clear, remember, in the October 2, 2016 debate. I think. Excuse me, it was. I think it was October 28th something. October 9th. It was two, three weeks before the election, when we heard the same lectures that Donald Trump had said with the Hollywood Access Hollywood tape. You remember, grab them in the blank. And he was talking to Billy Bush, the Bush descendant, before a show. It was 10 years. It was over 10 years old. And they dug that tape up and put a little timer on it to go off right before the second debate with Hillary Clinton. And National Review said that he should resign. I don't quite think they said that. They said, you know, everybody down ticket, just divorce yourself from Donald Trump and come out and attack him. And then I think it was seven or eight senators, John McCain's group, not in my name. He's got to step down. In other words, we'd rather lose and turn the whole thing over to Hillary Clinton for eight years. And then I guess that was Stephen Bannon's heyday because he brought Paula Jones and Kathleen, Willie and Kathleen Sheehan. And he had another one, the woman who was raped, unfortunately, in the rest home. She owned a rest home, Juanita Broderick. And he put all four of them, and he tried to. I'm doing this by memory, but. But he tried to bring them into the family section at the debate. Each candidate got their guests, and they were going to be right there. The point was even better, though. They came in and then the sponsors of the presidential debate, oh, my God, look at this. This is not fair. And they made them sit in the back, but the media caught them there. And Hillary's face was, oh, my God. And so the point was, don't lecture me in a sanctum. I may be a sinner. And he said he was sorry it was locker talk, da, da, da, da, da. But I did not, I will not conduct those types of activities in the White House in the way that Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy, but especially Bill Clinton did. And that's what he does. He tries to. He wants people on the left to get sanctimonious. How dare you. And then he replies to it. So he wants to say, kamala, you never worked at McDonald's. You can't even name the location. There's no records that you did. You have no evidence. Just show us one paste. Don't go around the country and soberly and judiciously lie to us. And I'm going to point that out. So then he goes to McDonald's. How dare he? It's horrible. Well, no, it wasn't horrible. It was trolling her. It was funny. And he had the two most iconic slogans or moments. They're not slogans of the entire campaign. As I said before, that Indian American couple, he said to her, we're just ordinary. To Trump, you're just. No, you're not. You're not ordinary. And then his wife said, and you took a bullet. And he said, you know, I guess I did. And those were reflective moments that were genuine and authentic. So he's capable of that. That's more who he is. But these are trolling incidents and they have a purpose. They're trying to rebalance an asymmetrical world. And he's trying to tell the world that our historic investment in the Panama Canal that our forefathers thought was essential to the security of the United States and in which we, in our pride, our stupid magna minute judge, any way you want handed over this invaluable investment with the idea that it would be neutral and that United States would get first passage, given our historical relationship and it's a two or three billion dollar moneymaker for Panama. And what do you do? You invite the Chinese communist in, whose whole purpose of running this canal in the same fashion. If you look at the map of the world, it's got the same type of apparat in the Piraeus in Naples. It's trying to get control of the world's choke points. And you did this. And don't lie to me that you don't know what you're doing. But he's not going to invade, but he wants people to understand what Panama is doing and put pressure on them.

Sammy Wink (53:44)

Yeah, well, the last thing about Donald Trump is that he is appointee ambassadors. And I know that you had a few that you wanted to talk about one, two.

Victor Davis Hanson (53:57)

They weren't ambassadors. Both. I thought that I was on the American Battlefield Commission.

Sammy Wink (54:04)

Yes.

Victor Davis Hanson (54:07)

The American battlefield. Excuse me, not battlefield. My gosh, I'm losing my mind. The American Battle Monuments Commission. And I was a George W. Appoint me and I got fired. It was a nonpartisan position. I did Visit, I think, 10 of the cemeteries on my own expense. I never billed the government, although they gave you a diplomatic passport and an expense account to inspect them. It was very valuable. I talked to the directors of those cemeteries when I was on the board. I wrote about them. But we have somebody, Tom Connor, a professor at Hillsdale who's retired. But this is the point. He's an expert on World War I and World War II. And more importantly, no one had really understood the invaluable work that the battlefield, the Battle Monuments Commission did. He wrote a book about it. He researched all of the archives. It was formed after World War I. John Pershing was one of the directors of it, the original director. And they had all sorts of famous generals. And it's a wonderful organization. Anybody goes to those cemetery sees how immaculate and honorific they are, hallowed places. But it doesn't come naturally. The marble, the landscaping, it's very expensive. It has to be controlled to the very detail. So you want somebody. I understand that donors. When I was on the commission, most of the people were donors. And that turned, I think Max Cleland took over and the Obama people, they waited a long time. They left it over open for about a year and then they bought their largely donors. But I think Donald Trump could really show the country that if he appointed someone who was the most knowledgeable person about the traditions and the operation of the commission, who is a retired PhD, North Carolina PhD and a Hillsdale, which I think speaks for itself and a Trump supporter, that would be unique and the commission would be wider known and it would reflect well on Trump. They are attacking him for these celebrity. Yes, mostly Kimberly Garfoyle in Greece. I lived in Greece, so that was especially close to me, that appointment. And it had a little wrinkle in it that in 2000, as I said, 2005, 2015 or 16, when Greece was bailed out by the EU, she went on the 5 and in a series of disparaging marks characterized the Greeks as irresponsible, even lazy or slothful, and therefore deserved to be cut loose. Let them declare bankruptcy, get them out of the eu and they remember that. That's a tapos now in the Greek newspapers, especially the left wing ones. But on the other hand, I know. And then the other Tapos is that she was Don's girlfriend and he wanted to break up with her. He has a new model and one of the most effective ways of cutting that Gordon Knot would be to dispatch her to a very enviable place, known in the jet set crowd from everything from Santorini to Mykonos. And therefore she's frivolous or she was a payoff. But actually, Kimberly Goville, I've been on her podcast. She's very intelligent, she has a law degree. She was first lady of San Francisco when Gavin Newsom, her first husband, was mayor. And she had a lot of experience in handling and arranging diplomatic visits to San Francisco. And she is a media personality that made it in the rough and tumble world of entertainment news. So she has the skill sets that she could be a good ambassador even though she doesn't have experience. The ambassador that's there now was a. I don't understand this, actually. I think Trump allowed him to come through stay from the Obama administration and then the Biden administration kept him. I could be wrong, but I'm getting up to something. Almost all of these ambassadorships have been taken. But I wrote a letter to a person in the transition committee that I thought that Max Nikias, the former president of usc, who had created this huge renaissance at usc. When I was in high school, it was UCLA was the academic Los Angeles campus along with Caltech down in Pasadena. And USC was OJ School. It's where the pretty girls were, the athletes were. UCLA campus was upscale in Westwood. USC was on the edge of Watts, very dangerous neighborhood. But in fact, under Max Nikias, they raised $6 billion. They brought in stars all over the academic landscape, they built up all the professional schools and they toughened the requirements. And it was almost as he left his tenure, it was more difficult to get into USC than UCLA. And the SAT scores of incoming freshmen and the GPAs were comparable to Stanford's. And then a series of things happened. The MeToo came in and Max, I've known him about 25 years, he's a very sober guy and so he doesn't get caught up in the panic. So the Me too came and there was a person on campus. It was a gynecologist, I think the public health director. And there were accusations. So he sent, set up a committee to investigate. They wanted him immediately fired and the DA to come in. DA looked at the case. Max retired under this pressure. He just didn't want to fight it. I don't Blame him. There was also people that were around him that were as they were in California. And that's my university, Stanford. Remember, we had a person at Stanford who was selling admissions to get. I think there was kind of a bogus. You can be a yachtsman or a boater or something like that, and then we'll get you in on an athletic scholarship, even though you don't make the minimum. That was happening all over California, mostly by Hollywood celebrities. Some people got into Stanford and usc. I can tell you, they never really fired anybody at Stanford except the people who were actually involved. It not the president, not the provost. But Max was a conservative. And that was his sin, that he was an actual conservative that had, you know, he wasn't an allowed conservative, he wasn't an activist, but it was pretty well known on the USC campus by the faculty that he was a conservative and he was an anomaly. So when the MeToo came, they said, fire him. He wouldn't do it. And so he stepped down. But my point about the ambassadorship is he's an engineer. He's not, you know, he's got an analytical mind. He's very highly regarded, he's well published. But more importantly, he ran this huge university and he met with people all over the world. And he was able to get along in a way, even though the Los Angeles Times went on a vendetta, as it does a lot of people, including myself, I think in a book review. But he was able to get along with the Hollywood set, the Los Angeles Times people, all of the left wing people that surround Los Angeles, that are movers and shakers within the LA community, even though they knew he was a conservative. But the key thing is that he grew up in Cyprus. He was a refugee, not quite a refugee, but when Turkey invaded in 19, his home was on the northern part, the most beautiful part of the island, and he had to flee to the south. And then he went to Athens, Greece, and was educated, came to the United States with nothing, nothing. And became a professor of engineering and then went to department chairman and then assistant dean, dean, provost all the way. Worked his way up until the pinnacle. And so he's a person who understands how to operate huge budgets to deal with all these diverse communities that you have to students, faculty, donors, alumni, Los Angeles, which is larger than Cyprus. And then in addition to that, he's a loyal conservative, a Trump supporter. In addition to that, he's a native of the island. He understands the whole strategic. He grew up with the strategic challenges of the eastern Mediterranean. And that Is, of course, there's now Russian oligarchs that have been trafficking in Cyprus. You've got a wonderful new government in Cyprus that wants to be pro Western. It wants to renew its alliance with Israel and Greece to have this natural gas pipe pipeline into Europe, which would be wonderful, which the Biden administration canceled. And so you need somebody who knows the island, who's got demonstrable administrative skills, who is a native Cypriot, but a very loyal American citizen and always has been, and a fluent. His native language is Greek, and he knows all of the people in the Cypriot government. And he would be exactly what Donald Trump needs right now when he's under criticism for not having merocratic appointees, that he got some pro to go in there. And some of you are going to say, well, we should have State Department people. Well, we saw the State Department. I'll never forget the Fiona Hill testimonies during the Vendman caper that led to Donald Trump's impeachment. Whether you like it or not, the State Department below the political appointments of Marco Rubio will be anti Trump. It's just the culture. It's the mother's milk of the State Department. But you could get somebody better qualified than a State Department diplomat that knows the language and culture, who would be loyal to Donald Trump and would be a wonderful ambassador. And that was the argument that I used. I don't know if it's going to. If anybody listen to it, but it's the hours late. That appointment to Cyprus has probably been made by the time you hear this.

Sammy Wink (64:50)

You know, a good movie that showed the State Department for what it was, was that 13 hours, that recreation of the Benghazi debacle under the Obama administration. And with Hillary Trump as the head of the State Department, and the State Department officials were just incompetent.

Victor Davis Hanson (65:10)

Well, I just remember the Vindman hearings. Here you were sitting here and the House was trying to find out what happened, and the whole thing was out there and nobody could do anything. It was this. Alexander Vindman had a security clearance. He's sitting in the National Security Council. He's a American expatriate. Ukrainian Ukraine has been knee deep in burisma, has been giving. Been giving what, a million dollars a year to a crack cocaine addict who's been funneling it to the former vice president of the United States who is going to run against Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is worried that this government, which has been given millions of dollars in military aid, is utterly corrupt. So on a phone call that's classified to Mr. Zelensky, he says, you know, I want to put a hold until I know what's going on. You've got a guy on your payroll who's getting a million dollars, who's tied up with this corrupt Biden conglomerate. And more importantly, you fired Victor Slocan, your independent prosecutor who was looking into this corrupt family and Hunter Biden. And Joe Biden is bragging about it in a Council of Foreign Relations meeting. SOB I told him, here's my watch, I want him. And they fired him. So clean it up and I will approve offensive weapons for you. Which, by the way, Barack Obama never did and which Joe Biden would put a hold on when he came in. It was so rotten. And what administration, Vindmanduke, when he discussed, he had this call, he called a friend, Eric Saromela said, oh, by the way, don't mention me. I'm breaking the law by disclosing a class. But you can be a whistleblower. But we all got to go talk to Adam Schiff in the House Intelligence Committee. And that's what they did. And so they cooked up this entire impeachment scam. And Vindman, then everybody, you know, he was supposed to be the hero of the left. He never came forward. How dare you suggest that. I called that, remember that? I think Devin Nunes asked him that. Aren't you really the person that got the so called whistleblower? And by the way, whistleblowers, remember, were deified. How dare you even question that? The left said they had to be sacrosanct. Then we had two whistleblowers, two IRS devoted public servants that said Hunter Biden is getting a sweetheart deal. We've never seen such egregious IRS violations. Millions of dollars that he's liable for and they're cooked up this deal. How dare you say that. You're a traitor, you're dishonest, you're a mole. No, they're whistleblowers, just like Mr. Benman. And then the what's happened to the whole thing? Donald Trump was impeached. They got their wish. Did Donald Trump cancel as Barack Obama did? No, he gave them the javelins before he was impeached. The javelins turned in to be mostly one of the reasons why the Ukrainians saved Kiev. It had been up to Obama or Biden, they wouldn't have had Kiev. It was that ability to destroy Russian tanks that were marching on the Capitol with troops that saved them. Donald Trump was the one that allowed that. No matter. And then was he the upright Patriot that had engineered this from the shadows. I don't know about that. After he stepped down, he and his wife, I think his, excuse me, his sister in law, tweeted that on one of the Trump assassinations, it was too bad he wasn't shot. Think of that. And then Vindman set up, quote unquote, a nonprofit corporation which he directed, whose main duty was to transfer weapons through his agency to Ukraine. In other words, he was an armed merchant. And then he bragged as well that he had been offered. He said two things during those hearings very quickly. He said, don't ever suggest that my patriotism is questioned. I was a decorated veteran and I had a wound. And yes, we appreciate that, but don't suggest that by bringing the topic up we're somehow disloyal ourselves. Because you bragged that the Ukrainian government, government offered you to be defense secretary of their country while you were here as an American citizen. That's a little strange. And then after the whole thing is over, the whole voglia is over, the whole disaster is over, then you end up making an arms company using your ties with the anti Trump Biden administration to funnel weapons with a little price added on to Ukraine. And when you look back at all of those people in the State Department that were testifying, they were not sober and judicious people. We've got to remember that they were involved in spreading the dossier. Yes, they were. And in addition to that, Ms. Newland was involved with the spreading of the dossier. And in addition to that, the ambassador from Ukraine to the United States in 2016 during the campaign wrote an op ed why you must vote for Hillary Clinton. And she was put up to that by the State Department. So I have zero confidence in the impartiality and professionalism of many of these State Department life professionals. Just listen to them, give press conferences and see how much you trust them. And you're right to mention the entire Benghazi disaster.

Sammy Wink (71:26)

Well, we were at the end of our show, Victor, and we did make it through. We're videotaping this show and we hope that it all works out. This is the first time we are in Victor's ex barn here, so I'm sitting right near the horse manger.

Victor Davis Hanson (71:44)

Know we're kind of amateur, so bear with us. I know that I'm gonna get a lot of emails. Victor, look at the camera. Victor, wear makeup. Victor, you look awful. Victor, this looks like it's a. What would it be? Fly by night opera? It is a fly by night. I don't Have a good guess. Neon seat. I don't have a lot of stuff.

Sammy Wink (72:03)

All right.

Victor Davis Hanson (72:03)

I just want to communicate to you guys.

Sammy Wink (72:05)

Well, we have a comment on the website on one of your Ultra articles, the turning point on the road, road to Trump's election, which we just recently put up. The train derail. This is by Peter Danaher. The train derailment in East Palestine highlights the greater possibility of such accidents because of the increased reliance on railroads and trucks rather than pipelines to transport combustible substances like oil. Challenge Canceling the Keystone pipeline favors and investors in rail transport and creates less flexibility in securely transporting oil over thousands of miles. What happened in East Palestine isn't surprising. Both the accident and the Democrats desire to ignore those affected by it. It was a denial of what was needed and an unwillingness to admit that the policies they support hurt those least able to deal with the impact of such an accident.

Victor Davis Hanson (73:05)

That's a very. Oh, that's a very analytical and eloquent letter and he's absolutely right. Transporting oil across or any hazardous material across long distances is very dangerous. But in the case of fossil fuels, oil, natural gas, it makes a lot more sense to do it by pipeline than rail car. The question very quickly is in response to this series I'm writing on Ultra right now, and I'm trying to figure out how it was that Donald Trump, after January 6th, he had seven senators, as he was a private citizen, vote to convict him. These are Republican senators. He had 10 Republican House members vote to initially impeach him. He had people wanting to put him in jail. He was polling about 33%, 34% when he left office. How did he come from the abyss and climb out and soar up to destroy his primary rivals? After the Mar? A Lago raid, after the five criminal and civil suits, after the impeachment, the second impeachment, the trial, the effort. And so I'm trying to look at iconic moments. The first Ultra was on Letita James and that, excuse me, the first one was on the August Mar? A Lago raid of 2022. That had never happened before. That's when they spread these files on the ground and photographed them and said it was insecure. And they knew the entire time that Joe Biden was vulnerable to the same criminal, if it was criminal liability. And they would only appoint a special prosecutor after they went into Mar? A Lago. And then, remember, Corinne Jean Pierre lied about it and said, oh, Joe was looking at all of his things. And he realized after 30 years he had classified files and he Said, oh my God, I'm a lawful person. I'm not like Donald Trump whom my FBI just raided because he was just about ready to announce his presidential campaign. So I'll go volunteer and say I found classified documents and the New York Times will praise me for my statesmanship and castiglion. Donald Trump. That's what that was. That was the first one I did. The second one was Letita James where the Deutsche bank comes in and says, we want clients way like Donald Trump. We gave him a loan and we knew how valuable Mar? A Lago was worth a lot more than $17 million. And we loaned him the money, he paid it back on time. One, we made a hefty profit on interest and number three, we would lend another loan with a client like that again. And she said, oh, he inflated his real estate because me, Latita James and a former third ranking prosecutor under Merrick Garland who worked for me and would go back to Merrick Garland, then go join Alvin Bragg. I'm talking about Mr. Is it Colangelo? Is that his name? But anyway, the point is that after all, that was the second one that they tried to draw and they find Trump $450 million. I think it was reduced down on appeal, 373. But that was so outrageous. And the judge Engoron, he was as bad as Judge Mershon in the Alvin Bragg case. He was the one that was kind of, you know, laughing to the cameras and posturing and editorializing and, and putting a gag order on Trump, but not on the Letita James staff that was going out and having this press conference about what a criminal Trump was, had campaigned. That was the second one. And that started to give empathy toward Donald Trump and the way he handled it, he didn't, you know, most Republicans, but let's face it, they would have said please, please help me cut a deal. I promise you I didn't. Yes I did. And he didn't. He said, this is warfare. Do your best to me, you do your worst and I'll do my best. We'll see who wins. And then the one that we just discussed was in the case of, and I'm writing them, I'm writing two right now, ultras that for this week, Christmas week. And one of them was the Alvin Bragg case. We all know about Alvin Bragg. Go read about it on ultra Ultra. And that wasand I'm going to have another one posted today, I think sometime. So the point I'm making is that there's going to be 10 of these and each, at each juncture, it looked like Donald Trump was going to suffer a sharp rebuke in the polls and public opinion. The opposite, in a Nietzschean fashion, happened. The more they went after him at Mar a Lago and more Letitia James went after him, and the more that Alvin Bragg went after him, the more that he climbed up. I think this will run for about two weeks and it will culminate with some of the things on the campaign trail.

Sammy Wink (78:11)

And you can join Victor Davis Hansen's website. It's@VictorHansen.com and it's called the Blade of Perseus. And that's where you'll find those Ultra articles. And, and they're on all sorts of topics, both current and historical and military. So lots of good material there. Please come join us.

Victor Davis Hanson (78:30)

Oh, you know what I was going to add, the fourth one was East Palestine I've written about. Come on and read about that. East Palestine, we had the toxic flume and the rail that you referenced in this letter, that was the one that came up first. And remember that Joe Biden did not go to East Palestine for a year. And Donald Trump went three weeks after when Joe Biden was in Ukraine giving them money. And then Pete Buttigieg came and made an utter fool of himself and tried to suggest that Donald Trump was a corporate lackey and corporate lackeys had allowed the railroad to derail. Donald Trump came there and talked to everybody and he actually bought goods there. And that was a turning point because it said to them, you may be deplorables, irredeemables, clingers. There's dregs in the mind of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But for me, we're going to take care of you. And that was kind of like, well, Mr. Trump, they're lower middle class. 98% of the community is white. There's only 5,000 of them. They're in Appalachia. What's the upside? The media has just ignored him. He didn't care about the upside. He said, these are people who have been neglected and I'm going to make sure that my campaign addresses their needs. That was an iconic moment. East Palestine, as was Bragg, as was Luteta James, as was the Mar A Lago raid. And as I'll have six more, I hope you enjoy them.

Sammy Wink (79:52)

Yeah. All right. Thank you, Victor, for everything today. It's lots of wisdom, as always, and it's just absolutely stunning. So thanks for your. All your. Your kindness and Merry Christmas to everybody. We were recording on on Christmas, Christmas.

Victor Davis Hanson (80:09)

By the way, I want to thank our dear reader who sent me this.

Sammy Wink (80:12)

That was so cool. That's one of the coolest things you've received. And nobody knows what it is, but.

Victor Davis Hanson (80:17)

Does anybody know what it is? And we'll.

Sammy Wink (80:19)

We'll let you guys write.

Victor Davis Hanson (80:21)

Think about it and write me what this is. I'll give you one hint. It came after the end of everything came out. So.

Sammy Wink (80:29)

So there you go.

Victor Davis Hanson (80:30)

It's a treasured gift. I want to thank the most generous person who sent it to. To me. It was authenticated as genuine with proper documentation.

Sammy Wink (80:38)

All right. Thank you very much, and thanks to our listeners for joining us here at the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor Davis Hanson (80:45)

Thank you.

Sammy Wink (80:46)

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