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Sammy Wink (4:58)

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. So, Victor, I know that you have a lot of information on the drones so in New Jersey, over New Jersey and D.C. and I know also too that Trump decided not to take his weekend jaunt to a golf course he likes in New Jersey. So there must be something serious going on there.

Victor Davis Hanson (5:20)

Well, it's serious. This is our first video. So this is a new experience.

Sammy Wink (5:24)

It is.

Victor Davis Hanson (5:25)

We haven't done this before and we're in our farm studio. A couple of preliminaries on the drones. We have heard from Corrine Jean Pierre one time. We've heard from Mayorkas and we've heard I don't know if Biden's actually, I don't know where Biden is. But the point I'm making is they have no credibility. So anything they were to say, if they were to say it's a foreign entity, it's not A foreign. No one would believe them. Why do I say that? Because they told us that there was a pangolin and a bat that originated the COVID 19 epidemic. They told us, if you just get the Moderna or Pfizer, you will not be infectious, nor will you be infected. That didn't prove true. They told us that the border was secure when we were actually seeing 10,000 people crossing it per day. They told us the Afghan skedaddle was a logistical triumph. It was the greatest military humiliation in 50 years. I think even worse than the 1975 helicopters off the Saigon embassy roof. So I don't believe them. The second thing is we got to remember we're in a transition. Joe Biden is leaving office with 36%, and that's high right now. In the next 30 days, it could go. I think it'll go lower. Richard Nixon left with 24%. He was the lowest. Donald Trump had 36 and left. But I think Biden will go lower. So you've got to condition everything they're saying with the idea that they do not want a major scandal or they want to cover up something they have done that blew up in their faces. So then that just leaves, as I see it, two alternatives. It is a foreign entity or it is a domestic agency. If it's a foreign entity, I think it would be very difficult for the Chinese or the Iranians to have a mothership in the air or at sea that was launching these with impunity. So if it was a foreign entity, it would be more likely that there is somebody trying to test US Air defenses and they have aid by people on the ground here. I say that only because during the Chinese balloon fiasco of 2023, they told us that that balloon was not communicating with mainland China and transmitting surveillance information about US Installations. We later learned, I don't know if it's been confirmed there were people on the ground that may have been navigating it and communicating it with. So we can't trust any of that. It does seem to me that if there was a foreign entity and they would be on top of it, and they may be correct that it poses no threat. But what the kicker is, they do not want to tell you how in the world a foreign entity got close enough and whether or not they had actual people that came across that porous border that were involved. So it's an embarrassment. If it's a foreign entity, they think, well, we don't have to tell people because there's no way in the world they're going to bomb us or do any damage. But if we did tell them, it would make us look like idiots with our open border and our appeasement of polls. The other thing is, it's an agency, take your pick. Epa, Atomic Energy, CIA. And that would mean that this agency is either doing something that it's improper or illegal. Take a guess. Maybe the CIA's charter that says it can't spy domestically and it is for some such reason, terrorist threat or something. Or they're not doing anything wrong, but they are trying to detect an existential threat to us. And they don't want to incur public hysteria, A and B, they don't want to admit that they got this far along. And that would be something that you read online now, that there's some fissionable material, uranium, radioactive material that someone of our adversaries from the Russian Ukrainian border or from the Middle east has brought in. Material that could be used with a dirty bomb. Therefore, our intelligence agencies are sending drones on grids. They have the ability to detect radioactivity at night. They're systematically going through an area where they're rumored through intelligence to have that type of potential. But again, the comparable incident is a 23 balloon incident because it started that transpired almost a week. And that week they gave us six or seven different narratives. It's too cold to shoot down this thing. It fall in the frigid waters. It's just in Alaska. Alaska is one of the least densely populated states there is. They said it might hit some people. We could hurt some people in the Alaskan wilderness. And then they said, well, we don't know if it's going over US Territory. It might go into international waters. It could go over Canadian. And then they said, well, it's not going. When it got to the continental United States, it's not going over strategic installations. Militant yes, it is. Then they said, well, it's too high up. We need to get a Raptor. It'd have to go F22. And then they said, well, we don't really know who's behind it. We knew. So they gave every different narrative they could. And why did they do that? Because they looked like idiots. The longer it went across. Then they tried to finesse it and finally the public outrage. And they remember one thing they never told us. It was some Montana news journalist who happened to see it because he was a journalist. He disclosed it or they would have never told us. So it's something, whether foreign or domestic, that is embarrassing to the administration. And they think it is not an existential threat. And they can get away for the next 30 or 40 days suppressing it. And then if something happens, that can blame Trump.

Sammy Wink (11:56)

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Victor Davis Hanson (13:57)

Well, remember the context. Donald Trump promised to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. Then he was severely criticized. Even people in his own party. I thought quite unfairly, Ann Coulter said he didn't do it well, he actually redid replace 500 miles. The left said, well, he didn't build the wall. Well, that 500 miles was rickety. It was a wall. And then right in his last year of governance, and this is despite lawsuits, people in the Pentagon trying to sabotage that they didn't want to help homeland security people. Remember Anonymous, he was a homeland security person and he bragged that they were thwarting and trying to subvert every directive that Trump had I just make that point because some of us are saying, well, why did he appoint Pete Hegseth? Or why did he point Cash? But he did it so he would have people who were loyal to him and they wouldn't do what people did in 2016 like Kelly and Bolton and people like that. But nevertheless, that was the stage. So then he authorized and right before he left, he was building it, and then he wasn't elected. So the materials were on the ground and they were rusting and everybody thought it was so great. Remember, Joe Biden said, not one square, not one foot of new wall will be built. Of course, in that hundred day chameleon incarnation of Kamala Harris. She said she was for border security and she was for a wall. Now she's vice president. Where is Kamala Harris? Why doesn't she say, I campaigned on securing that border wall. I wanted to build the wall. So. So I want to help Donald Trump build that wall. And so I want to make sure that's not sold off during my tenure. No, she's laughing and cackling away somewhere. But my point I'm making is that they're selling this off at reportedly pennies on the $5 a ton. And they say, oh, we're not selling it to the private sector. We're not selling it cheap. We're just transferring it to another government agency. Well, if somebody wants security and Homeland Security or Treasury or whatever, they can buy it from this auctioneer. That is a total lie. Because Donald Trump, when he gets the authorization, the new authorization from the new Congress, is going to have to buy it again and it's going to be double the price. We have suffered 30% cumulative inflation from Joe Biden. It's going to be twice the cost. Not 8 billion, probably 15 billion more to finish. And again, Joe Biden hates Donald Trump more than he likes the American people because the American people are the people who are suffering as taxpayers. So given all of that, you would think they would just at least be honest and say, why don't they just say this? We were always against the law, usob and you left that stuff there. You think we're going to clean up? No, we don't want it. So we're going to sell it and make it so hard for you to build that wall? Because we do not want to exclude anybody from the United States under any conditions. Why don't they just be honest? And then they said, well, we're not selling it off. Well, they are selling off. They have a private contract. I think it's called government Planet or something gov planet and they are selling it and now states have stepped up. Like one of the fact checkers said, well states couldn't buy it. Well, states are only stepping up because they were selling it off by a private contract. 40% went to non government entities. So they're just being malicious and petty, mean spirited. And I think it's going to, regardless.

Sammy Wink (17:36)

With the tax dollar, I think it's.

Victor Davis Hanson (17:39)

Going to boomerang on them. You know the larger question is walls. There's been a, there has been a trope, a meme the last eight years from intellectuals, especially university people. Walls don't work. The Great China Wall was breached the walls of Constantinople in 1450. No, they do work. The point is not that they can't be breached, but they make it very expensive and difficult on the part of those who would breach them and they free up manpower. So if you look at Constantinople, the Theodosan walls, they were never breached. For 950 years Constantinople held off 200,000 Ottomans with no more than 25 active,000 active combatants. Why? Because they had the most impressive fortifications in the ancient world. The Carthaginians held off the Romans for three years when they were surrounded by the largest amphibious landing and force of occupation in the ancient world. Why? Because the Carthaginian walls were the most impressive until the Theodosian wall. Walls work, that's why when you go to nice houses, it was funny. I was teaching at Pepperdine and I was listening to the radio when Trump first was building it in 2017 and I heard this. It wasn't NPR, so don't accuse me of listening to NPR. But it was a person saying walls don't work. And I just pulled over the side because I thought there was a fire truck and I pulled over where Barbra Streisand lived and it had the most massive. I mean it might have been Cher's place, it was a celebrity. It had the most massive walls I've ever seen. They were like nine feet tall. And then as I drove down the PCH those years I was teaching there, they all had walls. Every single Hollywood celebrity who was saying walls don't work not only had walls but they were planning bougainvillea so that people wouldn't get next to the sharp spine flower. Walls work, they really do. They're not designed to keep everybody out all the time. They're designed to make it very expensive and difficult for the intruder to go over a wall. That's why I have a nice wall that I Built around myself. It is exactly 600ft. And I built it myself with my friend Javier. The two of us built it. Took us a year and a half. Six feet tall, rebar. And it has worked like a charm.

Sammy Wink (20:12)

Well, I was wondering how it measures up this wall or the lack of building it, how it measures up to what you're often calling the Stonehenge of California, the high speed rail.

Victor Davis Hanson (20:25)

It's a model of efficiency and economy. But then anything is compared to high speed rail. High speed rail was sold to us on a ballot initiative that you could do the whole thing for $15 billion, I think, 14 years ago. And everybody said, 14 billion, yes, we'll clear out the 99, the 101. And now, 15 years later, they have not laid one foot, foot of track. They have spent 15 to $20 billion. They're anticipating that it will be 30 billion. I could not drive to work on Mountain View Avenue for five years. Every time I've talked about this on a podcast or a column, I get kind of a snarky little email from some official of the High Speed board. And they said, actually, we're envisioning that we will be laying track next year or you. You don't understand the complexity of the Mountain View overpass. Yeah, I do. You promised that you were going to displace traffic and you were going to be economical. And now what are you going to get? You're going to get 110 miles or something from Bakersfield to Merced for $300 billion? I don't think so. So it was. The wall was a model of efficiency. If they had just let Trump do it, he could have done the whole thing. The 2,000 miles. You know, it's 2,400 mile border, but 2,000 miles are wallable. He could have done the whole thing for seven or eight billion dollars. And did he make Mexico pay for it? He did. Everybody on the right who didn't like him. I did an interview with Ann Coulter and she just kept saying to me, he said Mexico was going to pay for it. They didn't pay for it. I said, he forced them through threats of tariffs and getting out of nafta, to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, to deploy thousands of Mexican troops along the Guatemalan border. And when he left office, there was nobody coming across illegally. So he has ways of making Mexico pay for it, making them patrol. But more Importantly, there are $63 billion in remittances. The vast majority of that money is sent by Mexican nationals here, here, illegally. Who are on some sort of federal subsidies. Education, housing, food, you name it, health. So the American taxpayer is providing subsidies. So people who have broken the law when they cross the border, broken the law when they continue to reside here, can free up 3 or $400 a month and send it in cash to their relatives or friends. And mostly southern Mexico, the poorest area, because the Mexican government either can't or won't take care of its own people. Mexico relies on that. It's the largest source of foreign exchange, larger than oil, larger than tourism, and they gloat about it. Mr. Obrador said, oh, it's so beautiful that we had 40 million people walked into your country. Oh, I can control what people think. I don't want any Mexican Americans to vote for Ron DeSantis. They're not going to vote for Republicans. He did that all the time. Oh, I'll help you, Joe. You can't get off the stairs. Remember, he helped. So they know what's going on. And they're terrified now because Donald Trump really will tell them, either you patrol the border or we're going to make you pay for the wall. And I think he should do it anyway. He should slap a 30% tax on all remittances, no matter who sends them. Legal, non legal, if you're from Sweden, if anything, sent Mexico from a source in the United States. And again, that's 63 billion. It's $18 billion you could get in a tax on Mexican remittances. And then you know what would happen? People might say, I don't think I want to enter the United States illegally, because if I did, when I send money, they take 30% of my remittances, and then they're angry at me. So I'm just going to stay here. So we'll see. But he can make Mexico pay. And I hope he does. And I hope even though he has to pay double the price now, start all over again on the new areas.

Sammy Wink (24:39)

Well, I think Mexico needs to pay for things beyond the border anyway. We do have a lot of entitlement programs.

Victor Davis Hanson (24:45)

Well, how about fentanyl?

Sammy Wink (24:47)

Legally and illegally taxed.

Victor Davis Hanson (24:49)

Somewhere between 70,000 to 100,000Americans die a year. And people say, well, no, no, Victor, you know, they're just addicts. It's their fault. That's what Mexico says. We're just meeting a demand. Patrol your own people. The problem with that argument is they're not only sending it as Ativan, as Xanax, as Vali, you know, prescription illegally used drugs, but are mostly harmless. Most of the time they're disguising it as those drugs. In other words, they're putting fentanyl into other forms that people have no idea that it's fentanyl. And they're even putting it in candy and stuff to make people think it's just food. Any way that people will consume it when they know that if they did consume it, it might kill them. Even an addict might know that. So they know what they're doing. They know that they're in cahoots with the Chinese who want to kill us. So the China is sending all this raw product. The cartels have specific factories that take the raw fentanyl and they make pills and capsules out of it for one purpose, to sneak it across Joe Biden's wide open border and kill people. And we don't say anything. They have killed more Americans each year than all the Americans that died. The 55,000 that died in Vietnam and the 34,000 that died in Korea put together. And no one said so. We have a lot of grievances against Mexico. And I think Donald Trump is no bigot. He's got a winning issue. And he's got a winning issue because African Americans in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York know that their social services and their safety is imperiled by Mexican gangs, Venezuela gangs, an open border. And people who are in the Mexican American community know that when these people come across, they settle in their communities. They go after their kids. The gangs do. They make it impossible to have advanced placement in their schools. They have to be reintroduced bilingual education. And it affects them. The white liberals on the coast who dreamed up this open borders, they're never subject to the consequences of what happens in the inner city or the barrio along the border border or here in the San Joaquin Valley.

Sammy Wink (27:09)

Absolutely not. Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about Liz Cheney's recent antics or some evidence about her past antics. Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Sammy Wink (28:22)

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. You can find Victor at his his handle is Dhanson and you can find him on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup. So Victor, let's turn to Liz Cheney and her actions as part of the January 6th committee. Apparently this week we found out that she was tampering with witnesses. She consulted a witness without her lawyer knowing it. And what are your thoughts on our lovely non Republican Republican?

Victor Davis Hanson (28:56)

I feel bad about how the mighty have fallen. I mean, this is a woman who was a very accomplished legislator. She was number three in the House at this point when she did these things, allegedly, you got to remember she had just, she had voted 95%, 93% with Trump. She was number three in the House in ranking. She was destined to be at some point the speaker of the House. She was from the most staunchly Republican family dynasty with her dad, former vice president. So why would she do that? Allegedly? Why would she either? And what has been alleged? There's been a number of alleged. None of them have been proven yet. But the House Oversight Committee has suggested that there are interviews, that the transcripts cannot be checked because the recordings of the interviews are missing. Kind of like Robert Herr and Joe Biden. But more importantly, as you say, she contacted a witness, I think it was Cassidy Hutchinson, and coached her, talked to her in a way that might not have been in her interest because her lawyer was not notified. Why would you take that risk if you were yourself? I think she's a lawyer herself. And the fact is that at that period of January, February, March of 2021, that the left and the never Trump right was completely unhinged. They had one week before Trump Left office, on the 20th of January, January 13th, they impeached him. That was the first time a president has ever been impeached twice. And they said, why do it? They only had one count. They had no special counsel. They had no cross examination. They had no witnesses. They just rushed it. They just said, well, insurrection. They didn't even define what insurrection was. An Insurrectionist does not tell an assembled throng. Would you please march over and assemble in the Capitol peacefully and patriotically. And when you have an insurrection, you find people with firearms in the Capitol. They did not find anybody with a loaded handgun or anything in the Capitol. So it wasn't an insurrection as we usually define it. And we know that there were FBI informants. We knew now, we knew then that Matthew Wesson. But at that time, everybody said Donald Trump was an insurrectionist. And when people tried to just politely object, well, Donald Trump and the acting Secretary of Defense, they asked the Capitol Police for more officers. There is a rumor that Nancy Pelosi herself said, I should have had more officers. She didn't take that recommendation. There is a report that a lot of FBI informants were circulating in and outside the Capitol. There are reports that there was a bomb that they said was going to go off that was planted under suspicious circumstances. So these were people that were arrested. 4, 500 convicted. They weren't even violent. And then all these other lies started happening. Five people were killed. No, five people died. Died. Four of them were Trump supporters. One died violently. We know Ashley Babbitt, 14 year old military veterans, 105 pounds, 5, 3. She was shot while unarmed for the misdemeanor of going through a broken window into the Capitol. Officer Byrd, who had a checkered record, we talked about him, he'd left a loaded gun. He'd been cited for a lot of infractions. They just completely silenced who he was. Compare that with Derek Chauvin. The moment George Floyd died, his picture was over every newspaper. No, it would be racist. It would be unfair. We're not going to tell you who shot Ashley. It took months for that to happen. So that was the climate. They could do no wrong. They were in the driver's seat. Donald Trump was destroyed. He left office with 34%, 36%. Somewhere between there, that was where George Bush had gone. And it was Harry Truman. Not quite as bad as Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter territory. And they said, he is done, finished. We can do anything we want. Kevin McCarthy said, if you're going to have a committee, it's my prerogative. Here's the minority members. I want this. This. Oh, no, the last two tough questions. That's that crazy Jim Jordan. No, no, no, no, no. We don't want them. That was the first time that a speaker has refused the nominations of the minority party for a select committee. So then they said, well, we're only going to have two Republicans because we'll veto anybody Else we don't like. And we'll have two Republicans and we want them to have two criteria. They have to have voted to impeach Donald Trump on the 13th of January. And they have to be politically inert. They will never be reelected. They've been renounced by their party. They're hated by their party. We know that Liz Cheney and, and Adam Kinzinger will not be re elected. And that's good because they'll be angry and they're apostates and they put them on there and then they apparently somebody lost a lot of evidence. They said, you know what, we'll get a zealot to be the chairman. How about Bennie Thompson? What was his requisition? Is he a senior member of the House? Is he renowned for his statesmanship, his fairness, his adjudication? No. He's known for one thing. 2004, he and 30 some odd representatives and Senator Barbara Boxer tried to stop, throw the election to John Kerry. George Bush won the popular vote. It's the last time a Republican won the popular vote until Trump this year. And they tried to say that the Ohio voting machines, Remember how they said Trump said that were inexact and that they had been rigged and that John Kerry really won Ohio? If he won Ohio, he won the election. He didn't win the popular vote, but he would win the electorate. Remember that?

Sammy Wink (35:21)

Yes.

Victor Davis Hanson (35:22)

Yeah. And that went nowhere. But they tried to hold up the vote of the electors. So he was an election insurrectionist. And they put an election insurrectionist as charge of that committee. And then they ran wild and they got people to flip. Hutchinson gave that fantastic story that Trump was in the Secret Service vehicle and he jumped through, I guess he broke through the glass barrier and grabbed the wheel and said, we're going to the Capitol. Remember she said that? I don't think she was even in the car at the time. I may be mistaken.

Sammy Wink (35:56)

Didn't they coach her to lie like that?

Victor Davis Hanson (35:58)

They did. So that's why she's worried right now. And she wants a partner. They all want pardoner because they operate on the premise of projection. If I had done to Donald Trump, I know what I've done to Donald Trump. If I was Donald Trump and I had suffered what I did to him and now he was in power and I was in power, I know what I would do. If I was Donald Trump, I would go after me. And so I don't think Donald Trump is them. I think he's a lot more magnanimous than they are. But that's why they're scared right now and she is terrified. And they're all terrified. Adam Schiff is terrified. We now learn that Adam Schiff was violating the law and leaking, according to the House oversight report, leaking confidential materials when he was a member of Devin Nunes House Intelligence Select Committee. So all of those are felonies and they know that. And if you're Andrew McCabe and you said this is going to be revenge, he's thinking, well, you know, I lied four times. The incident inspector general said under oath to federal investigators, if you're James Clapper, I lied under oath to the Senate. If you're John Brin, I lied under oath twice to the Senate. James, I beat you. I did it twice. What you did, that's what they're worried about.

Sammy Wink (37:15)

Yeah. Well, let's turn to the Paris climate Accords. Apparently Donald Trump has said that he plans to leave them. Is this a good thing for the United States?

Victor Davis Hanson (37:26)

Well, it's a very good thing. If you look at per capita carbon emissions by the United States, it's one of the cleanest countries in the world and it's largely because of what not solar and wind, clean burning natural gas. We're the largest producer of natural gas. We have the largest reserves. People until Joe Biden were using more natural gas for burning, for heating than the old coal or oil. It was a clean way to generate electricity. The only problem was it made heat and they reclassified heat as a pollutant. So we abided by all of those regulations. And then the third world, so called third world said, well, wait a minute, we only leave about 5 to 8% carbon imprint as you people do and you caused the industrial revolution. So we want, I think it was $70 trillion in reparations. So Trump comes in and says, I'm not going to give those people any money. Why should I do that? Do they use cell phones? Do they create cell phones? No, we did. And how do we do that? By energy? Do they take streptomycin, penicillin, chemotherapy? Do they make it? No, we do. And that takes energy. Do they build their own Dodge Ram trucks? Their caterpillars? No, we do. We do everything. They get it all from us. We produce it and Europe produces it. And we're not guilt ridden like Europe. So we are not going to hand over libel, blood money to the third world. Forget it. And as far as Europe goes, do we want to be like Germany? They took the most robust, dynamic economy in the entire world and what did they do to it? They destroyed it, they dismantled their nuclear plants, they dismantled their coal plants, they dismantled their oil burning plants. And in a coldly damp country, they went wind and solar and they can't generate enough electricity. And so what are they doing now? They're buying electricity from nuclear plants in France and they're reactivating coal burning plants. And so he doesn't want any part of that. And then the, the two giants in the room, elephants in the room, are India and China. They both pollute per capita more than we do now, especially China, and has no intention of stopping it. Makes two new coal plants supposedly every two months, one a month, and they're not going to stop. So it's just a way of guilt. It's a project of again, bi coastal wealthy left wing Americans that feel guilty and at somebody else expense. The average person in Fresno county, where I'm speaking, they're going to pay five, six dollars a gallon. They don't care. In Palo Alto, where I work, they're going to take away their natural gas stove and make them pay more for. They don't care. They have the money. So it's a way of making the middle class of America pay for their psychological anxieties, their sins. It's kind of a medieval penance. And we're not going to do it. Trump won't do it. It'll be tricky to get out of it. I mean, he has to finesse his way out of it. He has to say something like, this is a very valuable international organization, sober and judicious. The United States supports it in theory, but right now we're recalibrating. We're in a period of reflection. So we're going to take a temporary suspension and we'll come back to you and discuss it. But for right now, I'm more worried about the middle class of America that doesn't have the wherewithal to subsidize your utopian dreams. If he says that, it would be great.

Sammy Wink (41:23)

That's funny you say that because as far as NATO goes, those European countries are more than happy not to pay and they don't make any apologies for you.

Victor Davis Hanson (41:32)

He made them pay $100 billion more. And it happened right months before the Ukraine war. And a lot of that hundred billion dollars found its way to Ukraine. So he did them a great service. And I think when he came into office, there was three of the 30. Was it 25 NATO countries? I can't know the exact number, but There was only three that were paying their 2%. They had all sworn that they were going to pay 2% of their GDP in munitions and defense expenditures. And now I think there's 40% of them do.

Sammy Wink (42:09)

Yeah.

Victor Davis Hanson (42:10)

So that was got the old crowbar out. Yeah.

Sammy Wink (42:13)

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about I want to talk about George Stephanopoulos humiliated in a lawsuit by Donald Trump. Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Sammy Wink (43:31)

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. So Victor, Trump brought a case against George Stephanopoulos who was interviewing Nancy Mace and he said in that interview that Trump was found liable for rape and he was not. And now Trump has won. So vindication for Trump, 15 million to the Presidential foundation and 1 million to pay his legal fee.

Victor Davis Hanson (43:57)

Well, George Stephanopoulos gave an interview and I think on 11 occasions he said Donald Trump committed rape. In the E. Jean Carroll civil suit, she alleged that she was sexually attacked by him. The jury found that he did not commit rape but that he had committed there was a likelihood he had committed sexual assault. And the judge, Cohen, as I remember his name, had misspoken and said, well, somebody had corrected him or reminded him that he had never been convicted of rape. And he said what's the difference? Something along that line. And that I think will be cause for reversal because it's up on appeal that the judge basically said that he was and that shows pre existing prejudice that if the judge knew that the jury had not found or was not considering rape and yet he said publicly that they were indistinguishable, then that's going to be appealed. And so George Stephanopoulos was accusing on the air perhaps 11 times that Donald Trump was a rapist. There was no evidence for that, and that was wrong. So ABC looked at that and they're looking at all these other suits now. There's about 10 of them. Devin Nunes has some Donald Trump. And everybody thought, this is crazy. They'll never ever go after the left wing media for calling people murderers and rapists. And they are. And so they settled out of court. And Stephanopoulos is forced to apologize and then give that money to the Trump inauguration fund for the party and the ceremony. The thing about that case is very important, though. She doesn't remember the year that she was sexually assaulted. So in the year 2019, she was going to bring it, but there was a statute of limitations problem, 25 years. The new York legislature passed a special law basically for her. It said anybody accused of sexual assault will have no statute of limitations requirements in the state of New York. And they had done the same thing with IRS about Donald Trump. They had said, anybody that is accused of tax problems, the state of New York will allow their private confidential state returns to be forwarded to the federal government. That was a law that was passed. It was basically what the Constitution said was illegal, a bill of attainder. You don't pass a law to retroactively go after someone. And they did that twice. And that allowed her then to come back and file 20, 21 or 22 this civil suit that she had been a defamed by Donald Trump because he said she was crazy and that she had been sexually assaulted. And I'll just finish with some details. Number one, when they asked her what year was she was sexually assaulted, she could not remember. She did say, but I do remember the dress I wore. It was a designer dress. And then they found out that the designer dress was not in existence. In other words, she had seen another dress and then fabricated that back that she wore that she to prove the date when the dress was not in existence in the time frame in which she said she was assaulted. She didn't remember any much of the details, but this was the kicker. There had been an episode of Law and Order. You know, I bet you watched it. Crime drama.

Sammy Wink (47:44)

You probably did see it.

Victor Davis Hanson (47:45)

Yes. And in that episode, the very department store that she said she was sexually harassed, she said that she went in and saw this celebrity Donald Trump. They flirted and somehow she invited. She doesn't say he forced her way into her dressing room, but he found her way into her private dressing room. The implication to skeptics is that they were flirting and they wanted to have some quickie tryst. And they went in and that happened. And then years later, 30 years later, she said, that's Donald Trump. He's running for president. I want to be a liberal icon. I'm going to go back and say that I was raped by him. The problem is when she added in the details, it was almost exactly. And they brought this up in the trial of a Law and Order episode. There was an episode of Law and Order where a woman goes into the same department store, sees a celebrity, they flirt, they go into a dressing room, she's sexually assaulted, and then they have a trial. And that's exactly what she did. And even then, it gets worse. She had no money, of course, to spend two or three years in court. I mean, this would be millions of dollars of legal fees because it wasn't a criminal complaint. There was no DA that said, we have evidence that Donald Trump raped her. It was her private person suing that she was sexually raped or sexually assaulted and defamed. And so who paid for it?

Sammy Wink (49:19)

Who paid for it?

Victor Davis Hanson (49:20)

Reid Hoffman, the multi billionaire Silicon Valley Trump hater, who was worth about $6 billion and who footed the bill to tie Donald Trump up. And it was part of the larger schema of Fanny Willis, Alvin Bragg, Letita James, Jack Smith. She was the fifth tessera in that mosaic. And they were all trying to destroy him physically, mentally, spiritually, financially, politically. And it cost him 83 million bucks, I think it was, and I think it will be on appeal. But given all of that, why would George Stephanopoulos buy into that on national tv, network news? And I guess the answer is, well, Victor, he's not a journalist. He's famous for two things. He engineered the 92 Clinton campaign victory and number two, he was not just a campaign functionary, but he was head of the Clinton war room. The rapid response, that was the first time anybody had that title. George Stephanopoulos inaugurated the idea that if you're in a campaign, somebody says something about you, your candidate, within minutes you go to the media and you destroy that person and you counter. And that's what he was famous for. And then they thought he'd be a hard hitting journalist, but he was always a partisan. I don't know who's going to pay the 15 million, whether I guess ABC will for him, but I know that they took away his social media account.

Sammy Wink (50:59)

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Victor Davis Hanson (52:36)

Well, there's the generic issue policy reason, and then there's the personalities involved. Policy wise, these Western governments embraced two or three policies, ideologies that we are very familiar with. Number one, they were radical green advocates. So they essentially were in the process of shutting down natural gas fields in Britain, coal nuclear in Germany, and the Dutch government was even going after methane farmers. We saw the green jackets, yellow jackets, chartreuse jackets in Paris, the truckers, they were going after fossil fuels by increasing the supply and decreasing the availability. So it was that really energy being this, you know, the foundation of an economy that really caused hyperinflation even worse than Joe Biden's inflation. Secondly, they bought into Angela Merkel's yes we can open borders. So they had rampant illegal immigration. Maybe 30%. A million of people a year went into Britain alone. It's not 340 million, 330 like United States, it's 60 million. That was a huge percentage. And the same thing with Germany. They had over a million illegal aliens in a single year. France, if you go to France today, in the outer boroughs of Paris or Amsterdam or Rotterdam, it's like the Middle East. And those populations were not assimilating high crime areas, dependency, entitlements, put it all together, you Have a strapped European middle class that cannot pay its aging. That model of you're going to get married, if you get married at all at 30, you're going to have one child if at all. Their fertility rates were 1.6, 1.5. Aging population, shrinking population, more people retiring early, abortions, more abortions than children born in many of these countries. It's not a sustainable proposition. And when you burden it with non productive green energy and you have open borders and then you do these peripheral boutique issues, the trans issue, all of these other issues, and you're not spending on defense, a lot of people finally said this doesn't work. And then they started looking around number two in particular, and they said Argentina, they had 150% inflation. They have now a 3% inflation rate per month. It's 30 annual, but it's gone down from 140 to 30 and it's going to go down to 8. They cut 40% of their government employees. It's starting to work. And then they looked at the first term of Trump and they said, you know, we demonized that guy and we joined in, but that was much more successful. He left office with 1.2 inflation rate, with 2% growth, with 3% unemployment. And that was after Covid. So it was working. There was no illegal immigration in the last three months of his tenure. So they looked at that, the issues, what was killing them. And then they saw hope that there was a backlash against this cultural economic revolution. So they said, who are the worst offenders? Well, the Germans. The places that were being the most egregious, Canada, Germany. And they also looked at Eastern Europe and they said, Eastern Europe should have been much poorer than we are. They traditionally were on the frontier with Russia or the Ottomans, and they had a historical heavy lift compared to us. They were the protectors of Western Europe from inroads from the East. And yet in terms of GDP growth and unemployment and inflation, they're doing better relatively. They're not as wealthy yet, but they're catching up to Western Europe. And their governments have not bought into this North American European utopianism. So they started to throw them out. I think Donald Trump's election is the catalyst because now they're thinking, we don't know what he's going to do. We do know a couple of things. We hated his guts and we tried to demonize him and we don't want anything to do with him, but we don't have any defense. And now Russia is on the borders of Ukraine and has killed. I don't know, 300,000 or 400,000 Ukrainians. The Middle east is a. It'sit'sit's. Basically a war zone. Iran may get the bomb. We need help. And the only person that could help us is Donald Trump. Because as much as we prefer Joe Biden, he's not going to lift a finger for us. He's weak. So, Donald Trump, can you come to Notre Dame Cathedral even though you're not president? Oh, he says, no, that would violate the Logan Act. Remember that? They put Michael Flynn, they said, you cannot as a private citizen conduct foreign policy. And then they said, yeah, but Joe Biden's not there anymore. They gave up. They've given up. They failed. They want you to come. He says, okay. So he goes to Notre Dame. And then he. I'm not saying she winked at him, but Jill Biden gives him a stare. Joe Biden is not even there. He kind of trolls her and says, trump and the. What do you. He said, the lady and the Trump elegance. So he trolled her. And then it was the most amazing thing. He's sitting there and he gets up and it was like a gold rush. All these European diplomats and grandees that are so elegant and refrained, so sensitive and so critical of his uncouthness, they're fighting, climbing over each other to touch him. They want a piece of him and Donald Trump. Then they ask him, what's different? He goes, I don't know. Everybody likes me now. Maybe I've changed. Maybe I'm a nice guy now, I don't know. But they like me. And he's handling it much better. He gave a brilliant press conference. He's very calm, he's funny. They ask him a question, would you preempt Iran? That's a crazy question. Why are you asking me that? And four years ago, eight years ago, he might have answered it, but he's much better coach. I give a lot of credit to him. That was a life changing experience after he was almost killed. Life changing to have five civil and criminal court suits, tried to get him off the ballot, impeached him twice. So he's a Nietzschean figure that the more you try to kill him, the stronger he gets. And he has Susan Wiles and Stephen Chung and all those people around him, they're professionals. Eight, they waged such a much better campaign than Harris's so called professionals. Obama, remember, said, we'll get rid of Joe Biden. Harris will come in, I'll get my A team that got me elected. And he sent them in and they were incompetent. They were spending money on Oprah and Al Sharpton and Marquis ads, neon ads in Las Vegas. They were a bunch of incompetent grifters.

Sammy Wink (60:02)

So, Victor, I have a last question for you. There's two things that seem to be happening with Donald Trump, and one is that these world leaders seem to, in contrast to Joe Biden, see him as a hero of sorts and are really entertaining him as America's leaders. And then also I think it's the assassination to that really did something to him.

Victor Davis Hanson (60:32)

If I had not turned my head that microsecond, my head would be blown off. That would change anybody. And then he would think, how did that guy get that close? And then he's going to think another guy almost did it. Somebody didn't like me. And I think that and then the hatred after him. And then he survived all, but he thought, you know what I mean, how depressing would it be when you were facing like 93 felony counts and you knew they were all ginned up and yet he didn't give up. So I think he's finally and he's older. He's 78 years old. So he put all of it together and he's kind of at peace with himself and he's kind of funny now. And he's got his own Twitter. He's much more circumspect. Somebody is obviously editing his tweets and he's just at a higher level and he's got people who are loyal to him. So there's given these picks, there's not going to be anybody who says, you know, I'm anonymous, I'm going to write a hit piece. I'm John Bolton. I'm going to write a memoir and trash him. He's got people who are loyal to him.

Sammy Wink (61:38)

Well, Victor, it sounds like your dogs are telling us it's the end of the show today. So thanks to our audience for joining the Victor Davis Hanson show, and thanks to you, Victor, as well, for or your wisdom today.

Victor Davis Hanson (61:51)

Thank you very much.

Sammy Wink (61:52)

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