← The Victor Davis Hanson Show
The Victor Davis Hanson Show
Elon, Hamas, and Deporting Criminals or the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
01:08:47
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- [00:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
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- [01:29]
Sammy Wink
Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. This is our Friday news roundup and there's lots of news on the agenda today, so we will get to those tales we're going to look at. Elon Musk, of course, is making news, Hamas and its failure to honor the ceasefire, and then some things about illegal immigration that I think will probably be generally of interest to us. So stay with us and we'll be right back.
- [01:59]
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- [03:59]
Victor Davis Hanson
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- [05:29]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor is the Martin and Neali Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com Please come join us there. We're making lots of changes to the website, especially for subscribers and you can subscribe for 650amonth or $65 a year at a discount. So come join us. Well, Victor, we have a lot going on and I thought we would start with Musk and his doge activities since they've been barred by a judge, Paul Engel Mayer and he's barred them from getting data from the, the Treasury Department, at least for a week. And so they're having this play out in the courts a bit. But I was wondering your thoughts on this current. They keep calling it a constitutional crisis.
- [06:27]
Guest Speaker
It's not a constitutional crisis. It's to one Biden judge, Judge Vargas in Manhattan, and one Obama appointed judge. I think his name is Engelmeier. I've written it down here. And they feel that they can tell the executive branch who a judge, an unelected, lower ranked judge, just a federal judge, not an appeals court, not anything. They feel that they can tell the president, who has access to, I shouldn't put it that way. They can tell the president's own cabinet Secretary of the treasury that he has no right to look at the employee records of the people he employs. It's not going to stand up. It's, it's lawfare. It's the same type of thing they did with the five civil and criminal suits to bankrupt, ridicule, discredit, jail, Donald Trump. But when they say constitutional crisis, they keep using that word. And they do it in two contexts and they're both, everybody, very misleading. The first is that no executive has the right to not spend money that Congress approves. That's up in the court. I mean, we had a line item veto for a while and the courts ruled against it. That meant the president could just say, oh, the Congress approved that, but it was wasteful, it's stupid. I'm just not going to spend it. That is up in the air legally. But also up in the air is whether a president can just simply not veto it. He just says, I'm just not going to spend the money. We don't have the money. The Congress is wasteful. And if everybody thinks that I'm being too partisan, I'd like to draw your attention to two important facts about the Biden administration. The U.S. congress voted money and sent it to the president and it was signed to build the wall under Donald Trump. That was the law. Joe Biden came in, that money was there to finish the wall. And what did he say? He said, I am not going to. I'm not going to. You're not going to. There will be not another foot of wall constructed on my administration, not one inch. Other words. And people reminded him, they said, well, that's illegal. And he said, no, we're going to do an environmental study, endangered species. It was all disruptive. I'll give you one more example. When he was vice president, he gave a talk before the foreign, the foreign relations, private Foundation. Okay? And he was bragging that he had gone over to Ukraine and fired Victor Shokin, the prosecutor. He said to Poroshenko, I'm gonna. I want him fired. Now. Everybody in the left said, well, that was okay. He was crooked. Victor Shokin, well, now we find out years. And they said Rudy Giuliani made it up that Shulkin was looking into bereavement. He was. He was looking. We know that as a fact, aside from the testimony of Shokin that said he was fired because he was getting close to Hunter Biden. But the fact checkers. But that's irrelevant. The point I'm making is that was congressional approved money, $1 billion. And Joe Biden was named by his president, Barack Obama, to be in charge of that. So he flew over to Ukraine and he leveraged them. He said to the president, Porochenko, and I'll read it. And this is what he said, not what I said. So Biden is now relating this to the Council on Foreign Relations in Boston, bragging on himself after the fact. I said to him, you're not getting the billion. I'm going to be leaving in, I think about six hours. I looked at him and I said, in six hours, if the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money. And then Biden said, well, excuse my language, everybody, because if you have youth. But he said, I'm going to quote it. I think it's very powerful. He said to Poroshenko, well, son of a bitch, he got fired. In other words, what he was saying is, I am impounding $1 billion because Joe Biden. So it has. There's a lot of audacity for the left to say, oh, Donald Trump is not spending money in US Aid that the Congress approved. You set the precedent, whether it was the wall or foreign aid, you impounded it all the time. Presidents do that all the time. On the second question about the courts, and we said before that Judge Vargas and Judge Engelmeier were partisans, and they took it upon themselves to cancel out the executive branch's action. And then when Elon Musk said he should be impeached, or Donald Trump said he was really out of whack, we're going to go through the appeal. Everybody said, this is the constitutional crisis. And so let me just tell you what Joe Biden said. And this is not about a lower district court. This is the Supreme Court of the United States. They ruled that Joe Biden illegally contravened Congress and federal contracts. And with a wave of the hand in May 2024. For his own political purposes, I would add, he was still a candidate. He canceled billions, five. The debts of 5 million Americans that owed the federal student loan program. He just did like this. And here's what he said. Everybody listen. The Supreme Court tried to block me from relieving student debt, but they didn't stop me. I'm relieving student debt for over 5 million. I'm just going to keep going. In other words, the President of the United States says the court has no effect. What if Donald Trump said this about this lower court, not the Supreme Court Court? If you think that the left honors the court system as if they do, as they've said, they tried to pack the court. Nobody had done that since 1937. That was a black mark in judicial history. And they revived that with Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden and Charles Chuck Schumer. Chuck Schumer. In March of 2020, there was a throng, a mob, and they were at the gates of the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court was in session. And these were pro abortion march. Now, he didn't say to the mob, I expect you to assemble peacefully and patriotically to go to the Capitol. No, no, no, no. That was what Donald Trump was impeached for. Because they said he didn't. You have to fight like hell. Excuse me, the language. That's what Trump said. And they said, doesn't matter. He shouldn't have spoke to them. Here's what the Senate minority leader said. I want to tell you, Gorsuch, now remember, he's out in front of a mob and Gorsuch is inside. So he's naming a Supreme Court judge and threatening him, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. If any of you are in the parking lot and somebody cuts in front of you and you honk and he comes out and says, I want to tell you, Hansen, you have released the whirlwind and you're going to pay the price. That's a direct threat. But if you think that I'm exaggerating, let me just continue with the second half of the quote. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions. In other words, Victor, if you don't back your car out, you don't know what's going to hit you. That was a direct threat. And if you think I'm further exaggerating, not long afterwards, crowds started contravening federal law at the homes of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. And Clarence Thomas swarming them, including an assassin who traveled all the way across country to kill Kavanaugh. If Donald Trump had said that, if he right now went out to the Supreme Court and said, you did this, you did this, you did this and somebody showed up at their house, they would impeach him. And so don't take any of this constitutional crisis stuff. I could go on and on. I just, you know, when he, the Supreme Court ruled about presidential immunity, he said, this is fundamentally, this is fundamentally a terrible disservice to the people of the United States. It has undermined the law, established civil rights, and it's mired us in a crisis of ethics. And then in the State of the Union, he looked right at the Supreme Court judges and said, with all due respect, judges, women, this is about the Roe vs Wade are not without electoral or political power. And you're about to realize how much that was another direct threat. And so these people cannot be trusted. They're disingenuous. They always change the rules. The court is wonderful when they have it on their side. When it's not, then it's renegade, it's terrible. They threaten justices by name, don't pay. There's no such thing as a constitutional crisis with these people. They make it up as they go along.
- [16:09]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, yeah. Well, the right has also been saying, and I think they're more accurate, that justices preventing the executive power from using their power legitimately is equally a constitutional crisis. But that's a whole nother story.
- [16:26]
Guest Speaker
There is the constitutional crisis is that two low ranking federal judges, both with a long history of left wing activism and appointed by two Democratic presidents, were cherry picked. I mean, what is Delaware and Manhattan have in common? Nothing. If you're going to do anything, go to Washington. But they found the most liberal judges. They filed this thing. They knew they were activists. And these judges set a precedent. They said that now an unelected lower circuit judge can go in and forbid the Secretary of the treasury to look at his own employees records. If that stands, you wouldn't have a government. And remember that the larger context were $37 trillion in debt. And so when they keep attacking, you want to ask them, so you really do want to borrow at 7%, another $40 million to give to the Chinese gain of function laboratory. You really want to borrow another 8% of the BBC's budget at 7% interest? Do you really want to do that? Do you really want to borrow a quarter of a billion dollars so you can train 6,000 left wing journalists Reporters Without Borders and pay 7% to bondholders. 6% 5%. That's what it's about.
- [17:49]
Sammy Wink
It sure is. Well, Victor, let me welcome a sponsor back to our show. I'd like to take a moment for Factor. Factor has chef made gourmet meals that make eating well easy. Their dietitian approved and ready to eat and, and heat and eat in two minutes so you can feel right and feel great no matter what life throws at you. Factor arrives fresh and fully prepared, perfect for an active, busy lifestyle. Eat smart with Factor. Get started@factor meals.com Victor 50 off and use the code Victor 50 off to get 50% off your first box plus free shipping. That's code Victor 50 off@factor meals.com Victor50 off to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box. And we're happy to have Factor as a sponsor of the Victor Davis Hansen show. So, Victor, the next topic was Hamas. It looks like they are not honoring their ceasefire. Two things about the the what's going on between Israel and Hamas are the ceasefire not being honored by Hamas and then also the Saturday deadline that Trump has given to Hamas for the release of the hostages. And I thought you wanted your thoughts on those week stories.
- [19:20]
Guest Speaker
Well, they thought they have about we don't know how many hostages are left, 75 maybe. They won't tell us how many are dead. I have a, a sad, instinctual feeling A lot of them are dead. So they thought they were going to use these hostages releases for political purposes because they were almost devastated. And then the remnant the Hamas leadership and by the way, they don't tell us who is now ahead of Hamas because to do so would be equivalent with a death sentence. And they know that. So they staged this. So they started leaving, releasing these hostages and they thought that they were going to stir up the crowd and they did. And everybody should take a, a deep breath because everybody says the poor people of Gaza, they were trying to get at the hostages and Hamas of all people were trying to restrain them. It was deja vu 10-7-12 when they spit on the hostages. So the, the people of Gaza are, are not innocent. So anyway, they thought this was going to be a big propaganda. So they got all their fatigue, they came out of their tunnels. They're now they're, I mean, they're hiding as cowards in their tunnels and they're shooting as civilians who disobey them. And now with the international press, they come back out and they get their big six footers with their camouflage and their mat. They don't show. The only people on stage that you could see are the hostages. They had mask on because they know that if they show their face and they were involved in October 7, the Israelis have a registry now and that's a death sentence for their murdering. And so they did all this bragadocio. Oh, and but it's starting to backfire because, like Trump said, that the three hostages look like they came out of Auschwitz, the Holocaust. They deliberately denied them of air. They had dank air, they had bad food, moldy bread, they didn't get any sunlight, they were emaciated. And so it, it didn't achieve their political propaganda agendas. Everybody was shocked and angry at them. Then they regrouped and said, well, we've got to delay this because A, there's three choices and they're not mutually exclusive. We got a lot more that we have to release and they are in bad shape and worse than these. So we got to fatten them up or we got to do something. Or two, there's not very many left. They're dead. But we haven't told anybody that. And we're getting to the point now where we don't have very many left. Or three, we got all our chief killers and murderers and terrorists, the guys that we wanted out, and the rest of them are just collateral dam. We don't even care if the Israelis don't release arrest. We got the main murderers. But what they don't understand is not Joe Biden as president. So Trump gets on the phone, no doubt with Netanyahu, and says, at noon, all bets are off. You do what you want. We're not going to tell you what to do. What do you need? You need bunker busters. You need. You tell me what. But you can't deal with these people. And they are losing the propaganda war. And I think when Trump said this admittedly outrageous thing at the beginning that the people of Gaza should move out and then they should clear the rubble and rebuild it like Dubai or something, and then let people in that are not related with terrorism or have a passport control and have an international city, not a U N, not a US, not an Israeli, and then let people come back in, but not Hamas supporters. Everybody said that was, I think, aoc, and this is colonialism, this is genocide. But then people started looking at the rubble and there's some Palestinians who say, I can't say it, but they're going to build me a beautiful apartment building and I don't have to deal give 1 15, 15% of my salary to Hamas. So that is what he was intending. And it's kind of like a subversive idea that he throws out there. And he. It's like planting something in the ground and now it's growing and they don't. And it's going to have a lot of ramifications. He was meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan and typical Trump, if you're King Abdullah and you're sitting there in front of the press and then he starts mentioning the Gaza plan right in front of Jordan will take. And the guy goes, yeah, well, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's he supposed to say? Take your billions of dollars of foreign aid and stick it? Is that what he's supposed to say? Excuse the language. He's supposed to say that to the President. United States. No. I mean, no, we don't need your Black Hawk helicopter parts. We don't want them anymore. We don't need them. We don't need aircraft parts from you. We're Jordan. No, he's not going to say that.
- [24:12]
Sammy Wink
Yes, but does he care if he's less than honest with the President of the United States? I mean, it's just like the ceasefire not being honored by Hamas.
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Guest Speaker
This is part of a larger theme. The United States is not yet done with. It is in decline. But it was so rich and powerful, as Milton Friedman say, that decadence, there's a lot of rot in a decline, declining empire. And we are still very strong. We don't know how strong we are. And this President comes in and all of a sudden he says, this is this landscape. Canada, $50 billion high tariff. Mexico 170 billion tariff, 63 billion in remittances, 20 billion in cartel profits. Europe, 500 billion surplus. Is it because we're weak and soft and on. No, it's because they raise these tariffs. So we're going to. We're going to do. I don't know. That's terrible. That's horrible. And he's. What he's trying to say is if you make trade tariff neutral and you pump another 2 or 3 million barrels of oil so that we're exporting natural gas to Europe and you get people in Taiwan and people in South Korea and people in Japan and you tell them that your investments will be safe and you don't have to deal with the Chinese and we will buy your products and you build them here, you've got a potential to make the economy take off like a rocket. And when you look at revenues under his tax cuts of 2017, they went like this. If you can get revenues with deregulation and keep the tax cuts and get all this investment and you get 3 to 4%. I think it was announced today, it's 3% economic growth. Go like that and you can cut back spending. So you're running instead of a trillion and a half, maybe the first year, a half trillion, the next year, a quarter trillion, and then get to maybe close to a balanced budget. This economy will grow like it did under Reagan, will go 6 or 7%. And of course, you can't now, now the left is attacking Donald Trump because there were fewer jobs created in the latest economic abort in the Department of Labor and there was higher inflation. And now we're learning that if you've been in power for four years, you're not culpable. But if somebody's been in power for three weeks and hasn't and they've been blocking their initiatives, then they're responsible. Another thing, you can't trust the Department of Labor statistics because we know now that every time under Biden or Obama they issue a jobs report, then it's usually before the midterms, it's very good. Or the general election. Then finally the correction come. Oh, under sober and judicious second thoughts, we went over our figures and, oh, they're a little bit, they were a little bit optimistic. We have to downgrade the actual number of jobs and the inflation rate was, well, it was kind of a little higher than we thought. We all know that. I'm not paranoid, everybody. They do it all the time. And so with Republicans, they do it just the opposite. So that's what this whole thing is about, that this deep administrative bureaucratic state is a, I don't know what you call a clearinghouse, a sinecure for left wing retired officials, politicians, ossified bureaucrats. And they're all left wing. And they try to, as Anonymous did during their first term of Trump, they try to fight within. And this time they're going to, they're declaring war on them and they're screaming to high heaven. But they're. We're in a cultural war and we'll see who wins.
- [27:51]
Sammy Wink
Well, I have a feeling that Elon Musk and Donald Trump will win by sheer.
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Guest Speaker
As long as they keep going.
- [27:57]
Sammy Wink
Possible by sheer presence. But they're going to win because the argument's better. The American people. How can you argue against transparency? I mean, that's what they need to.
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Guest Speaker
Remember what the great African American pitcher said. Satchel Page. Joe Biden called him a Negro. Picture. He was a very great guy. And he had been discriminated, so he didn't get into the big leagues to his late 30s, early 40s. And he said, wonderful picture. He said, don't look back. Are you getting too old? Don't look back. And they got to keep pushing because the more anger that they incur, the more statistics they release. And they're making the Democrats say, we really want that money for Wuhan. We. Because they don't. They don't differentiate. They don't say, there's nobody in the Democratic side that said comic, transgender comic book. Some guy in a forklift from Ohio has to pay. That's not right. Why do we. Why does a waitress in Seattle have to pay for. Why does she have to pay for Politico? That doesn't make any sense. We're not going to do that anymore. And they don't make that argument. They just say, oh, he's a fascist. He's Hitler. He's a fascist. It's not going to work if they keep pushing because the more they find, wait till they get to the big place. And that is, we all know, Medicare and Social Security.
- [29:22]
Sammy Wink
All right, Victor, we will take a break and come back to talk a little bit about illegal immigration. So stay with us and we'll be right back.
- [29:35]
Victor Davis Hanson
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- [32:54]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back. So Victor, we've hearing a lot about Tom Holman's ICE is picking up all sorts of illegal aliens that have committed lots of crimes. And it seems like, okay, so they already kind of knew where they were enough so that they can go out and swat them, run SWAT operations to capture them. And we had another one this morning, Texas. Houston, Texas. They capture this guy who's committed tons of crimes. And I think what our audience is probably thinking as they read that, and I am too, is they, they knew basically where these people all were. And Joe Biden's administration just didn't go out and capture criminals, I mean criminals with large long rap sheets. And I was wondering, can you explain that to us?
- [33:50]
Guest Speaker
Yeah, I can. So when Joe Biden destroyed the border, certain South America and Latin American countries said this is a golden opportunity to do two things. A pay the United States back for being a Yankee imperialist and B, saving us a lot of money by emptying our mental hospitals and our jails. So they began sending 500,000 people. I'm talking about Venezuela, Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, all of these countries. Chile, we had Chile. Illegal alien criminals. And Peru, Ecuador, they're all, they were all coming up. And then the Biden team said to themselves, we're just going to open the borders. And when people started to complain about that, whoa, Lincoln Riley was murdered, or this woman was raped, or this person was beat up, the La Raza group, the immigration radicals, the aclu, they all said, keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it. Because they needed an argument. So the argument was this, if you go get that murderer or that Colombian that had raped five people in Colombia, or that person who's been deported seven times for felonies, and he's in his home and you break in and you grab him, there might be somebody over there who's his girlfriend or his mother or so, and they're here illegally. And that's not fair because then you're going to ask their status and they might have to be deported because basically they're saying, we're going to break the law. We're going to ignore federal. We're neo confederates. We believe in South Carolina, 1832, nullification. So we're, we're renegades, secessionists, basically. But it's going to, they're going to use these criminals and they're going to get some good people in the process. So we would rather have the 500 kill, let them go kill, rape, assault, than deport somebody who has not been a criminal. That was their theory. And so then they deliberately. And then the second part of the theory is then they got together and said, now Mayorkas has got kind of make sure he says, Alejandro, Alejandro Mayorkas. So he was a Cuban aristocrat, but he was going to pose as a Latino, and he was going to lie to everybody and say, the border is secure, the border is secure. And they would say it was kind of like the CNN tape during the rioting, or it was at the msnbc, the demonstrations were largely peaceful. And then the buildings are in flames behind their head. Well, they were looking at all of this. So they said, alejandro can lie very well. He'll just keep saying it and they may impeach him, but just tell him that. And our left wing, MSNBC and NBC, pbs, npr, they will lie and they will get the narrative. And that's what they did for four years. So they knew what they were doing. And now Trump comes in and he says, these people are running wild and I'm going to send them all back. And these dictators think he's Joe Biden. You're not going to send them back. You treated them terrible. They came back in handcuffs. And he just says, okay, we're 25% tariff, it'll go up to 50 any minute. And then they said, well, we're going to have a trade war. And they thought, oh, we have an economy 1% the size, basically the size of Fresno county or something. Right, so we're not going to fight you. After we took a deep breath and so then the next. That didn't work. So now they're arresting people and you. And they knew that where they were all the time, these were the loyal, law abiding ICE border people. They said they were hitting their head against the wall. They were telling their supervisors, that guy is a murderer. And we know he's an Aurora. We know those people are in Manhattan, we know they're in the Bronx, we know they're in Fresno. And the boss would come back and said, I'm not going to get fired. If we arrest those guys, they'll wait till it all blows over and they'll fire me. And now it's the opposite. Trump is saying, we will fire you if you do not arrest them and follow the law. So that's what's happening. So now they have the last ditch effort. Remember, these people are insidious. They never give up. They remind me of the Tokian character, Smeagol, Gollum. You can't get rid of him. I mean, you know what I mean, he's like a leftist. You can throw him off a cliff, you can make fun of him, they can threaten to kill. You can, they can't get rid of him. He's just indestructible and that's what they are. So I mean they're, they're inert like Gollum was and they're weak and they don't have real power, but they're insidious. So now the idea is the left comes up, well, what are we going to do now when they're really, they got the names and they're deporting all these rapists and murderers that we champion. Ah, I know what we'll do. Remember all those renegade FBI guys that were tipping us off and remember all the guys in ICE that were left wing. Let's just tell the Nortegnos, Serenos, tren people and M13 that they're coming and then they can't arrest them. So in other words, they're going to break a few eggs on our nice open borders omelette. They'll kill a few Border patrol. We don't care. That was their attitude. Pam Bondi has said that if they find the people who leak them, they're going to charge them with a felony. She's got another thing very quickly remember, is Joe Biden set these precedents. He set the precedents that you can ignore the law that you can impound funds, that you can attack the courts, that you can ignore the Supreme Court. And he also set, set the precedent that the attorney general can talk to the president, as Merrick Garland did, too. And the president and the attorney general can do pretty much whatever they want because we saw that with Merrick Garland. I'm not saying that Pam Bondi is going to do that, but they have expanded the venue of the attorney general. And the old day was actually, I apologize that Barack Obama broke the wall. He called Eric Holder, my Eric Holder said, I'm the president's wingman. And he, he disobeyed a. The first time in a, a attorney general in the history of the United States was held in contempt. He refused a subpoena from Congress, which has put Mr. Navarro and Steve Bannon in jail. Eric Holdered that. But the point is that there is no boundary anymore because Biden and Obama broke it. So Pam Bondi is going to work very closely to go after these people that leak. And they also set another precedent with the J6 people. They said, you know what, if you are breaking federal law and you're doing it in a conspiratorial manner, we're going to arrest you. Maybe we'll put you in solitary and we'll kind of think, kind of what will we charge them with? 2 years, 3 years. It's a horrible thing. But they did that. So now they are scared to. What I'm getting at, everybody is I'm not condoning it. What I'm saying is they are enraged and terrified because they know, and I've said this before, if they were Donald Trump and they had suffered as Donald Trump did from them and they were now in power, they know what they would do. They would go after all of their enemies. So they project that onto Donald Trump. Oh, he's just like us. He's going to go clean house like we would, especially after what we did to him. But I don't think he is. He's going to follow the law.
- [41:46]
Sammy Wink
I think. I think Pam Bondi also is creating a weaponization task force. So she wants to highlight the.
- [41:54]
Guest Speaker
Well, everybody's saying now when we're listening to this, I know they're going to say, victor, Victor, Victor, if you don't do anything, they'll do it again. So it's not revenge, it's not weaponization to hold the people responsible who weaponize the government. So if you find people during the Trump people, in other words, if you find emails that on the same week, and I think it was in the same 24 hour period that Fannie Willis's Nathan Wade Paramore was in with the White House counsel, the day that Mr. Colangelo resigned from the DOJ to go work for Alvin Bragg, the day that Joe Biden appointed Jack Smith a federal prosecutor. And there are internal communications to that effect. Then they might go after racketeering or conspiracy. And I think that's a fair investigation.
- [42:49]
Sammy Wink
Absolutely. So Victor, let's turn to another very interesting topic, especially for a lot of people who've been wondering about this for decades. They are going to declassify files on JFK, Martin Luther King Jr. And Anna Paulina Luna, who is representative, I think from Florida, if I'm not wrong. She's gotten out in front of it all. I think she's part of the people who are declassifying this and said that she thinks from what she's seen that there were two shooters in the JFK assassination. I thought that was interesting. But your thoughts on the declassification the Warren.
- [43:31]
Guest Speaker
Everybody understands the Warren Commission Report, given that their reluctance to be candid about certain things that were geostrategic. Remember that everybody said that all these presidential assassinations are always right wing people. They're usually left wing people. The Puerto Ricans that tried to kill the Congress people in the 50 left wing. The people who squeaky from, tried to kill Gerald Ford, left wing. The two Trump would be assassins. They were left wing or they dealt with left wing. And Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist and he went down to the Mexican embassy and met somebody from Cuba. So I think why they withheld it was there was a feeling or a fear that the CIA under Kennedy had tried to overthrow the Castro government at the Bay of Pigs. And they were not sure whether Castro had been talking to people from Cuba or had enlisted help from people to Cuba. That was the, that was at. I'm not saying that's the narrative now, but at the time people said the Warren Report did not discuss exactly where Oswald was, what he was doing, why he shot John Kennedy. And the answer was the CIA and The FBI do not want to tell people because they might feel that they're culpable by trying to overthrow the country. And then there was the other conspiracy theories that Bobby Kennedy or somebody might have had. Mafioso. He, Judith Exner, was one of the girlfriends of a Mafioso that was involved with the Kennedy brothers. So maybe there was something that he either got on the wrong side of the union or somebody used, I should say the mafia controlled union Teamsters at that time, and Jimmy Hoffa disappeared, etc. So there was some talk. And I don't know if that's going to be in the records or not, but that's why it was sealed. The other thing is there's some pretty graphic autopsy reports and photographs of Kennedy. I was 10 years old. I remember it was 1963, November 22nd. I was in fourth grade. Mrs. Peistrup's room. I can tell you the exact second it happened. I'm just thinking of that right now. I was in class and we had an African American student, Ruth Bottoms. I remember her. She's a good friend of mine. And Mrs. Peistrup said, we have just heard that the President of the United States has been shot. And Ruth Bottoms got up and started crying in front of everybody and said, this is so terrible. He was my favorite president. And then everybody started crying. And then me being a nerd, I said, we have to get to the bottom of this, Ms. Pystrop. And so I got on the bus and I was dropped off at my grandmother's house and I ran out and the Fresno B came at 3:00 in the afternoon, the afternoon paper. And I ran out and I got it and I took it and lied on. My crippled aunt goes, victor, read it to me, read it to me. So I read it to her and. And we were all very upset and went for four days, four days in November. That was four days of mourning. And so it was a terrible moment. And we don't. We never got the full. I don't think we're going to get the full story, but we're going to get closer to the full story.
- [47:02]
Sammy Wink
Do you think that there. What do you think of the argument that there were two shooters? Didn't.
- [47:07]
Guest Speaker
Well, there was always the grassy knoll theory and people heard too many sh. For the amount of casings that he did. But. But when you look at the. It was an Italian. I think it was a 7.5 millimeter. I can't remember. It was an Italian bold action action that he'd ordered online with a scope. But he was a very good. He was a. He was a classified as a sharpshooter in the military. And for years they would. Different groups would take a kind of like a railroad track and they would put a cart on to simulate car the same size. And they put somebody. And they would have the same angle. And then they said, can you shoot? Is it three shots? I can't remember what one going the fatal. The first shot did not kill him. It went through this area and was a clean wound. It might have disabled him. And then the second shot's the one that hit him. And then there was. There might have been a third shot. I think Governor Connally was hit and I think that was from the first shot going through him. But anyway, people tried to see if you could replicate that in a minute. And they did. They found sharpshooters in the Marine Corps, in the army. And there was a number of studies afterwards and said, you're Lehivre Oswald. This is the moving car. Can you take this old Italian and shoot? And they could. So we don't really know what happened. And anybody who says that the Warren Report was absolutely factual is wrong. And anybody who says that the Warren Report was completely bogus and conspiracy is wrong. Somewhere in the middle, they were worried about implications if they divulge all the theories of who shot Kennedy for its geostrate. It was a Cuban missile crisis and everything it was. There was things that were going on that we didn't want to know about, supposedly. And Trump, you know, this is very ironic, isn't it? Because he's supposedly not transparent. He's a dictator, he's an autocrat, he's Hitler. And he is the most transparent president. He's letting everything out. He talks at the stream of consciousness. Anything on his mind. He's met with more reporters in three weeks than Biden did in two years. So he's the most. He's completely transparent to sometimes to his disadvantage.
- [49:31]
Sammy Wink
Well, Victor, I would like to welcome back a. A sponsor to our show. If you've been with us at all for six months, you probably are familiar with our new favorite brew, Wired to Fish Coffee. As you know, their delicious, smooth coffee. Their cough. Sorry. As you know, their coffee is both delicious and smooth. But more importantly, they are a company with an amazing commitment to give back. Wired to Fish coffee gives back 25% of profits, 25% to conservation, clean water and things like missions and evangelical outreach, from river cleanups and initiatives for fish habitat to programs that give people in slums Clean water and spread the word about Jesus. Wired2Fish Coffee is in it to make the world a better place. They also have just launched a medium roast decaf and their much loved brew is now available in two pounds and five pound bags for avid coffee lovers. Join us and enjoy your coffee while making a difference in the world and join a community of like minded coffee lovers. Subscribe and save today and enjoy discounted coffee and free freight and just give this great brand a try with discount code. Just news or just the news for 10% off your first order, head over to Wired Number 2 Fish Coffee today and make this year a year you align your coffee with your values. So Victor, I wanted to then now turn to a short topic here. Dolce Gabbard was just confirmed as the Director of National Intelligence and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that. I'm really happy that she got it.
- [51:28]
Guest Speaker
And that they well Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins and Senator from South Carolina Tillotson, I don't forgot his name. But they had been holdouts wavering and they after the big thing was it was kind of like are they going to withhold the the flood waters? And they thought that Pete Hegseth was going to be the dam that would stop the Trump flood. And when Pete Hexseth got confirmed by the vote of J.D. vance that meant they needed to get Ford. They needed three defections and one more because advance could break he was and they all they moaned and they got angry but that's exactly what Camilla Harris did. She bragged about it more so than Vance to break these ties. So after Pete Hexeth then the momentum was with the Trump people and I think they nominated Gates a because he was going to be censored when the they didn't want that report being published about his extracurricular activities. He was going to take a lot of flack. Then they're going to say, say oh I, I guess he just can't get confirmed. He'll have to quit. And then they the Republicans got him out of the House and then they paid some IOUs and then the Democrats got a scalp right. But after that they drew the line. And what I mean drew the line they went to Susan Collins and they went to Murkowski and they said you know what? We're going to run ads against you. Maybe you're going to run for election reelection or not, but we're going to run ads to you. This is what I'm imagining this but people have talked to me about it and we're going to show your your votes for Pete Buttigieg. You voted for Lloyd Austin and Pete Buttigieg and you voted against Betsy DeVos. Can you imagine that? And she was a wonderful secretary of Education. So you want that or do you do and you want to be in line. You want to be in the same league with these hysterical people that are screaming like Maisie Hirono. Women must be believed. That woman and Elizabeth Warren, you want to be in that because that's who you're going to be with. You're on the Pete Buttigieg is okay. And they folded and so now they're all going to be confirmed. And as I said earlier, I've met her a couple of times and I spent an evening with her when we were joint speakers in the same billet. And she was the most polite, considerate person, public figure I've met. She was, this was very, she wasn't just a congressman from Hawaii. She was at one time the left wing's future of the Democratic. She was I think, Democratic National Convention vice president. And she was on that debate stage entangled with all of those people, Elizabeth especially Kamala Harris. She kind of destroyed her. And so this was a major defection and they were not going to forgive her for that. But she got confirmed and RFK will get confirmed and Cash Patel will get confirmed and Jay Bachario will get confirmed. Another thing that's happening is the eighth floor of the FBI, they're starting to clean out the and the NIH announced that you're not going to be you universities out there. I, I, I this morning I came back from Stanford, so I'm kind of tired. I just got up very early in the morning. I drove my four hours and they are insane. They are so angry. That provost sent us all the letter. We're going to lose $184 million. And I said to a colleague, did you see that? Yesterday it was announced. He said, wow, Stanford can only charge 15% on all the hundreds of millions of dollars they get. And they were charging like 50 and up. And I just said, well, every culture has a term for that. The Greeks called it nemesis. Ancient India called it karma. The vernacular in the United States said payback's a bitch. The old 19th century motto was what goes around comes around. But if you take a wonderful scholar like Jay bacharya with a MD and a PhD and you demonize him because he co signed the Great Barrington Declaration, said that he questioned the efficacy of the quarantines, he questioned the efficacy of the boosters that they, he didn't say don't take them. He just said, I don't think they'll stop you from being infected or infectious. And they tried to destroy him. And we have that with Fauci's email. When he goes after him, well, now he is the, the omega is now the alpha. And so what I'm getting at is that they're going to be confirmed and somebody's going to ask Kash Patel, did you fire all these FBI people? I'm not confirmed. It happened before. And they're going to say to Jay, did you do this? 15% is going to kill little kids and all that stuff. They always say it wasn't confirmed. In other words, they're doing a lot of the necessary work before the confirmation. The acting heads of these agencies, which is smart, but the main thing is I'm on the Bradley board. And when we give, we're a philanthropic non profit and when we disperse grants to individuals within organizations, sometimes that person has an office or power. If you, if you give it to Heritage or AI or Public Policy or Pepperdine University and you give that, most of them allow it just to go straight to them. A few say, well, we have to get 10 or 15% because they have an office and power. But no one ever would give, we would never give a grant for 30, 40, 50%. That's what these universities are doing. They're shaking down the federal government. And you know what they're also doing. So when the Gates foundation or these other private NGOs give them grants for medical research, they don't charge the same amount of overhead they do the government. And that's coming out. And so yes, Stanford, I have a little message for Stanford University, my alma mater and also where I work. If you're worried about a $183 million shortfall on your grants, you have about 16,000 graduate students and undergraduates and you have, according to the Wall street journal, not Victor, 15,000 administrative staff. I think about a quarter of them are di. Why don't you just allow them just have a hiring freeze and say we would encourage you with it, like the Doge. We'll have you a six month buyout or a year. We will pay your salary and then go and you will find the 183 million. You'll be leaner and the faculty will love you. The left wing people will do the following. They will scream, they will yell, this is Donald Trump. And then privately, when they go to the faculty lounge, they're going to Go, wow, that DI guy's not going to call me up about my syllabus. Oh, wow. They're not going to look at my grading patterns and say that I'm systematically racist. Oh my God. We're going to get the SAT back and competitive valuations of gpa. We're going to get good students based on merit. And I can go back and assign seven authors in a set of two. And I can actually, instead of giving 80%, that's what it is, 70 to 80% at Stanford A's, I can go back and give, you know, 20% A's and they're not going to call me racist or sexist or transphobic. So they're going to be happy. So that's all they have to do. But they won't do that. They'll scream and yell and we're supposed to feel sorry. Everybody shed one crocodile tear and move on.
- [59:32]
Sammy Wink
I like that. The dean told Donald Trump and Doge how much money they could keep from Stanford. 180 million. Way to go.
- [59:41]
Guest Speaker
I mean, he just said that we, we lost $183 million. And I'm thinking, well, would the office still be there? Would the lab still be there? Were you the only funder of these government labs? Didn't you have these people teaching and working and they had all sorts of grants from all sorts of different people and how many of your grants were not? Is this particular procedure a good cure for breast cancer? Is there a new way of teaching, reaching people with terminal bladder cancer versus was this an underserved community that was not giving the booster as promptly? Was this zip code? That's what you were doing? You know, you were doing that because I've been reading some of the grants, especially from Stanford, and there was DEI up, just up and up. No, no cover up, just blatant. This is what it is, we're proud of it. And now they have to pay the penalty.
- [60:40]
Sammy Wink
It's pay the penalty.
- [60:42]
Guest Speaker
It's really ironic because I, I know Jay Bacharia a little bit and I've watched him and Scott Atlas be the targets of the biggest bullies in the world. So before you again, everybody, before you feel sorry for Harvard, Yale, Stanford, they practice anti Semitism. There was a big report at Stanford. It makes it pretty much as bad as Columbia or Yale. 900 pages written by colleague of mine, Larry Diamonds. Very factual, man of the left, very disinterested, systematic anti Semitism. We can see it on campus. They had the Hamas people breaking the rules for almost a year out in the quad with their camp and nobody did anything. They trashed the president's office. They ran wild. And now people are saying, you know, it's a whole new era. It is. I was on campus the last three days, the last six weeks, pretty much every week. And it's just, I can't. Everybody's. You mean there's no DI well, you know, I was always kind of against it. Oh, there's a, there's a meeting in the, in the, there's a meeting in the department. How to protest di. Oh, I have a doctor's appointment. I can't make it. I just can't make that di. It's horrible that they canceled, but. Or the more candid. I don't want to get on a list that I was against dei. They're kind of employing the same tactics that we did or. Wow. I don't think I'm going to go out and say from the river to sea because Donald Trump said he's going to go after anti Semitism and I'm not going to call for the destruction. I think I'll take my Hamas scarf off that I was wearing and my little green flag because I might be promoting terrorism. Oh, I have a student visa. I'm from Dubai. And I've got to get this Stanford MBA because I got to get a five hundred thousand dollar salary. I don't want to be suspended because if I'm suspended, they have to turn my name into the State Department. And I'll be going back to Dubai, which is a beautiful place, but it's not a place where you can say you hate the government of your own country. And the nice thing about the United States is that they're stupid. So we come over here and we call them racists and we demonstrate, we tear down Jewish posters, we light fires, we desecrate monuments, we spray paint colonnades that are historic. And then we say, screw you, America. You have no right to criticize us. We're your guests. We hate you. We hate you so much we don't want to go back home. That's what it is.
- [63:19]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, absolutely. So, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the prisoners that are being released to Donald Trump. Stay with us and we'll be back.
- [63:34]
Victor Davis Hanson
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Guest Speaker
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Guest Speaker
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Sammy Wink
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Guest Speaker
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- [65:37]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. You can find Victor on his social media. He is on X and his handle is D. Hansen and he's also on Facebook at Hanson's Morning cup, so come join him there. Well, we got a prisoner back from the Russians, Mark Fogel, who was there for about three and a half years. He got arrested under Biden for having medical cannabis with him.
- [66:05]
Guest Speaker
I think it was. Yeah, I wouldn't if I was Mark Fogle and he was a teacher that had been all over the world, yeah, I don't if I went into the Soviet Union or China, first of all, I wouldn't go, excuse me, to Russia or China. I wouldn't go in those countries. But if I did, I would go through every inch. If I had an arthritis, I would take every Gumby out. I would take every Vaping out. I would take anything that had anything to do with a illicit drug, even if it was illegal in The United States legal here, because what the Soviet Union did, what Russia does now, what China does, what Iran does, they have criminals in the West, Europe, the United States, they have spies in the west and they are convicted and they're sitting in jail. So they are scanning everybody who goes into those countries and they are X rating every inch of their luggage, their person, and they are trying to think of any little misdemeanor that they can find so that they can say that these are Internet international drug smugglers or drug dealers. And then they hold them until we get upset because we have a different standard of humanity. And then they exchange that person. Donald Trump didn't say who was released, but we know it's going to be some big Russian spy or criminal cartel or Russian mafia, somebody. That's horrible. And then that's what they do. So the only way to stop it is two things. You can do the cruel, callous way, but maybe it's not so cool. Callous. Just say, don't go to those places, because if you do go there, they're going to arrest you for any. And then we're not. We're going to have to let in, let out terrible people. And that's on you, not on us. We can't help you. Or once they get caught, just, you know, just say to Putin, okay, if you want to do that, it's not symmetrical, but we're going to take it out on you. And Trump apparently did all that. He's threatened tariffs, he threatened everything. But in the end, I have a feeling that there'll be a much more nefarious figure let out than a medical marijuana transporter. And that's, that's what Putin does.
- [68:29]
Sammy Wink
They said that the, that there was somebody that was being released, but they wouldn't give his name. He's supposed to give his name today.
- [68:37]
Guest Speaker
On Wednesday, broadcasting today, but maybe they will. But we know from Biden we let out some international gun runners, weapon illegal weapons dealers. They were terrible people. He paid around $6 billion for hostages. That's what they do. They appeal to Western sense of humanity. And then we, we're a free country, so we don't tell people. If you go to the following six or seven places, you'll be likely to be arrested for the minor, the most minor. So don't go. If I were Trump, I would just put a travel ban on all those countries. Don't. You can't go to China, you can't go to Russia, you can't go to Iran, you cannot go to Cuba. Any country that does that and see what happens.
- [69:22]
Sammy Wink
Well, our last topic for today is Fort Bragg has become Fort Bragg once again. So during the Biden administration they called it Fort Liberty and now they're changing it back. Pete Hegseth says to Fort Bragg and I was wondering your thoughts on this renaming of the renaming.
- [69:42]
Guest Speaker
Well, Pete Hegseth had a insurmountable problem. He comes in and he's got generations of Special Forces people who were trained at Fort Bragg. So if you talk to those guys, they always talk when I was at Bragg or I met him at Bragg. So Bragg was institutionalized. And so then Obama came. Excuse me. Obama raised the issue first, but they didn't dare touch Bragg because of the support. Biden came in and after the George Floyd there was momentum. So they said they were going to change the name of Southern generals that these bases are named after. And they got the usual. Petraeus came out, they got all the generals, Petraeus came out, McChrystal came out. You got to change the name because it was named after Braxton Bragg. Braxton Bragg. Everybody was a typical Confederate general, but he was not very good. He wasn't, you can call all these people slave owners legitimately and racist. But he didn't have the brains of Nathan Bedford Forrest. After the Battle of Shiloh, Nathan Bedford Forrest almost hit Braxton Bragg. He said, we won the battle on the first day and you lost it on the second. And you, we had the Yankees up against the river, Tennessee River. If we had just gone into dark, we would have annihilated them. And now you let them live and General Buell is here that we leave them and now we're going to lose. And they didn't listen to him. So, and there I could go on about Braxton Bragg during Sherman's March and everything. He was just completely incompetent and he was stubborn and he was mean and nobody liked him. But when they started after World War I to make these bases because they knew that after the war we needed military bases. And the south was depressed after Reconstruction and then Jim Crow and the stigma of the Civil War. And it was, it never recovered really to the same degree from the Civil War as the north did. It had been devastated. So the idea was also these, these were one party states, all of them, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Louisiana. By that I mean there was only the Democratic Party, whereas There was a two party system from 1870 to the present in the North. But in the south you didn't really have a Republican party till the 1970s. So what that meant is that people like James O. Eastland or Strom Thurmond, they would be elected every year. And the Senate and the House were based on seniority. So when you looked at the Senate's Armed Services Committee or the House Armed Services Committee or the House Appropriations or the House Ways and Means, they were all Southerners and they were segregationists. And so they said. And they were all against the federal government spending what they called internal improvements that goes back to the Civil War. So they said, we've got to rearm and we can't. We've got to have bases. And so the Southerners said, well, you know, you should have them in Southern regions where it's warm so you can. You can deploy in the winter and train. You don't want it Minnesota, Alaska, you know, North Dakota. So we want them in places like the Carolinas or Georgia or Florida or Texas. And they said, okay. And then they said, well, you guys are segregationist. And they said, okay, we're going to hold up the. We're not going to arm at all. So the. The compromise was that they made a number. Fort Hood, Fort Bragg. And they named them after Confederate generals. Unfortunately, they didn't name them after people who were good, like Fort Lee. They did have a Fort Lee, but not the big ones. And they didn't name it after Long street because he had worked for the Northerners after the war. General. He was a brilliant general, great guy, worked for the Northern. He was a reconciliationist. He wanted to recall. So they named him after mediocre German. So then we come along under Biden and the George Floyd, and we gotta say, get rid of four. That's our segregations. They had a point. And then everybody looked at it and they said, Pete Hexith, when I met, he had a dilemma. It was like, well, it's so ingrained in the American mystique. If you're a special force, brag, brag. I went to Bragg. I was. I don't want to change the name. I want to go back to Bragg, but I can't, because Braxton Bragg was an ignoramus and he was an artifact of this weird compromise when they built the bases. Ah, I got a solution. We'll go through the whole list of heroes in all of our wars, and there must be somebody named Bragg. And they found a person in World War II had fight, fought heroically, a private, and. And in the Battle of Bulge. And they said, it's named after. Not that brag, but this brag. So they're good. They changed the official name to his name and they just released it. And I probably will have a statue of him. And it's not. And every time the left says you're racist, you're. It's not Braxton Bragg. You're the racist. You keep wanting to honor. It's a different man. It's a man that fought heroically in World War II. And because we're an egalitarian society, we were honoring somebody who was not a general. So that's square the circle. Brilliant little compromise.
- [75:25]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, that was a brilliant little compromise.
- [75:27]
Guest Speaker
Hexeth is really coming into his own. He was in Europe at a defense conference of like minded defense ministers. And it's so funny because he's not a grandee, you know what I mean? He's tattooed and young and buff and they, and TV guy and they were all deferring to him, like, you know, we need the United States, Pete. And then he was working out. I don't know if you saw the thing that he decided to go down into the gym with the army. He's out jogging and he's making heroes out of all these special big guys that are muscular and he's out lifting weights and he's young. It's a very different, it's very different from past secretaries. And it's going to be very hard to criticize that because it's very egalitarian, populist. And that's what's so weird about all this, because you want to say Donald Trump is a billionaire and he's for all the aristocrats and the billionaires. Billionaires, billionaires. But then you look at them, it's like Elon Musk is. He says, I'm autistic and he wears jeans and he has terrible little houses he lives in. And then you look at Tulsi Gabbert, she's sui generis. I don't know. And then there's Robert Kennedy and he's demanding, you know, we think about the poor little guy and not big pharma. And they're defending big pharma, you know, and, and then you get Pete Hexeth and he's, he's not going, he's not coming in from Raytheon like Lloyd Austin. He's not going back to General Dynamics, Lockheed. And Jay Bacharya is a apostate that took on the whole nih. It's just very hard to categorize them as the usual Mitt Romney, wealthy white male aristocrat, wealthy guy who didn't talk to his garbage man. And put his dog on the top of a car. You can't because they're hoi.
- [77:33]
Sammy Wink
There's something very refreshing about that.
- [77:35]
Guest Speaker
They're hoi polloi. I shouldn't say they are hoi polloi. You can't say the hoi polloi because hoi means the. They're not the. The polloi. They're hoi polloi.
- [77:44]
Sammy Wink
Alright, Victoria, so this is the end of our show and we'd like to thank our audience for coming. Make sure you note that Victor is currently on YouTube and on Rumble. So we are doing video casts and they will be. They are distributed both to YouTube and to Rumble. So we're welcome to come visit us there. And thank you everybody.
- [78:08]
Guest Speaker
Was to behave today in the Farm Studio, the new Farm Studio. The dogs, the Queenslands, were on their good behavior. The spray. The operator who our friend who was spraying the almonds was quieter. His spray rig detoured around the house.
- [78:30]
Sammy Wink
And this is going to be published on Valentine's. Do you have any big plans for Valentine's Day?
- [78:35]
Guest Speaker
If I'd have known that from the beginning, I would have been kinder and softer, kinder, gentler. George H.W. bush figure.
- [78:45]
Sammy Wink
Well, have a good Valentine's Day as it is, and to all of our audience, too.
- [78:49]
Guest Speaker
Yes. Happy Valentine's Day, everybody.
- [78:52]
Sammy Wink
This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen and we're signing off.
- [78:55]
Guest Speaker
Thank you for listening again.
- [78:59]
Victor Davis Hanson
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