← The Victor Davis Hanson Show
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- [00:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
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- [01:34]
Sammy Wink
Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. This is our Friday news roundup and there's lots going on this week. So we're going to be talking about the big beautiful Bill Monda, me, the New York mayoral candidate and two fatwas put out against Netanyahu and Donald Trump. So stay with us and we'll be back with those stories. Hello everyone. Like you, I'm not into chasing trends, but I am all about stuff that fits right, feels good and comfortable and actually lasts. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. Their lightweight layers and high quality staples have become my everyday essentials. Quince has the kind of stuff you'll actually wear on repeat, like breathable flow knit polos, crisp cotton shirts and comfortable lightweight pants that somehow work for both weekend hangs and dressed up dinners. Best part, Everything with Quince is half the cost of similar brands. By working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen, Quince gives you luxury pieces without the markups and Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. My favorite piece for the summer months is a linen vest from Quince, which I can dress up or dress down in the typical Quince Fashion. Super cute and fun fashions. Revamp your closet with Quince. You won't regret it. I certainly haven't. Stick to the staples that last with elevated essentials from quince. Go to quince.com Victor for for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U I N C E.com Victor to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com Victor and we'd like to thank Quince for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.
- [03:44]
Victor Davis Hanson
This is unconstitutional. Have you heard some biased journalists, maybe on a podcast or a YouTube show say this? Probably. Do you just take their word for it? Which begs another question. Have you ever taken the time to read and understand for yourself the meaning of the United States Constitution? Most haven't. That's why I'm excited that Hillsdale College is offering a brand new free online course called the Federalist. This terrific course explains how the United States Constitution established a government strong enough to to secure the rights of citizens and safe enough to wield that power. And today it's our responsibility to pay attention, to be vigilant, as our founders might say, in order to preserve and protect Republican self government. Hillsdale's online course, The Federalist includes 10 lectures, each about 30 minutes long. You can take the course at your own pace. There's no cost to sign up. They're remarkably well produced and engaging and and a must for anyone like me who's never really delved into the Federalist papers. Enroll here at no cost. Go right now to Hillsdale Edu VDH to enroll. Again, there's no cost and it's easy to get started. That's Hillsdale Edu VDH to enroll for free Hillsdale Edu VDH.
- [05:12]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor is the Martin and Neal Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne M. Archibusky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com the name of the website is the Blade of Perseus. Please come join us there. Just about everything Victor writes, a lot of, his interviews and podcasts of course are all all there so you find lots of material and then he writes two articles a week and does one video for Ultra subscribers. So come subscribe with us for 650amonth or 65 a year. We'd love to have you. So Victor, lots going on, but the big beautiful bill, of course is the first one. It looks like it just narrowly passed the Senate. Two Republicans, Ron Paul and the North Carolina Tillis, were against it, and they apparently talked Murkowski, the Alaskan senator, into voting for it. So JD Vance came in and gave the swing vote to approve it. And I was wondering your thoughts on this big, beautiful bill. It's going back to Congress. I thought Ed had already passed Congress. I mean, back to the House.
- [06:31]
Unnamed Guest
I thought it had already passed reconciliation. They passed it.
- [06:34]
Sammy Wink
Oh, okay.
- [06:37]
Unnamed Guest
Well, there. It spends too much money. And it caused the dissension with Musk because he felt that he and the Doge people, but he in particular had taken so much heat by these draconian cuts that may have been recommended that they're not enacted, but maybe $200 billion, and yet it didn't really help the deficit. And the deficit is unknown, but it's predicated on some things out of Donald Trump's control. If the economy grows at 2%, 3%, we're going to have a big deficit. If it went up to 4, 5 or 6, the revenue might not. The revenue might be able to mitigate the size of the deficit. Depends on the interest rates. A billion dollars a day, almost a trillion or over a trillion dollars a year in interest. If the Fed would go down a point or two, we could save maybe 2 or 300 billion. So there's all these known unknowns at this point. It's a political matter, and that is whatever damage it does to the MAGA cause and the purity of the movement and the emphasis on fiscal sobriety and discipline versus weakening the president when he has all of these other initiatives in the Middle east, on the border, on crime, on energy, it seems to me you'll do more damage to the country and to this administration by canceling it on a point of fiscal principle than you would be voting for it, holding your nose and voting for it.
- [08:03]
Sammy Wink
Chuck Schumer seems to be out there with the usual claim, and I don't know if the Democrats are going to get away with this, but that the bill was all just about billionaires, and that was his critique. And then we saw that some of the Republicans were worried about taxes, tax cuts, and then that the deficit was going to grow, Medicare cuts, and that tax cuts would end in a larger deficit. I think those were the two critiques on it. Even Elon Musk spoke out against that. I was curious about your take on.
- [08:37]
Unnamed Guest
Trump and Elon, some mutually exclusive agendas and propositions, because once you go down the road of continuing the tax cuts, which was necessary, but also expanding them with no tax on tips. That's going to be problematic because a lot of people will try to suggest that the majority of their income was tips, you know, cash, you know, and no tax on Social Security recipients. Apparently we'll see whether it's gauged upon income or not. So far it's not. And there's been talk of no tax on first responders or military personnel. So you're offering potentially large reductions in revenue. And then you have at the same time sacred Cals that the MAGA agenda cannot touch, such as Social Security. And when you go into Medi Cal, excuse me, Medicaid, you've got to be careful because there is a lot of waste, fraud and abuse. But you'll be tagged with cutting the poor while you're cutting the taxes on the wealthy. So what I'm getting at is if you're going to make all of these reductions in revenue, then you have to either make that money up by additional revenues, by growing the economy, or by commiserate cuts. And this doesn't quite do it. It offers some promise. It says to the country, if we deregulate and cut taxes and we get foreign investment of $10 trillion, then we might grow at 4 to 5% GDP, and that could result in a trillion dollars more in revenue. And in addition, the experts were wrong so far on tariff income. They said it would either decline or it would be negligible and it would be at most a trillion dollars over a decade. That's $100 billion a year. But if you look at the first months after the these tariffs start to kick in, you're starting to see a much more sizable revenue, 50, 60, $80 billion a month. So there's so many unknowns we don't know, but Congressional Budget Office, which is liberal, and his critics say this is all based on hope, speculation. But I think if you listen to some of his economists, there's a good chance it could happen and their extra revenue would mitigate the size of the deficit. Elon's talking about a balanced budget right away. That's not going to happen. Elon said he could cut a trillion dollars. You can't do that without a revolution, unfortunately.
- [11:04]
Sammy Wink
What did you think of the interchange between Elon and Trump? Elon saying that this bill is going to turn us all into debt slaves. And Trump saying that he was threatened him with going after his companies. And on top of that, actually, apparently the Tesla stock has gone into a spiral. So it's a good time to buy Tesla.
- [11:34]
Unnamed Guest
Yeah, I'm gonna buy a Tesla Just a support for Elon.
- [11:38]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, but I mean, to buy Tesla stock. I don't know if it's going down.
- [11:42]
Unnamed Guest
No, because it is. The longer that he's away from direct management of SpaceX, Tesla X, Starlink, the more stockholders are worried. Those are four huge companies, multi billion dollar companies, and he's getting in these Twitter wars over nothing. I mean, he had peace. He'd called up Trump and apologized. He said he wished he hadn't have done it. He regretted doing the Epstein files attack. And so it was kind of a. They didn't talk to each other, but they had an understanding. Now, all of a sudden, over this bill, he's back at it. And he's not only back at it, he's threatening Trump by saying, I'm going to primary your House supporters. In other words, all the people in red districts, ultra red districts that have sizable MAGA contingencies. I'm going to get an array of candidates and have them well funded and they will defeat your Trump people. Trump can't take that sitting down. It's basically saying, I'm going to end your legislative agenda. So that was unnecessary. Then he said that he was going to start a third party. That's ridiculous. We've had two. We've only had two successful third parties. We've had in the 30s, we had Eugene Debs and we had Socialist parties and we've had Communist parties, we've had Libertarian parties. But the only ones that really made a difference was the Bull Moose Party of Teddy Roosevelt, the former president, who challenged disastrously. So he had. He challenged the incumbent, William Howard Taft, that was a Republican. He lost the Republican nomination. So he bolted like a bull moose and he came in second. But the result of that effort was to ensure the progressive Woodrow Wilson was elected. It was counterproductive. Wilson did a lot of damage. And the other One was the 92 and 96 runs of Ross Perot. And Ross Perot in 92, when he was semi coherent, got 19% of the vote. Most people attribute his not in the Electoral College, but he diminished the Bush vote in swing state so that Bush lost the Electoral College. Not that he won enough to be considered president or get close, but what's forgotten is that in 1996, he pulled out and he was all over the map and he was really incoherent, and yet he won 9% of the vote. What he did to the Republicans is he ensured that Bill Clinton could be elected with 43% of the vote in 92 and 49% in 92. Excuse me, in 92 and 96, he could be elected with 49% of the vote. So had all those parole voters. And I know there were some maverick Democrats, but most of them were conservative. And so he really destroyed the candidacy of George H.W. bush. And he probably. Bob Dole would have lost, but not lost so catastrophically. So does Elon. What I'm getting at is when Elon says he's going to have a third party and he's going to get all these people involved, all he's going to do, and maybe this, he's smarter than I am, so he knows the history of the third parties. He's sending yet another message. If my primary efforts to defeat your MAGA doctrinaire supporters doesn't work, or in addition to, I'm going to create a third party, and then in the 2028 elections, I may be able by this third party creation to defeat JD Vance or Marco Rubio, your successor. And that's what he's doing. I don't understand why he's doing it. I think he's personal pick and anger and hurt. You know, I did all this for doge. I spent $300 million to win Pennsylvania. All you people are ungracious. I won the election. Without me, you wouldn't have won. He said all that. And I did this all for somebody who was in the Epstein files. You know, it was just crazy.
- [15:36]
Sammy Wink
Do you think I was going to say, do you think he was accurate on the election? That if his money hadn't gone in and his way behind, it would have been closer. It would have been closer.
- [15:46]
Unnamed Guest
He might have lost Pennsylvania. That's where he put most of his money.
- [15:50]
Sammy Wink
Is that right?
- [15:50]
Unnamed Guest
But he. It wouldn't have mattered because he won Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin. He won all of the other six swing states Nevada didn't even need. He didn't need it.
- [16:04]
Sammy Wink
All right, Victor, let me take a moment for our sponsor, Quince. One of my favorite online stores, Quince has the kind of stuff you'll actually wear on repeat. Like breathable flow knit polos, crisp cotton shirts, and comfortable lightweight pants that somehow work for both weekend hangs and dress up dinners. The best part, everything with Quint is half the cost of similar brands. By working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen, Quince gives you luxury pieces without the markup. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and and finishes. Stick to the staples that last with elevated essentials from Quince go to quince.com Victor for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N C E.com Victor to get free shipping and 365 days returns. Quint.com Victor and we'd like to thank Quince for sponsoring the the Victor Davis Hansen Show. So Victor, let's turn to the New York gubernatorial race and Mamdani, who is just recently on a news show. He was interviewed and he would not say he condemned the global intifada. And in fact, he said things in the past as the social media went out and found all the these things, that Palestine is central to his identity and that defeating the occupation was a priority and that Palestinians don't have freedom, justice and self determination. And he seemed to be implying that somehow we're responsible for that and not the Palestinians themselves.
- [18:01]
Unnamed Guest
Ondami is really incoherent because on the one hand when he's asked to explain what globalize the intifada means, he says, I don't want to. That's not relevant to the New York mayoral election. Why are you bringing up foreign policy issues and things like that? And then he's the one that brought it up. And he brought it up because he wants to energize young people. He can't explain a lot of issues that people are asking him about. So he thinks these are new ideas. Rent control, state owned grocery stores, free transportation. None of it's new. It's all been tried. I remember at Stanford going to the Palo Alto co op and it was supposed to be nonprofit. I never thought it had as much produce and it was that much cheaper than Safeway and it went out of business. They all do. So that is incoherent. Then he said that he was going to target white, whiter, affluent neighborhoods. And he said that because if you look at the demographics of the rank voting and this is ranked voting, which favors minor outside candidates, he understands that he probably wouldn't win a regular election against somebody like Bloomberg or Giuliani in their prime. But he's looking at the field and he sees that Eric Adams is disgraced because he was all he alienated the white vote, he alienated the black vote. He was indicted and then he was polling about 8 to 10%. And then he got a little bump when Trump dropped the indictment that the Biden DOJ had filed against him. And he flipped to an independent and clapped down on illegal immigration. And then you have Curtis Silwa, who's sort of always running perpetual candidate. And then you have Andrew Cuomo. And a lot of people couldn't vote for him, not just because of those 10 or 12 sexual harassment allegations, but he put thousands of COVID active patients in the one place where people were the most vulnerable, rest homes. And they died. They were killed. So he's very lucky in his opponents and they will divide the conservative vote. But to ensure that he's trying to appeal to blacks and minorities, which he lost. His constituency is tripartite. It is the subsidized poor, not always minority, the upscale metrosexual, Bernie Bro Cat lady, educated white women in particular that feel that the city is a wonderful cultural place to live. It's hip, but they can't afford a home that they think they deserve given their education and moral superiority. They can't afford food, the type of lifestyle, the accoutrements of a metrosexual professional. So they're for him. And then the very, very, very, very wealthy are 2. Not the people who are worried about confiscation. But you know, people make 1 to 5 million, 8 million. Their attitude is, doesn't really matter if I pay 12% or 13%, they don't care. They just like the idea that he's young, he's hip, he's like Obama and they'll vote for him. And the one group that he's not going to win are the lower and middle class working people, Hispanic, black, Asian and white. So he knows that that's a lost constituency. He also knows that the white professional class is his anyway. They voted for Kamala Harris, they voted for Biden. So it's not going to be a national movement unless he can appeal to what Trump did and that is win over Hispanic and black voters, voters. And he can't. At least he can't now. So he got Al Sharpton to endorse him. He's working on Hikem Jeffries. He said he was going to go after affluent whiter areas. That won't sell well in the rest of the country. But it's very hypocritical. If you look at the calibration of ethnic and racial groups by per capita income in the United States in the census and private data, people have shown pretty clearly that so called whites are around 17 or 18 in per capita income, ranking at about 59,000 per year on average. Family. And what are Asians? Well, the top group is Asian, but more importantly it's Indian American, Asian. It's about $105,000. It's almost double what whites are. So if he being a child of privilege and his parents were, could I use that term, colonial settlers in Africa who were the 1% in Uganda and then they moved to South Africa. And by the way, they are very left wing, but they were very privileged. And if you were Mr. Domini and you're going to apply his exegesis and criticism, he could say, my own parents were like Israelis because he attacked Israelis as settler colonists. They didn't belong in Africa. They went down there to make money and they made a lot of money and they were hated and they were kicked out of Uganda. Then they went into South Africa and they were kicked out. And so. And then he would, if he, if he had principles, he said, we got to go after people where the money is. So the wealthiest group in the United States are Indians, Me, my people. So I'm going to go target their neighborhood. But he won't do that because he feels that attacking white people appeals to Hispanics and blacks and will get him some traction. The final thing is, how do I put this? He fits a paradigm and it's a very sad paradigm. And that paradigm is people from dysfunctional and failed states in places like Jamaica or the Caribbean, in places like Africa, in places, even impoverished places in Europe, Malta. We get people from those areas that get generous American scholarships. They're bright, they apply for competitive scholarships. They get DEI sometimes preference. They go to Harvard, they go to Yale. And then they become media personalities or arts, cultural people, filmmakers, writers or academics. And then they become very, very left. And their kids then become the second generation. They get into politics. And I'm talking about Kamala Harris, mother from India, who was a cancer researcher and came over here on a scholarship. And her father, who came over here on a scholarship, an economist at Stanford, child of privilege. And they were both very critic. Her father was very critical of the United States and she has been. And then we get Pete Buttigieg, his father was born in Malta and he says, well, he may have been white, but he was dark and suffered prejudice. Then he came over on a wealthy scholarship, very generous, became a professor, I think it now New Mexico. And then he went to Notre Dame and he was very left and critical. He worked a book on Gramsci, the communist. And then we had Barack Obama's dad dreams from. My father from Africa came over on a scholarship, married his white mother and was given everything. And he was very left wing. And this is what AOC's parents from Jamaica. And this is what Talib. And this is what Ilyan Omar. And this is What? Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard. Her parents in Haiti owned a big cement company. They were very wealthy. So you get these very wealthy DEI people, they come to the United States and they're given everything, scholarships, die preferences. They're very successful, but they're very anti American and critical. And then their kids that are growing up in relative privilege. AOC has been exposed that she's not a girl of the Bronx, she's from a wealthy area of a New York borough. And Pete Buttigieg grew up, as did Kamala Harris, a child of two parents that were PhDs. And Barack Obama's grandmother was a bank president. He went to private school. And then these second generation become left wing critics. And that's who he is. He fits that to the. You don't think that any. You want to say to Mr. Mamdani, wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. This country that you criticize so much, its capitalist engine that you make fun of, it's what created the wealth. It gave your parents the opportunity. Your mother, the filmmaker, who's a multimillionaire, and your father, the professor with an endowed chair. It gave them the money and the wherewithal to live in a very nice area and send you to prep school and then prep you to take a merocratic discriminatory test that got you in the finest public school in New York. He always says he doesn't believe in merocratic stuff like that. And you really didn't have a job. You were a rapper, you tried to run for office, you were a political activist. And it's all based on the fruits of capitalism and the largesse of the Americans to allow people who were not born in this country to not only have equal opportunity, but more importantly, to get an edge by having DEI and affirmative action. And I don't think there's any acknowledgement of that privilege. He's very privileged and yet he damns people that are privileged. And then he says that he wishes the billionaire class did not exist. But he's an indirect recipient of George Soros billions, millions that are put into the political sphere because George Soros has funded all of these municipal get out there vote activists. And some of those have been working with and parallel to him. So why doesn't he just say, I don't like billionaires. I don't think we need. They said we didn't need them, so. And I'm going to tax them. And I'm talking about you, Reid Hoffman. I'm talking about you, George Soros. I'm talking about the former Sam Bankman fried. I'm talking about all you people. But he won't. So it's a sham. Just a question of whether New Yorkers can wake up to who he really is or they can consolidate behind one effective candidate. My gut instinct is, as much as I dislike Eric Adams, he's got the best chance of defeating him.
- [28:17]
Sammy Wink
Apparently Mamdanmi thinks that he's got the best chance too, or he wouldn't be working so hard to cater to the black vote in particular.
- [28:25]
Unnamed Guest
I think that's what he's doing. He's got Al Sharpton on the stage with them.
- [28:29]
Sammy Wink
Sad. Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about the Justice Department suing the city of la. Stay with us and we'll be back. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen show. You can find Victor on X. His handle is at VD Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Morning Cup. And there's also a Victor Davis Hansen fan club on Facebook that has lots of followers and they all post things they find from the past in particular. The current stuff too, as well, but the past in particular, and they do a great job of that. So, Victor, the Justice Department is going to sue the city of LA over its sanctuary city policies. And I was wondering you your thoughts on that because they're interrupting interfering with ice's work.
- [29:24]
Unnamed Guest
So, yeah, there's a whole series of suits and they've been empowered by the Supreme Court decision that these district judges cannot apply their jurisdictional authority nationwide. So they're not going to be as they're going to be. They're going to be in a much better situation that the administration. Ultimately, you get down to just a simple question. Is it illegal or not to come in to the United States without permission and to reside here without permission? It either is or isn't. If it isn't, then you have to go home and try it again legally. If it is, then you can stay and then you don't have a law. But is there a law? Yes. And the left says, well, it's not a criminal, but it is a civic statute. It's like saying, oh, Donald Trump doesn't have to pay E. Jean Carroll or Letitia James 88 million to Eugene Carroll. And I guess even with the reduced sentence, it's 375 million to the state of New York because those were civil suits. He didn't do anything. Those were just civil infractions. But it is against the law to come in here illegally. What the protests and what Newsom and Karen Bass and they're all saying is we want you to select which laws you enforce and which ones you don't. And we're going to be the arbitration. So these, these, these, these, these you don't enforce. But we want gun registration to be enhanced. We want environmental legislation to be enhanced. And don't dare, you know, run over a three spotted lizard on the road. He's an endangered species. Do not get a silencer on a gun. Do not get a particular type of magazine. That would be nullification. That would be neo Confederate Civil War type of stuff to nullify our federal law. So that left picks which federal laws have sanctity and which don't. They're not consistent, they're not principal. No surprise.
- [31:15]
Sammy Wink
Well, it is sad to see them with their app. That was what came out this week that is tracing where ICE agents are going. I don't know how good the app is.
- [31:27]
Unnamed Guest
I know that CNN put that on television to apprise everybody. You could get the app. And then we have officials who are doxing ICE people telling us where they live, their address. One of them is going to get killed, or two or three of them are going to get killed and they don't care about that. And the odd thing about it, when you look at the protest, I mean, look at them very carefully. And I would say the vast majority of the protesters are wealthy white, particularly women. And I would say at least half of the ICE officers are historically Hispanic. So there's a class element there, that I'm a pretty wealthy, upward mobile Los Angeles female and I feel really good about myself to help Josephina, my maid, and she's here illegally. And all these people get on social media and say we should hide our maids or who's gonna do our work if you do this? Or we should let them go, we should pay them to stay home and hide. But the people who are trying to enforce the law, a lot of them are minorities. And so there's sort of a disdain for them. Ultimately, if you want to fathom the left, it's usually a class thing. The leaders, the activists, movers in Shaker to the left are wealthy. They always have been. You know, they come from the upper classes, che Guevara, Castro, etc. And they feel bad about their wealth, they feel guilty about their privilege. And one of the ways that's manifested is by going very radical to help the poor, but they usually end up protecting themselves. The Castro dynasty is probably worth a billion dollars. And it's always the same. The people that ruined the Soviet Union were billionaires, and the people who are leading this socialist revolution are very, very wealthy people.
- [33:18]
Sammy Wink
Well, what do you think the chances are that this suit will, will win ultimately in court, and, you know what will come of it?
- [33:29]
Unnamed Guest
There's another suit that's similar, and I wrote about it 23 years ago in Mexifornia. I had students at Cal State Fresno, and I had this very poor student who was a Mormon from Utah, very poor. And he was. Came into my office and he said, I have to pay out of state tuition at the California State University system. It wasn't a lot then. It was maybe $600 a semester versus 1800 now. It's in the thousands. But I said, yeah. And he said, in your class, there's about 10 people that are here illegally. And I knew who they were because I liked them. And I talked. He goes, you think that's fair, that a US Citizen has to pay three times the tuition? What's the argument? I said, well, the argument is that there is no such thing as illegality. One or one. They don't enforce a law, but they say, well, they're living in California, so they pay a sales tax. He says, well, I pay sales tax. I'm here. And then they would say, well, they pay more sales tax. They've been here long. He said, no, they haven't. Two of them just got us across the border. And then I would say, they pay California income tax. He said, no, they don't. They don't work. And I'm working right now. And they deducted on my check. And I said, well, how long does it take to get a residency? About a year, according to the California Franchise Board. So I always was, I wrote about that, how unfair it was. And now you see that the Trump administration is using a prior law that says the federal government cannot discriminate against foreign nationals at the expense of U.S. citizens. It's a statute, and they're suing a lot of universities, and I think they're going to win that one. And if you look at what tuition is now at places like UCLA or University of Michigan, you're talking about $12,000 versus, you know, 35 or 40,000 a year. And if you're on the left, you say, this is terrible. You're going to deny people their hopes and dreams. And if you're on the right, you said, this is going. You mean we're spending billions of dollars on foreign nationals and we're making Americans who are US Citizens pay for it by out of state tuition in a zero sum game for every illegal alien that gets 30%, 60% discount, there's a US citizen that pays three times more to subsidize that. It's very hard to disrupt something that has been unlawful but so commonplace and institutionalized that people think they have a God given birthright or it's now part of the American ethos. So a disruptor comes in and says, sorry, you people, for the last half century you've been breaking the law and it's time to reform. Everybody goes crazy. It's like the abortion with the Roe versus Wade. It was abortion on demand. And then the Supreme Court says let the states do it. And then you try to tell somebody, well, there's no difference in California, it's a blue state and the majority won. Abortion on demand to the moment of birth. And the same thing thing in all the blue states and the red states don't believe in it. So live and let live. And because this is a very affluent society and red and blue states can be juxtaposed. If you're in California and you feel so bad that you're watching infants killed, then move across the border tangentially up to Idaho for example, or if you're in, you know, you're, you're living in Idaho and you're very angry that you can't get an abortion, then just go across the border to Washington or Oregon. That's the way the system works. And that's. And they got so angry because they were used to. That is the law. Even though there was no law. It was just a Supreme Court decision and now there's another one and they don't like it. But that, that argument has been. The steam blew out of it. It's because it, it never made any sense.
- [37:22]
Sammy Wink
Victor, I would like to take a moment for our sponsor, Vibrance. Vibrance is my. One of my. Has one of my favorite products and that is the super C serum that can replace your day creams, eye creams, night creams, neck creams, wrinkle creams and even dark spot reducers. Made in the USA with the highest quality ingredients including vitamin C, C, hyalurolic acid, vitamin B5 and vitamin E. Super C serum delivers noticeable results, simplify your skin care routine, get a healthier complexion and minimize wrinkles and age spots with Vibrance. And if you don't find it better than your current skin care routine, you'll get a full refund. Go to vibrance.com Victor to see save up to 37% and free shipping. That's Vibrance V I B R I A n c e vibrance.com Victor and we'd like to thank Vibrance for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. So, Victor, I wanted to turn to the California since we're kind of here, the California cities, many of them or some of them, I guess I should say, are canceling their 4th and it is the 4th of July today. So happy 4th of July to everybody canceling their 4th of July events. And their claim is that the ice has been causing too much chaos and they're afraid of having these events go on because of that.
- [38:55]
Unnamed Guest
So I don't think they're going to miss it. Because if you've been protesting for two months and your signature flag is the Mexican flag flag, and then you're saying that you don't want to celebrate Fourth of July because you might be deported, I think it's because you really don't care about the United States. And is Victor being vindictive and making that? No, because we just saw a poll taken asking Democrats and Republicans to what degree do you feel patriotic and love your country? And Republicans are always about 90% and Democrats are about 60. It's down to 30. I think it was 36%, 36%. Two thirds of people who identify do not like the United States. And that's an elephant in the room that we haven't discussed. But when you have 55 million people who came into the United States as foreign born, they can be legal, they can be illegal, they can be green card holders, they can be students, tourists, whatever, but residents. And you're not assimilating them. And you don't believe in civic education. They don't know what America the Beautiful is. They don't know what the Bill of Rights are. They're not teaching that. They're not studying Martin Luther King and all that. You're going to get that type of poll. And no democracy is sustainable when half the country, two thirds of half the country don't like it, it's not going to work. And yet that's pretty clear from the people I see on the left. I see that a lot.
- [40:30]
Sammy Wink
It seems to me that it's not only that they aren't teaching civics, but they are teaching these young students that they have all sorts of reasons to hate the United States and people in the United States and the old world that actually made the United States all of that old white Men class that built the United States all the way up to the current last 50 years, maybe leave out, right. That's a terrible system and that's the reason that they hate it.
- [41:05]
Unnamed Guest
The thing about it is they always try to rationalize that. They say, well it was built by blacks, but if you actually look at the demography, 90% the country was so called white. That's kind of a weird word because that could be people from. It was everybody that claimed you could be dark in Armenian and you were white. But the point I'm making is there was a very. The Hispanic population was 1 or 2%, the Asian was maybe 1%, the black population was about 11% and you were about 88 to 90% white. And so and then the second thing is there was surely prejudice. Birds of a feather, as Socrates says in Plato's laws, they flock together. And that's endemic. I see. I grew up in Hispanic community that believe me, was more racist toward blacks and vice versa than toward whites. I saw on the playground blacks and Hispanics fighting each other, calling each other the worst things in the world and white people just bystanding watching it. So the idea that non white can't be racist is crazy. But my point is they never could get over they these people who were so critical of the United States, if that were true, that we really weren't a multiracial society until Ted Kennedy changed the voting laws when he was a young senator in 1965 or six and they introduced the Hart act that said that no longer was it going to be based on language capital scales, legal. It was going to be proximity to the border and familial ties because they wanted different constituencies. But nevertheless, when you have 12 million people coming into this country, do they really believe that it was just created 40 or 50 years ago? They're coming into this country because of a bunch of old white men that were the founding fathers, created a system that would put themselves out of business. And perhaps it said all men are created equal. And there was nowhere else in the world where an independent judiciary, a bill of rights, free market capitalism, freedom of dissent, freedom of religion, all of that combination, when you put it together, creates wealth, security and people want a part of it. So then why in the world would you come into that system and then blast, damn or demonize the people who come created it and say they're not perfect, therefore they're not good. It makes no sense. And then to be like Whoopi Goldberg and said it's better in Iran or to be like Ilian Omar. It's better in Somalia, but people are fleeing Somalia to here. I don't know any Americans. There's a huge Somali community in Minneapolis. Is there a big exodus back to Somalia? I got here and, you know, I just, I don't like it. It's not. It's primitive. Ilhan Omar said it was full of garbage. She said it's dirty. So I'm going back to Somalia or I came here from Chiapas and Michoacan and I didn't like it. It's too cruel a society. So I'm just going back to Mexico. Well, a million deported, but they didn't do it unless you offered them a thousand dollars, a free air ticket and a guarantee they could apply back legally, which other people who get deported without deporting, without notifying authorities cannot reapply legally, at least for 10 years. So it never made any sense. We hate all these old. We hate the white people. We want to tear down their staff. They were horrible people, but we want the system they created. And then you look at cities and I, as a young person, I went to Los Angeles in the 1950s. I went to San Francisco in the 19 I can remember 5, 6 years old, I went to Los Angeles. I remember walking in downtown Sacramento, downtown Fresno, and I asked myself, all of those cities are run by Democrats and most of the mayors have been black or minorities. And are they safer, more prosperous, more secure for their own constituents? The answer is no. When I was 7 or 8, my mother worked as a state employee in the California State Building in Fresno. And we had no daycare, my father was working. So she took the three of us up to work with her at seven in the morning and we were not allowed to be in the court. She worked as appellate court research attorney. And she just started. She was in her 40s, early 40s. So she said this. I'm giving you each a dollar and you three of you stick together and you can walk down the new Fresno Mall, which is until they tore most of it out. It was one of the most dangerous places in Fresno.
- [45:44]
Sammy Wink
Not back when you were a kid, but now it is.
- [45:48]
Unnamed Guest
But in 1962, I think I was 8 or 61 when I was 8 and 9. So then she gave us a dollar, two actually one to eat. We went to the Golden Key Hotel and got hamburgers. And then the three of us, I had twin brother, 8, 8 and 10, walked over to the Hardee's Theater with our dollar for matinee lounge seats and watched a movie or two movies, double feature. And then we walked back to her. We walked maybe five miles and then we were allowed to go to the library and look at books. We were completely unsupervised. If anybody did that, child protection services would intervene today. And so we call that progress. But we're afraid to say that the quality of life has radically changed. And in many cases it's not the old white men who did it. And it's result of a polarization and an emphasis that's directed against policing, fire protection, creation of jobs, housing, etc. To government's going to do this for you. Government's going to do that for you. Government's going to do. You have. You're a victim. You're a victim. Defund the police. That doesn't work. It hurts the people. It's intended to help if it is intended to help people. So I remember those people that were so called white people and put it this way, when I turn on MSNBC and CNN and I try to, to give a balanced view sometimes and I look at the view and I listen to Joy Reid and I hear a lot more fixations on race and racism and anger and fury and hatred than I did in 1963 listening to three white guys called Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor and you know, Howard K. Smith. Those were the three anchors. I didn't hear that. I heard that they were very angry about George Wallace and segregation in the University of Alabama and they had to nationalize the Alabama Guard.
- [47:50]
Sammy Wink
Sure. They were fighting.
- [47:51]
Unnamed Guest
By the way, Gavin, did you hear what I said, Gavin, that John F. Kennedy nationalized the Alabama National, I should say State Guard because it was not following the law. It had to be nationalized so that they could remove the governor. Just like Donald Trump said that your State Guard was not helping the outnumbered and out resourced Los Angeles pd. So he nationalized your guard and you, like George Wallace are using a Confederate argument that he can't do it. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.
- [48:27]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, Gavin. All right, let's go to a break and come back and talk a little bit about the two fatwas against Netanyahu and Donald Trump. Stay with us and we'll be right back.
- [48:42]
Victor Davis Hanson
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- [49:38]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen show. You can find these podcasts now on video, on YouTube and on Rumble and on Spotify. So if you have any of those outlets as your RSS feed, please come join us there. So there have been two clerks, clerics, sorry, in Iran that have issued fatwas against Donald Trump and Netanyahu as well, because Trump has threatened the ayatollah and they say, therefore, he is an enemy of God and he's waging war against God. And therefore he I think they must.
- [50:20]
Unnamed Guest
Be executed from a bunker. Mr. Kamanes was secretly hiding in a bunker. And because there had been attempts to kill Netanyahu in the missile exchange, both earlier and recently, he said that he was a target, Khamenei. And Donald Trump said, don't kill him. So when this happened, Donald Trump said, listen, I saved you. Don't lie and say you won the war. I saved you. I could have let the Israelis kill you. And one of the clerics involved had issued the fatwa against the author, Salman Rushdie, in the Satanic Verses. So here he is again. And that was nothing to laugh about. He caused a lot of physical pain and misery to Salman Rushdie. And I don't think that's a wise thing to do because right now, as we're speaking, there was an Afghan national who met Iranian operatives who Joe Biden, under Merrick Garland at the doj, indicted for trying to kill Donald Trump, who fled to Iran. And they are building a case now in the Trump DOJ to indict, try and convict him in absentia. So it's pretty clear that Iran tried to kill Donald Trump. And they should remember that because if they keep doing this and when he issues such a fatwa and we get a third assassination attempt, I would say that that person's life is worth nothing. Because if he knows anything.
- [51:48]
Sammy Wink
Do you mean the clerics?
- [51:51]
Unnamed Guest
Because if you're able to fly from Missouri 17 hours and then from 50,000ft, drop a 30,000 pound bomb into a hole, the Size of a refrigerator. I think you can take a fighter from a base in the region and fire a missile at some point window. And if you think you don't know where they are exactly, I think you just call up the Mossad and they will tell you whether he's having dinner in the living room or asleep in the bedroom the last 10 minutes. And so I don't think their lives would be worth anything. So they should cool the rhetoric if they know what's good for them.
- [52:29]
Sammy Wink
I've been hearing about the Iranian street currently that the Ayatollah has his IRCG or GC out, and they are arresting people on the street. They're asking for their IDs there. I, I didn't hear the execution part, but they are.
- [52:52]
Unnamed Guest
Like 10 or 20 already.
- [52:54]
Sammy Wink
And so I think that they must be after the people that are informing them Assad.
- [52:59]
Unnamed Guest
But they don't really care if they get the right people or not. The point is to deter it and just show you don't even be under suspicion. And at the same time, I think the Germans have found terrorist cells they're looking at. So if they were to pursue a terrorist campaign and they have no air defenses, I think that would be a foolish part of the theocracy, because Donald Trump is unpredictable. If they killed a bunch of Americans in a terrorist cell, he would go after Khomeini. He really would. He would go after all of them. And, and he might be successful. He wouldn't put one boot on the ground, but he has the ability to fly into Iranian airspace, and he would do that. And Israel would do the same. If they do it to Israel, at least in this period until they. I mean, they had one of the most sophisticated air defense systems in the world. They bought it from the Soviets, it was top of the line. And Israel destroyed it in two strikes last year. It was amazing.
- [53:54]
Sammy Wink
Well, there's. Iran seems to be falling apart at the seams. And I think that's the other thing that I noticed, that their streets, all of the actions, in fact they, their legislature just passed a law that says this. Any action or cooperation in carrying out political, cultural, media and propaganda activities and preparing or publishing false news or any type of content that typically causes public fear and terror is corruption of the earth, apparently, is the accusation. And they can execute you for that.
- [54:32]
Unnamed Guest
Sort of like James A. Baker, legal counsel of the FBI, James Comey. All of them partnering with Facebook and Twitter to ban what they call disinformation or misinformation, which is a synonym for Something that was absolutely true, but injurious to the public Biden candidacy and seemed.
- [54:52]
Sammy Wink
To show that our left was falling apart at the seams as well. So, I don't know. I think it's good news. As bad as it is, it seems like it's good news for anybody who wants the toppling of that theocracy. So I thought that was interesting. The last thing is that, or one more thing is, is that the Education Department has issued a letter to Harvard charging them with violation of Title 6 and was discriminating against, especially Jews, so their anti Semitism. And I was wondering if you had any thoughts on this.
- [55:29]
Unnamed Guest
We talked about that, and the metaphor I used was that they were a mossy, impressive granite rock on a beautiful hillside. And then you turn it over and there's slugs and snails and spiders and snakes and underneath. They're not going to win this. They know what they're doing. They know what they're doing. There's a suit by a Jewish student at MIT which is a brief walk from Harvard, and he says that a professor singled him out, mentioned him by name, and kept attacking him as a Jew. And it came to the attention of the MIT president, who, whom we remember, said, it depends on the context, whether it's anti Semitism. And they did nothing. And he's suing and everybody knows what's going on.
- [56:17]
Sammy Wink
Can I just say something? So, yes, they do. And they in fact, had their own investigation at Harvard. And they say, okay, yes, we know there was anti Semitism problems and we are addressing it. We're going to audit the programs where there was pervasive. That was their word, pervasive, anti Semitic. And we're going to set rules for the classroom so that nobody's doing those crazy things like saying, if you're of Jewish heritage, you have to get over to this side of the room and, you know, things like that. So they say, my point is just this. They say they're going to address it by audits and rules.
- [56:52]
Unnamed Guest
They have a paper trail.
- [56:53]
Sammy Wink
You and I know education.
- [56:55]
Unnamed Guest
They have a paper trail. All they're going to do is subpoena the emails of people they're going to subpoena. I was in the university, I can tell you. I'll give you an example. In 1988, we had three candidates, and they were all strong classics professors. And one of them was really good. And the dean at the time came to me and said, what are you doing? I do not want to hire a white person. And I especially do not want to hire a white male. So get him out of the pool and bring me either a woman or are minority classes. I said, I can't do that, can't do that. And he said, if you can't do it, your life's going to be hell here. He told me that. And I said, you do your worst and I'll do my best. And I was able to appeal to the provost. And I said, this will be very embarrassing if you do. But they were doing it all the time. I was at faculty meetings when they said that. And it was very ironic. I went to a white male who had applied to the philosophy department and he was part time. He taught there for 10 years. They passed him over, he was pretty good. And they kept hiring women and minorities. And so finally he said, would somebody help me? So I went and talked to the chairman. He's now deceased, so I'm not going to mention my name. And he said, it's time we settled everything and gave everybody parity. And I said, but you're nine white guys. You all got hired. Abductions, these people can't be hired. Abd. Abd Everything but dissertation. So in other words, in the glut of the 1960s, I said this to them. We hired people in graduate school in their second year. And the most traumatic experience of their whole life, including yours, was finishing your thesis. I'm not talking about writing an article. You didn't have to do it, not writing a book. You have never written one article. And your dissertation, I've looked at it, is pathetic. And it took you 10 years to finish. And you're passing judgment on this other person. And that's what they did. It was like all these old white males that were mediocre went up in the attic and they pulled up the trap door and the ladder and said, you can't come. We're going to be now sophisticated. One guy was very honest to me, he was another philosophy professor. I won't mention he's still alive. And I mentioned this to him. I said, you're doing the same thing. And he said, would you like to go to a faculty meeting with nine old guys that are in their 50s and 60s and haven't hired anybody in about 15 years when budgets got tough? Or would you like to have five new young women to shepherd and mentor? That's what he said. And in fact, he married one of them. So the point I'm making is it was so hypocritical and they know what they're doing in all of what I've talked about that was all communicated with email or in those days with voicemail. So they have a record. And when they turn over this rock, they're going to go to Cornell. Cornell's been same thing. Cornell has memos where people are saying, we can't hire a white person. So they're going to go in there, they're going to get the emails, they're going to get the memos, they're all going to bring it out and then they're going to say, you violated the Civil Rights Act, Title 6. Title. And then they're going to go and say they're going to get all the emails and all the documents on the surcharges and you're going to say, you, we don't believe that you needed 55 to 60%. You, the university, and we want to see your data that shows you the lab, the salary. A lot of guys were getting 55% when they were home on Zoom by themselves. So they're going to look at that and then they're going to go look at the foreign students and say, have you checked these people out? Are there any People Liberation army provincials that killed and are here? And they're going to find a lot of them. And then they're going to look at the 4th, 5th and 6th amendment and they're going to say, when this person was accused of sexual harassment, did he have any constitutional rights? Could he face his accuser? Did he have a right of appeal? No, they're going to. And then they're going to say, let's look at these speakers that you ask. Here's 10 speakers at visit. Was this person shouted down? Was Judge Duncan almost mobbed at the Stanford Law School?
- [61:02]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes.
- [61:03]
Unnamed Guest
So you don't enforce the First Amendment. And then they're going to say, you can do whatever you want, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, mit, but don't do it on our dime. Go follow the Hillsdale model. And so we're going to tax your endowment and we're going to cut back on your federal grants. And when they hear all that, they're going to settle. They're going to say, okay, mea culpa, mea culpo, mea maxima culpa. We're guilty. What do we have to pay? And how do we get you off our back? And how can we get more federal money? Another final thing is their endowments. Everybody says they got a $50 billion endowment. Stanford's got 30 billion. Go look at it very carefully and see how much dollars are discretionary. They're all targeted some multi billionaires. I feel guilty. I think. I don't know. People from Haiti didn't get a fair shot. So I'm going to create Haitian studies. I'm going to give 20 million for Haitian studies. You can't use it in the general fund. So what are they going to do when the donors are off by 10 or 15%? Costs are going up by 2 or 3, they're clamping down on. 26% of the student body are not Americans. They gouge them and they're going to have to borrow money against the endowment. They don't have the money from the income of the endowment. Especially when they don't, they've got to only get 15% of grants and they're going to be taxed on the endowment and they're going to be subject to cutoffs in federal money. So they're going to be in bad shape and they deserve it.
- [62:35]
Sammy Wink
Yes, let's hope they are. Eventually. All right, Victor, so we're at the end of the show and I like to read some of the comments on your last Saturday show. Very interesting to go to YouTube. There's so many and there's so many that just say, wow, what a great show. Victor, you're doing an excellent job. But here were some other ones that I found from hardware 1197. He said, he or she said, these episodes are a great reminder of how we got where we are as a nation and a warning that this spirit and determination can can be lost with the ideological pollution we have allowed to infect our youth. That was interesting. And then he says this, Victor, the four engine replacement for the DC3, by the way, was the Douglas C54 Skymaster. There you go.
- [63:25]
Unnamed Guest
It was. Thank you. That was the military version. I'm going to have to go. I have an appointment.
- [63:30]
Sammy Wink
Oh, okay. And then just a couple of other ones. I drove a tractor and spread bins out in the peach orchards and worked with the braceros in the 1960s. The arms many of us boomers worked all summer so we could pay for college or cars. I did, too. We weren't all hippies in San Francisco. And that was from George Sousa. And then just two things. Very short. Dave King 9393 says, Another fantastic hour of my life. Thanks so much for sharing. And then Fraser Sutherland, 1834, says VDH Sammy Jack in storming form over the Israel Iran war.
- [64:14]
Unnamed Guest
Thank you, everybody.
- [64:15]
Sammy Wink
He caught us. Yes. Thanks, everybody. And we will be back next week with another edition of the Friday News Roundup. Thank you for joining us. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.