← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Antisemitism Surge, Iran Deal Doubts, Europe’s Free-Ride, and California’s Breakdown | Victor Davis Hanson
01:33:08
Victor Davis Hanson and Sami Wink cover New York’s Mamdani removing a city webpage celebrating ties with Israel and broader incidents they describe as a mainstreaming of antisemitism, which Hanson attributes to DEI ideology, Middle East money and influence in universities, and Israel’s current strength.
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- [00:01]
Victor Davis Hanson
Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money.
- [00:06]
Sammy Wink
Because behind every headline is a bottom line, whether it's the funds fueling AI
- [00:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
or crypto's trillion dollar swings.
- [00:14]
Sammy Wink
There's a money side to every story.
- [00:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
And when you see the money side,
- [00:18]
Sammy Wink
you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story.
- [00:23]
Victor Davis Hanson
Subscribe now@bloomberg.com Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good
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Sammy Wink
in this world, stop with Mint.
- [00:37]
Victor Davis Hanson
You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month.
- [00:39]
Sammy Wink
Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments.
- [00:42]
Victor Davis Hanson
But that's weird.
- [00:43]
Sammy Wink
Okay, one judgment anyway.
- [00:46]
Victor Davis Hanson
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.
- [00:56]
Sammy Wink
See full terms at mintmo Maudami has stuck his head out once again and he has gone onto the city website and taken down a page that celebrates relationship with Israel.
- [01:10]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, he's had radical Islamists inside the mayor's mansion. What was scary is Ken Griffith I think is Jewish and he walked up to his home, tapped on the window and basically the message, we're coming after you as a billionaire who's given a billion, I think for philanthropic needs in New York and now he's driving them out. You saw Carney today? Did you see that?
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Sammy Wink
No. Go in there.
- [01:33]
Victor Davis Hanson
Canadian prime Minister. He said he hates the United States. He detests it. He's much more anti American than Trudeau. Trudeau was a buffoon. He just was a party pretty boy. Right. He likes to date actresses and wear blackface. He's just a joke. It's a combination of three factors that have coalesced and a synergy. The DEI postulates this was Obama's creation, that it's no longer the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. No, no. Basically, Dei says that 70%, 67% of the country is white. Therefore they're oppressors and they're victimizers.
- [02:18]
Sammy Wink
Hello and welcome. This is Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. And we are on our Friday news roundup. So we've got lots of news on the agenda today. Mamdami's sticking his head out and into things. The Iran Peace Treaty is on the horizon and some things about the California Democrat, California governor's race as well, and the Palisades fire. So stay with us for those and more stories and we'll be right back after these messages.
- [02:49]
Bradley Devlin
If you enjoy. VICTOR DAVIS Hansen you might enjoy the Daily Signals flagship show, the Tony Kennett cast the same common sense perspectives you Love, weekdays at 7pm Eastern. And unlike some of the other evening shows, we work until showtime to bring you the latest breaking news, analysis and good old American sarcasm. Thom Tillis I'm pretty sure might have been useful at one time as a doorstop. Find the Tony Kennett cast on YouTube, X radio, TV or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [03:20]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words or a subsidiary of the Daily Signal. For you who are new Victor's the Martin and Neali Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsh Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. So Victor Mondami has stuck his head out once again and he has gone onto the city website for New York City and taken down a page that celebrates relationship with Israel from the city website. And that's one thing. And the second thing is I don't know if you saw this video, but Mamdami's wife was talking to somebody and being taped inside of a it looked like a restaurant. And once she found out that it was Ms. Israel, she wouldn't say a word to her. So it was pretty insulting.
- [04:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
He's had radical Islamicists inside the mayor's mansion. We know that. And he's made it clear that ICE will be he's at war with ice. They're not allowed to do anything he claims doesn't understand the Constitution about the federal law is superiority over state. But that's all there. And what was scary is he, Ken Griffith, I think is Jewish. And he walked up to his home, tapped on the window and basically the message we're coming after you as a billionaire who's given a billion, I think, for philanthropic needs in New York. And now he's bragging and driving him out. But today there was a synagogue daycare center and it was swarmed. This isn't anything to do with Israel, just swarmed by protesters to try to shut it down. London, there were people, Jews were attacked in London. There were people who were apparently pretty happy about it. I just got out of a Piers Morgan interview with a professor at the uae, the United Arab Emirates. And I didn't, I thought I was just going to go on myself and talk about a range of topics. But it was apparently designed to find somebody who would support the idea of neutering Iran. And both the host, Piers Morgan, and the guests were very adamant that it's been a failure, you know, 60 days. And they they can declare it rip and I disagreed with that. And then they got onto Israel and my, the other guest, I was trying to explain he was demonizing Israel. It's Greater Israel. It's tried to take over this. It's committed genocide. It's bombing Hezbollah as if, you know. So it was very funny because, you know, I've had afib in this heart and I've never had any problem this week with it. And I looked at my Apple watch and it went from 80 to 130 beats. I was so upset. And so I tried to be very rational, but I just said, you're speaking to me about why we support Israel and we don't. It's the only pro Western, westernized constitutional government that tolerates all different people. If you want to have a mosque, build a mosque. If you want to build a Christian church, build a Christian church. Women have full rights. Gays have full regularly scheduled election. There's tensions between the legislative, executive and judicial branch, as in our country, and nowhere in the world can you find that. And he denied all of that. I said, well, right now you're speaking from the uae. Right now, just as a hypothetical, let's just say that you feign sincerity. And let's just say, well, I'm from the UAE and I'm a professor here, well paid by my host. And even though I'm an American and I've had a change of heart, I'm starting to see that Israel is a model democracy and I advocate that we all make peace with it. I said, how long would you last before they pull the plug? Or maybe better yet, you could say, I have a friend here and he's decided that Islam is not for him, so I'm going to take him over to my Christian church. And I said, can you go to a Christian church outside the enclave in the uae? Well, you can. I said, no, no, just answer me. You can. In Israel, you can go to a mosque. Then Piers Morgan said, well, I've been all over the Middle east and I've been accorded freedom of action. I said, that's because you're a celebrity journalist, Piers, and they like what you say. If you. He said, well, I've disagreed with him. I said, maybe so, but why don't you put on a guest in the Middle east country and have him pick a critic, a critic and see how long you're on the air before you're cut off. Why you're giving an audience of somebody attacking as they do in every other Western country. So the Whole thing was an Orwellian experience. But what I'm getting at with this excursus is I don't want to be hyperbolic, but I'm 72 years old. I have never ever seen the mainstreaming of anti Semitism as I see now Jews. I saw it. And what's dangerous about it is when I was growing up in this area, I never met somebody who was Jewish Till I was 18. But there were people all of all different ethnic groups. And you'd say, well, the price of Santa Rosa plums, it crashed by a $50 today. I'm gonna go broke. It's them Jews in New York, the brokers. You know, I mean, it was kind of a they control everything stuff. Kind of like the 40s movies that tried to combat that gentleman's agreement with Gregory Pack. You know, there's anti Semitism, okay, But the left at that time, the liberal left, the Adlai Stevenson left, you know, it wasn't like Woodrow Wilson, the progressives, they were against it, so they pushed back. And that was part of the civil rights movement. And then the left went into the anti Semitic mood about 20 years ago. You could argue that Barack Obama issued it in, but I won't get into the specifics of that. But when you look at DEI and it makes an open season. So you have say, Black Lives Matter people putting gliders on their flags to celebrate October 7, or all the left wing universities erupted and violence not just expressed against Israel, but directed at individual Jewish students, pushing them, hitting them. And Harvard University giving two awards to two people who had been in anti Semitic activity, physical confrontations. And then if you look at the FBI statistics for hate crimes, the Jews, 3 to 4% of the population, they account for about 40% of the attacks is what talking about now. But the difference is now. So when it was on the right, the left was the counterweight. Now the left has institutionalized it and the right counterweight is disappearing because they're all jumping ship. And they feel that the momentum now is with the 500 million Arabs and the wealth of the Arab world. And when you look at donations, Israel's about 7 and money spent on lobbying, it's the UAA and Saudi and China that are at the top, way ahead. And the universities have so been endowed with Middle east money. And it's a simplistic fix. So if you, you say, well, I voted for Trump and I agree with everything. I don't want to be ostracized like Republican, but I'm against this war. So all you have to say is the Jews made him do it. Netanyahu made him do it. I'm being crude, but that's what they're all saying. Almost all of these people have. If you took tapes of all these people and you look what Candace Owens was saying about Jews in Israel eight years ago and now, or Steve Bannon eight years ago and now, or Tucker Carlson eight years ago and now, or Megyn Kelly maybe, whom I like a lot of. But if you look at what she was saying maybe six months ago about Israel versus Islam, not so much Israel versus Islam, but Islam in itself, rightly suspicious. She gave a very good, incisive critique. I remember somebody sent it to me and I read it. It was very good about the seclusion of women and they couldn't express themselves and the lack of free expression and. And then if you juxtapose that to what she's saying now as almost antithetical to each other. So my question is, what is brought along this radical change and why is it not there's no pushback? I saw a little bit during the Iraq war when they said the neocons planned it. That was Bill Kristol in his glory days, David Fromm, Richard Pearl. I remember that because I was at the, the Naval Academy when the war broke out, and I supported it. And I would be asked by people, are you Jewish? I said, no. Why? Well, the Jews support this. And I said, actually, Israel doesn't. I remember that they wanted us to keep out of Iraq and direct our attention to Iran, which might have been wiser, by the way, but it's now mainstreamed and it's gaining momentum and it's reached the point where it's acceptable to. Damn. Not just. It started and said. And they say, well, I'm not against Jews, I'm just against Israel. I'm not against Israel, I'm just against Netanyahu. And it gets. But the whole thing is now a continuum.
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Sammy Wink
Do you think that this is strange in the age of dei, at least on the part of the left, that they have all of a sudden become very anti Semitic? I mean, it seems strange, I guess DEI somehow excludes.
- [14:03]
Victor Davis Hanson
It's a combination of three factors that have coalesced and a synergy. The DEI postulates this was Obama's creation, that it's no longer a black white historical problem with the legacy of legacy, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, a 1288 paradigm. No, no, it's everybody who. This is what you need a DNA test to verify this crackpot theory. But basically, Dei says that 70%, 67% of the country is white. Therefore, they're oppressors and they're victimizers. And the others are victims, even though they might be richer, they're more fortunate class. No, it doesn't matter. They are victims by the color of their skin, even if they're whiter than the people on the other side, by their ethnicity or their religion that postulated that Israel was white and Western and an oppressor. But worse, they were in a sea of indigenous Arab people who were not indigenous, by the way. They came in, in the 7th or 8th century to where the world is now. But they were the worst because they were colonial settlers. The second catalyst for all this was the university's Middle east programs and the Palestinian question. And what changed that were two things. One, the huge amount of money that has been invested, it's got to be, oh, I don't know, $30 billion the last 30 years at the Harvard, at the Stanford, at the Yale, at the Princeton, at the Georgetown, at John. How Middle east programs. And they're not Middle east programs in the sense that there is a strong Jewish professor, Bernard Lewis. They're not. No. They're all ideological, Islamicist, anti American, and they teach these kids. And there's another element to the second factor of the Middle East. The number of students from autocratic Middle east, which is a. A redundancy because they're all autocratic except for Israel, has exploded. It's not just 10 or 20 or 40 or 80, it is 150. China's 300,000. It's getting close. And they are a constituency and they are loud and they are wealthy and they are powerful and they outnumber Jewish students on campus because remember DEI admissions, 8% of Stanford's incoming class the last three or four years has been white males. That includes Jews. So the Jewish population that was overrepresented because of merocratic standards is down from 30%, 20% down to about 7 or 8%. So there's not very many Jews on campus. There's a lot more Middle Easterns. They have money, they have the ear of the presidents. They are left wing, and that has legitimized the body. So you add the fact of dei, and there's one other thing that it's very important. I think it's not just DEI and it's not just the money and the students. The third crucial factor, Israel, is not 6 million people facing annihilation like the 67 war or the Yom Kippur. War. Whatever people on the left say about Netanyahu, he inaugurated, as Sharon's economic minister, a economic revolution. And he opened the economy and he allowed capital to flow freely, and the kibbutz idea of a whole nation was ended. And if you go to Israel today, there's cranes everywhere, there's skyscrapers. Their standard of living, I think, is when I walk the streets of Haifa and I compare it to San Francisco, it looks much better in Haifa, cleaner. There's more people out on the streets. There's no homeless. So it's powerful and it's powerful militarily. So as I said on an earlier broadcast, and I said that today on the Piers Morgan show, they were talking, I said, well, France and all these NATO countries, they want to be part of, they want us to be, you know, a partner with them, but why don't they go help their former colonies in the Gulf or Lebanon? And Piers said, this professor said, well, I'm listening to a French jet. How many French jets do you think are in the Gulf and where do they come from? One carrier. There's over 2,000American aircraft there. There's 800 Apaches and Warthogs. This is what gets me about the Europeans. They sent one little frigate or they sent the HMS lion to Cyprus, and then you think it's Lord Nelson and the Armada a Trafalgar, you know, or the D day British and Canadian bombardment fleet. There's nothing there. And so what I'm getting at is that Israel is very powerful. They have more aircraft than Germany, than Britain, than France. Nobody would have ever believed that. And they're better at it. So they're a very powerful country that can't be destroyed. So now in the Western paradigm of self hatred, oikophobia, they are the oppressor and they're too strong. And all the 500 million people around them with vastly more money in the Gulf, trillions of dollars of capitalization. They're the victims. And this little tiny country of ten and a half million that came out of nowhere, and it's fully capitalistic, free market, consensual, transparent. It's the bully. So I said, well, what would you do on. So they were all talking about, I said, what would you do on October 7th? What would people do? If you were a country, all of a sudden on October 7, you've had 20,000 people working in your country and you've got this idea now that Hamas has been normalized and when they break their leg on a kiboots, you take them to the medical and they, they talk to you, you develop friendships. And then one day out of the blue on a holiday, they blow apart this flimsy fence. It is flimsy, I've seen it. And then what, 3,000 people swarm across and they go, and I don't know what would have stopped them. And they rape and they behead and they commit every medieval atrocity known and they butcher 12 million women, children, elderly, you name it, torture people. Then they, and all to the applause of people back in Gaza who, when they hear that you can rape and you can steal, three or four or 500 of them, come across as opportunistic killers or looters. And then when they take these people, where do they take them? Well, people are trying to hit the hostages. And then they take them to a subterranean labyrinth, a billion dollar complex that they have appropriated all of the aid money from the UN and US and Western countries and they built this labyrinth beneath it. And then they put the hostages there and then they exit an entry under hospitals, schools and mosque. And then they say to the Israelis, what are you going to do about it? And Israel waits, what, 28 days? And they say, give us back the perpetrators. Now, we know Iran planned it and Hezbollah and all of you people. Just give us back the people who plan that and will try them. And they wouldn't do it. So then what are you going to do? I asked them and they just said, well, they stole all the land and they shouldn't be there in the first place. And they did a river to the sea argument. River to the sea. So my point is Israel is now powerful, so it has no empathy or sympathy among these people. There's a lot, a gigantic amount of Arab capital here, and there's a lot. There's even more in the Gulf, which we have a lot of people wanting to invest over there and go back there and make a fortune. And that money has been lavished on the Middle east studies program and led to tens of thousands of people from the Arab world in the United States. And you add that with the ideology of DEI that says the wealthier and whiter you are, the more culpable you are for your sins. And because Israel didn't have, have slaves, they didn't have encampments, the Japanese, they have to find something, so its existence is a crime. They are colonial settlers because they never just say Gaza, the West Bank. And if you say to them, well, they just had their 1947 borders, all you had to do was not try to destroy them. You've tried to destroy them in 47 and 56, 67, 73. And if you just left them alone. But the problem is you always attack them and then you lose the Sinai for years and then you attack them and you lose the west bank and then you attack them and you lose the Sinai, why don't you get smart and not attack them? So it's a perfect storm and I should say it's not a primary catalyst. But there's another subtext to all this, the three catalysts. And that is it's chic. It's now considered cool. If you're a young person to hate Israel, there's no social opprobrium. It's the thing to do on a campus. It's a thing to do with podcasters. When you get, you know, it's when you get. If you're Candace Owens and you look down and you say, I've only got 4 million subscribers, I need another 20,000. Oh, the Mossad was in on killing Erica Kirk. And if you're Tucker and you say 70% of my broadcast from now will either deal with Israel or with prominent Jews or with the history of the Middle east or something about that topic, it'll help and you'll get a new constituency. And that's what's happened. And there's nobody the people. I get the impression that there's very few voices now that are going to speak out against it. And you're not going to get the weird thing is that the people who were staunch Zionists on the right, people like Bill Kristol and all those people at the Bulwark and they've all jumped in bed with the left, they're very quiet, very, very quiet. So I don't see that there's a constituency even among the Jewish community that's going to stop. I do think that subterranean or subtext wise that's a bad articulation. But stealthily there's going to a lot of Jews who say the left still has more anti Semites than the right. And if you're Nick Fuentes or Candace Owens, people ostracize you on the right. If you're Hassan Piker, they deify you on the left. So I'm not going to say anything, but I'm not going to vote for these people because they want to destroy Israel and they're going to attack Jews. It's going to get open. I really am not an alarmist. As you know, I kind of make fun of conspiracists, but I think we're going to get to the point where people who can be identified as Jewish are going to be attacked on the street? I really do, yes.
- [26:21]
Sammy Wink
And to some extent, that's already happening. Victor, let's welcome back one of our sponsors, My Patriot Supply. There's a lot going on in the world right now. Escalating global conflict, threats to infrastructure and supply chains, growing concerns about food shortages. It's enough to make you stop and think, is my family actually prepared for what comes next? We've talked a lot about preparedness these days, and if you're sitting on the fence about it, it's time to get started. That's why our friends at My Patriot Supply have created the Family Starter Pack. Each kit gives you an emergency food supply that feeds your family for a full week, plus the tools you'll need to actually use it, like off grid cooking gear, water filtration and backup power, all for as little as $100 per person. It's in stock and ready to ship right now at preparewithvdh.com that's preparewithvdh.com Take this one simple, affordable step to make sure your family is protected with the essentials. Go to preparewithvdh.com to see everything included. That' preparewithbdh.com and we'd like to thank My Patriot Supply for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. So, Victor, that was a great explanation of why the why Jews either don't use or can't use their what would put them in the DEI category, which are the extensive long history of pogroms in Europe. And then of course, the Holocaust.
- [28:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
Also historical ignorance, amnesia. If you ask, look at Whoopi Goldberg. She didn't even know what the Holocaust was. And she's in my generation. But if you ask the average college student, can you please tell me what the Holocaust was? He'll either not know or he'll say they killed a bunch of. But he won't mention Jews. They don't have any idea what it was. Yeah, it's not taught in the universities anymore.
- [28:35]
Sammy Wink
No. All right, so let's turn to Iran. Now. It looks like this week the update is that Trump is floating the idea that they're getting closer to signing a treaty, perhaps with the Iranians. And I was reading the Daily Mail on this. So some of the major provisions of that treaty are caps on enrichment of uranium at 3.67%, sanctions lifted, and billions of frozen assets unfrozen. So I think the criticism there of was that that's not too much more than what Obama was doing. And so I was wondering your thoughts on what's going on with the war.
- [29:20]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, you start with the proposition you can't trust anything they say. They have a strategy. For three and a half weeks, we devastated their military industrial nuclear complex and we wiped out their top echelon. And they were reeling. I don't know why we didn't immediately cancel and freeze their banking assets and block the. We destroyed their navy, but we could have destroyed all of their PT boats because they were still sending missiles at us. But we could have just said we're going to open that strait, okay. And we were making progress. And then we reached a point where the targets that we had listed were mostly exhausted. So the next question was, do you want to apply further military pressure by dual use, Bridges, electrical grid. In other words, you want to be like Bill Clinton in Serbia or even Obama, who hit a lot of them, as I said, on numerous occasions in Libya. But we didn't. So we, that was what that was their entry mark. So then they started with a wink and a nod, said, well, there's mines out there. Well, we might, just might kind of sort of have a thousand missile, two thousand, maybe five. Well, we kind of didn't forget to tell you that our missiles didn't quite exceed 1800 miles. They exceeded it by a lot, 2,500. And oh yeah, we forgot to tell you that enrichment under the Biden begging us to get back into the Randu. We just hit the accelerator and it's 60% enrichment. We can make 11 bombs. So even what they were saying is that we have the ability even in our diminished state to close the strait, causing a worldwide depression, hit the Gulf nations and destroy their abilities and cementing it unless you negotiate. And Trump said, well, look at, they have no air. He says that again and again. They had two no Air Force, no air defense, no original command and control. That generation's dead. Yes. No Navy. These PT boats, or I guess they call them the Mosquito fleet. But the point is, and they've destroyed a lot of the factories. But the point is that at the same time when he was considering whether to go into these negotiations, he was dealing with with about six factors. Number one, they could threaten to do what I just said and cause a worldwide recession. We had to take that. Then he was getting representatives and senators from purple districts. You're going to lose the House and you're going to lose the Senate and they're going to impeach you and shut down the Trump counter revolution unless we get this solved. And I'm going to be out of a job. And then, of course, the left said, there's no need for an agenda. Agenda. Don't talk about an agenda. They don't like our agenda of open borders, trans illegal aliens, critical race theory. They don't like it. Just say Trump is a monster and he's going to cause World War Three. And so they got pressure from that, and then they got pressure from the Gulf. The Gulf said, if you're going to start a war, finish it. If you're not going to finish it, we're going to triangulate like we always do. So in that complex matrix, he's now trying to say, I got to get out of this, because the midterms are six months. I would argue that six months ago, that would be October, say, October 6th. Can anybody remember what we were doing on October 6th of 2025? I can't. Can you? I have no idea. So my point is, six months from now, if this is solved, nobody will even remember it except as a talking point. And if there's a revolution, it'll be in his favor. So he has a good point that he destroyed their military, and that's going to take them years to rebuild. He's probably destroyed, I don't know, a half a trillion dollars of arsenals, weaponry, industry, military infrastructure. Hezbollah and the Houthis, they'll get money from them, but it will take them a long time and the people will be angry. So that's all true. And then when he reiterated, as Marco Rubio did the other day, there were objectives. The first objective is they can't have a bomb. The second objective was we were going to damage them for what they've done to us. And we did do that. Check. The third was we were going to stop their ability to harm through missiles and drones. We have not done that yet. Yeah, they still have missiles and drones. And then. So what I would like to see is not a memorandum of understanding for further rug selling and bartering, because that's what it's going to be. And we're going to get closer and closer to the midterms. I would like him to say, here is a memorandum of understanding. A, I don't know, international committee will go into your country and they have gauges and instrumentation, and so do we. And they're going to tell us where this refined enriched uranium is, and you're going to turn it over. And if we can't get to it, then we're going to blow up the mountain on top of it. We'll do that. Bomb it. That's number one. And then we want an inventory of all of your offensive weapons and we want to collect them and destroy them. And then we will have lift the sanctions. They will say no to that. If they say no to that and Trump acquiesces, then he's got a problem because then the left's argumentation starts to get scarier to him because they will say, well, they still have missiles. They still have missiles in most countries do, and they have enriched uranium and they can make a bomb, so why do we do that? And he will say, well, they're not the same thing. Come on, look at them now versus all the power and prestige and money. Yes, that's true, but he did promise that. He didn't promise regime change, he didn't promise to destroy their oil. He didn't promise to do any of that. He promised to pay them back for the harm they've done, make sure they are not able to hurt people and they don't have a missile and drone and a nuclear. And he can do that still. If he was going to gamble, he would take that and say, you did not make it clear you would give up your nuclear plant nor your missiles. And then he, the next time one of those boats attacks a tanker or a US warship, he should obliterate all of them. If it is true, 800 Apaches and Warthogs scour the skies of the Gulf and of the Strait and then he can put in 500 airplanes and they can take out the bridges, they can take out the docks. They don't have to get on the ground at Carg island, they don't have to blow up the oil, the oil pipeline, they just have to blow up the piers, the cranes, so they cannot be offloaded. If it can't be offloaded from Carg island, they won't have any income. And then they have to open the strait and that means that they can demine it, they can lead an armada through it. And if they attack a carrier or I don't know if you want to put a carrier in that narrow confine, but if they attack a frigate, then they can really go to town with an Erica campaign and diminish it. But if he stops now without guarantees that they won't make a bomb or that they have a sizable, the greatest missile, if the American public thinks that they still have the greatest missile force in the Middle east, then he's going to suffer politically. So he's in a very tenuous place right now. He's very close to victory and he can pull it off, but it's going to take about two or three weeks and he can do that. But what I regret is I thought it was very wise to have negotiations. But very quickly it showed that they were not negotiating. We sent people over there where they came back, they said Trump, one of the secular elected officials, would call him up and say, we have a deal. And then the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would say, no, we don't. So you can't deal with them. You can't deal with them when there's one person speaking. But when there's four entities, the army and the Guard and the theocrats and the parliament and all President, you can't. So I'm not optimistic that you cannot solve this. I don't agree with Jack Keane on everything, but Jack Keane is right about this. He's right about it. He said, now, you may not like it, I don't like it, but sooner or later you're going to understand that they're playing you and they will not tell the truth and you have to finish the job and take out their ability to make war.
- [38:50]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, he seems to me spot on as well.
- [38:51]
Victor Davis Hanson
And you saw Carney today? Did you see that, what he said?
- [38:55]
Sammy Wink
No, go ahead.
- [38:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
Canadian Prime Minister.
- [38:56]
Sammy Wink
Yeah.
- [38:58]
Victor Davis Hanson
Gosh. He's a citizen of three countries. He said he hates the United States. He detests it. He's much more anti American than Trudeau. Trudeau was a buffoon. He just was a party pretty boy. Right. He likes to date actresses and wear blackface. He's just a joke. But this guy is a technocrat banker and he hates Trump. He hates Trump because Trump pulled off his globalist mask and showed him what he was about. He was about a $61 billion surplus with the United. He was about a 1.3, 1.4 investment in GDP on defense, violating the NATO promise. And he had an open border and his country is completely socialist now, not to mention euthanasia. Euthanasia. And he said that there's going to be a return to the rules based order, but it will be in Europe. And I thought about that. So it's going to be in Europe, the rules based. So the Carney is going to go to a European conference and say all of the choke points of the world will now be on return to international control. And China says, yeah, you're not going to get near the Spratly Islands. You're not coming in the South China Sea. It's too tense. And then Iran gets back and Said, oh, the street. And then he said, but Europe is in charge of the rules based order. European forces will now enforce the rules based order. And what will France and Britain and Germany and the rest of them do you think they're going to send their populations and they don't have anybody to put them up? Where does their fleet, they have no fleet fleet. They attacked a British base in Cyprus that the US Navy helped knock down the incoming charge drones that were aimed at and missiles. And they sent HMS Dragon. But it was a Friday so they didn't want to pay overtime to the unions to fix up the Dragon. It didn't leave for 20 days. They didn't get there for I guess 20 days. So they have not. They couldn't do the falcons again. So when I hear that Carney, I'd say, well, it's going to be, why don't we have the rules based order. In Canada you spent 1.3% of GDP and World War II, you had your own beach at Normandy, you had the fifth largest fleet in the world. And the Canadians had a ferocious reputation for military efficacy. Go to it. Get so tired of all of these technocrats and globalists lecturing us about, you know, we can be difficult, we can be idiosyncratic, but the fact is that we have 80,000 troops, 80,000 troops all over Europe and what, 55, 65, 75, 81 years after World War II. 81 years.
- [42:15]
Sammy Wink
Years.
- [42:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
We're keeping the European peace, Russia out, Germany down, America in. At some point, wouldn't they be embarrassed and say, we like you guys, but you don't need 80,000 people here to protect us. We have 100 million people more than you do. No, they don't. They're shameless. It's like you've got to anchor NATO. I heard that in this conversation today on the air. They were all, you know, NATO's wonderful and this and this. And it's just so frustrating that without the United. It's not even that. We pay 16, 17% of the actual budget. We pay about 60% of the overhead, the logistical costs, the nuclear deterrence, all of that. And they just ride right on it. And then they insult us like Mertz does. And then when. And Trump pushes back and said, well, if you hate us or you and the Spanish, the Italians, you don't want us to do, maybe we'll just take some. How dare you say you would take 5,000 troops out of Germany. How dare you.
- [43:20]
Sammy Wink
You know, Victor, we need to take a break and come back. And I have A few things on what you've just been saying. Stay with us and we'll be right back.
- [43:29]
Victor Davis Hanson
Since the founding of America 250 years ago, many things have changed. But some things never do. The commitment of husband and wife. The importance of passing along our values to our children. The faithfulness of God. Some wonder how we can ensure America will continue to thrive as long as we keep first things first. We've only just begun. America the Beautiful.
- [43:59]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. You can find Victor on X at VD Hansen and on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup. So if those are your media outlets, the social media, come join him there. So, Victor, it seems to me that if somebody's going to call Europe's bluff, which it may be called sometime, you know soon enough about their strength, et cetera, it seems to me it would appear in Spain first of all that the Spanish would be subject to the called bluff. But I don't know.
- [44:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
He's polling about 20%, so it'll be interesting if he represents the Spanish people or not. But generally, Europe hates Trump in particular, and they're either envious or they don't like America. Some of them do. People in Normandy, they still remember D Day, but. And why wouldn't they dislike us? Because they have more people than we do. They should have a bigger gdp. They look over here, they don't have any energy at all. United States is the greatest producer of natural gas and oil in the history of civilization. And all because Americans invented a new technology that no one knew about. They look at AI, you look at the top 10 AI countries, I think eight of them are American. You look at market capitalization of all corporations in the world, world, it's eight Americans at the top. If you look at universities, such as they are, they're still engineering, math, they're all American at top ranked. And they never asked why is that? So why are they so wealthier? Per capita income in England is about $44,000. It's 83,000 in the United States. If you took it English per capita or household income, and you compared it with the 50 states, they would be behind Mississippi. And what's weird is when they ask them that, how do you think you would rank your economic data compared to United? The Brits said seven, we'd rank seven. So they had this idea that they're so successful. But when you have socialism and they're really socialists now and you have open borders and you have 16% of your population are radical Muslims, most of them there illegally and you have no defense and you're from fertility rates 1.3 something. It's not good.
- [46:26]
Sammy Wink
No.
- [46:27]
Victor Davis Hanson
Although my ancestors are doing very well.
- [46:29]
Sammy Wink
The Swedes, they are doing much better.
- [46:31]
Victor Davis Hanson
They're not going to use the word Islamophobia.
- [46:33]
Sammy Wink
They are. Since you've got there. That was one of my topics. You might as well talk about it. They've said that one of the foreign minister, I think came out and said that we are no longer using the term Islamophobia because Islamists have exploited it so. So you can say haters of Muslims or other things.
- [46:54]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think we should adopt the three pillars of Swedish citizenship. They told all of their immigrants, if you don't want to go home and you want to be a Swede, number one, you had to speak Swedish. Number two, you had to assimilate into the culture. And number, number three, you could not be on social assistance or have a criminal record. And the reason that they're doing this is not because they're enlightened necessarily, because they have the worst gang problem in Europe now and they've got the highest crime rates. And so if we just said tomorrow, okay, well, if you will have an amnesty. Not an amnesty, but a pathway to citizenship. No, excuse me. Third, try a pathway to a green card. You have to pass an English literacy and oral fluency test. Two, you have no criminal record. Three, you have to be off social assistance. Everybody would say that would be fair. There's about. They said there were 20 million illegal aliens here. The Yale study showed that before Job Biden, he let in 10 to 12, let's say 2 million have left. Say there's 30 million. How many would qualify for that? You know What I mean? 20 million. I have a feeling. Only half about.
- [48:24]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, I was going to say you're more optimistic about 5 million, but.
- [48:27]
Victor Davis Hanson
And then the left. And so if that's true, then you have a. You would have 8 to 10 million people who came this country and had, were not, did not want to learn the language and are not self sufficient and may have a criminal record.
- [48:44]
Sammy Wink
Yes, well, we got off on a little sidetrack there. I wanted to go back to the war. Rubio. Caroline Levitt is on maternity leave and Rubio stood in for her. And I got the impression that he was trying to suggest that Operation Epic Fury is done and finished. And I think, think I've read other places about that. And I think it's because they want to say avoid the War Powers act time limit. But there's two things Here. Is that your impression? And two, they've been saying that the War Powers act, the administration's position is that it's unconstitutional. I was just curious what that meant.
- [49:26]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. The Constitution says that, that the Congress has the right, the responsibility to declare war and to approve treaties. But it's very vague about the executive commander in chief. I'll give you an example. Obama did the Iran deal. It's a treaty. Did he ever submit it to Congress? No, he just said it was an executive sidebar or something. Did Lyndon Johnson ever say the Vietnam War was a war? No. Korea, Police action. So all these presidents feel that they have the executive right under the Constitution as a commander in chief. So they passed this thing during the Vietnam years, the War Powers Act. Yes. And it was aimed at Richard Nixon. And the War Powers act, to be frank, is probably unconstitutional. And number two, it's only applied in reality by Democrats against Republicans. So if you're Bill Clinton and you're bombing Serbia for 72 days without a NATO authorization, although there are NATO countries of the willing who participated wasn't official in NATO, it's okay. No war powers. If you're Barack Obama and you think that the Arab Spring is going, you're going to liberate all the Libya, but you can't. And Nan Samantha Power and Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton come to you and say don't be a chicken. You've got to go join France and Britain and you do and you bomb for seven months. Where was the War Powers Act? Didn't exist. So it only exists when there's a Republican president. And usually it only exists when the Republican president is unpopular. George H.W. bush got congressional authorization to go into Iraq and we got you in authorization to go into Afghanistan. But it's, it's irrelevant what, what will happen. It's not 60 days. They have to inform the Congress and then they have a. A limit at 90 days if they, they don't get authorization. But what Rubio was trying to say is that the kinetic part is over. So even if it is legal and even if you do apply it, even if we do put up with this, we still have time because you can't count the time the last three some weeks that we haven't been fighting, it's been calm and that's what he was trying to do. I wish he had have said, said he did say that we weren't after regime change. We weren't going to invade. We were there to diminish the ability to make war, to neutralize and guarantee they didn't get a bomb and to make sure they didn't have the ability to attack their neighbors through either terrorism or missiles. But he didn't say to get those three goals we have to either force the Iranians to submit or we have to negotiate. And if they concede that, we have to have the ability to make them honor their word. I just don't think in the 47 years I was in college and graduate school when this happened, I can't think of one time where they told the truth. They even cheated John Kerry. I mean they cheated. There was a good article. It's in as I said earlier in Powerline and at Charles started what would have happened if Trump had not gotten out of the Iran deal and all of the 10 year period was up. So they assumed that they were always going to. And then if you say that was a mistake to get in the Rand deal, nobody stopped Joe Biden. He begged them. He brought John Kerry out of the freezer and reacted to it, reanimated him and he said go over there and get the deal. They didn't want it. They didn't want it because they had already violated all of the tenets and they were enriching to 60%.
- [53:54]
Sammy Wink
All right, Victor, let's welcome to our show a new sponsor, Home Title Lock. American homeowners, the FBI has been warning about a type of real estate fraud called title theft. And your equity is the target. With just a forged signature, your ownership can be transferred out of your name and without protection in place place, you're left with an emotional and financial nightmare. That's why you should visit Home Title Lock so that you can find out today if you're already a victim and protect yourself, use promo code Victor. That's promo code victorometitlelock.com to get a free title history report plus a free trial of their million dollar triple lock protection that comes with 247 monitoring urgent alerts. And if you're a victim of fraud, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it. That's hometitlelock.com promo code Victor or use the link in the show notes. Don't be a victim. Protect your equity today with Home Title Lock. And we'd like to thank Home Title Lock for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show show. So Victor, let's turn to California and recently the we know as well a lot of our viewers know California has a jungle primary where everybody the primary is all the parties are in and the last the two that are on top are on the ballot for November. Well, no surprise, but our chair of the Democratic Party in California, Rusty Hicks, has decided that this is does not work as a primary.
- [55:42]
Victor Davis Hanson
I thought it worked. Great process. It always got the results. The law was. They drafted the law. I know they said they had 60% Democrats so they could ensure that in most all. And it worked. We haven't had a Republican statewide office holder since Arnold schwarzenegger left, what, 20 years ago. We have super majorities in both legislatures of Democrats. All the old Schwarzenegger judges are all retiring. They're wonderful judges, but they're all termed out. That's not the right word. They're retiring. And so they got the judiciary, they've got executives, they got the legislative branch, all because of these jungle primaries. And the real cause, 4 million people have left the state the last 15 years. And these were Reaganite, dungmazionite, Pete Wilson type, Schwarzenegger types. They're gone ban easily. Yep, that's it.
- [56:37]
Sammy Wink
And we know why that is. Another thing about this governor's race is some of the candidates for governor who are on the left are already talking about new taxes that they would impose. The most recent one is, I forget the candidate's name, but he wants to have a tax on EVs since they avoid the high gas prices that they would tax EVs.
- [57:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
Their message to us, the voters is, well, you know, we lost $240 billion on high speed rail and we lost another 250 billion in Covid hospice, entitlement fraud. We didn't really lose it because the money, as Barack Obama said, is spread around. We spread the money around, spread the wealth. So people got money. But you know, we need. As for bookkeeping, we've lost a half a trillion dollars. So we want you to pay. No, you have 13. You have the highest income tax in the nation. How high are they going to go? I don't know, 13.3. They go much higher. And they've got the, I think the fifth, when you add the county, add ons fifth highest sales tax, the highest gas taxes, the highest electricity cost outside of Hawaii. Hawaii, the highest gasoline in the continental United States. Everybody's angry. I was very curious about that. There's a national crisis because gas at its lowest point I think was $1.88 or $2 national under Trump before the war. And now it's up to $4 anytime. The last five years I was driving and I saw $4 gas. I pulled over and filled up. I just saw it Yesterday, it was $6, 20 cents. They're mad that they have to pay California prices, but we in California pay that every day. And it's even worse than that, Sam. We pay it every day and then we keep electing the people who charge us that. That's what's so weird about that debate stage. I looked at a clip today, Porter. She came up with a brilliant idea that if she self critiqued like she was in a Korean prisoner of war camp, would you please critique yourself? So she said, and she had. About being mean to people. And then Becerra. Poor Villa Grossa didn't know what he was talking about. Becerra just gave. Basically everything is great and we're going to give you more great things. And then Bianco and Hilton were pretty good. And the guy from San Jose, McMahon or whatever his name is, he was just.
- [59:17]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, that was the ev. Tax guy.
- [59:19]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. I'm not them and I'm not them. I'm in the middle. I'm not left or right. I'm just nothing.
- [59:27]
Sammy Wink
Would it surprise you that the Palisades arsonist has revealed himself to be left wing? Some of his social media posts are. Or. Sorry. These are the history of his searches on his computer. Free Mangioni and kill billionaires.
- [59:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
He did. I mean, if you think about the assessed evaluation of that beautiful Pacific Palisades, it must have been, I don't know, billions of dollars he destroyed. It killed 12 people. And he's a hero, probably. And the hundred million dollars was raised for private charities. It's all gone. They blew that. The NGOs took that money. There's not, I mean, there's nothing there. You think they. Boy, I get back to those videos of LA in the 50s. If you had had a guy like Sam Yordy, who I wasn't particularly fond of, but he was a good mayor in the early 60s. He would have just gone on now, that would have been all rebuilt by now. But the subtext was a leftist burned it down because he hated wealthy people and he knew a communist mayor. And I say that because she used to visit Cuba Castro, Karen Bass, and he knew that she wouldn't rebuild, build it and would try to have high density affordable housing. You know what I mean? That's just a. That's just a buzzword for we're gonna look outside Rome or Amsterdam or Paris. We love those high rises. They have a little bit of lawn and then the bus picks everybody up and that's what they want. Not for them, not for them. They want a big, beautiful, gracious John Kerry Or Elizabeth Warren House. That's what they, they want. Or Nancy Pelosi's three mansions or Barack Obama's four. That's what they want.
- [61:22]
Sammy Wink
Bernie Sanders three.
- [61:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
He has three. Two. Yes, he does. One on the lake. Of course they have to have. If you're a Democrat and you're a socialist and you want high density housing for everybody else, it's absolutely important. One of your many houses has to be on the lake. I think his is on Lake Champlain, isn't it? And Brock has two. He has one on the Atlantic and one in the Pacific. Pacific on the shore. And I don't know about. Dianne Feinstein had one at Lake Tahoe Mansion. They usually have them, you know, pretty near the sea.
- [61:55]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. And doesn't it seem funny to you that they are offended by billionaires but they want to take more money from the people via all of these excise taxes and things like that. And they're just fine with the fraudsters that are taking it from them. Like that's okay, they're spreading money around.
- [62:15]
Victor Davis Hanson
But a billionaire, they don't believe it. When, when money is stolen or wasted, they think, well, who got the money? The people did. So they don't. And then Hassan Piker, the Marxist pro, Luigi man, Luigi Mangioni, he had a tar, he had a new Porsche. So I just did. Before we started, I was curious. I said to Grok and I'm going to check it with chat ptd. Does Hassan Piker have a Porsche and how much is it worth? $200,000. Some people say he has Cartier jewelry or something or watch or something.
- [62:55]
Sammy Wink
He looks like he has that kind of stuff on.
- [62:57]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. So you have a $200,000 Porsche and you're defending the guy who killed a middle class person who worked his way up United Healthcare. I have United Healthcare. I had over a million dollars in medical fleet. There's only been one little dispute, one dispute on a PET scan that I may end up having to pay, but I doubt it. I wrote him a very nice note. So when he says that they just poach on people, I don't know what he's talking about. They insure millions of people and they're in financial trouble mostly because of the medical thought on the part of the left. But it's so weird that they're not even shameless. So you're this Piker guy and you praise murderers that kill what they call enemies of the people or social murderers because they are social murderers. And then you are so brazen you drive around on a 200,000 wouldn't a true Marxist said, well, I like that 200,000 Porsche, but let me do the math. Ah, I could buy. I could buy four or five Honda Civics for the people and I'd like to help them. I suggest we all have a program that nobody on the left buys expensive cars. No, this. Nothing about ideology. That's just the way they gain power for themselves and money.
- [64:28]
Sammy Wink
Well, since we're talking about Hassan Piker, I believe he's in Michigan running for Senate.
- [64:34]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, that's not him. That's Al Sy.
- [64:36]
Sammy Wink
Oh, that's El Said. That's right.
- [64:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
He's very worried that the death of Khamenei will hurt his constituencies. They might be so, yes. Reckless to say, oh, we miss him
- [64:49]
Sammy Wink
so much, but let's return to Michigan. And there was a professor at the University of Michigan who hijacked the commencement ceremony to voice his own political views. And one of the things he said said was that the in he complained about the inhumanity of Israel's war in Gaza. So it was a pro Palestinian.
- [65:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, that was courageous, wasn't it?
- [65:14]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. I, well, get this though. What my, my question is or my observation is that the crowd went wild. So I'm not sure my statement that he hijacked the ceremony.
- [65:26]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, he hijacked in a sense that he was required to submit a text, but because he's an academic, he's a liar and they knew he was going to do it. That was like, you know, giving a child a hand grenade. You know he's going to pull it. So he says this and the university, this is not who we are. And same thing with the Cornell president. He came out of a lecture and the Palestinian crazy Middle East, I don't know anti. They blockaded his car so he. They could. So he thought he would. He's seen enough TikTok YouTube votes. He'll do the old slow break, slow approach. So he backed up, slow broke, and then they kind of gave way. But one poor little baby hurt his foot. So the president, then president of Cornell assaulted a student. Maybe ISIL protesters with phalluses will wave at him and show up. But what kills me about these people is that what they say later, they have this certain vocabulary. They must be a. It's all boilerplate. And it's saying, this is not who UCLA Law School, this is not what we do. But they do it. And you're correct.
- [66:41]
Sammy Wink
The president of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor said, this is not who we are.
- [66:46]
Victor Davis Hanson
Of course it is. Who they are. And Mr. President, you are who you are in the university. That's why you're in such bad trouble. Because you overcharge people and you want the government to subsidize student loans to pay your inflated costs while you have cut the teaching loads and raised the salaries of ideological professors and you've got all these administrators and DEI and you're just not very efficient and you're not honest and you're not disinterested. And people who graduate from universities in the humanities or English or social science are not educated, period. I should say though, it's infecting science, math, medicine, everything that.
- [67:31]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, it is. You know, since you went there and before we go to break, I just had a, A, a poll from the skeptic research center that was surveying Americans who believed Europe, Europeans had introduced war to Native Americans. Like they weren't fighting before the Europeans got here. But anyways, this did it according to how much you trust educators. And so if they had high trust in educators, 64% said that they thought that the Native Americans learned it from the Europeans. Medium trust in educators, 56%, almost 57. And then low trust in educators, 36%. And I think that the poll shows that one should hardly trust educators because we all know that the Native Americans were as likely to fight each other before the Europeans showed up and as they were after. Right.
- [68:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
You know, I had a brilliant friend, he's still alive. I really haven't, I haven't seen him after I got. Well, Charles Garrigus, Gus Garrigus, I mean Chuck Garrigus Sr. I've known him for 40 years. One of the brightest guys. I modeled a character in Feels without dreams Busagas. And when I was farming full time, I used to talk to him all the time. His farm was two miles away. And I got this part time job to teach one Latin place. And it was right during the meltdown with Sun Maid raisin cooperative. So we had no money. We lost $78,000. They appropriated our capital retained. That was a lot of money then. And they blew it. They didn't tell us they had used that capital retained, not for capital retained purposes but to subsidize their money losing operation that couldn't compete with a private packer. Okay. So I, he said, well, what's the deal? You're going to go up there for a while? I said yeah, I'm getting so tired of dealing with these raisin people that lie. They just lie to you. And he said, what do you mean? Of course they do, but you're going to academia. And I said, yeah. He said, they're bikers compared to those people. He was a PhD candidate. He goes, you're going to hear more lies. And I had been a graduate student and I had been lied to, but he was absolutely right. First thing you know, I went in there and it was, you're going to have a really nice office and a trailer, and it'll be. Four people shared it. And then it was, you're. We're going to give you a good time to teach. It was like 8 in the morning, which is fine with me. I was a farmer, but I go there and there's hardly any students that get up at 8 in the morning. And then it was, we've got a better classroom. It was the gymnasium, the south gym. It was just again and again and again. And then it was, well, there will be a tenure track job open, and you are one of our leading candidates because you published a book. And then they had a candidate who was pretty good looking and they brought them all out. And the chairman says to me, I won't mention his name. This is academia now. Only in academia could this happen. No Raisin Packer would do this. He says to me, well, I ski a lot and she's a skier. And I said, yeah. He goes, well, would you mind just. Would you mind just being part time?
- [71:08]
Sammy Wink
You mean this other candidate that wasn't you that he wanted to give the job to?
- [71:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
It gets worse. And he says, you know, we don't, we don't have a lot of money, your classes. We don't have any other classicists. I said, that's. I created the position because you told me a year ago that if I started with nothing with one class and I got 100 students, I met the FTE requirements and you'd have a tenure track job. And the McClatchy foundation gave money for it and I created it. Yeah, I know, but we want you to interview her. I said, what? Interview my antithesis, my opponent, to take my job. He said, well, you know, she's got a lot in common with us. Meaning we don't hire young women very often. She's quite stunning. And the next candidate came and they said, hey, Victor, this guy is really impressive. Could you do me a favor? I got to go off for the weekend. Could you take him to your house and let him stay overnight with you? I said, on my farm, he's applying for my job. I created my job. And you know what? I did? And then he came up to me, I won't mention his name. And he said, I didn't know that I was going to stay overnight and I don't have any white shirt. Can I have a white shirt for my interview? So, so I went in my closet, you know, as a farmer, I didn't have any, and I found a starch white shirt. So I gave it to him. So he wore my shirt to the interview to take my job. And I had wife, kids, everybody cook breakfast for him. And he was a nice guy. And that's what academics do. They just, they're completely tone deaf to protocol, to traditional manners. And that's why everybody's shocked when they shout at people. You know, all those students that do that, they're vulgar. They try at UCLA or Stanford, they say, we want to rape your daughter, Judge. Where do they get that? They get that from the faculty, because the faculty are just older graduate students, you know what I mean? The whole university has been so corrupted from the 60s and 70s. And so it was very funny because I said to myself, and then I said to Chuck when I came home about a week later, I saw him, I said, you're absolutely right. And he said, now remember one thing, because we were dealing with some pretty tough people in the raisin business, the cell and the fruit business always prefer an upfront crook. Upfront crooks you can deal with. They're tough people and they may be crooked, but they're transparent and they're just going to try to bulldoze. These people will stab you in the back or slit your throat and smile at you. And he was absolutely right about that.
- [73:54]
Sammy Wink
Or they'll smile at you first and then slit your throat and stab you in the the back. All right, Victor, let's take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the Supreme Court. Stay with us, we'll be back.
- [74:06]
Bradley Devlin
Hey, I'm Bradley Devlin and just like you, I'm a huge fan of Victor Davis Hansen, whether it's his long form podcast, Victor Davis Hansen in his own words or his short form content for the Daily Signal. Victor Davis Hansen, in a few words. I always leave an episode learning something new.
- [74:20]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think they forgot the 1982 Falklands
- [74:22]
Bradley Devlin
War and in the 80s of clickbait and rage bait. That's a really good feeling, right?
- [74:28]
Victor Davis Hanson
The media. Thank you, you can leave now.
- [74:30]
Bradley Devlin
Well, if you agree, you might like my show, the Daily Signals long form interview podcast called the Signal. Sit down. Every week we take you behind the scenes of the biggest battles in Washington D.C. as they happen with some of the biggest names in politics. We explore big ideas and we analyze the policy making process from an unabashedly and unapologetically, apologetically conservative perspective. And that's important now more than ever with the Trump administration back in office, because in 2024, you sent Washington a message it couldn't ignore. It's your government and together we're taking it back. So check us out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you enjoy. Victor Davis Hansen, we're there too. And drop me a follow on X radleydevlin to stay updated with what's happening on the Signal.
- [75:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
Sit down.
- [75:15]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back. Back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own word. I think I said this earlier, but we are a subsidiary of the Daily Signal and you are all encouraged to go to the Daily Signal. There's lots of, lots of conservative material on the Daily Signal site, so you'll enjoy that. So Victor, Justice Alito and Justice Jackson were on opposite sides of this Louisiana redistricting gerrymandering. And what the Louisiana court had done, court state had done was to gerrymander a district according to how many blacks were in it or they wanted to have more blacks in it so that I guess they would argue they would have a representative. The court found that as illegal that you can't base people's voting rights based on their, their color. And that was a six to three opinion. And in the fallout from that, Justice, Justice Brown Jackson, sorry, had said that and I'll try to make your argument and then you can tell me because Justice Alito said that this was baseless and insulting, but this was her position. She said, well, we can't force the early implementation of this because the court said, well, we've got to do it quickly so that when the people go to vote, they're voting in constitutional districts. If we don't do that, they'll be be in unconstitutional districts. And she said, well, you're just hurrying the usual 32 day rule that you wait for implementation and that it, if you do that it might appear that this is a biased opinion. Those were the two things. There are two complaints and Justice Alito said that that was baseless and an insulting argument. And if I might, well, I mean
- [77:17]
Victor Davis Hanson
she's her whole theory is anybody that votes against me on the court and wins is biased. Anytime that I win, I'm not biased. And he was just saying if this is the law and all of these states are countering, we're going to send out our ballots and we got to redit and you might as well, well, you know, expedite and get it. So you don't have elections because if you have elections under in districts that have already been declared unconstitutional, we're going to get a whole bunch of lawsuits. The other, there's two other subtexts to this. I keep using that word, I'm sorry but one of them is and I know that people will say this is prejudice because she's black African American. I think one of the smartest people in the country Court is Clarence Thomas. Not just because I agree with him ideologically or conservative, just because he doesn't say a lot but when he says something it really matters. But as far as just pure intellectual brilliance, I think Alito is really at the top and he's very mild mannered. I want to read this new biography of him by Molly Hemingway Alito. But he's a wonderful gentleman judge. And so unfortunately for Justice Jackson, she is the least competent of the three. You can make whatever you say about Judge Kagan or is it Brennan, they're competent. They know she doesn't know anything. And so when you put the most adroit person versus the the least qualified into any exchange and they've had a lot of them in writing, it's very embarrassing and people haven't commented on it to the fullest because it, you know what I mean? It's just so one sided. The other thing is she's acting on bias because there's three developments that are transpiring now that may be the most revolutionary developments in American politics in the last century. Number one, there is a redistricting fight as we all know, before the November election, maybe in some cases cases before the primary, depending on the date and California, we're going to get slaughtered here. Virginia is slaughtered maybe. But when you look at the state legislatures that can pass it either over the veto of a governor or share a governor of the same of the Republican party and if they were to redistrict, and I think more and more will, you're talking about an exchange of 30 or 35 states seats, number one
- [80:02]
Sammy Wink
in the favor of the GOP.
- [80:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes. And so you're talking about 273 Republican seats. It'll be pretty safe. Number two, this Supreme Court ruling that says that you can't gerrymander a district just to achieve a race based anticipated result will reduce the black caucus which are mostly Democrat. There's some black, you know, we have Senator Scott, etc. That are black. They're not in the black caucus. But the left wing Democratic Black Caucus will be reduced by anywhere from 10 to 15 seats. Add that to the other figure I mentioned. And then there's the third. We're seeing the greatest, where they're seeing the greatest exchange of population, I shouldn't say exchange, I say influx in the history of this country, I think except maybe for the westward expansion or the Oklahoma diaspora. But even greater than that, California is 300,000 a year and all of the so called purple states are losing anywhere depending on which year you pick 1 to 3 million per year. And because the census is adjudicated, adjudicated, adjudicates House of Representatives seats, the number you've got besides the makeup of the district, you've got another outside factor of the number of seats because red states are going to pick up 10 to 15, at least 10 seats. So let me recap. They're going to get 10 more seats in aggregate that are going to go to red states. In addition to that, they're going to, if there's a full fledged gerrymander war, which it's starting, they may pick up anywhere from 20 to 30 seats. If there's no more racial gerrymandering, they may pick up 10 to 15 seats. And the electoral College as we remember, each state that a candidate wins the electoral votes that put him over the top, I guess it's 271 those are adjudicated not on the size of the population per se exactly, but in the number of congressional and Senate seats. So you'll see red states, more red states with bigger electoral college numbers. And that's why they look at this. And this was very. The reason she's angry about it is that she's been told or advised by the DNC and the politicos, you've got to stop this or delay it. And that's why James Carville is coming out and saying this is unfair. And you always want him to give an example. He never gives an example. This is warfare. Well James, why do you want to pack the court, end the filibuster, get rid of the electoral college, let in too steep. It's because if you don't demography and, and these changing laws and rules are going to emasculate your party and they know it. And it could have some. If these are implemented before the midterms, you might pick up Republicans in theory could have 10 to 15 seats in play that they didn't have before and they have what, a six or seven? They would have to lose probably 20 or 30 seats that's very possible. They could. But if the war were to end in a month, and then you had five months before the there was a suitable, presentable peace, which I'm very skeptical about, then Trump could be going in by saying, you know, I removed the menace in Venezuela and I emasculated the Iranians and there's no more that. And then the economy is already ready to boom. It just is with the jobs report, the stock market, the foreign investment, very low claims for unemployment insurance, AI spending, AI efficiency, it's really going to boom. And when the, the only missing tester in that mosaic is the oil price, it's doubled. But if it gets back, I don't. If the oil price, if they open this trade and everybody's pumping, the oil price won't go back. It'll collapse because of speculation where people have so desperate to get product, they pa anything and they're going to be stuck with $110 or $115 oil when it's 50 bucks or lower and they'll dump it.
- [84:48]
Sammy Wink
Well, Victor, we're getting to the end here and we have a pretty hard break, but I thought maybe just a word from you. The Met Gala was this week or last weekend. It was. I want to just get your opinion on this. And this comes from the View as they were analyzing the Mint. And they didn't put this in this succinct of words, but they were disparaging towards Jeff Bezos because of all of his wealth and wealthiness. Who's the guy that founded this whole Met Gala. And yet they were all enthralled with the display of wealth and finery that was. I don't understand the Met Gal.
- [85:33]
Victor Davis Hanson
They only disliked Jeff Bezos because he brought a modicum outcome of balance to the Washington Post. But when he first bought it and bailed him out and he was still on the left, they loved him. They love George Soros. He's got a 9 billion or $10 billion fortune. They love him. He's put more money in there than Jeff Bezos ever did. They used to love Mark Zuckerberg. He put 419 million in in 2020. They loved Elon Musk. He voted for Hillary and he probably voted for Biden. They all voted for them. And so they're, you know, you look at a guy like Reid Hoffman, he's a multibillionaire, you know, LinkedIn, they love him. Why do they love him? Because he funded the entire farce of E. Jean Carroll's suit against Trump and he gave millions of dollars to Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. So they don't hate billionaires. They only hate billionaires that don't give them money. And then that's the way it is. And you could see that Graham Platner, who said he hates billionaires, he had his little video out, he said, well, you know, Susan Collins is just a creature of billionaires and this campaign is grassroots and there's going to be a lot of money coming in here. And of course we'll take some money too, but it won't be. It won't be because we haven't raised enough from the people. So he's going to get every big fat cat left wing guy to write a check. They always, as I said before, if you look at the foundations in the United States or you look at political contributions, they have all the money. It's tech money, law money. That's where finance, investments money. That's those sectors. You look at the Fortune 400, you got to go down a little bit to see conservatives. And most of their money is in like real estate, assembly, transportation, oil.
- [87:42]
Sammy Wink
And they're usually self made people.
- [87:45]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, most of them are. And they're prep more pragmatic and they're not ashamed of their money. They feel I earned it. Not that the left is ashamed of it, but there's. But they feel that, well, I'm a left wing commie and I'm rich, so theoretically I should give my money away. But they never do. I mean, Tom Steyer is a billionaire. He offshored his money in the Caymans to cut his tax burden.
- [88:12]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, that can't be good for the soul. They must have some.
- [88:17]
Victor Davis Hanson
They don't believe. I'd say that most of the new Jacobin Democratic party does not believe in a soul. They're atheists or agnostics. They don't believe, believe in a Christian duality. They think that's their problem. They think, oh my God, I'm 72 years old, I'm going to die and this is it. So I got to make sure that everybody doesn't smoke around me. And I got to make sure everybody doesn't have a gun. And I got to make sure that the air is perfectly clean where I am. And I got to make sure that there's no fumes because I got to live to be 120.
- [88:49]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, you're reminding me of Ted Turner died today. Sorry. And he was very anti religion long he. Yeah, he was 87, I believe.
- [88:59]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. He had a lifetime of heavy use of antidepressants I think cocaine. At one point, he was a real technological pioneer. He created C in and then he kind of lost it.
- [89:10]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. Broadcast cable news.
- [89:14]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, he bought. He bought. He created cable news. He bought the Atlanta Braves. He even managed them one year and, and they were at the Cellar and they became at one time the preeminent team. And then he actually bought a sailboat in the America Cup.
- [89:33]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, he became a sailor.
- [89:34]
Victor Davis Hanson
And then he was kind of a Renaissance guy. I liked him when they said he had problems with depression and they asked him, I think he said, what do you do when you're depressed? He said, I get on the floor in a fetal position, cover my ears and yellow. And he was married. You got to give him credit. He actually was able to survive being in a room with Jane Fonda every
- [89:55]
Sammy Wink
day for 10 years.
- [89:57]
Victor Davis Hanson
10 years.
- [89:58]
Sammy Wink
Somewhere around 10 years, yes.
- [89:59]
Victor Davis Hanson
I'm sure she got a big settlement.
- [90:02]
Sammy Wink
Perhaps he said that. Or they said in an article I was reading that he died from lose. Dementia, I believe it's called, and that the manic depression was a symptom before the actual dementia.
- [90:19]
Victor Davis Hanson
They think that's kind of a Parkinson's, like amyloid Alzheimer's disease, as I think. And yeah, it's at one point, if we had this conversation 30 years ago, he would be. He had the position in American popular culture that Elon Musk does or Bezos, you know what I mean? Everybody was talking about him. He didn't. It's funny, I think at one time he was the largest landowner, second largest landowner in the United States.
- [90:51]
Sammy Wink
I think in the article I just read, he still was the largest landowner in the United States.
- [90:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, he didn't get into really that. He was a pioneer in the communications, but he didn't get into the tech business.
- [91:03]
Sammy Wink
All right, Victor, thank you very much for your time today and thanks to our audience for choosing to join us on this Friday news roundup.
- [91:09]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you very much, everybody for watching and listening.
- [91:12]
Sammy Wink
This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson and we're signing off.
- [91:20]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this, you can also check out my own website@victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features. In addition,
- [91:36]
Bradley Devlin
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