← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Bad Cop Trump, Good Cop Vance? Inside the High-Stakes Iran Gambit | Victor Davis Hanson
01:25:16
Victor Davis Hanson and host Jack Fowler discuss President Trump’s profane Easter warning to Iran and frame it as a “Nixon madman” bad-cop/good-cop strategy involving JD Vance, while contrasting Trump’s decisive military rescue efforts with past administrations’ failures.
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- [00:00]
Jack Fowler
We gather here tonight to bring women
- [00:03]
Victor Davis Hanson
back to their rightful place. The Testaments, a new Hulu Original series from the executive producers of the Handmaid's Tale. It's easier to accept a story than believe that the people around you are monsters.
- [00:14]
Jack Fowler
The battle isn't over. There comes a time when you have
- [00:17]
Victor Davis Hanson
to take action, when you have to choose your own destiny. Never quite as it seems. Watch the new Hulu original series the Testaments, streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers. Terms apply. And the saddest thing about it is they've done studies, they don't really give you the figures. They say 15 to 20. It's more like 30 billion they've spent.
- [00:38]
Jack Fowler
Just to be clear as we speak right now, are the funds there to complete LA to San Francisco?
- [00:44]
Victor Davis Hanson
The entire amount of money we need not there today.
- [00:47]
Jack Fowler
How much do you estimate it's going to cost to connect high speed rail San Francisco to LA today?
- [00:52]
Victor Davis Hanson
We estimate with the right optimization, just over $125 billion. I think $126 billion is the current estimate for that. And they haven't laid any track yet. I mean they had to have imminent domain. They went right through one of the most historically beautiful farming areas in California, if not the United States and the world. And then people have pointed out if Elon Musk came in here and said, well, you know, I'm worth 400 billion, so I'm going to pay off the debt for 30 billion. So it's free. It would lose money every year. It would lose millions of dollars, most certainly billions of dollars that have already been invested in the project. And the project now has in excess of $100 billion.
- [01:30]
Jack Fowler
Budget Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day all wrapped up in one in Iran. There will be nothing like it. Exclamation points. Open the blanking strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in hell. Just watch. Praise be to Allah. President Donald J. Trump.
- [01:49]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think we're seeing a deliberate replay of what we the Nixon madman bomber. Bad cop, cop, good cop. Nixon 1973 during the Yom Kippur War and especially with Vietnam. Earlier in the Christmas bombing, he told his national Security advisor Dash Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In particular cases, that would be the Egyptians and the Arabs that were fighting Israel and their Russian sponsors as well as the North Vietnamese. Kissinger was supposed to say, playing the role of vans desperate to get a piece. I'm working for a madman. He's crazy. He's capable of anything. And then Nixon went to DEFCON 3. DEFCON 3. And Kissinger said, I don't know how to control him. I do not know how. But I tell you, he means business. And it worked very. I mean, they got a settlement with the Egyptian. They saved the Egyptian Third army in Israel. And then the same thing where they had the Christmas bombing. And then it didn't work out long term, but there was the peace. But I think that's what they're doing.
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Jack Fowler
And if we have time, your favorite person who you knew well. Fang. Fang.
- [02:54]
Victor Davis Hanson
I didn't know her well.
- [02:56]
Jack Fowler
Well, okay. Well, you've known her personally.
- [03:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
I bumped into her when she was monitoring all columnists who said anything nice about Japan and I wrote something nice about Japan. She said she wanted to visit me to get my thinking straight from the San Francisco consulate office. And the next thing I knew, she called and said she was outside the door of the Hoover Institution. Yes.
- [03:23]
Jack Fowler
In very faint.
- [03:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
Frank, maybe Eric Swalwell is. He might have been there. He doesn't live that far away.
- [03:40]
Jack Fowler
Well, hello, ladies, and hello, gentlemen, and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in His Own Words on the Daily Signal. I'm Jack Fowler, the host, and Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and he's a senior contributor at the Daily Signal, which also carries his other weekly. It's not weekly, it's four or five times a week. Victor Davis Hansen, in a few words, five, seven, nine, minute videos. Check that out. Glad you're all here, folks. We're recording on Monday, April 6, the day after Easter, before the big NCAA championship is played between Michigan and UConn. I may be crying later in the
- [04:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
week, or I think you will be. I hope you're not.
- [04:25]
Jack Fowler
Well, I saw Michigan just destroy Arizona the other night. So they are a formidable team. This episode will be up on April 9, Thursday, April 9. Also, more importantly, Victor, between when we're talking and when this is up, only the Lord knows, and maybe Donald Trump and the mullahs, what is going to be happening in Iran. But I have several questions to pose to you about things, developments from the last couple of days, including the president's very blue language, Easter Sunday threat to Iran and some subsequent activity. We have biolabs in the news again. We have a graduate whiner who doesn't want to pay her student loans. Get your take on that. Donald Trump positioned an executive order on election integrity. And if we have time, your favorite person who you knew well. Fang. Fang.
- [05:25]
Victor Davis Hanson
I didn't know her well.
- [05:27]
Jack Fowler
Well, okay. Well, you've known her personally.
- [05:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
I bumped into her when she was monitoring all columnists who said anything nice about Japan and I wrote something nice about Japan. She said she wanted to visit me to get my thinking straight from the San Francisco Consulate office, and the next thing I knew, she called and said she was outside the door of the Hoover Institution. Maybe Eric Swalwell is. He might have been there. He doesn't live that far away.
- [06:00]
Jack Fowler
Well, this is really a story about Eric Swalwell, but it's of course related to Fang Fang. Anyway, we'll see if we have time for that. We'll do all this. We'll get the ball rolling on Iran when we come back from these initial important messages. If you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, you might enjoy the Daily Signals flagship show. The Tony Kenneth cast the same common sense perspectives you love. Weekdays at 7pm Eastern. And unlike some of the other evening
- [06:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
shows, we work up until showtime to
- [06:26]
Jack Fowler
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 Kenneth cast on YouTube, X radio TV or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. By the way, I Victor's website, the Blade of Perseus is victorhansen.com Please do check it out and subscribe. And when you do that, you'll be able to read the articles twice a week. Victor writes exclusively for the Blade of Perseus and one exclusive video and I don't know, maybe in a few days we'll see a link to your book up there, Victor, the forthcoming book the Counter Revolution. So let's get cracking on Iran. I mean the most recent news when we're talking Victor is Donald. I'm looking at a Fox headline that the President and J.D. vance's point man. So what's the Let me see the JD Vance, JD Vance. This is a Daily Mail headline. JD Vance leads desperate all night scramble for Iran Peace Deal as Trump sets deadline and warns I'll blow up everything. This was this morning on the Daily Meal Mail. But as we're talking, headlines are out. Trump says Iran made a significant proposal, but it's not good enough. And this all follows on Donald Trump's very colorful social truth media post from Easter Day. Tuesday will be power plant day and Bridge day all wrapped up in one. In Iran there will be nothing like it. Open the blanking strait, crazy bastards, or you'll be living in hell. Just watch Praise be to Allah. President Donald J. Trump okay, Victor There's a big ball there. What's your.
- [08:26]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think we're seeing a deliberate replay of what we used to call the Nixon madman bomber. Bad cop, cop, good cop. And what I'm referring to is Nixon during the Yom Kippur War, but on other, earlier occasions in 1973 and especially with Vietnam, earlier in the Christmas bombing of 73 and earlier, he told his National Security advisor, Dash Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, to more or less tell in particular cases that would be the Egyptians and the Arabs that were fighting Israel and their Russian sponsors as well as the North Vietnamese, that he was, Kissinger was supposed to say, playing the role of Vance, desperate to get a piece. I'm working for a madman. He's crazy. He's capable of anything. And then Nixon went to DEFCON 2 or maybe 3, DEFCON 3. And Kissinger said, I don't know how to control him. I do not know how. But I tell you, he means business. And it worked very. I mean, they got a settlement with the Egyptian. They saved the Egyptian Third army in Israel and then they had a Yom Kippur and then that led to, you know, Sadat and, and Begin. And then the same thing where they had the Christmas bombing and then they didn't work out long term, but there was the peace. But I think that's what they're doing. And I think Trump is also saying, Vance is saying, you know, I'm getting killed by my MAGA base. And Tucker wrote the other day that the empire was over. He's happy the American empire is over. He said that. He said that Trump has given up on the empire. So apparently what he's saying is that the Candace and Trump and others advocacies have materialized in real policy and Trump has come over to his point of view. I guess that was the subtext. He didn't say that explicitly, but he said Trump has kind of shrugged his shoulders. I think Vance then is going to play that role. It could be effective. I mean, he tells people he can probably tell the Iranians or he can tell the Europeans or the Gulf states or Israel. He said, you know, Trump is so frustrated and you guys make fun of him and all this. He's under enormous pressure, so I don't know what he'll do. Can't we get this thing settled before we unleash him? The other thing is, like you, we're all a little upset when the President of the United States uses the F word. I am a little bit. I say, what do I qualify this a Little bit only because the left is really criticizing them. But they put out videos with the F word. People in the Democratic Party from the halls of Congress, when they're giving speeches use the F word. They use this. They had a whole campaign, if you remember, it was called DFU Trump, we're going to DFU the United States. All this stuff, it was just filthy. And they say the sh. So I wish he wouldn't do it because I think our side doesn't do that as much as the other side and shouldn't do it at all. But I think it's part of this role playing. He's doing that. He's a madman when he says praise Allah and all of this stuff. He wants to get the impression across that he's at the end of his tether and he can think and do anything. And he's got the biggest, most powerful military in the world that just rescued, in a brilliant rescue operation, Down Airmen that isn't, isn't. You know, I saw a lot of criticism today, Jack, and from the left, they said, well, we blew up 200 million dollar planes. And I thought to myself, yeah, but we blew $200 million, 100 million, 100 million that got stuck there. We didn't want to let them have it. But then I thought, well, what would you want to do? Would you want to leave it like Obama did the drones so they could reverse engineer it? Would you like to do what Biden did and leave $50 billion of equipment in Afghanistan? He got yes, and an embassy and an Airport and $50 million, $50 billion of equipment in some estimates, and you got 13Americans killed for nothing. Or would you want to do what Hillary did and Obama did in Libya, where we had CIA and contractors and Special forces people trapped and they had been warned earlier to beef up the consulate. They thought that would be a sign of militarism or it would defend the Libyans. And even when they were under assault, we knew that American forces in Sicily could have come at the earliest moment. They could have been there with at least drones to give them air support, and they didn't do it. And so I thought Trump really showed that he cared a lot to use assets to save an American soul. They had about 300 people involved as compared to what the Obama administration felt when we had the people killed in Libya and didn't send aid. Or the Clinton administration when everybody remembers Black Hawk down and you that weird Orwellian scene of Pakistani tanks coming to help us. And we were told that our forces had requested armor and heavy equipment and Clinton heavy fuse to give, you know, ship over Abrams or anything. So there's been a tendency in the past that presidents have not taken seriously the danger of Americans in precarious positions will not let them be armed fully. And Trump's different. He used all the resources of the United States to save one person and then it was successful and he lost two planes, which is regrettable, but he didn't lose $50 billion and he didn't crash a state of the art drone in Iran like Obama did and then was afraid to bomb it. And that was some of the basis for their drone industry because they reverse engineered it. And so I think that's what Vance is doing. That's a long excursus on that. He's playing bad cop, good cop. And I think Trump is letting him do that to restore. I think he's getting very sensitive that there's been a lot of positive press, and deservedly so, about Marco Rubio. He's been wonderful. And Vance has this albatross around his neck of the hard right MAGA that is only pulling about 6 to 7% on Iran in the Republican Party. And I think he is saying, I need to get into the scene of the action. And he's doing a wonderful job so far. And he's brought attention to the fraud. So I think Trump is trying to say Rubio is getting a lot of attention and you're the vice president. I understand that. So crack that fraud thing wide open in California. That'll be timely in the midterms. It's been going on. Everybody knows what's going on. It's a $250 billion fraud, JD take care of it. And you know what, if you want to go over there and play a primary role in last minute negotiations, that will elevate your foreign policy status and will give you some parity with Marco. And more importantly, you can show your mega, your mega core supporters that you tried to avoid the use of ground troops or something, or endless forever wars. That's what it's all about.
- [16:12]
Jack Fowler
Victor, back on your commentary about the one colonel who was saved by our special forces. I think I get the impression, just as a reader of the news, Donald Trump's very authentic about his concern for our men and women in the military. But if you go back four years, these were the same men being suspect as possibly white nationalists by the prevailing administration at that time.
- [16:45]
Victor Davis Hanson
Absolutely. It was even worse than that because we paraded Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin and the Chief of Naval Operations Before Congress, what a year after the George Floyd. And they all said that we should be reading. They all said lunatic things. We should be reading Kendi. Professor Kendi. We should be reading about Marxism. We're going to look at DEI and white supremacy. And then they had a special investigation. And a year later, right before Christmas, they kept it quiet, quietly issued it as they always do on a Friday afternoon. And what did it say? I read it. There was no systematic cabal of white supremacist and racist in the US military, but they did accomplish the goal of DEI. They reduced by about 25 or 30% white male enlistments into the military. And that was, it wasn't just extraneous. It was directly tied to this left wing narrative that there's a bunch of old dummies, old good old boys, old rednecks that are still in the last century and they're suspicious of vaccinations and we got to get them out of the military, 8,500 of them. If you look at the profile of those that were drummed out, they were mostly white male. And so there was a war on white males. And inversely, when we got rid of that administration and the DoD or now the Dow said there's not going to be any more racial preferencing. We're going to get off the, you know, pregnant flight suits, we're going to get off the trans people, we're going to just talk about battlefield efficacy, lethality. And as soon as they did that, lo and behold, they were up by 50,000. They not only made their quotas in all four branches of service, they had 40 or 50,000 in excess, which was good. And then of course, typically of the bureaucracy and the media and the left, it has no connection, no connection at all. And then the data suggest otherwise. It's a stupid thing for the military under Biden to gratuitous insult and defame and smear the one demographic that statistically was dying at double their numbers and their demographics. So the left always says, well, whites are shrinking and they're going to shrink to almost nothing. And there's only 68. It's not 70% anymore, it's 68. Well, if males are half of that, and I think it is 70%, that's 34% of the demographic. And that would be even smaller fighting age men. But that group died at 72 and 75% respectively in Iraq and Afghanistan. So they were in the combat units disproportionately. You could use all the lefts, Jack, all of their Favorite terminology, but in a different way. They could say it has a disproportionate impact. There was no racial equality. There was no representation. There was no proportional balance. There was no diversity. I said that once and some of my friends in the military said, that's kind of sick of you to talk about the dead in terms of diversity. I said, I didn't do it. They do. They have created this myth since Vietnam that non white minorities die disproportionately in America's unjust wars abroad to create an imperialistic system that oppresses them at home. And that had been rebuked in Vietnam. It was rebuked in all of the wars since Vietnam. And it's not even the very poor. The people who die are people in the lower middle class and the middle class and they're largely suburbanites and rural people. And they die at numbers that are quite disproportionate.
- [20:45]
Jack Fowler
The left always lies about death. The transsexual movement has a big thing about black transsexuals murdered. They actually have lower. They're murdered at a lower rate than you or I. Victor. Yeah, I'm not sure.
- [21:02]
Victor Davis Hanson
How about mass shooters going into school? They're much more represented than their demographics.
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Jack Fowler
But the left, cops kill blacks more. All this stuff does racial.
- [21:15]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think everybody knows by now that the left, it has a very peculiar mindset. It believes that because it's morally superior, because it's for equity and fairness and mandated equality, then it can do anything, any means necessary to achieve that morally superior, desirable end. So if it's Covid and they're arresting kids with skateboards outside, then Gavin Newsom will be at the French Laundry, Nancy Pelosi will be getting her hair done, and there'll be 1,000 healthcare workers who will sign a petition that says, well, we think that racism is a more important health concern than breaking the quarantine that we said had to be enforced. So anybody want to go out and march for George Floyd and blm? You don't really need to worry about social distancing. Just go out there. That one thing just destroyed all of their credibility after that. Nobody's had any belief in them. But again, it was, you know, it's like sort of the wind industry. When they tell them again and again it's killing perigee falcons, it's killing eagles, it's killing wildlife. Or the solar thing in the Mojave Desert was incinerating fauna and they said, oh, well, it's for green. Same thing about the windmills. Off the coast of,
- [22:41]
Jack Fowler
you know, New England in Massachusetts. Yeah, Kennedy compound. It's all right to distort whales living,
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Victor Davis Hanson
but they have no. Everything is fluid for them. They make it up as they go along. Yeah.
- [22:55]
Jack Fowler
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- [24:37]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, we did. And I remarked to my wife, I said you just passed Stonehenge and you didn't remark on it. Yeah,
- [24:46]
Jack Fowler
I don't watch 60 Minutes but I saw a lot of clips this morning on on X. So I assume last night 60 Minutes did a report on the California transit system or this this train to nowhere. And it was from the clips I saw it was long overdue take down and going from Bakersfield as we've talked Bakerfield to Merced, not knocking the people Bakersfield and Mercedes. Yes. Yeah. And where we're gonna get this 125 million mortars to get to do this and we're gonna get it so they wouldn't say where are they getting it from?
- [25:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
And the sadd is they've done studies that forget the and you can't really, they don't really give you the figures. They say 15 to 20. It's more like 30 billion they've spent and they haven't laid any track yet. And a lot of it was weird over. I mean they had to have imminent domain. They went right through one of the most historically beautiful farming areas in California, if not the United States and the world. If you go down to Kings Canyon, outside of that area by Hanford, there's these majestic 300 year oaks from the annual flooding of the Kings River. And they're all protected. You see these cotton farmers or wheat farmers, they deliberately and they farm around them and you see these beautiful fields with these big oaks that are almost like they're, I don't know, they're like monuments. And they just went through there and just plowed up and they broke those farms in twos. So somebody would have 80 acres here, 40 on the other side of hay speed rail. Then he'd have to go around, you know, seven miles to the approved station and go under because you know, it can't have as many crossings. People had suggested for the price of the 15 to 30, 30 billion. They could have taken all of the north south longitudinal freeways that are have in some cases only four lanes, two each way. The 99, they could have gone from Bakersfield all the way up to the northern border with six lanes. They could have taken the 101 all the way from basically Ventura, I mean all the way from la and they could have added and ensured that at least every mile of that all the way up to Northern California past Santa Rosa would have been six lanes, three each. They could have taken the i5 all the way from where it joins the 99 year Bakersfield all the way up to the 580 and made it three lanes each way for a fraction. And then people have pointed out that if you gave the high speed rail project to the people of California and you said, if Elon Musk came in here and said, well you know, I'm worth 400 billion so I'm going to pay off the debt for 30 billion, so it's free, it would lose money every year, it would lose millions of dollars. They're going to have a SEIU type of union that run it, they're going to have DEI mandates for it. And then that saddest thing is, Jack, right next to it is a Santa Fe Amtrak. And that corridor they could have viewed, they could have just said, you know what? They've already said it's not going to go 170 miles or whatever. It's going to go like 130 or something. But that track has no, it doesn't have two tracks. So when you take Amtrak from say Bakersfield to Sacramento, you've got sit there on a side track while the other one comes. But they could have just for a fraction of cost, they had the land already. They could have had two Amtrak improved them and got those amtraks up to 90 miles an hour for just a fraction. And now what's circulating is Gavin Newsom, they've uncovered all of these things when he was mayor of San Francisco, even when he was lieutenant governor and he said, nope, it's not going to work. It's not going to work. Don't do it, don't do it. It's not feasible. So it's just amazing about that guy. And you know, there's, I think everybody has seen his wife, the actress or whatever she was, and she was talking about that safari tour of the southern states where like tourists in little buggies or something, they were going to look out at the animals which were supposedly white rednecks in Mississippi and Alabama. She actually talked about that. And then she talked about having reverse sex dolls for her boys and girl. Girls are going to do boys play boys. That's going to be really a fine thing to do. And then she's got this advising company where she talks about toxic masculinity. I think they, she's got a company that sells her videos to the state. I don't know what the ethical implications of that are, but they've been playing her videos in a thousand of California school. He never says that. It's 40 seconds second. The schools are about 42nd in the United States and he never talks about their freeways. I think the American Trucker Society association says don't go. Their members are discouraged to use the 99. As far as miles driven, it's the most deadly freeway in the United States. And I could go on and on.
- [30:08]
Jack Fowler
Steve Hill, you live in a racket, you know.
- [30:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, I think Chris Ruffo is absolutely right. 250 billion have been missing and there's something that no one talks about and it's the third rail. You just get tarred and feathered. Joel Kotkin will mention it once in a while, but nobody else will talk about it because you see about 50, oh, maybe 60% of the state classifies itself as DEI and about 27% of the state are foreign born. So you can't. They, they want reparations The African American community wants reformations. The super majority and the legislature wants DEI to overturn Prop 2, 209. But what you can't say is if you look at the people involved in this hospice racket or the COVID racket, they tend to be recently arrived immigrants, a lot of them, or people that would classify themselves as Deil. And it's analogous to what we saw in Minnesota. And people say, you know, I'm not going to write about that. I'm not going to say this particular community is overrepresented. This particular community is overrepresented. I'm going to talk only about these communities when they're underrepresented in getting federal funds, not that they're overrepresented and misusing them and committing fraud. And those committees, you know, the two guys they just brought in, the couple, they were barred from using federal funds for their hospice. And so they put their company in the name of their daughter. And when they had the guy in handcuffs walking out, he said, ah, this is no thing. They've been investing me for five years. You know, it's like, come bring them on. They're all contact, they all have. You know, it's what people had always said that these NGOs were the same thing. USAID is the same thing. And this federal money that goes into the state and is not audited by the state and encouraged not to be audited, then these people take billions of dollars and they recycle it. Small amount, but a large amount in terms of politics to Democratic politicians who approve it and oversee it. Well, Gavin Newsom should have been ashamed of himself, but that we're long past that when he said, I think two days ago, it's not our fault, it's federal money. Yeah, Gavin, the federal money is the purse. They give it to you and stupidly they trust that you're honest and that your agencies will spend it in a wise way and then you just squander it and commit fraud and steal it. And then you blame the federal government for giving it to you and they should cut it all off. What we're going to see pretty soon in the midterms is the new budget. The left is going to say, Donald Trump is increasing the defense budget budget for from roughly 950 billion to a trillion and a half. That's for all of these new drones and the space anti missile system and some new technologies and to replenish our stocks. And they're saying, oh, he's cutting and he's not going to Just print the money. He's going to cut it from these programs that are fraudulent. But the left is going crazy. It's the Iran war. The Iran war will cost about, if it lasts six to eight weeks, about 50 billion. It's not going to cost a half a trillion dollars. The half a trillion is to rectify the fact that we let our defenses slide. But they want more money for all of these programs and every single one of them is fraught with fraud.
- [34:00]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, there's slush funds for the left. Well, Victor, we're going to talk about. What are we going to talk about before? Have we stick in California? We have the biolabs. Well, we'll get to biolabs and then I'd like to raise something. Azra Nomani, who's running investigative reporting for Fox News, she did some research on some of these no Kings rallies and who's funding them. And we'll talk about that graduate student who's living in Prague now because she doesn't want to pay her debt, her $60 a month debt. We'll get to all of that when we come back from these important messages.
- [34:41]
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.
- [34:57]
Jack Fowler
The faithfulness of God.
- [34:59]
Victor Davis Hanson
Some wonder how we can ensure America will continue to thrive as long as we can keep first things first. We've only just begun America the Beautiful.
- [35:11]
Jack Fowler
And we are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. We're recording on Monday, April 6th, and this episode will be up on Thursday the 9th. I hope all our friends and viewers who worship the good Lord had a happy Easter and to our brothers and sisters in Abraham that the Passover is going to be special and holy for them. Let's start with these biolabs, Victor. Here's a headline from the Daily Mail. Shocking discovery of secret China linked biolabs housing vials of COVID HIV and Ebola amid fears America is a sitting duck for bioterrorism. And this was about a discovery of an unauthorized biolab in Las Vegas with links to China. I won't read this whole thing, but the house, this is biolabhouse has also been listed as collateral for bail by a Chinese national with suspicious ties to the Chinese Communist Party. His name is Jia Bai Zhu, who was arrested in 2023 after being accused of operating a similar unauthorized biolab in Reedley, California, which you have talked about. And I think at one point you did a Little work there.
- [36:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, I think it's the HR Hamilton packing house. I used to, I worked there for not a long time, a little two weeks, three weeks. And it's right on the Reedley railroad tracks. You just drive down Manning Avenue and it's right there and it's kind of. I guess the strategy was we're going to put this bio lab right in the most visible place in the entire little town and people will just. And it worked until they saw some water coming out of it. And then there was a very strange veil of secrecy. Once the locals were really good, the city and county, and then the state came in and put a hush on it and were investigating it. But at some point, if you have this bio lab and it has all these deadly diseases and it's deliberately put in a rural, nondescript place in the sense that people don't know. None of your listeners outside of California or maybe even inside know where Readley is. And you have the same thing in Las Vegas and you compound that with the two Chinese nationalists that were caught putting, I trying to put explosive devices at a US base. If you combine that with the mysterious drones that they spotted that were of military caliber going over in Louisiana at an B52 base. If you put all that together, and then we could even add the Iranian niece of Mr. The late General Soleimani, the arch terrorist that killed, probably was. Had a hand in killing more Americans than any other terrorist, terrorist entity when he was the architect of the shape charge, IED export to Iraq and even Afghanistan. He put all that together. You have to ask yourself, Jack, what in the world is wrong with the United States? Why would you let these Chinese nationalists come in? And then we had the anchor baby thing that just was surfaced that these two people were anchor babies that set these bombs in and their parents were illegal aliens for 23 years. Why do we do that? I was glad that Rubio just told Ms. Soleimani, who's an Internet influencer. I don't know if you saw the pictures, but she looked most un Islamic. While her father was instrumental in forcing women in Iran to wear burkas and have no rights at all, she was exposing flesh for cash on the Internet and she had a fancy car. And apparently she thought, I'm living in, as Joe Biden would call it, chump city and no one's going to deport me and I can say what I want. And the Chinese thought, you know what, we can open a bio lab right in front of you people. We can put, I guess they're saying to us, man, these people are stupid. We plant bio labs with these dangerous viruses right in their country. We have a balloon go across and nothing happens. We got a couple people get a little out of hand and trying to put bombs at a military base. We got some more guys letting our guys are putting drone. What does it take? These people are stupid. If one person set foot in China and did that, they would be in our gulag and you'd never hear from them again. So they have contempt for us. They really do. And then you add this to all across the country, the Confucius Centers that was shut down finally, or the second, the Chinese police that works parallel to ours to go after Chinese students that are dissidents. Ru. We had a good old Stanford University a few years ago, hired a lecturer in neuropsychology. She was a colonel in the People's Liberation Army. So I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's the di. They're master propagandists. Every time that you try to crack down on them, they allege racism or the 19th century yellow peril, the Asian internments in World War II, anything. But at some point, we're just going to have to say, you know what, we're going to stop a lot of this immigration until we can audit it and ensure that it's diverse. And we're not going to allow people in from countries that are designated an enemy of the United States. And that's four countries, essentially. Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Just nobody comes in that's coming directly from those countries. Nobody. And I think that would be a lot safer. And then we could say to all of them, no American's really going to go to Iran. No American's going to go to North Korea. No American's going to go to Russia. No American's going to go to China. And I think we wouldn't lose more. I don't think we would make unhappy More than 20,000 capitalists, you know, know big business guy, that's about it. We'd be a lot safer.
- [41:44]
Jack Fowler
I thought I saw some figure a week or two ago, Victor, that there are hundreds of thousands of Chinese who took these tourism births, came over here, had the kid, kid goes back to China, but fully intending to vote in American elections because they claim that. Right? So this is all this stuff is very quite disturbing.
- [42:05]
Victor Davis Hanson
And they have no ideology except one thing. They're told by their commissars in China, you're going to vote for the person who's most likely to appease China. And in our experience, it's the Democratic Party.
- [42:21]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. Can you imagine how close elections are going to be turned by a bunch of kids in China? Speaking on the propaganda expertise, let me just raise quickly, I saw this morning on X and again we're recording on Monday, April 6, Azra Nomani. I have known Azra for years. She used to work in the Wall Street Journal, but now she's running heading some investigative department at Fox News. And she's done a report on these no Kings protests. And I'll just read this quickly. I followed the money behind the no Kings protest in St. Paul, Minnesota and uncovered an estimated $250,000 paid to nine vendors to produce an event that was the size of a Death Leopard concert. Sources said that the Democrat nonprofit Indivisible paid the bill. It didn't respond to numerous requests. It was professionally engineered. And it raises bigger questions when protests look like production, who's really behind the curtain? So the thought, Victor, that we get these no Kings are just grassroots and they spring up and it's.
- [43:35]
Victor Davis Hanson
None of them do.
- [43:37]
Jack Fowler
It's very organized. It's very. And it's paid for by this, this guy who's over in China. He's bankrolling, he is godly.
- [43:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
And we have another guy who I think he's Swiss or German in Montana or Wyoming. He is a billionaire foreigner living here and he hates the United States or at least he hates conservative America. The funny thing about it is is almost any layman when they look at the anti Doge Dash Tesla protest, the anti ICE protest, the anti Israel protest, the no Kings protest, they start to see the same type of signs. They see the tents are all the same color on the Columbia campus. The sleeping bags look the same. And then you see those in Washington or New York. You see all those pristine Porta Potties as if you know that they're very. So it's all fun funded by basically if you. It's all funded by the Democratic Party. Really left wing people who are synonymous with the Democrats.
- [44:42]
Jack Fowler
Well, and it could very well be money that taxpayer dollars that went to NGOs that then. So you're paying for this, folks. Yeah. Hey, let's get your. Oh, I have to. Let me read something first. Victor, to our dear listeners and to our viewers, if you've studied enough history, you start to see a pattern. Nations don't lose their way over to overnight. They drift through debt and division until one day you realize the foundations you thought were permanent were never permanent. At all. Today, America is spending at levels once reserved for wartime. We've normalized deficits that would have stunned earlier generations, and policymakers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention, more printing, more distortion. But here's the historical truth. Every society that pushed its currency beyond discipline eventually paid a price. The wise, though, never waited for collapse. They prepared for the correction. And that's why so many thoughtful Americans, especially those nearing retirement or in retirement, are reallocating part of their wealth into something that has outlasted every paper experiment in human history. Physical gold not as speculation but as insulation. Our reputation matters here at Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Which is why we're partnering with Allegiance Gold, a company distinguished by integrity, reliability and an A plus rating from the Better Business Bureau. For years, they've guided Americans through transparent education and long standing relationships built on trust. And right now, they're extending a special liberty offer to our listeners and viewers to help you get started with real gold, whether your funds are in a retirement account or sitting in the bank. If you believe, as we do that the best time to reinforce your position is before the storm becomes obvious, call 8447-909191-84479, 09191 or visit protectwithvictor.com that's 8447-909191-84479, 09191 or Visit protectwithvictor.com History rewards those who take the long view, and we thank the good people from Allegiance Gold for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. By the way, you know someone who should have invested in gold or silver something. Victor is Amanda Lynn Tully. The headline from the New York Post Graduate mocked after fleeing us over $60 a month student loans. And this Ms. Tully, who's 37, admitted she was never financially stable as she revealed how she hasn't made any repayments in seven years since moving to the Czech Republic to escape $65,000 in federal student loans. There were many comments on this article. This is just Whole Foods shoplifting, says one person. They fancy it better better kind of theft because they're educated elites and their reasons for doing it are more therapized than the average thief, someone else writes. Another point how Tully appeared to be wearing designer headphones in her photo shoot for the New York Times. This is the story came out in the New York Times profiling this poor soul. Poor soul? She couldn't afford $60 a month, but she could afford beats by Dre, said an X user Victor, your thoughts about this poster child for.
- [48:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, part of the problem is that these politicians keep like Joe Biden right before the 2022, remember, he was going to forgive student loans even though the Supreme Court said he couldn't. But the message goes out that eventually, eventually somebody is going to wipe out the $1.7 trillion. So then everybody waits and said, I don't want to be a sucker and pay my full way, but Trump should come out and say, we're not going to do it, we're not going to do it. Maybe if you were in a particular profession that is vitally needed by the United States, we might give you some credits, but we're not going to do it. And we're going to start taking these funds out of your IRS refund or we're going to use the IRS to collect it. It's $1.7 trillion. It also tells us you shouldn't have the federal government just blanketly guaranteeing these loans because what the universities have done is they look at their budgets and they think, wow, we're really top heavy in administrators. In a 20 year period, the CSU campus, the largest university and the world, increased the faculty by about 3% and the administration by about 200%. And that's where the money is because those salaries are fantastically large. But if you just said we're not going to get into the business because what they did was they just said, well, tuition can go up higher than the rate of inflation because the federal government's going to cover it and they can keep, they just borrow. They go to a local bank and it's not cheap, Jack. It's not like they're getting zero interest loans. Some of them are 5 and 6 and 7% through private banks. It's not the interest rate necessarily that's so good about it, it's the fact that it's covered by the federal government. So if you default, the universities get their money. And so what we should be telling universities is, you know, you guys have these, some of you have huge endowments. Why don't you cover your own loans with your endowment? And I guarantee you that if Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, whatever they are, if you said to them, I'm Joe Smith and I got into Stanford and I understand it's going to cost 200,000, maybe 250 a year because your tuition has gone skyrocketing and room and board, but if you will give me a million dollar package and guarantee it, I will come. And so the university gives them a million dollars they go to a private bank at 6% and the university says, we'll guarantee it if he defaults. And then you know what the university would do? They would call him in every three months and say, what are you doing right now? How many units are you taking? And they would monitor and they would cut their tuition costs. They would do anything because there'd be competition and there would be moral hazard. The moral hazard would shift. And so that's what we need to do. The other thing is we all know Jack and I know in my family, not my immediate family, but my friends and family and some, that people owe money to the federal government and it's not the prevailing mindset. The longer they don't collect, the less I have to pay. It's sort of like you go in and, you know, it reminds me of my grandfather, the Swedish war veteran and horse breaker. He had a kind of a. He was born in 1889, but around 1930, in the middle of the Depression, he had a shift in. I like that term, Adam. Shifty. That's where I. But he had a shifty brother in law named Jack. And every once in a while he'd say, oh, you know, I only had $800 in the bank. I gave Shifty Jack $500. He said he was going to use it for a funeral, but he didn't. They lived it up. It was my wife's sister, so I had to. And so he. When he got really sick, you know, and he'd had been severely gassed, his lungs were in worse shape than mine. Only had half of each lung and then it developed into mouth cancer because he had eaten poisoned food in World War I and ate out a lot of his gums and stuff. But he says, you know, your dad didn't want to collect act. And here I got can I got the cancer. You call it the cancer. I got the cancer. The cancer. I'm not going to be now, Victor. I was 15 at the time. Now when I die, you go over to that Uncle Jack and you tell him that you're collecting for Frank. 50 to $500. That's a lot of money, especially in the Depression. You want to do that for me? I said, well, I want you to. Look, Grandpa, I want you to live. Nah, I'm not going to live. I don't have. I can't breathe. So you get the $500. I've tried my whole life. He'll never give it. But the point I'm making is the longer you don't pay back A debt, the longer it is. And, you know, my late daughter, I had a deal with her, and I said, I tell you what, she wanted to go to Pepperdine. It's a wonderful program, a Master's of Public Policy. It's very expensive. It was about one hundred and something, thousand, with room and board and tuition. But it was a wonderful program. It really developed her. I think it was the best. She had gone to UC Santa Cruz as an undergrad. It was total chaos. No collegiality, no sense of student participation. Everybody was off on their own, and the people off on their own were crazy. But when she got to Pepperdine, she got friends and there were activities, and she was so happy. But I said to her, well, I paid. You know, I paid her. I made them all take loans, and then I paid them off as soon as they graduated. So. Just so that they would feel that they had some moral hazard. But I said to her, if you get all A's your first year, I will pay it off. And pay. I will pay it off. No, excuse me. I said, I will pay your first year, year, and your second year, you will take loans. Because I didn't have enough for the second. And if you get. I think it was a 3.8, I will pay them off. Well, she took the loans, and I was paying them off. I don't know what it was. I didn't have the money to pay it off then, but I was paying about 1,500amonth every month, and the loan was over 120,000. And then she died tragically of leukemia at her first job. So immediately I got this letter, and it said, would you please give me the name of Susanna Hansen? And I did. And it said, was she an independent adult? And I said, yes. Did you write her off on your income tax as a dependent? I said, no. She was working, you know. And then they said, well, not. They wrote back and said, There's 80. I don't know what it was. $82,000 or. I can't even remember. It was a large sum that was not paid off, but I wasn't responsible for it. And then I thought, wow, you get. You talk to people about responsibility. And your daughter would. You're going to have your daughter. Her memory is one of owing to, you know, money to the federal government after getting this wonderful education. So I paid the whole thing off. I paid it all off. And once I did a lot of traveling that month or two in November of 2014 speaking, and I paid the whole thing off, and I Thought, if I can do that and I didn't have the money, why don't people do it? And I think it's just if you don't do it, if you don't pay it off quickly, you're never going to pay it off. What gets me about it is the two types of people that are not serious. The first person is the one that is kind of the basement prolonged adolescent and takes 3 units, 6 units, 3 units, 8 units and drags out a 4 year experience into 10, 8. And then works only part time, lives at home and takes these loans out and then says, my psych degree, my environmental, my gender studies, they're not competitive, I can't pay it back. Well, what'd you think was going to happen? And then the other are the middle class person that's a very good student and a hyper achiever and they get a loan from their undergraduate, they go into a business school, med school, law school, they get another loan and now they're making 150,000 and they have 200,000 in loans and they don't want to pay it back. And yet their lifestyle represents the 150 or 200,000, but not their obligation to the government. So I think the whole problem with our society is we have an amnesty society. There's no consequence. You shoot somebody, there's no consequences. You go onto a train and butcher a beautiful young girl who was a guest at our country, there's no consequences. And people are, and there's take out a big loan, tell the government, try to get it out of me, I'm poor, I need a new video game or I need new tires on my car, whatever, there's no consequences. And people want a consequential society. They really do.
- [58:03]
Jack Fowler
Another slice of this student loan thing, Victor. I know somebody close to the family who is in a nonprofit. So here's the deal. You work, get, you get the loan to go to college X and if you work for a nonprofit for 10 years, the loan's forgiven. Now you know, I work, that's my business. It's the land of where I work at Anvils. And you're on the board of Bradley and you know, you're very knowledgeable about things. Nonprofit. And there's so many wonderful nonprofits out there. But nonprofits also are being sprung up for all kinds of terrible reasons and they are the pass through for all that of all the madness in our society. Anyway, I'm thinking like why, because you work for a non profit, quote unquote, do you should you get this absolved, and then that feeds into also this other mindset of young people. What do you want to do when you get out of college? I want to work for a nonprofit. What does that mean, even.
- [59:03]
Victor Davis Hanson
That's a good point. I'm really lucky, as I've been on the board, I think, for 12 years of the Bradley. They have the most superb staff. When they give reports and somebody says, well, you know, I think this group is really. And then they ask the staff and they say, when they reject a declination, you know, they say something in effect that they'll say. They're almost robotic, they're so good. They say something like, well, the $27,000 that we gave them was supposed to go there. And we went to and checked and saw. We didn't see any direct tangible results about that gift. And then we look at the overhead, and they have more administrators per endowment than is recommended, and they can spot anything. You know, I'm kind of being a caricature now. I said, the money that was supposed to go to the museum, they went to a caricature of Jesus Christ. And so, you know, you're just sitting there and you think, think, because people find out who are on the board, and they'll call up and say, hey, Victor, I got a patriotic organization. They need 300,000. You think, well, really? But then you mention it to a staffer, and they say, no problem, no problem, no problem. But what I like about the staff is they treat the Bradley money as if it's their own. You know what I mean? If it's precious and they audit them and they ask for a cat, and then they're so good at it that the Bradley Impact Fund, people will give to that fund anonymously, usually. And then they'll just say to me, we want to help orphans, we want to help veterans, whatever it is, they'll find the approved organization and connect the two, and they don't make a profit out of it, but it's a very good organization. My only problem is I don't know if I can fly to Milwaukee three times a year. Year or two times.
- [61:01]
Jack Fowler
A little bit of a struggle. Well, anyway, I'm not denigrating nonprofit. I'm denigrating the abuse of nonprofits here. And there's a lot of that that's gone on to the government of America,
- [61:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
a lot of it.
- [61:13]
Jack Fowler
Hey, let's wrap up the show today, Victor, with getting your take on Donald Trump's executive order that he put out last week, too. It's called ensuring citizenship verification and integrity in federal elections. And there are any number, if you ever look at an executive order, the AB subsets, all sections. But the two main things that I take out of this are he's directed Homeland Security to coordinate a list of every potential, everyone who has the right to vote, 18 and above. Who are they? Let's have this comprehensive list and then give them to the state. So we know who should be voting. We also buy that if your name's not on the list, you shouldn't be voting in federal elections. That's the point. And then also there's an effort to work with the Postal Service to come up with some systems like barcodes or these other kind of coding to combat all the abuse of mail in balloting. So he's issued this executive order. Media criticism is this is a congressional role, the President has no role in this, et cetera, et cetera. But the effort here is integrity of elections. And if you don't, as you know and you've read written about on citizenship, if you don't have integrity in elections, you don't have sovereignty. So anyway, your thoughts on what Donald Trump.
- [62:38]
Victor Davis Hanson
I just think everybody knows the thing about Trump is when he starts screaming and yelling, he's written off by the left as an election denialist. But when Stacey Abrams still says that she's a real governor of Georgia and she was ripped off, then that's considered a wise and sober assessment. But he's onto something that when you have that many people coming in for anchor baby deliveries and you have that open border, there has to be an overall reason, a cause for that. And then you ask yourself who is benefiting. Of course the employers are. They want cheap labor, but it's basically the left wing Democratic Party because they know that traditional merocratic immigration prior to 1965 gave you people like Cubans, but middle class and wealthy Cubans and people like the Hungarians that were fleeing the revolution, the middle classes and Europeans and people like that. And they didn't want them because they were successful and they were educated and they tended to be conservative. So their idea was, we're going to end the that and we're going to let in as many people from Asia, Africa, but especially the Western hemisphere who are poor and need entitlements and that will grow the welfare industry and provide SCUI employees and it will give us a constituency. And when we institute mail in or early voting and then we tell everybody that they're racist or illiberal, if they dare ask for an id, then we're going to have these people fluidly get into the system. System. And they do. Two and a half million ballots were double registered in California. If you talk to a leftist, you'll say, whoa, all that is Victor, it's Billy and Tommy went away to college and they registered at college and they got their ballots. And me being a patriotic democratic parent, when their ballots, another ballot came here out of a. I just tore it up. That's all it is. No, that's not. That is happening. But very rarely. It's more like you go in and get to the disability office, then you go to the DMV office and then you go to another office in California. Nothing to do with voting. And they will register to vote. And you just say, my name is Victor Davis Hanson. My name is Davis Hanson. My name is Victor D. Hanson and I live at 83:43 da da da da and da da da. And you change and you get multiple babies ballots and then you hire people, your NGOs Jack, to get out the vote. And they are notorious doing what they do. That's why in 2012, Barack Obama just. Lois Lerner, they just went after any group that was going to be for a non profit that was going to do things that might check election integrity or be conservative. They just shut them down and wouldn't allow that to happen. So I don't know, I'm getting to the point where it's just almost a fusion. When you say left, Democrat, election fraud, ballot fraud, registration, open borders, anchor babies, it's all, it just blends in into one ideology. And the ideology is there should be no borders. We're a universal community and everybody should just be able to come and vote. And then when you tell these people, well, Mondame required four IDs to shovel snow, or if you go to a Bruce Springsteen conference concert, you have to have an id. Or if you go to a liquor store or you go write a check. Nobody is complaining that it's racist that you have to have an ID at a rock concert. And then when you look at the polls and minorities overwhelmingly support ID because they don't want to be characterized. They like it. I mean, it's so patronizing by the left. They think, well, I'm going to pat a little minority voter on the head and say, I'm your protector. You don't have an id. Now I know you have one. Or now they're saying it's very hard to get a birth certificate. No, it isn't hard to get a birth certificate. You can get it right online. You can get almost a passport on. It's very easy to do.
- [67:20]
Jack Fowler
Did you see the black congressman who asked the. It was at a town meeting who doesn't have ID and nobody answered because they all had IDs. So. Well, moving on.
- [67:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
Moving on. Yeah, so he was condescending too.
- [67:40]
Jack Fowler
Well, anyway, we move on too, Victor. So I just want to ask you, as we wrap up and I have a couple of comments to read, was everything you had a nice Easter with your father?
- [67:51]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, we drove up and saw my daughter and her husband and their three children. And they are refugees. They're not refugees. They were in Santa Cruz. Yes, they are refugees. And the school system and the DEI and the grooming, you know what I mean? Is your daughter thinking about transitioning, all that stuff. The Santa Cruz public school system, it was crowded where they were living, it was congested, beautiful ocean. And they went up near Auburn, California and I helped them. And they have a beautiful father, acres and a house. And my daughter who grew up on a farm, I mean, she's weed eating every day. She's tending to chickens, she's going to build a goat corral. She's back to her agrarian roots as a mom and her husband, she's not working. She worked for 10 years at Stanford as an event planner, but I think she's much happier. And then the people that she meets, even though the majority of them are not conservative, they're very sweet people and they're all, I mean they don't. People that are refugees from the Bay Area and most of them are, they just couldn't take living, you know, in the high priced suburbs of San Francisco and the left wing homeless and crime and the terrible schools and prep schools were too expensive. So they go up to this area where it's calm, it's 1950. But that doesn't change their ideology. You know what I mean? They don't become conservative. They never make the connection that what drove them out was their own ideology. Their attitude instead is, well, you know, they went a little excessive up there, so we just wanted to get away. But they're nice people is what I'm saying. It's very safe and it's kind of 1950s. A Little League coach calls the kids up. They have little Easter egg things everywhere in the area. The neighbors are all nice. You know, I walked this morning and I saw one of the most atrocious dumpings. You know, it was part of our property that one of my siblings sold. And I walk on it and I Could not believe it, jack. It was 15ft of just solid car seats, garbage, everything. And they don't see any of that up there. And then, you know, last night I was walking and there was a guy on a motorcycle that just tore into the alleyway, didn't ask permission. And we're only a mile and a half from the city and I think people are starting to see that there's that if you're in a blue state or a blue city and you have any means of escaping, you're going to escape whether it's even within the blue state. In her case, she moved to a place where there's none of the Galvin Newsom's. She doesn't have to get on the freeway and have a decrepit Freeway Drive, Highway 17 every day from Santa Cruz to Palo Alto. She doesn't have to deal with right next to her house in Santa Cruz. Can you believe it? They're putting these halfway houses of exactly. And convicts deliberately in areas that are middle class. So one and a half houses down from where she was living, they had attics and they would come by and, you know, it was scary for the little kids. And now she's moved up there and guess what? They want to put another halfway house up there nearby because they deliver. I don't know whether it's spite or what, but there must be some critical legal theory, critical race theory, critical penal theory that says, well, if this person is a chronic drug user or he's a thief or he's a rapist and he's served half his term, we're going to put him in a halfway house. But it would be much more conducive and safer if that person was in a upscale, solidly middle class, safe neighborhood by osmosis. And the first thing that happened when they put this house there, the guys were smoking. I don't know what they were smoking, but they burned down. The poor neighbors. A single mom, they burned down her fence. Oh my gosh.
- [72:21]
Jack Fowler
Remember, this started over 40 years ago, maybe 40 years ago in Yonkers, of all places, New York, where I actually was born, with that Judge sand who said public housing is no, you know what I'm putting in your neighborhood here. And then they created this federal government.
- [72:38]
Victor Davis Hanson
It would start really bad if they just said, if we're going to have halfway houses for addicts, homeless convicts, we're going to put them. They have to be put within one mile of the top 10 officials in California. So if you put one in Gavin's $9 million neighborhood for his house. Then you could take your choice, the Pelosi Napa Valley Piazza or the big San Francisco mansion and put right now next to it former heroin addicts. And then the one in Napa put in former rapists, murderers who are on halfway and put them there. And then, you know, you could do that. But they all, all these people have this habit when they retire. You know, they go to Rancho Mirage or they go to Tahoe, but they never suffer the consequences of the ideology that they inflicted on everybody else. But it would stop really quick. It would stop, stop, stop.
- [73:40]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. Well, you said is it spite? And it is spite. That's my viewfall.
- [73:44]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think it is spite. Every time I have a visitor comes to my place, they drive down a particular way from the freeway and the first thing they say, do you feel safe here? Did you see what I saw on that intersection down from you? I said, yes, yes, yes. This is an experiment. It's called an open borders experiment. Experiment.
- [74:07]
Jack Fowler
Mad Max. Mad Max.
- [74:09]
Victor Davis Hanson
Mad Max. Road Warrior.
- [74:12]
Jack Fowler
Okay, I have three comments that good people took the time to write. And we try. Sammy Wink, the great Sammy Wink and I, we try to go through the comments on YouTube and other places. Here's just a few of them. Yule Guerrero, Guro. Yule Guro 3,346 writes. Dear VDH and Sammy, thanks. Thank you for a truly amazing interview. Great expose of Europeans. There's a lot of hate and envy towards US elites. Poisoned masses too useful. Idiots don't need freedom. They are doomed to live under the modern version of Nazism which is Islam. Then we have MIA MD3K1KI. Excuse me, writes many viewers, Victor watching. They want to comment on things they see similar. Sammy, you look extremely rested today. Lovely. With such a kind demeanor. Your choice of color is very flattering. Always the epitome of class. Thank you both for everything. Mr. Hansen, the goat, the greatest of all time at simplifying very confusing topics. Great bunch at the Daily Signal across the board. Thanks again. One last comment. This isn't even a comment. This is an interesting point from Lynette Palooka. 2775 Hess. Anyone mentioned yet that IRGC stands for Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp. Not Iranian? The current regime are occupying not natural born Iranians. That to me makes the difference between regime change in quotes and returning Iran to her. People love this show and so glad you're with the Daily Signal.
- [75:53]
Victor Davis Hanson
That's a very good comment. Although I see it in the media. Media more Iranian than Islamic. But do you see the clip of all the people driving in from Iraq, Shia radicals that are now coming in to beef up the Iranian street thugs that are going after dissidents. They're coming in from Iraq. Just very quickly, about the other comment about Europe, I think we're really at a watershed. I really do. Because we're working worried that that issue about Spain and France and Italy and Britain not wanting us to use shared NATO bases in their airspace is much larger for two reasons. They have promulgated this lie that they went to Iraq. Only about three countries did in any sizeable number. Australia, Britain and France. Germany. Germany. No. But my point is they've got this idea that they were in sizable number. UK and Australia did pretty well, but. And Iraq and Afghanistan. But those. At least Iraq, I mean Afghanistan was a UN sanctioned effort. Okay. And it was. I thought it was in their mutual. But if that's their benchmark, then they're in big trouble because. Because that doesn't apply to the things they said to us. They said to us Ukraine is a European problem and if they don't hold this line in Ukraine, they'll be in Europe. So we want you as a NATO partner. But we said it's not a direct confrontation with an enemy, it's to protect a non NATO member. And we're over here. So we'd have to go across the world and help you protect. Yes, that's what you have to do as NATO. And then we said, they came to us and said there's part of the NATO alliance that wants to bomb Gaddafi out of power for the Arab Spring. And we said, what? Yes, we want you to come here and lead the bombing. This was a European initiative. Then they said to us earlier in 99, Milosevic is a threat to humankind. And we said, well, not really. He's a threat to Europe. Well, yes, he is. Serbia, this is the Balkans.
- [78:14]
Jack Fowler
This is Europe.
- [78:15]
Victor Davis Hanson
But, well, you have over 2000 jets. Oh no, no, we need American know how. We need your technology, we need your leadership. We need you to hold off the Russians while we do that. Okay? And then France comes. And then there were worse. There were the unilateral. France comes to us. Well, we have a neo colonial problem and Chad and Gaddafi and the Islamicists are going to flip Africa. Can we have that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 from you? Yes, yes, yes. And then, you know, earlier, Falcons, Thatcher, I like Thatcher, she said this is bad. If a NATO partner would lose its colonial possession by outright theft. We need the following. A, B, C, D, E. That's what it's about when they want to do, that's what's going to change. When they want to do their singular operations, either France or Britain or any of them, we're going to say no. And when they want to do a NATO inspired effort to protect a particular entity in Europe and, and it's not in direct connection with an attack on a NATO member, we're going to say no. And the reason that they're doing this, and I think this is the most important part of this final round. I don't know how to say this, but they are becoming very different people, Jack, than we are on so many issues. Euthanasia, abortion, open borders, defense spending, fertility, free speech. They're just not Western in their way of thinking. They've repudiated the Judeo Christian ethos and it shows in their productivity. I mean, we're 35% bigger in actual producing power of our GDP. We're bigger and it's just not even close in labor productivity. It's not even close in per capita income. And it was at the millennium, it kind of not close. But they were not lagging. We increased productivity I think the last 15 years by some staggering 35, 40%, maybe higher. And they only did like 12. So economically they're not, they're slipping badly because of what I just outlined, you know, their decision to not use fossil fuels to the full extent they could. And then more importantly, when you look, look at culturally, even our bankrupt universities of the top 10 and the Times Literary Higher Education Supplement, I think seven of them are American out of 10 and the only three are British because the British did the survey. The other three, but every single barometer, cultural influence, movie income, popular music income internationally, it's just all the, you know, us and our system, whether you like it or not, creates more goods and services and opportunity and freedom and prosperity than theirs and more security. And we're going to have a real come to our deity moment because we're going to have to tell them, I don't even know if you guys are Western anymore because we believe that 15% of your continent that's Islamic is more radical than the Muslims in the Middle East. I think if you ask the British and the French and the Italian Muslim community, if you poll them, if you could get an accurate poll of them versus the Iranians, I think the Iranian people would show less confidence in the theocracy in Iran than the Muslim population in Europe. No brainer. Don't you? I agree, Victor.
- [82:06]
Jack Fowler
You know, growing up we were reading these history books about the sick man of Europe, which was, I think was Turkey, right?
- [82:11]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah.
- [82:12]
Jack Fowler
But the sick man of Europe is Europe. It's in a fetal position. It's. It's thrown in the towel.
- [82:20]
Victor Davis Hanson
It is. And it's dangerous because I, I think they got the idea that they could just kind of, tongue in cheek, call us crazies. Gun cowboys. Shoot it. Shoot them up. Failed radical. All these terms they use, uncouth. And we just sort of said, well, yeah, we're legionnaires and you're philosophers, but we're on the same team. I don't think. I think people are sick of it. It's big. It's one big museum. People go over there because they want to go to the museum, but otherwise that's a lifestyle and it's going to get worse. And their only hope is a conservative pop revolt. But I can't see that happening. Socialism is too entrenched. And I think the trauma of World War I and World War II is never going to go away.
- [83:14]
Jack Fowler
I was going to ask you about that, but I will ask you about that on our next show because I think that's so colossal and maybe is one of the defining things. Well, anyway, Victor, we're at the end here and you been terrific as ever. Thanks so much for all the wisdom you shared. Thanks, folks, for watching and for listening. And go to Victor's website, the Blade of Perseus. Do subscribe, go on Amazon. Buy his forthcoming book. It'll come out in August or September.
- [83:46]
Victor Davis Hanson
You'll get it then, the Counter Revolution. That's on Amazon. You'll like it.
- [83:51]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. So thanks all, and we'll be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen in His Own Words.
- [83:57]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you, everybody. 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, Quick break. This surprised me.
- [84:18]
Jack Fowler
The most useful advice I get now doesn't come from experts.
- [84:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
It comes from regular people, people on TikTok.
- [84:24]
Jack Fowler
What works, what doesn't.
- [84:25]
Victor Davis Hanson
No filters.
- [84:26]
Jack Fowler
Download TikTok and see for yourself.