← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: Iran in Shambles, Rubio Targets Regime Families, and the Return of the Impeachment Hoax
01:26:39
CNN and former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes are of the opinion that President Donald Trump, who has chosen the sword over the pen, will get a far worse deal out of the mullahs in Iran than his predecessor, Barack Obama.
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- [00:00]
Sammy Wink
CNN has been supporting the View that Trump will ultimately get the same deal or worse than Obama had. And so the implication, I think is, is that the war was unnecessary.
- [00:14]
Victor Davis Hanson
That's being peddled by the former deputy national security advisor for Obama, Mr. Rhodes, Ben Rhodes. This is so absurd that we have all these people who hate Donald Trump or they think they're going to win the midterms by leveraging this. Chuck Schumer has a whole list of all the things that went wrong. Now he throws it away and he get because they're all right now. There are things in play right now, major changes of thought, ideology, philosophy, politics that are radical. Right now. They're changing. People have had it with the Soros crime philosophy, critical legal theory, they've had it with the DEI critical race theory. They've had it with NATO, they've had it with Iran. It's like a huge jigsaw puzzle of the world and somebody threw it up in the air and now the pieces are all being reconstructed, but maybe in a different way. I don't very exciting to be alive at this time because I think in a year from now, the United States and the world are not going to look the same.
- [01:22]
Sammy Wink
Hello and welcome. This is Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. And we are on our Saturday edition. So welcome everybody to the weekend. We have Poseidon as our middle segment. So Victor will talk a little bit, which I think is a good topic given that we're in a blockade in the Gulf, in the Persian Gulf. So that will be interesting. And then first we'll look at some news stories. So we'll start with Iran and Rubio's work as secretary of State. So stay with us for those stories and we'll be right back.
- [01:56]
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, we work up 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 Kenneth cast on YouTube, X radio TV or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:27]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hanson in His Own Words, a subsidiary of the Daily Signal. And Victor is the Martin and Ellie Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. So, Victor, I know that there's a lot on the Iran war always going on and we Talked about it on Friday, but there's more out there yet today, I noticed that CNN has been supporting the View, that Trump will ultimately get the same deal or worse than Obama had with his. And I never can remember the name of the joint. Whatever deal Obama did. But, and, and so the implication, I think, is, is that the war was unnecessary.
- [03:18]
Victor Davis Hanson
That's being peddled by the former deputy national security advisor for Obama, Mr. Rhodes, Ben Rhodes. He's famous for bragging that he created an echo chamber, remember? And he said that the young journalists who were liberal and acolytes of Obama, he said they know nothing and he was easily manipulated. Of course, he never even took that treaty to the Senate. But it's absurd because think about it, he did this treaty. He didn't say they were not going to have a bomb. They said for 10 years they wouldn't enrich up to a certain point. Okay, and what did they do in that 10 years? He had no sanctions on them. So they were getting hundreds of. We're told that they're making almost a. They were making almost a half a billion dollars a day in petrochemicals, natural gas and oil. So half of, you know, they were making 175, $200 billion a year every year. So when they did that deal, it was pretty much a bonanza for the Houthis, Hamas, the people in Syria and Iraq that are their proxies, and of course, Hezbollah. And then Trump came in and he stopped all of it. He stopped all of it. He, he sanctioned them. They did not continue enriching because they were scared not they would have because now he said the deal doesn't. He got out of the deal. Well, then why didn't they go enrich all the way up? Because they were scared of him. Because he'd take. He'd Soleimani, he'd killed Baghdadi, he'd bombed isis, he had bombed or he had had people take care of the Wagner Group, et cetera. And so during the first administration, he declared Trump the Houthis a terrorist entity. He's hit them as well. And when he left office, US had great deterrence such to effect that Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, bragged that his portfolio right before October 7th was his least worrisome. And that was what he inherited from Trump. And so what did Biden do? He resurrected the Obama Shia Crescent strategy. Houthis, Gaza, Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, pressure against the Arab monarchies and Israel. And they knew it. And so then he did. He crawled on all fours and begged them to get back in the deal. He said, no, why are we going to get in the deal? Now we can enrich. And that period of Biden between 2021 and 2024 is when they did go enrich up to 60% because they weren't, they weren't scared of anybody. The other thing about that absurd statement that we're just, we, we could have had the Obama deal or it's no deal. When Obama made that deal, they had an air force, a big air force. They had about 200 ships. They had ballistic missiles they were acquiring from China and North Korea and Russia. They were fully armed. The Iran that we had to confront today was built during the Obama administration and during the Biden administration. And now it doesn't appear. So what they're saying is our deal that allowed them to enrich when Biden came in and our deal that never said they couldn't have a weapon, they just had to wait, delay it, and there would be no snap inspections. Our deal allowed them to get all the revenue they want and rearm. And then Trump stopped that and they were scared stiff to enrich to weapons grade or near weapons grade. Then when they saw Biden, what he did in Ukraine, oh, I'll react if it's a minor or major invasion and you know, please, Vladimir, don't hit hospitals when you hack our infrastructure and et cetera, et cetera. And they were giddy, giddy, giddy, giddy. When they saw that their proxies and they had help planned October 7th and they saw that we were kind of ambiguous about who was morally equivalent, that's when they really pushed the envelope and got up to what they later said were enough enriched uranium to make 11 weapons. So what I'm getting at is that deal was inseparable from the rearmament and the enormous amount of money they had to invest in this largest arsenal in the Middle East. And the result of that is that Europe was terrified of them. Because Europe knew what they were going to. Because we knew now that they were always going to build a ballistic missile that could hit Europe. And they knew the Gulf was terrified of them and they knew everybody was terrified of them except Israel and us. Now they have no military, they're flat broke. This isn't a negotiated two way. Let's see if we could have to deal. This is. Here are the demands. We gave you a chance. You just wanted to continue. You thought it was cute to blockade the straight. You started it, we finished, now we're blockading it. And your ships are not going to get anywhere near the straight, nobody going to you, nobody going out, and you're going to lose $450 million a day. And here's the demand now, take it or leave it. And where are their proxies today? The Houthis haven't said anything. I thought they were going to shut down the Red Sea pipeline of Saudi Arabia. They do. They're going to lose all of their electrical plants and they'll be bombed to smithereen. Where is Gaza? They're hiding in the tunnels. Where's Hezbollah? They're going to try to cut a deal. So where is Iran? It's in shambles. And to say that an Iran that's in shambles, that's begging us, begging us for negotiations, is the same thing as a fully armed, aggressive Iran that's about to destroy the whole Middle east is, is absurd. It's just crazy. What's happened to the left is in this 24 hour cycle of hysteria. You know, Tom Friedman, I, I'm glad that Trump is kind of disarming Iran, but I want him to fail because he'll be too powerful. And then all these articles the leftists are writing, this Trump might be too powerful or this is bad, or it's imperial. The Pope, Leo, weighing all of this stuff, it's ahistorical. It doesn't look at the long term. And the long term is what is the geostrategic position of China now versus before? What is the geostrategic position of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis? What is a geostrategic position of Iran? What is the geostrategic position of Europe? And, and seems to me that it's all diminished. And the one nation that is controlling the oil in Venezuela and keeping the Chinese and the Russians out of the Western Hemisphere and shortly going to squeeze this 50 year, 70 year problem in Cuba and now is going to solve the 47 year in the Middle east and will be the adjudicator, at least in the near term, who comes in and who comes out of the Gulf to the benefit of the Saudis and the Kuwaitis and the Emirates and Oman and Qatar. And they are going to not forget who attacked them and they're going to build pipeline that will bypass the Gulf and Iran will find itself irrelevant unless they have regime change. And now we're, where are we now? When Obama came into office, they had a green revolution. Million people went out in the streets. They were begging for US War, verbal support. And he didn't do anything because he had, he and Valerie Jarrett and Ben Rhodes had this idea that they were going to create a friendly theocracy and balance it off. They hated Israel and they hated Gulf states, and it was a disaster. And now the regime is down to the third tier. They've wiped out dozens of theocrats, politicians, army people, Revolutionary Guard people. And they've lost, According to them, 260 people say, more likely, a half a trillion dollars in military installations. That's not including the tunnels, the nuclear facilities, the petrochemical plants, the steel plants that they use to create their drone and missile fleet under tutelage from the Chinese and North Korean. So all of that. And what are they going to do when this is over? They're going to tell the people, well, this is what we accomplished. We took on the Great Satan and, you know, everybody talks about the Black Knight in Mummy. We got our arms cut off, our legs cut off, and we won. And as I mentioned earlier, it's like going to Tokyo Bay to deal with the Japanese and the Japanese. We're not going to negotiate. We don't have any cities, we don't have any navy. We don't have any, but we won't. Well, that's what they're doing, and it's a joke. And so the people, not in a day, not in a week, not in a month, but they're going to be restive, especially when this crooked regime and these newcomers that don't know how to run it are going to start to say, we have to rearm. We got to take your money and we got to give it to Hezbollah. We've got to resurrect Hamas, We've got to get. They're going to get so angry at that. And they're going to have an open. They're going to have Internet again. And we're going to do our best to tell the people who cause their misery. And if they say they're not going to negotiate and they're going to attack our ships, well, they have a whole target list, an existential target list.
- [13:33]
Sammy Wink
Our military does.
- [13:34]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, our military does. And they can do it tomorrow. They can do it in a day. They can put it in a medieval darkness. They don't want to do that because they don't want to hurt the, the Iranian people. So this is so absurd that we have all these people who hate Donald Trump or they think they're going to win the midterms by leveraging this, and they change. Chuck Schumer has a whole list of all the things that went wrong. Now he throws it away and he gets another one because they're all right now, the embargo. They never thought of the Strait of Hormuz. Not only did they think of the Strait of Hormuz, they enacted it in one day. But they were smart enough to let the Iranians put their head in a noose and try to do it first so they can say, we tried to negotiate. They're the ones that started it, so we're going to finish it. It was brilliant and yet I don't know what to say about these people. They.
- [14:23]
Sammy Wink
They're wrong, wrong, wrong.
- [14:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
You can't let your emotions drive and destroy your intellect and reason.
- [14:29]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, well, the article I was reading from CNN claimed that two days or one day before the war started, the Iranians had agreed to a significant reduction in their nuclear capacity in very significant ways. And they said that they. The states of Hormuz.
- [14:50]
Victor Davis Hanson
What did the UN inspect? The International Atomic Commission say every time they went there they found a new facility they didn't report that was enriching uranium or it was had centrifuges or they did something. They can't tell the truth. They lie about everything because they think that lying to enhance their radical Islamist cause is not lying. And that's what they do. And only a few naives in the United States would be stupid enough to believe them. The only time you can believe them is if you have a gun to their head. And you're going to say this is where you are now, in rubble. And if you don't agree to this, you're going to be in permanent rubble. And even then they're going to lie.
- [15:33]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. So not only was the war necessary and not unnecessary, but it's going to have benefits far beyond what change is
- [15:43]
Victor Davis Hanson
going to change the entire mental East. The people in the Gulf states are going to say, you know what? Israel didn't attack us, it attacked the enemy. It, its enemy is our enemy. So the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And if we put a big pipeline across the desert into Haifa or somewhere near Haifa, we know one thing, the Jews are not going to blow it up with a bunch of terrorists like what the Houthis will try to do in the Red Sea. It'll be the safest pipeline there are. It'll be in their interest. And there are. They have a rules. They have a society that's legitimate and it's based on the rule of law.
- [16:29]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. Well, Victor, we have a sponsor, Pure Health Research for this Saturday edition. If you want to drop extra pounds, boost energy levels or reduce swelling in your legs and feet. This message is for you. Pure Health Research is on a mission to make America healthy again. And two of their best selling health supplements are leading the way. First is Liver health formula. Over 100 million Americans have a sluggish liver riddled with fatty deposits. This can kill your metabolism, pile on the pounds and make you feel tired. Liver Health Formula takes care of all that. It supports thriving liver health with special ingredients like artichoke and extract and milk thistle. This is one of the easiest ways to slim down and revitalize your energy levels. Next is lymph system support. If you struggle with fluid buildup or swelling in your legs, ankles or feet, this is for you. The natural ingredients in lymph system support help gently flush extra fluids and toxins out of your body. And right now, for a limited time, you can get 35% off liver health Formula or lymph system support along with all 50 plus health supplements from Pure Health Research. Head over to PureHealthResearch.com that's PureHealthResearch.com and use the coupon code Victor at checkout. That's PureHealthResearch.com with coupon code Victor to save 35% on your order today. And we'd like to thank Pure Health Research for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Well, sort of associated with that is Rubio's work as Secretary of State and he's currently involved in extraditing Iranian nationals that are relatives of the theocracy in particular. But I think that this week his most important extradition is. They called her Screaming Mary. And she apparently I remember her when
- [18:36]
Victor Davis Hanson
I was in college watching her and
- [18:38]
Sammy Wink
1979, she was the grad student spokesperson for the people that had.
- [18:45]
Victor Davis Hanson
She was a young, mildly attractive woman, but she was decked out in the burqa and she was screaming and yelling and she was the most radical of everyone. She was the one calling for.
- [18:56]
Sammy Wink
Can I just make one statement? It wasn't her extradition. I'm sorry. It was her son.
- [19:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, it was her son, but I remember her. And he was a part time teacher at a community college or something. It's very funny how these people get out on the street and they rev everybody up to the Great Satan and they preach about Western decadence and then whether it's the 911 hijackers or the mass murderers who want to party in Las Vegas or it's the sons of the theocrats and these radical Islamists, they come over here and they're everywhere and the only reason we know them is because we have over a million expatriates from Iran that are against the regime. And they keep outing them. And of course, they've been doing that for years. And the Biden administration and the Obama administration thought this is okay. They've let Ahmadinejad come in. Remember that he spoke, I think, at Columbia. So they like these people. And these people are not just serious scholars. They're knee deep in this culture. You could see Soleimani's niece and grand niece. My gosh, they were decked out as if they were salacious Internet influencers. And they were knee deep in the lavish culture of Los Angeles, which is kind of bankrupt. So these people are not sincere people. They're not really theocrats. They're hardcore dictators. And it's not some religious purity. They are the most corrupt government in the Middle east, and that's saying a lot. And each one of these luminaries, whether it's the Soleimanis or the Khomeinis or the Khamenei, whoever they are, they have huge fortunes that they have stolen from the Iranian people. And they have beautiful homes in England. They have beautiful homes throughout the France, Europe. They have bank account. Lucky for us that one of our best secretary of Treasuries is Scott Bessant, and he knows this, and he's a master of finding their money and canceling it and freezing it, and he's going to do that. But Marco Rubio is really good at that. Every time he does that, they get angry and go, there's a Bill of Rights. And he tries to say, the Bill of Rights doesn't apply to foreign nationals here on a visa. It's. It protects them while they're here with their feet on the ground. They have free speech. They have the rule of law. They can own. You know, they can do what they want, search and seizure. But they don't have to be here. We invited them, we gave them a visa, and so we just say the visa ran out. Go home. You love Iran so much. You're much needed in its hour of need. You've been broadcasting hatred toward the United States, and you're better off there to do it and rally the troops. All the best. Siya wouldn't want to be it.
- [21:59]
Sammy Wink
You know, you said something about the Iranians, that they keep their money in Western banks rather than having their own banking system. Do they not trust each other?
- [22:08]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, because they know that the. I'll mention a member of a foreign group and I won't Mention the foreign group. I like him. And I said, why are all of your ethnic group doing so well here? And you seem to be overrepresented in tax evasion. And he said, woof among sheep. When we're back in the home country, we have to compete against ourselves and nobody follows the rules. So it's dog eat dog. And we come over to a society like you, you're all very sheepish and you pay your taxes, you do at this, and it's easy to do it. And we don't have any competition here because everybody follows the rules. So we do very well. Maybe in the third generation that won't be true. They'll be like the rest of everybody. And you can see that with the, with the welfare fraud. If those Somalis had been in Somalia, Somalia from Minnesota, and they were stealing from the government, they would have taken them out and shot them all. If they weren't in the right clique, if they were stealing for the government, which I think Ilyan Omar's father was in, involved in, they would have been the. They would have been the thieves. But here they're thinking, oh, we'll play the DEI card. Tim Waltz is a joke. Jake Fry is an idiot. The whole Minnesota people are so wishy washy, they'll never touch us. We'll just call them racist. And these Americans, you can just steal and blind. Same thing in California. That's a subtext of the whole government fraud. There is a demographic of recently arrived immigrants and second generation and they are overrepresented in the demographic involved in this. And they are not. They have perpetuated this for so long because they felt under the aegis of D.E.I. they were exempt. And they were. And that Waltz knew what they were doing. Ilian Omar knew what they were doing. Mayor Fry knew what they were doing. You can't tell me Gavin Newsom didn't know what they were doing. Can't tell me Karen Bass. They were brothers in crime. They were fellow DEI people that these other people protected.
- [24:34]
Sammy Wink
Well, there was an article this morning. I'm sorry, I don't know where this is, because this is off the top of my head, but that the agencies, the welfare agencies that are handing out the money were told to deprioritize anybody that they thought was practicing fraud. But you know why that is? Because the more people they have on their rolls, the more money they get from the federal government. So they have no incentive for stopping fraud.
- [25:01]
Victor Davis Hanson
The more money they get from the federal government and money they. It's like the 19th century, big cities, the Irish say in New York, D. Hall. So what they do is they enrich the Somali community or the Hispanic community or whatever, the Chinese immigrant community, with these big programs. And then they go to them and say, we want this money for political donation. So it's a circular process. They distribute the money and then they get political fealty and they get donations from them. And that's why no politician would ever cross the Somalis on the left. And, well, it's gonna. It's. We'll see. There's. I guess what I'm saying is there are things in play right now, major changes of thought, ideology, philosophy, politics that are radical right now. They're changing. People have had it with the Soros crime philosophy, critical legal theory, they've had it with the DEI critical race theory. They've had it with NATO, they've had it with Iran and things. It's like a huge jigsaw puzzle of the world and somebody threw it up in the air. And now the pieces are all being reconstructed, but maybe in a different way. I don't know. But. But it's very exciting to be alive at this time because I think in a year from now, the United States and the world are not going to look the same.
- [26:37]
Sammy Wink
Well, Victor, before we go to break, we have another governor that is part of this progressive project and big government, et cetera. Spanberger. And she has an illegal alien in her state who has attempted to rape somebody. But I think more important about him is that that was going to be the 25th crime he would be picked up for.
- [27:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
Killed.
- [27:05]
Sammy Wink
Yeah.
- [27:05]
Victor Davis Hanson
And she's at Sanctuary City. I don't know how long. Abigail Spanberg, she's smarter than Gavin Newsom and she's smarter than Tim Waltz. So she did what Biden did. The whole Democratic playbook was the more you can act moderate, the more radical you can become when you're elected. So she ran. Oh, I'm. I've been familiar with intelligence agencies, law and my family, law enforcement, all that stuff. And then when she got in, she went full anti ice. Not going to work with them, raising taxes on everything. But she doesn't understand that she and these Sanctuary, they send a signal in these blue states and blue counties to, well, whatever of the six or seven hundred thousand criminals that came in under Biden and were here earlier have not already been incarcerated or deported. There's still hundreds of thousands of them. And the signal is, and as well, to career criminal. Society is your enemy, not us. You don't have to Atone for any of your crimes. They don't say that, but that's the message that filters down to them. If you're an illegal alien, you're a victim of racism and Donald Trump and fascistic eyes and I'm here to help you. And the guy thinks, well, if you're here to help me, I've been arrested 20 times, nothing's really happened to me. I think I'll rape again. There's a woman, let me just go rape her. And what will happen? Send me to ice. No, ICE are fascists. They wouldn't send me to a concentration camp. And then you hear this Tom Steyer really saying, I'm going to hold Heiss accountable. I'm going to open the border, I'm going to do this. Oh yeah, the borders. What more could you do to California? I mean, it's already completely lawless. If he doesn't believe that, come to the Central Valley and I can, I can take a, I don't know what I would call a four mile circumference drive and I could point with my finger and dictate to an iPhone and say, that is illegal. That is illegal. That is illegal. That is illegal. Whether it's a car on the side of the road dumping their trash into a vineyard, or it's 17 trailers and shacks around one home, or it's a bunch of dogs, a pack of dogs sitting in the middle of the road. It's. That's what California is.
- [29:27]
Sammy Wink
Or it's the flea market down the street.
- [29:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, no sales tax. Flea market. The no income tax.
- [29:35]
Sammy Wink
Exactly.
- [29:36]
Victor Davis Hanson
Market. Well, don't touch that. That's an iconic thing.
- [29:40]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, sure is. Well, Victor, let's go to a break and then we'll come back and you're going to talk to us about Poseidon. Stay with us and we'll be right back.
- [29:50]
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.
- [30:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think they forgot the 1982 Falklands War.
- [30:07]
Bradley Devlin
And in the age of clickbait and rage bait. That's a really good feeling, right?
- [30:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
The media. Thank you. You, you can leave now.
- [30:14]
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 conservative perspective. And that's important now more than ever with the Trump administration backing 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 or there too. And drop me a follow on X radleydevlin to stay updated with what's happening on the signal. Sit down.
- [31:00]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. And and Victor can be found on X. His handle is Dhanson. And on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup. And there is the Victor Davis Hansen fan club on Facebook as well. There are a large group of people who seek out Victor's work. So they have the current stuff and they have stuff that is he's done years ago that they can link you up with. So they're a good place to go. So, Victor, I'm anxious to hear a little bit about our God of the sea, Poseidon, and I'll let you have.
- [31:36]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, we're talking about the 12 Olympians. And the three most famous were the first generation that overthrew their father, Kronos and mother Rhea, and that was Zeus, who inherited the heavens. And they're parceling out of the human experience and Hades, the underworld, and Poseidon, the sea. We're going to talk about Demeter and I think the two most interesting gods, Athena and Apollo and subsequent shows. But Poseidon is nominally the God of the sea. And remember that these peoples in Italy, and it's Neptune, as I said in Roman, but especially in Greece, they're seafaring peoples. Greece has 1500 islands around the Greek peninsula. It's got one of the largest coastlines for a country of that size. And in the ancient world, seafaring and Transport is 1/10 the cost of having oxen or horses. So everybody in the ancient world in the Mediterranean is a seafaring people. And therefore the primary aspect of their God of the sea is Poseidon. But he has a multiplicity of tasks. He's portrayed with the beard and the trident. And you worship him when you're sailing. And believe it or not, the ancients had very sophisticated bottomary loans. Those are insurance loans on importing grain from the Black Sea. And so they were very sophisticated in their navigation techniques and in their financing of it. And Poseidon was the person that they set altars through or there was particular temples for. So if you're coming into Attica, for example, to Athens and you want to go around Sunium, Cape Sunium, it's a cape that sticks out. Then you have the temple of Poseidon at Sunium. The first thing you will see as a seafarer is that you will honor Poseidon. That got you home. He also had other aspects too. He was a God of earthquakes and he was also the God of horses. A lot of people have tried to explain why that was. They combined local cults into one person. The name Poseidon and it's disputed like all of the etymologies of the Greek gods. Apparently it was something from that Greek word posis. It's an early word for lord or master of the house. And then didon might be related to day and by extension gay lord of the earth. But he's worshiped in places like Arcadia and Thebes, but not necessarily as a God of the sea, because they're both landlord but a God of horses and a God of earthquakes. And as everybody knows, Greece is a very seismically active country. And because of the nature of temple building, almost every temple there at one point was they take years to build and they're very vulnerable to earthquakes. So they were constantly evoking Poseidon both to protect commerce as the God of the sea and to protect them from earthquakes and to protect them. And what was their gasoline? Their gasoline was hay and horses to move. And so in some ways he's the greatest commercial God because he's the one that you have to sacrifice to and give things so that you have a safe voyage. One thing about the Mediterranean, remember it's a relatively shallow sea and it's enclosed and it doesn't have high waves, but it has sudden storms, especially in Aegean. And it's very treacherous to see. I can remember once when I first got to Greece, I went to the island of Syros for Thanksgiving and there were 40 foot waves. We had a little boat and they locked the entire. They put ropes through all the doors so we couldn't go out. And then they had us all sitting. You couldn't go to the bathroom, you had to sit down. There was no seat belts, but everybody was vomiting over the floor. It was never been so terrified. I looked out the window and I couldn't see anything but water. It was higher than a ship and the ship wasn't that big. So it was a terrifying experience to sail the Mediterranean, especially the Aegean, in the autumn and the spring. One thing Remember about these gods are that it was very popular in the 60s and 70s to champion polytheism and the idea that the gods are just big humans. They have no superior morality. They don't. They fornicate, they commit adultery, they murder, they kill, they have illegitimate children, they mirror image. And people would say, I remember taking mythology and religion courses as a graduate student. I'd have students in the seminars say, these people are so much more sophisticated than we are. They're so much more confident in themselves. They don't have to create a God or a Jesus. It was crazy. And polytheism, which is always considered a mark of pre civilizational countries until they become monotheistic, they were saying, was a better because you had a more variety or diversity of gods. And more importantly, they liked the idea that Poseidon would try to rape Persephone, or he had illegitimate children with various demigods, or he had homosexual partners, young boys, all of that. They thought, well, this is really good. Because these Greeks were so confident that it was kind of pre civilization. You can see what's going to break down once you make the gods like Poseidon, the representation of the sea or of earthquakes, and you're still a rational society and the age of reason is upon you in the 5th century. Then you have people like Democritus, Hippocrates, scientists, and they're starting to see things that, that maybe there are underground forces, earth, water, wind and fire that are moving the earth, not just Poseidon. Or maybe we're constructed of atoms. Or as Epicurus and Lucretius had said, when you walk by a statue and everybody touches its hand, the hand wears off because they're knocking away little atoms off it. And that we're just reconstructing atoms. And when you bury a corpse and you dig it off up 10 days later or 10 years later, it's all decomposed. Well, where did it go? The atoms then separated. What I'm getting at is they were starting to see electricity. They didn't quite know it was electricity, but they saw lightning as something other than Poseidon's thunderbolt. And they saw there was not necessarily a cause and effect. They saw people who were very pious, always sacrificed to the gods and died early or were killed and people who were complete scoundrels, you know, and their morality didn't take an account for that. They thought that it was a ritualistic one, was considered devout or not. It wasn't a private thing. You didn't talk, you didn't go on a seafaring voyage. And say, Poseidon, strongest of all the gods. I've been a very good person. I've not lied, I've not fornicated. I don't have a. To engage in adultery. I'm completely representative of Hellenic values. Would you please help me? And I believe in you. No. What they would do is catch a fish and cut it open and see what the liver looked like. And then maybe on the trireme or galley, they would burn a little bit and throw it into the sea.
- [39:43]
Sammy Wink
You know, I was wondering that about Hephaestus, who is the craftsman God. Did craftsmans in ancient Greece, like, keep a effigy or something of Hephaestus? Oh, they did. And so. But they would have the other gods as well to deal with. But Hephaestus was their main guy.
- [40:02]
Victor Davis Hanson
There's two types of patron gods. So if you're down near the Isthmus of Corinth, there's the sanctuary of Isthmia, Poseidon, because, you see, you know, it's only six miles wide. There's Poseidon in the Gulf of Corinth, and there's Poseidon and Angean. So they have a temple of Poseidon and that city in that region, then worship him as their primary protector. If you're in Arcadia or Thebes, you can worship Poseidon the God, the protector from earthquakes, or Poseidon, the cultivator of horses. And that's one thing you do. But then there's also, if you're engaged in particular avenues of trade or commerce, if you're a sailor, it's Poseidon. If you're a craftsman, it's Hephaestus. If you're a soldier, it's Aries. So you privilege the particular patron saint of your occupation and your locale. And that's led to problems because the Greeks thought that with 1500 city states and all of these different gods, you had to have some unifying aspect. And so they had what they called the Panhellenic Games. And they were staggered every four years. There was the Olympic Games. That was the big enchilada, the super bowl. And that was at Olympia. And that was honoring Zeus, Olympian. And it was a huge temple. It was at one time the biggest temple in the Greek world. You can still see it, the foundations and some of the column. It's a beautiful area in the Peloponnese, the northern northwest Peloponnese, and then Delphi was the next biggest one. And that was in honoring Apollo and God of Seercraft, Reason, who might have had aspects of the sun God with Helios, and that was the Pythian game. Pythia was a legendary snake and there was a oracle there. Those were the two big. And they were every two years and then every four years and then in between them they had. So you almost had something to do. Every year they had the Isthmian games at the Isthmus where you honored Poseidon and then every two years you went to Nemea and honored Zeus and there's a temple of honor. So he got double credit. But the point was at some point every year there was a sanctuary where you could go and people from all over Greece went and they competed in music contests, rhetoric contests, speech contests, running boxing, wrestling, and there were oracles there. And there was a lot of rivalry among wealthy people to build treasuries there. So when you came or little hotels, you say, well, I'm from Mantinea and our richest guy has a little Mantinean treasury where all the people from Mantinea can put their shields or swords or statues there to honor the God and they'll be protected. And they also have a Zeno del Cheon, a little hotel for us to rest up. So it was a way of getting everybody together and encouraging that they had the same religion, the same language, even though they had no word in their vocabulary for nationhood. So we'll talk about Apollo and Athena maybe next.
- [43:43]
Sammy Wink
Apollo and Athena. Okay, that sounds good. And we're going to talk some time about Hephaestus maybe. And how about Asclepius, Is that a God?
- [43:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
A minor God. I was going to do the Olympians first. We still have to do Hestia, Vestia, Hermes, Dash, Mercury.
- [44:03]
Sammy Wink
Got it.
- [44:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. And Demeter. Das Demeter.
- [44:08]
Sammy Wink
We'll do those next. And we're going to talk a little bit about Kelsey Tulsi Gabbard's referrals after we hear from our sponsor here. And that sponsor is Patriot Mobile. Everyday Americans make choices that shape our country's future, right down to which cell phone provider we. Here's what most people don't realize. Patriot Mobile isn't just a wireless provider. They're an activist organization funded by selling top tier cell phone service. They've been on the front lines defending our freedoms long before it was cool. Standing in the gap when others wouldn't. The best part, they deliver prioritized premium service on all three major US networks, giving you the same or even better coverage backed by 100% based customer support. Get unlimited data plans, mobile hotspots, international roaming and more. And when you switch to Patriot Mobile, you'll help grow a movement that fuels the Christian conservative cause. Every bill you pay helps advance the values of faith, family and freedom. Switching is easier than ever. Activate in minutes. Keep your number, keep your phone or upgrade. Take a stand today. Go to patriotmobile.com VDH or call 972 Patriot. That's 972 P A T R I O T and use promo code VDH for a free month of service. That's patriotmobile.com VDH or call 972 Patriot and make the switch today. And we'd like to thank Patriot Mobile for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson show. So, Victor, I know that this is a very complicated case. This is about the impeachment of Donald Trump by the House. And he was impeached on the for using U.S. assets and, or threatening not to use aid that he had with the newly elected President Zelensky in the Ukraine unless he looked into prosecuting Burisma. So that was what Donald Trump was impeached for. But apparently the Gabbard criminal, criminal referrals are for two people that led to that lie.
- [46:52]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, the context, remember, was that during his first year, 2016, 2017, in office, almost immediately, by March, excuse me, April, May, June, the left had already engineered the Russian collusion hoax that was engineered by John Brennan, James Comey and James Clapper. And we know that because they met in the White House along with the Clinton campaign. So Robert Mueller had his 22 month investigation, it found nothing. And everybody thought Donald Trump was exonerated and now we'd have a normal presidency. Then they had to cook up something to run out the clock on so he couldn't do what he was elected to do. And remember, this was the first administration. This had people who were, I don't want to say swamp creatures, but they were people who were part of the establishment. Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, Bill Barr, John Bolton, that kind. So almost immediately they left, cooked up a new idea that the National Security Council listens in to presidential calls. They're under statute not to divulge that. When they divulge it and it's a Democrat, then they say that the phone call wasn't classified. If it's, if it's a Republican and a Democratic president, then they say it was classified and they try to prosecute him. So there's where Mr. Vindman comes in and he was listening and he was a dual citizen, he was a US Citizen, but he also, I think had retained Ukrainian citizenship. And in the call Donald Trump called over, and the context was that Joe Biden, at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations, a public event, had wanted to brag on himself. So he said Victor Shevchenko was the. The prosecuting attorney of Ukraine. He said, well, you know, I went over there and I said, I looked at my watch and he looked at. And I said, before I leave, you're going to fire that. So. And he didn't tell us why he wanted him fire. He said, well, you know, corruption. But his son Hunter was getting over a million dollars a year to do nothing by sitting on the Burism Energy Board. So when Biden went over there, there had been congressionally approved aid to Ukraine because it had been invaded in 2014, both in the Crimea and the Donbass. So Biden actually was threatening to suspend aid as vice president. He said, you know, before I leave, you're not going to get your money. And now he's relating this story years later, and it was very incriminating. He said, well, I can't say it. He said, son of a. Guess what? They folded. Haha. I'm tough. Joe Biden. And they got their money, which they had a right to once the Congress approved it. So Trump remembered that. And so he basically was thinking, these people are totally corrupt. The Bidens, because they threatened the Ukrainian government with cutting off congressionally approved aid. Aid.
- [50:31]
Sammy Wink
So unless they stop their investigation, they
- [50:34]
Victor Davis Hanson
fired the man that was looking into Hunter Biden. And of course, they lied about all the circumstances. So in this phone call, Donald Trump said to Zelensky, we've got aid approved and we're going to send it, but you better look at this Biden stuff and Burisma, because you. And he referenced it. And Zelensky said, okay, well, Venman was on that call and he broke his oath of confidentiality and he declosed it to his friend that he had worked with who had worked for Biden, Eric Salomello. And he called him up and he said, guess what I've heard? And he related that. He said, you can do something about it, but, you know, I don't want to lose my job. And I like. So we never heard that. Eric Salamella never was on the call. He had no. This was hearsay. It was all Vindman's version. So then what did he do? The first thing he did, and Saramela, who later would refuse to testify if they even talked to each other. They did. They cooked it up. And they went over to Adam Shift, who was on the House Intelligence Committee, the ranking Democrat. And they said, hey, you know what, I'm AD Libby now. But, you know, the Mueller thing didn't work, but we can get Trump using political pressure on designated aid. And Schiff said, yeah, yeah, yeah. So then they introduced articles of impeachment. And the rule was that he declared himself a whistleblower so he could remain anomalous. Everybody knew who he was. Everybody knew that he had talked to Vindman who put him up to it. Everybody knew that Schiff had coordinated it. But because you couldn't mention his name when you ask under oath, Schiff, did you ever talk to either one? I'm not. Either he said no, or I'm not going to talk about. But how dare you try to endanger the identity of the whistleblower. And then they said to Vindman, did you talk to the whistleblower? I can't tell you that. Why can't you tell me that? Well, he's a whistleblower, he's protected. Can we bring in the whistleblower? No, you can't bring in the whistleblower. So it was a charade. And then there was the inspector general. So the inspector general, Atkinson was given a referral about this and he was asked to look into it. And he said that Sermelo, who was a Democrat and worked for Biden, was not a political operator. And he didn't even call in Venman, he didn't even call in Ship. He just said, they're not political and this is genuine. And he forwarded that Trump had did something wrong. And that's where they had that circus that went on and on and on and took Trump's things down and they brought that Fiona Hill, they brought everybody and they embowed all these people. And the subtext was, it was very ironic. They thought the Ukrainians had played a very active role. The Ukrainian ambassador to the United States had written an op ed in the 2016 campaign, I think it was in the New York Times or Washington Post, damning Trump and saying, don't vote for him, vote for Hillary. And they were very invested in her. And so that was part of the Russian collusion. See, they're going to were the victims of Russian aggression and they're working with Trump. Trump, Trump, Trump. He's Putin. That was the Ukrainian line. So Zelenskyy was basically even in 2024, he came into a factory in Pennsylvania, remember, and was obviously being used by the Democrats for the election against Trump, but he didn't want Trump to cut it off. But here was the final irony, Trump didn't do anything. I mean, Biden did. Biden said, if you don't fire him, you're not going to get the aid. And they did fire him. And so they got the aid. Trump didn't say, I'm not going to give you the aid if you don't investigate. He gave them the aid. And the aid that he had given them that he approved from the Congress were things like offensive weapons like Javelin missiles that proved crucial in the defense of Kiev later on in 2022. And the funny thing was that Obama had never approved offensive weapons. And then they said in the impeachment hearing, this is part of Donald Trump's, you know, they brought in these left wing, career deep state swamp creatures and they'd say, well, Donald Trump has got a inexplicable love for Russia or he's a puppet and all this stuff. And that was the subtext of why they were not the official reason. But the point I'm making is Atkinson didn't interview very many people. He knew that Sara Mellor was a Democratic operative. He knew that it was all by hearsay. He never really got Veneman in and grilled him. And then he sent this. And now Tulsi Gabbard has got all the transcripts and Sarah Merrill looks like, like, well, he looks like Democratic operative, like he is. And so does Atkinson. And that's worse for him because he's an inspector general. And the final irony was they invaded under Obama, Crimea and Donbass. Obama did nothing. In fact, he encouraged it by earlier saying in Seoul, South Korea, to Medvedev, the Russian president, go tell Vladimir that this is my last election and I'll be flexible on missile defense, I. E. I'll cancel it just for you if you give me some space. Meaning, don't invade. Why I'm up for election. And they both kept their word. They invaded after the election. And Obama did cancel what would have been a very valuable missile defense system the checks on the polls were, were collaborating on. And then the other thing about it was, what did Donald Trump do actually vis a vis Russia compared to Biden and Obama? Well, he gave them offensive weapons that saved them at Kiev, but they hadn't done it. He sanctioned the oligarchs even more severely than they had. He told the Europeans, you're crazy to have this Nordstrom Treat Stream 2 pipeline. And now you're fueling this Russian war machine by buying their natural gas that wants to destroy you and Ukraine. Stop it. He was the first person he Killed more Russians than anybody than during the whole Cold War. He said, if the Wagner group gets near you, American insulation in Syria, destroy them. And then he got out of the asymmetric missile deal. He got out of that. So if you look empirically about his relationship with Putin, he was much tougher on Putin. And the result is the proof. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. He invaded Osatia under George Bush. He invaded Donbass and Crimea under Barack Obama. He tried to take Kiev and all of Ukraine under Biden, but only within those four presidencies. Only four presidencies, 24 year period. There's only one space that he didn't go in anywhere and that was during Trump's first term.
- [58:08]
Sammy Wink
So once again, the Russian hoax was bogus against Donald Trump. And these two people that Gabby Tulsa Tulsi Gabbard has a criminal referral against are Eric Saramella, who was the quote, unquote whistleblower who took conversation that was had between, between Donald Trump and Zelensky. But he took information about that from
- [58:33]
Victor Davis Hanson
Vindman and he never really disclosed where he it. The people who watched the hearing, it was very clear that Eric Salamella had already leaked out that he was the whistleblower. It was very clear that he was nowhere near that phone call. It was very clear that all of the information that he used for the impeachment of Donald Trump came from an even more partisan activist, Veneman. And they couldn't talk about it because he said he had exemption as he didn't even show up. And he was supposed to be this saint and this inspector general knew all of that. And he knew that Adam Schiff had met with him and he lied about it. He said that there had been no conversation between Schiff, Samuela and Vinman and there had been and he knew it.
- [59:26]
Sammy Wink
So he's being referred. And then Michael Atkinson, who let it just go by the inspector general, he's
- [59:33]
Victor Davis Hanson
being referred and they should get both of them.
- [59:36]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. And then on top of that, Donald Trump has been, was. Didn't he just had Zelensky in his office or he had conversation and they were both saying that Zelensky goes, I didn't feel like under any pressure about the aid. And Donald Trump says there's no pressure. But at this time when Gabbard has put these referrals forward, Zelensky had always said that.
- [59:58]
Victor Davis Hanson
He had always said that. You could argue, well, he was afraid Donald Trump would cut off aid if he said otherwise. But even in the very beginning when he didn't know Trump. He said that. And the weird thing about it is no one complained louder about aid to Ukraine and no one did more to help Ukraine. When Trump came in, they heimed and hawed but he did not cut off aid. And now he's giving the green light for the Europeans to step up. They don't have the, the ability but he's saying to them, you've got money, you can buy all the weapons you want from us. There's no holds bar. Just buy and we'll and give them the Ukraine and step up to the plate. It's right on your border. And Ukraine privately knows after looking at Venezuela and looking when he did his first term and looking at what he did to the Wagner group and looking at what he did to Iran that if you put it this way, would Zelenskyy rather have a loud mouth, supposedly unstable Trump that comes through and is not afraid of the Russians or anybody, or would he have a sober and judicious NPR sounding Obama who will never come through and everything is just empty smoke with him? He prefers Trump.
- [61:18]
Sammy Wink
He does, for good reason. Yes. Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take our last break and then we will come back and talk a little bit about Putin's Russia. Stay with us and we'll be right back.
- [61:32]
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.
- [62:02]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back. Victor has social media accounts. You can find him at XD Hansen and on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup. So Victor, there's in the Moscow Times there was an article about a report given to Putin on the the Russian economy which is in the dumps by all the measurements. And he told his government reporters that this was insufficient. But he didn't seem to have any reflection even according to the Moscow Times, that maybe his war in the Ukraine might be part of the problem for the Russian economy.
- [62:44]
Victor Davis Hanson
It's taking 50% of all government expenditures. They have hyperinflation. We don't know. Nobody gives the figures, but people believe there's been at least a million Russians dead and probably a million and a half wounded casualties. Total casualties are probably 2 over 2 million. There's probably been 300,000 Ukrainians killed and probably 600,000, probably 3 million on both Sides, casualties, but inordinately Russians. And because of the radical fluidity of the battlefield and the Ukrainian, Ukrainian is more decentralized than Russia is. It doesn't have that. It doesn't have to the same extent that corrupt Stalinist Communist apparat that controls everything. It, it might want to, but it's so decentralized now as a war that you have all of these people that are, are ad hoc in it. They're thinking of things, and they are creating drones of every type. And the result is, after four years of war, they have developed a way to jam drones from the Russians, and they have a way to make them unjammable. And they are really killing a lot of Russians on the infantry battlefield. They've really confined the Russian navy to its port with mobile maritime drones. So he's in a bad shape economically, politically, Putin is. And so I would think that the battlefield is undulating. If he had a DMZ, in some places, he might be 30 miles only beyond what the border had been when he, when he first invaded in 2014. And some other places, there's pockets where he might be 75 or 100. But the point is Ukraine could probably live without if they had a fortified border and they were armed to the teeth. And so I think what's happening is Putin is under pressure from the oligarchs and the military to stop this because it's not going to work. They've got to the point now where, in a cost of benefit analysis, what little additional ground they could gain is not worth the deaths and the harm to the economy. So he's looking for an out. He's looking now at the whole picture in the Middle east, and he's thinking, assad gone, that was our proxy. We could cause trouble all over to Israel, to the Gulf State, Iran, our best friend. We armed it to the teeth. We got their oil. They gave us oil credits. The they. They gave us drone. They're gone. They're gone. And China is prone to pressure now, and Venezuela's gone, and Cuba will be gone. We have no toehold. And the communist governments in Colombia and others are on the ropes. Chile's conservative, Argentina is conservative. Maybe our holdout is Mexico. But they don't have anybody in the Western Hemisphere anymore. They don't have anybody in the Middle East. They don't have anybody in Africa. Europe is arming to the teeth thanks to Donald Trump. So at this point, I think he's thinking, well, oil prices are pretty high and there's still sanctions of some sort. On us. Not always. By the end, it's a good time to cut a deal and get in on just flooding the zone with Russian oil to pay for all this and then declare victory. That I, Vladimir Putin, move the borders westward and I nullified the Ukrainian threat, whatever that be, it was non existent. And then he's looking at NATO and he thinks, you know, I kind of like the idea that Spain didn't let the United States use any airspace and that let in 500,000 immigrants. I kind of like the idea that tough nut Meloni kind of folded and she didn't allow them to land in Sicily. I kind of like the idea of France just kind of sold out. The Lebanese government didn't help them at all get rid of and they won't let the Americans use it. I kind of like the idea that Turkey said it's going to invade Israel. And of course, I really like the idea that Britain wouldn't let the United States land at Diego Garcia. So the whole thing is a mess. And if I'm not stuck in this war, I can weasel my way in between the United States and flatter both sides and play them off. And then maybe when we couple, hope 10 years, there might be alternatives and opportunities. But that's what he's going to do. He's going to try to get a ceasefire, declare victory, make some money on the oil, and then he's going to go to the Europeans and say, you think the United States is going to save you now after you snub them? I don't think so. So this is what I want from you. Rebuild the pipelines of gas. Do this, do this, do this. And then they're going to do what? No, no, they're not going to say anything.
- [68:02]
Sammy Wink
No, of course not.
- [68:03]
Victor Davis Hanson
Donald Trump will stop you. No.
- [68:06]
Sammy Wink
Well, under Donald Trump's second administration, they don't seem to be able to get together an impeachment of him. But they have.
- [68:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
They will. If they lose the, if the Republicans lose the House, there will be no legislation for two years. It'll be just impeachment. Impeachment, impeachment. They won't impeach Trump. They will impeach Pete Hegset.
- [68:27]
Sammy Wink
They've just introduced six articles of impeachment. That's what I was going to ask you about.
- [68:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
They were a complete joke. I thought Pete Hegseth comes in, all they talk about is his past, drinking, marriage, tattoos. Only the Democrats could say tattoos are really important when they have the Jerusalem cross and they're holy, but they're not Important when Graham Platner. Platner down in May up in Maine has a Nazi Totenkov SS tattoo. And by the way, he has just basically admitted it to their embarrassment. Well, I didn't know what I was doing. I was drawn and I got in there and I woke up and I had this tattoo. And now he's saying, I did know what I was doing. Yes, it is a Nazi tattoo, but I was brainwashed by these evil, white, racist Pentagon death cult, military industrial. So he's lying and making himself up. So anyway, they're going to go after Hegseth. Here's what the impeachment should be. Pete Hexseth inherits Pentagon with 40,000 recruits short. Pete Hexeth in six weeks. Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, all recruitment goals exceeded. Pete Hex said there was no more transsexual. There's no more dei. There's no more racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, prejudice. Morale has skyrocketed. Pete Heck said the budget will go from 900 billion to a trillion and a half dollars as they're going to try to rebuild the flu. Pete Heck, Seth, we've got to look away from not away, but in addition to Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed, Northrop, the usual gang, and the revolving door to Anduril and smaller companies that are making drones. So quantity, a quantity of good weapons is what we're after or what we see. We don't want a few perfect weapons that cost. We would rather have a million drones. We think a million drones at $20,000 a piece could beat ten F35s by flooding the zone. So that's what Pete Hecseth has done. And then we look at the record. Well, what has he done since he been here? Oh, he got us into Venezuela. Well, it was perfect. It was a perfect idea. He got us in Iran. Well, the rescue was perfect. How did they pull it off? The Iranian war? They only lost 13 soldiers. That's what Biden lost in one day on his skedaddle from Afghanistan. Oh, Cuba's on the ropes. So notice that the impeachment doesn't have anything about what he's actually done is he was rumored to be drunk or he was unprofessional, or they're really angry because Pete Hecseth, I think, channels people like Patton and Curtis LeMay. So when he says, we're going to kill them or we're going to. We bombed him in the Smith, they don't like that language. It's more like, tragically, we were forced. Tragically, we were Forced to, to hit a municious plant and there was a terrible explosion. And we regret terribly the loss of life. But they forget that. Colin Paul, one of their heroes after he became a Trump hater during the first Gulf War, he had a little map and he said there is a Republican Guard. And he kind of drew, he took his pointer around it. I said well what are you going to do? I'm going to encircle it and kill it. Oh wow, Colin, you really want to kill people. People.
- [72:22]
Sammy Wink
So they prefer the Bill Clinton. Remember when he hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and he came out in the morning and he said, well there's been this terrible accident. We accidentally bombed the Chinese.
- [72:40]
Victor Davis Hanson
I don't know if it's an accident,
- [72:41]
Sammy Wink
but he claimed that the next day he did the whole Bill Clinton we're so sorry, this was an accident. They hit it, they nailed it. They two apartments and a big long building. You couldn't.
- [72:54]
Victor Davis Hanson
I'm not saying that that approach. When I went to Iraq as a so called Journalist, 2006 and 7, right at the heart of the surge, I went all over one time with Blackhawks and the other the next year, few days with Humvee. And the one thing I noticed was I went to some of their press conferences. I read their, the military, they said this is the surge and we're, we're concentrating on civic infrastructure and we're trying to build parks and electrical and we're trying to win the people and we're setting. And then you talk to some special forces guy. Nah, nah, we're killing them like flies. We're killing them all over. McChrystal has just gone crazy. He's killing all of the Baathist sons of Saddam and the ISIS people. So what I'm saying is that Petraeus had a pretty good strategy with saying that we're not interested in just kinetic activity. And it was true. But the kinetic activity was more, never more kinetic. And it was almost like oh, oh, 500 jihadists were killed with that bomb. I didn't know that, you know that kind of stuff. But Trump would have said, or Hexith would have said, yeah, we, we bomb him to smithereen or Curtis LeMay, you know, a cigar in his mouth. Yeah, yeah, we gotta bomb him back to the Stone Age. So there's two ways of, of approaching. I really don't believe when Trump said existential, a lot of his supporters, I saw some on Fox News said well he spoke in the language of the Middle east, so that's why he Said that he wanted to destroy. You're going to wake up and your civilization's going to be dead. But he didn't mean the Iranian people. He wasn't using that to scare them. I don't think by saying they're going to take out. I think he was talking about the civilization of the regime, the radical Shia who had kidnapped or hijacked Persian history and culture. Some of them weren't even Persian.
- [75:05]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, it's true. True. And we're at almost to the end here, Victor, and I just wondering, have you seen that Hunter Biden is in South Africa? Reading about it, I got the impression that he's trying to avoid problems here in the United States. Probably tax problems, but.
- [75:25]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, he got pardon and he got off on the tax thing. But he owes $17 million to lawyers and anybody stupid enough to let him stay in their house for free or fly him on their jet. He was a leech. The weird thing about it was he was kind of an amateur grifter. So he had all that exposure. Every time that he comes out, if he's in the New York Post, they show those pictures where he's stark naked with a prostitute, snorting and gross sexual activity. So he's never going to live that down. And he says things like, they were talking that Donald Trump might be a cocaine addict. And when they had cocaine under the Biden administration. And one of the bookcases as you came into the West Wing and with Hunter Biden is on record saying that crack cocaine is a good thing and everybody should try it. Basically, it's not as bad as alcohol. And then everybody wants money from him. His little artist thing. Everybody's the left, made a feeble argument and said, you know, yeah, he may be blowing paint to his straw on his nose, and he may be, but they were actually very. They'd always wheel out some phony Manhattan art critic who would say, despite popular belief, I've examined the corpus and the oeuvre of Hunter Biden, and it's very impressive stylistically. Reminds me of the French impression. They would get that, and then they get these crass guys who would buy it for a million bucks. So they could go in and tell everybody that. They'd tell everybody, I gave a million dollars to Joe Biden. I want you to give me an exemption from my grandma or something to come in. And as soon as Joe Biden went out, when they kicked him out, it was like. Like Z and that. Did you see that? His mea cpa, he sold one painting. He has no income at all. And he's lazy. He's still in his mid-50s. I think he. Does he have a law degree? I think he does, yeah.
- [77:35]
Sammy Wink
He's just.
- [77:36]
Victor Davis Hanson
Why doesn't he open Hunter and Hunter and Co or something? Or Hunter and Son or Biden and Biden? He won't. Doesn't want to work. He likes warm climates, you know, like LA or South Africa. He married this woman, very attractive. And he's down there hiding out, I
- [77:56]
Sammy Wink
guess, like any thief would.
- [77:58]
Victor Davis Hanson
He did.
- [77:59]
Sammy Wink
He did an artist, I should say.
- [78:01]
Victor Davis Hanson
He did challenge either of the two Trump older boys to a cage fight.
- [78:06]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, I saw that.
- [78:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
Greg Gutfeld said that he would be a good correspondent for Gut Pie. Felt. I think he was half serious, too.
- [78:15]
Sammy Wink
Yeah.
- [78:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
Kind of like a Johnny that does Jesse Waters.
- [78:18]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, exactly. And it would be a novelty. So he would get.
- [78:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
I don't know how to say it, but I don't wish that type of familial ruin on anybody. But while this was going on, Joe Biden, who is senile, suffering from dementia, has stage four prostate cancer, was up on the podium and he looked over at somebody in the audience and his challenged mind said, that's Barack Obama. That's what it told him. So then he said Barack or something and come up here. And the guy didn't want to come up here. Come up here. And then as he started to get closer, you could see that he might have thought that it wasn't Barack Obama. And then he said, you look like Barack Obama. And he engaged in the biggest stereotype that people of one race all look like each other. Asians all look whites and up, but blacks all look like each other. And then he had that gravelly. It's. It's really sad because they really were going to make him. They thought they could have him in the office right now. But when he was talking, he'd say, Huh? Yeah, Nobody knows what he's saying. And that's true. I feel bad. It then he had that crackpot doctor. Ronnie Jackson was a good doctor. He was a doctor for Obama and Trump the first term, and then he's now in Congress. But Biden's doctor knew all this stuff. How could Biden be the President of the United States and you wouldn't even give him a PSA test. How does the president, United States, sitting right before your very eyes, have stage four metastasized prostate cancer? It doesn't make any sense. It's treatable if you can catch it. And one of the ways you can catch it and they say, well, you don't take. That was Obama to save money. He said, well, you're after 70, don't take a PSA. And they found out that the death rate skyrocketed because the new longevity is 90. So yes, it can take 10 years to kill you, but a lot of people will live from 80 to 90 and be productive. So why didn't they do that? I don't know. Know, it's almost like they wanted him to die. I don't know.
- [80:27]
Sammy Wink
I don't know. But as you were talking, Hunter Biden was reminding me of our Eric Swalwell. He got kicked out of a mansion that a millionaire owned. And that guy just said, I don't know him anymore.
- [80:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
It's a pro. It's the left mindset. Remember, that's always projectionist left. If they're committing a crime, they say you are. If you're a horn toad and you're sexually assaulting women, then you give a soapbox speech about Brett Kavanaugh. That that's just. And if you are want to tax all wealthy people like Mondami and Eric Swalwell, then he hangs out in a mansion. And Mondame likes nice things and his wife especially likes nice things and his parents really, really like nice things. So a lot of the left wing political manifestations reflect a deep seated neurosis that that's what they secretly covet. So they accuse other people of doing what they want and sometimes they can't repress their appetites. I mean, Weiner, Anthony Weiner and Eric Swalwell were loud advocates of MeToo and women. As Senator Hirono said, women must be bleed. Women must be believed. Well, you didn't believe. Apparently you knew about Eric Swalwell. Everybody did.
- [81:47]
Sammy Wink
Eric Swalwell said almost the same thing. Haven't you ever talked to women? You should believe them.
- [81:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, about Brett Kavanaugh when he was what, 17? Well, when there's stories and there's stories about him and there's stories, then they're either true or he must be the unluckiest man in the world. You know what? That was very pressing, Eric. He was the most unlucky person in the world because he ran into the likes of you who fabricated all these stories just so you wouldn't have a conservative on the Supreme Court.
- [82:20]
Sammy Wink
And now there's stories and more stories of Eric Swalwell and more stories and even more.
- [82:28]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think that. I don't think he was in Congress when he made those commercials. That was another projectionist idea. He was on that raft floating around when he said Congress was out. He was lifting weights. He was kind of showing that the Republicans did this to me. They made me relax and maybe why don't you stay in Washington and study legislation or something. He was partying all the time and he was married with three kids. And the people in the District knew it. Yeah, everybody knew. Nancy Pelosi knew it. Schumer knew it. Ruben Gallegos, his friend, knew it. His amigo, he knew it.
- [83:05]
Sammy Wink
And the last thing, I just need to, I don't know, assure our audience that I did understand or know that Tony Gallegos was the Republican who's having trouble similar to Eric Swalwell in Congress. And so there is, it's a bipartisan problem, harassment of women in the D.C. area. And in the political it's a little,
- [83:30]
Victor Davis Hanson
it is, except there's a difference. It's not that Republicans are not as I, that they're always more moral, although I do believe they are. But they, they have deterrence. They know that if they step out of line, the press hates them and they're all going to be exposed. So that deterrent effect makes them behave a little bit better. The Democrats know that they can do anything. And the press, like they've learned from Clinton and Biden. If you don't believe me, look at the difference between E. Jean Carroll and Tara Reid with Biden. That was a much more clear cut case of rape, sexual penetration, sex. And then Jean Carol's story was full of holes. Tara Reid told her mother about it. Her mother called in to CNN about it. Everybody knew about it. She told people about it. We all knew it, but nobody on the left was gonna do anything.
- [84:38]
Sammy Wink
Well, Victor, we're at a pretty hard break here, so we better go. Thanks to our audience for choosing to join us on Saturday or the weekend. And thank you, Victor, for Thank you
- [84:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
for watching and listening, everybody.
- [84:49]
Sammy Wink
This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen and we're signing off.
- [84:52]
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.