Victor Davis Hanson: Iran War Update, Mexico’s Cartel Problem, and the Tyler Robinson Case

Summary

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Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words

Episode: Iran War Update, Mexico’s Cartel Problem, and the Tyler Robinson Case
Date: July 11, 2026
Host: Victor Davis Hanson
Produced by: The Daily Signal
Co-host: Sammy Wink

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Victor Davis Hanson delivers wide-ranging analysis on current political and cultural issues with his characteristic focus on history and big-picture context. Main points of discussion include the ongoing situation with Iran and U.S. strategy, Mexico’s cartel wars and diplomatic tensions, updates on the Tyler Robinson murder case, recent polling and political developments, philanthropy-backed activism, American policy in Israel, and in-depth segments on James Madison and George W. Bush. Throughout, Hanson explains the bigger historical lessons and contemporary implications of each development.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

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[04:27] Iran War Update: Negotiations, Strategy, and Misconceptions

• Failure of Diplomacy:
  Hanson critiques the recent 60-day negotiation attempt with Iran, arguing that any hope of reaching an agreement was illusory. He suggests Iranian officials manipulate perceptions (“good cop/bad cop”) to stall until U.S. political timing is more favorable to them.

• The Iranian Regime’s Game:
  “They presented a face…‘we are moderates now’…But we have these Revolutionary Guard Corps…Is that the true representation of what happened, or were they huddling together and saying, ‘looking at you guys, you deplore it, then say, "What are we supposed to do?"’”
  —Victor Davis Hanson [05:10]

• Political Timing:
  Hanson speculates Iran’s strategy is to drag out negotiations to hurt the incumbent U.S. administration and position themselves for better terms with a future government more akin to previous Democratic administrations.

• Military Options:
  Recommends more aggressive military responses, including targeting infrastructure (rail bridges, docks, supply centers), and suggests leaving a small U.S. naval presence in the region, inviting allies to share responsibility.

• On Special Envoys:
  He criticizes the business background of some envoys, noting “They don’t understand radical Shia theocratic ideology. And so I think Marco Rubio has people in that State Department…that know that.” [08:43]

• On Trump’s Approach:
  “They don’t understand Trump, that he’s fluid, he’s transactional, he’s unpredictable, he’s predictable…But if you push him long and hard enough, he will do something. And he’s at that point now.”
  —Victor Davis Hanson [09:44]

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[10:11] Mexico’s Cartel and Diplomatic Problems

• Incidents and Escalating Tension:
  Recent ICE shooting incident with a Mexican national sparks condemnation from Mexican President Sheinbaum, who threatens international legal action—though with no real power to do so.

• The Context of U.S.-Mexico Relations:
  Hanson details the scale of illegal immigration, criminal deportations, and the toll of fentanyl and drugs trafficked across the border, arguing that the Mexican government has long treated human export and the drug trade as economic boons.

• Quote:
  “You have been waging a veritable war against the United States…You have taken the Southern Mexico, Chiapas, Michoacan, Oaxaca, and treated it as some type of export…Your government and you sent drugs to us and you ran up over $100 billion surplus…Don’t lecture us.”
  —Victor Davis Hanson [13:03]

• Political Tone:
  Hanson is bluntly critical of the “Mexican communist government dictating to us,” stressing that such posturing will not resonate with most Americans.

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[14:21] Political Updates: The Maine Senate Race

• Susan Collins’ Resilience:
  Hanson analyzes polling showing Susan Collins in a tough race, but downplays the risk to her seat by referencing her history of electoral overperformance and strategic positioning as a moderate.

• On Democratic Candidates:
  Hanson asserts, “There is no such thing as an independent candidate now…The Democratic Party you have a certain checklist…It’s a socialist communist agenda. So it really doesn’t matter who runs…” [16:40]

• Primary Dynamics:
  Suggests the left-leaning Democratic electorate in Maine will force any candidate toward an inflexible agenda, regardless of individual background.

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[20:55] The Tyler Robinson Murder Case

• Open and Shut:
  Hanson is forthright in his view of the case, saying all evidence points to Robinson’s guilt.

• Quote:
  “The boyfriend testified that he admitted that he did it and that he felt bad about it…That was a plea for leniency. I don’t think he feels bad about anything…It was a political assassination.” [21:29]

• Critique of Legal Handling:
  Ventures that the defense should have sought a plea deal from the start; calls the trial a “travesty.”

• Media Criticism:
  Blames right-wing commentators such as Candace Owens for stoking conspiracy theories about Israeli involvement, saying,
  “They implanted a lot of really pernicious ideas in people’s minds…Anybody who picked up on that theme…is despicable.” [23:41]

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[24:21] Influence Campaigns, Philanthropy and Subversion

• On Neville Roy Singham and Activist Funding:
  Discusses Treasury investigations into foreign-based funders (notably Singham) of left-wing and anti-ICE activism, suggesting their actions amount to conspiracy and calling for legal action.

• Quote:
  “I don’t know what you do when you have a former US citizen that goes over to your hostile communist belligerent and from there sends money to the United States with the express purpose of undermining the government…” [25:11]

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[25:52] Rahm Emanuel, Israel, and American Jewish Politics

• Emanuel’s Critique:
  Responds to Rahm Emanuel’s statements in Israel about U.S. policy enabling Israeli abuses, dismissing them as inaccurate and politically motivated gestures.

• Hanson’s Historical Context:
  Contrasts Israeli restraint and warnings to civilians with the brutality of Hamas’ October 7th attack, and criticizes Democrats for failing to denounce antisemitism within the party.

• Quote:
  “You can’t deal with a hardcore anti-Semite. And that’s what this party is.” [34:00]

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[38:01] Historical Perspective: James Madison

• On the Founding Father’s Legacy:
  Hansen profiles Madison’s formative influence on the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, and expansion of the republic, as well as his mixed legacy regarding slavery and Native American policy.

• Intellectual Genius vs. Practical Politics:
  Praises Madison as a brilliant but introverted and sometimes naïve builder of American institutions, shaper of Enlightenment ideals, and a near-peer of Jefferson and Hamilton in terms of influence.

• Quote:
  “He was one of these eight presidents…from Virginia. They were all wealthy, they were all classically trained. He was a wonderful Latin scholar. Madison. We know him from the Federalist Papers…” [38:23]

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[43:45] George W. Bush: Reappraisal and Lessons

• Bush’s Conservatism:
  Hanson positions Bush as the most conservative president since Reagan, but critiqued for big government Republicanism and the failure of outreach to Democrats.

• On Iraq and Afghanistan:
  Mixed assessment of these wars—crediting initial successes, but acknowledging the costs, later instability, and Democratic congressional pressure.

• On the 2008 Financial Crisis:
  Blames Democratic financial policy (especially Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the push for subprime lending) but notes that Bush’s lack of hard budget restraint started a cycle of deficits.

• Quote:
  “Bush did some good things on the conservative side…He had tax cuts…But he didn’t insist on budget cuts. So we started this cycle where we were working to pay off the debt and he cut taxes and he actually got some more revenue…And then all the spending…It wasn’t representative.” [51:30]

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[57:05] Elections and Political Rhetoric

• Bush’s Reelection and the Politics of War:
  Reviews the context for Bush’s 2004 reelection—wars not yet mired in insurgency, skilled campaign management, and the beginnings of the left’s tendency to vilify Republican presidents.

• Recurring Pattern of “Nazi” Charges:
  Documents how each Republican president is painted as extreme until replaced by another, at which point the previous is rehabilitated by the left for contrast.

• Quote:
  “All this idea that Trump is unusual and he’s a…We’ve never called a president a fascist or a Nazi. Al Gore said they were Bush-Cheney wore digital brown shirts.” [53:33]

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[63:30] New York Politics: Momdami and Urban Leftism

• Ethnic Identity Politics and Policy Failures:
  Hanson critiques New York’s leadership (Mondami), accusing him of anti-white, anti-Jewish, and anti-European rhetoric and policies that ignore the city’s socioeconomic realities. Predicts that progressive urban experiments are unsustainable due to their effect on productivity, taxation, and public morale.

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[68:37] California’s Public Employee Unions

• Enduring Power of Public Sector Unions:
  Using Schwarzenegger’s failed battle as an example, Hanson argues that California’s government unions are a near-insurmountable political force, and growth of the public sector and “Green New Deal” priorities go unresisted.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On Iran’s Bargaining:
  “They don’t understand radical Shia theocratic ideology.” —Victor Davis Hanson [08:43]

• On U.S.–Mexico Tensions:
  “You have been waging a veritable war against the United States.” —VDH [13:03]

• On Modern Political Conformity:
  “It’s a Stalinist…They’re on our team and we don’t tolerate any dissent.” —VDH [16:40]

• On the Tyler Robinson Case:
  “It was a political assassination…open and shut case.” —VDH [21:29]

• On Activist-Backed Demonstrations:
  “Funding all of these demonstrations against ICE especially, but also the Middle East demonstrations you saw on campus and things like that.” —VDH [25:11]

• On Rahm Emanuel’s Israel Remarks:
  “You can’t deal with a hardcore anti-Semite. And that’s what this party is.” —VDH [34:00]

• On James Madison’s Genius:
  “He was a little bit crazy. He and Jefferson were the most brilliant of all of the founders.” —VDH [43:03]

• On Recurrent Attacks on Republicans:
  “That was mainstream calling. He was the first president that they really called a Nazi. The left hated George Bush and they hated Cheney…And then, as always happens, when the next Republican came, they transferred their hate…” —VDH [53:19]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [04:27] Iran War Update
• [10:11] Mexico’s Cartel Problem
• [14:21] Maine Senate Race Polls
• [20:55] Tyler Robinson Case
• [24:21] Influence Networks & Activism Funding
• [25:52] Rahm Emanuel and U.S.-Israel Politics
• [38:01] James Madison: Historical Impact
• [43:45] George W. Bush: Record and Lessons
• [57:05] Managing War and Reelection
• [63:30] New York & Urban Politics
• [68:37] California’s Public Sector Unions
• [70:47] Listener Mailbag & Conclusion

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Listener Mail Highlight

“You are a hope and light for us all…the knowledge you share and your passion to share it…inspires me to look further and do my own research…A rebirth of God, country, family, respect, love, honor and dignity is desperately needed…”
— Listener Michael Ferrari [69:40]

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Closing Thoughts

Hanson’s episode showcases his talent for blending history with present events, challenging listeners to see political developments as part of deeper civic and cultural currents. Consistently critical of progressive policies and sympathetic to traditional conservatism, he frames modern struggles as repetitions of past choices—emphasizing that understanding history is essential to navigating current crises.

Find more content by Victor Davis Hanson at victorhansen.com and on The Daily Signal.

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Transcript

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[Victor Davis Hanson]

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Foreign.

[Sammy Wink]

Hello and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in His Own Words. This is our Saturday edition and we're going to be looking Victor wanted to do some updates on Iran and the Mexican government situation and its critique of the abducting of El Mayo. And then we'll look at. What was that? Oh, Tyler Robinson case. So stay with us for that. We do have a middle section, which we usually do, and Victor's going to talk a little bit about the George W. Bush administration and James Madison. So that's our topics today. Stay with us. And we'll be right back from these messages.

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[Sammy Wink]

Davis Hansen In His Own Words. Victor's the Martin and Neely 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. He he has a website. It was just launched new on July 4, so it is a new website. Please come join us there. It's VictorHansen.com and the name of the website is the Blade of Perseus. Just a note to people who are doing it on their cell phones, be sure to use an Internet browser on the cell phone because we are currently updating the app and the old app is not working well with the new website because it's totally revamped. So come and see the new website. So, Victor, I know you wanted to talk a little bit more about Iran. We did talk yesterday, but there was things that came up, so go ahead.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Well, I think we're learning from Marco Rubio and commentators that the memorandum of understanding and the idea that for 60 days you were going to negotiate with this regime was impossible. In other words, it doesn't really matter who was playing bad cop or good cop. They presented a face. The elected officials said, basically, we are moderates now and we want to be reasonable and we agreed to your demands. But we have these Revolutionary Guard Corps and we have the theocracy and we don't know what to do with them. Is that the true representation of what happened, or were they huddling together and saying, looking at you guys, you give the then every time we want to hit something, you deplore it, and then you say, what are we supposed to do? We have problems with these people, too, and then drag it out and we'll get close to the midterms and then we'll get the price of gas up and we'll get the Europeans and the Asians mad at Trump and we can get him out of office and then we can deal with the kind of people that we've dealt with in the past, like Obama or John Kerry. And that's what we want. So I think that's now the consensus that that's what they were. And I think everybody knew it along. I think no one. J.D. vance is a wonderful vice president, but when he said there were moderates and they were working with him, and I knew that that was mistaken. Jack Keane pretty much has been accurate all the way through when he said. And he's been a supporter of the Trump plan. So what's the strategy now? It's for the short term to see how gas prices react. It's hit them disproportionately. 10, 20. He's up that now. He. The other day he said 10 times. Now he says 100. But we can do enormous amount of damage. And I don't know why we had not hit that rail bridge that would knock out all trade to China. It's a long distance. They have to go through various countries. But they were getting weaponry from China and they need to hit the Caspian dock work so that they can't import things from Russia. That is weapons. I think they need to go back in with B2S and hit pickaxe Mountain and anything that you see activity there with the B2s. If they have. I don't know if they have a supply of bunker busters. They're very hard to develop and there's only a finite amount. And then they are taking out systematically the Mosquito fleet. It's very expensive to do that with expensive rockets on these little motorboats, but they need to keep doing that. At some point, I think he has to unload if he gets the right pretext or causation. If they really start sending what missiles they have left. We don't know how many missiles they have. They seem to be able to have volleys of six or seven. We don't know if they're making them or importing them from China or what. But if they continue, he needs to unload on them and then destroy the military nuclear industrial complex of that regime and take out the transportation hub and then leave. Leave at least 60 days to 90 days before the midterm. And as I said the other day, leave a vestigial naval command and force. Not too expensive, 10 or 12 ships, a rotating carrier and tell the Europeans and tell South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, etc. Give us one ship or two ships each and let's just blast through and keep this open. But we're not. We don't need to have it open. That would be a magnanimous gesture on our part. I also thank Brian Kilmay whom I like and know a little bit. And he suggested that the, the era of Kushner and Witkoff has now run its course to have special envoys going back and forth in Ukraine. And one of the reasons he said that is that somebody who deals with Iran must have intricate knowledge of how that regime functions and think over 47 years. And the problem with business people is they deal with entities in a whole different context. They don't go back and look at the history of 50 years of this company or this CEO. They just do it in the here and now. And they think everything is transactional. They don't understand radical Shia theocratic ideology. And so I think Marco Rubio has people in that State Department, which is completely different than Joe Biden's, that know that. And I think his team should be negotiating. I agree with Brian on that.

[Sammy Wink]

It seems that from Trump's perspective, if I were Trump, that you would need to, I would just ask the military, you neuter those people as best possible in the next few weeks so that then we can sit on it until after the election.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I think that's the plan. Yeah, it seems like that's the plan. I think that is the plan. And I think they, they don't understand Trump, that he's, he's fluid, he's transact transactional, he's unpredictable, he's predictable, he's mercurial, he's calm. But they don't know what he's going to do. But if you push him long and hard enough, he will do something. And he's at that point now.

[Sammy Wink]

Okay, so on Mexico, I know we said a few things about Sheinbaum's speech where she was disappointed that the United States had taken in and arrested El Mayo. Like nobody would be disappointed about that. That's the head of a country normally. But she was. But now today we have new stories out and I was wondering, go ahead and update the Mexico situation.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Well, Mexico's angry because an illegal alien had an encounter with ice. He wasn't the person they were looking for. They saw him in the trajectory to get the person and he was here illegally and there was some type of altercation and ICE is alleging that he tried to run over them. So they shot him in the abdomen. He died. And Mexico then listed a number of cases of illegal aliens, but I think it was 20 something that have died after they were apprehended. But they don't give the circumstances of which. And more importantly, you're talking about a million self deportations. A million deportations. Including 300 to 400,000 criminals. We have a very small number of people who have died at the hands of ice miniscule. So she has. Sheinbaum has accelerated the tensions beyond the diplomatic doublespeak. And now she's directly saying that she wants to press charges. She can't, but in some type of maybe international context, and she's alleging that she wants a full fledged investigation. But here's the problem. If you calibrate the last 20 years, how many people have died of Mexican imported fentanyl? And how many Mexican governments have welcomed the Chinese importation of the raw product? And how many Mexican presidents have seen that fentanyl that goes into the United states earns about $20 billion in foreign exchange? And how illegal immigrants, Obrador, remember, the prior president was bragging that he had sent 40, Mexico had sent 40 million people here. I think there are 30 million that are here illegally. They have 50 consulates that facilitate that, and they get $65 billion billion dollars in remittances. And those remittances are often sent from illegal aliens who are either on some type of health, housing, food, legal support, entitlements, and are working for cash off the books and not paying taxes are a mixture of both. So my point is they have been waging a veritable war against the United States and they are responsible, not wholly responsible. People make decisions when they take drugs, but these drugs have been masked as prescription drugs. So you go to a party, you're a teenager or you're depressed, and you say, I want something to calm me down, maybe, oh, I have some Valium or you want to get uppers. I have some meth and they are disguised, in many cases are laced with fentanyl. So the point I'm making is that she has no leg to stand on. She should not be dictating anything Trump should say to Listen, you should be ashamed of herself. Your government has sent people here and exported humans as if they were mere commodities. You have taken the Southern Mexico, Chiapas, Michoacan, Oaxaca, and treated it as some type of export to the United States. All of these people came in, for the most part, illegally. And you did that. Your government and you sent drugs to us and you ran up a over $100 billion surplus with us. And you're getting 65 billion in remittances from us. And we don't want it anymore. So don't lecture us. If you want people not to be endangered by eyes or not to be apprehended, don't Send them up. And I think the idea of a Mexican communist government dictating to us is not going to go down well in America.

[Sammy Wink]

No, it's not. So Victor, let's do a few other things. I know there's a lot about Graham Plattner, but I was looking at some polls by Z to A polling and they show that Susan Collins is ahead by only one point of Nirava Shah if she were to run 47 to 46 and Troy Jackson is ahead of her by one point. So with Graham Platner out, the race still seems to be very tight.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Well, as I said last time, if you look at how she did six years ago and how she did 12 years ago, she was, I think she was down the polls by 10 and she won by 6. So Maine's relationship with Susan Collins is we are more to the left than she is, but she's not a regular Republican. She is a rhino Republican in name only. And then they get angry in the Trump era because they want a Republican who is elected by liberals to take on Donald Trump. But she finesses that very well. She on some high profile iconic issue, she votes against him and gets all of this static from the right which channels into her support, support and they like that. But otherwise she votes with the administration about 90% of the time and she helps confirm justices. So I think she's going to win. And you got to remember one final thought, that the Republicans think that these other two candidates have skeletons in their closets. They don't care. The voters on the left in Maine by that is these two voters, these two candidates can only run on one thing. I think Trey Jackson is his name or which

[Sammy Wink]

Troy?

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Trey I think or Troy I don't know. But he's had some problems himself. He said some illiberal things that sounded almost conservative before he flipped. But. But there is no such thing as an independent candidate. Now in a primary in the Democratic Party you have a certain checklist. Taxes on realized income, taxes on net worth, expansion of entitlements, open borders, abolish ice, cut off Israel, say nothing about antisemitism, New Green, Deal, radical Green. It's a socialist communist agenda. So it really doesn't matter who runs. And that agenda is so strident and so dictatorial that there is no candidate can drift from it once they captured and controlled the party. And more importantly, the people who turn out for the primaries are the galvanized, the hardcore Democratic socialists. So they will be overrepresented in this Democratic primary and they don't care whether a person has a Nazi tattoo or committed rape. To them it doesn't matter. It's a Stalinist. You know, they're on our team and we don't tolerate any dissent. Sort of like when you look at votes in the Congress, the Republicans always have eight or nine defectors on everything and a Democrat is 000 and that's the way it is. So I think she'll win And I don't think Graham Platner is through yet. He's going to insist that the most left wing unelectable and the general the Republicans would say unelectable candidate gets nominated or he will stay on the ballot. He has till Monday to get all.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, I saw in Breitbart they had an article that apparently some of his staff had said that he is going to withdraw on Monday. Yeah, we'll see if that happens.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

If he does withdraw It'll be the 11th hour last minute. Yeah.

[Sammy Wink]

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[Victor Davis Hanson]

I don't know why they didn't plea bargain from the very beginning and save all this. His lawyers made a fundamental mistake. They should have gone to the judge if they. If they're interested in the client and say, my, we will plead guilty if you waive the death penalty, because this is a travesty. The boyfriend testified that he admitted that he did it and that he felt bad about it. I guess that was a plea for leniency. I don't think he feels bad about anything. That he engraved the bullets, that he was angry. It was a political assassination because he said that, why did you kill him? And he said, Tyler Robinson said, well, with certain extremists, you have to intervene and take him out. So it was a political assassination. We have everything in the classical diagnosis of a murder. What was the motive? He wanted to kill a political figure and weaken, he thought, resistance to transgender acceptance and set us the whole transgender agenda. That's what. And why did he want that? Because he was having a sexual relationship with a man who thought he was a woman. Number two. What was the mode? We have pictures of him scouting out earlier in the day, circulating to size up the scenarios. Look at the lax, lax, lax security. And then came back limping with the obvious idea that he had a gun hidden. Goes up there. He was spotted coming down. He was spotted getting away. We have his car. He left the weapon. And he expressed worry that his grandfather's rifle and that was that there was DNA up there that associates him. His parents turned him in. They were kind of very. That's a whole other topic, his parents, but they turned him in. So it's an open and shut case. The final word. The podcasting world should really look in the mirror because Candace Owens kept hitting this and hitting this and hitting this that Charlie Kirk was thinking of turning on Israel. And it was echoed to a lesser extent sometimes by Tucker and others that said there might be an Israeli connection or a Mossad. There was none. Anybody who listened to that and I listened to it in the car would know that the Israelis. Jew. No, no, no involvement whatsoever. He did not kill Charlie Kirk because Charlie Kirk supposedly was backsliding on his support for Israel. If you ask that kid where is Israel, he wouldn't even know where it is. If he had communications with people who would influence him. It was in his small little furry circle. So these people who peddle that have a real responsibility. They implanted a lot of really pernicious ideas in people's minds. And Erica Kirk had nothing to do with it. In fact, that was the worst thing that Candace Owen did here and there. And what they always do is, I'm not saying, I'm just throwing it out there, just throwing it out there. So Candice Owen should be ashamed of herself. And anybody who picked up on that theme that the Israelis or the Jews were involved is despicable.

[Sammy Wink]

Well, let's then turn to the administration for a second. I don't know if you've heard of this, but Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary is investigating a one Neville Roy Singham and he's a now China based, I think he's an American citizen though. But he's absconded to China because he does a lot to fund leftist groups. And now they are investigating him and even and gone to Goldman Sachs who seems to be facilitating the Singham financing.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

He and the various Soros disguise foundations, they usually disguise it. They're mostly responsible. There's also a Swiss billionaire up, I think he's in Montana. Two or three of these people

[Ryan Reynolds]

are

[Victor Davis Hanson]

funding all of these demonstrations against ICE especially but also the Middle east demonstrations you saw on campus and things like that. And so I don't know what you do when you have a former US citizen that goes over to your hostile communist belligerent and from there sends money to the United States with the express purpose of undermining the government of the United States activity. But it seems to me that you should freeze his account or do. Or do something. It seems to be a classic Greco statute, a conspiracy.

[Sammy Wink]

Oh, I was wondering, is that what the crime you think it is?

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I think it is.

[Sammy Wink]

That's the crime you would have. Okay, all right, then let's turn to the other side of the political spectrum. Rahm Emanuel recently was in Israel and he gave a speech in which he suggested that the unconditional US support in Israel has allowed you to deny food and medical relief. This is a quote. Has allowed you to deny food and medical relief to innocent Palestinians in Gaza, leaving the world to conclude that Israel wants to kill Palestinians and are indifferent to their death and suffering. And I was wondering, Rahm Emanuel is Jewish himself.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

So we know what that is. We have all sorts of video of Israelis sending food convoys on open kitchens. And no one is talking about starvation right now in Gaza. Again, Rahm Emanuel, anybody, whatever, Jewish or not Jewish, you just ask one basic question. It's now October 8th in a time of peace, when the Netanyahu government, who's very tough, was very lax toward Hamas and tried to reach out to it. They had poor defenses on the border. They allowed, they didn't know somebody allowed 1200 people to come in, excuse me, 5000. And they killed 1200 people. And they butchered them and they mutilated them. They took back 240 plus hostages. They wounded thousands of people. And then the Israelis waited and they said, bring back the ringleaders. They said that even though that there were hundreds of Palestinians, when they heard they were raping and killing Jews, they swarmed through the hole in the fence because they wanted to get in on it. And when they brought hostages back, the killers had to protect the hostages from their own people who wanted to butcher them in the street. And then they waited one week, two weeks, three weeks. And they said, bring back the hostages and bring the leaders. And they said no. And they said no because they had stolen over a billion dollars in foreign aid from the United States and the United nations and Europe, and they had built a billion dollar hundreds of mile complex. And they thought they were invulnerable. In a sense, they were. And they. Their entries and exits were in mosques, schools and hospitals. There's a situation. What would Rahm Emanuel have done? What would all of these people. I asked Piers Morgan that. What would you do? Would you just sit there and say, would you please, we're going to file a writ at the International Criminal Court. We're taking this to the un we're going to get the EU on it. We're going to discuss it at the next NATO movement. We're going to ask Russia and China to help. No, there's nothing you could do except what they did. And they warned them, get out. And they started taking and they text people. They even texted people, get out of the building. You're harboring the Hamas killers in your basement. And that's not even half of it. During this whole period, they sent about 5,000 rockets into Israel. And they were not targeted. They were just indiscriminate. And then anytime one of them, in their incompetence, went up in the air and came back and blew up something like it did at the hospital, the whole Western Muslim Communist socialist propaganda machine kicked in and said it's the Israelis fault. Oh, we're not going to pursue it anymore because they have evidence that it was our own rocket. We'll just drop it and go on to the next lie. And so then he goes over there, given all of that, and he's thinking this, my party has gone way into social. At some point people are going to want Clintonism again. Bill Clinton won. He never got 51% of the vote, but he had a two party. He had a third party in 92 and 96 and he won even though he was not that popular. And he defeated an incumbent Republican president in 92. And he came up for re election and he was unpopular and he won again. And the reason he won is he charted a middle course, middle, middle, middle, middle. So I'm going to go over there and get a highly publicized trip and attack the government of Israel and say that I want something different. I want a two state solution. We've had that for what, 50 years and it doesn't work. And he should say if there's genocide, he should ask themselves why the population of Gaza has just swelled the last few years and why the percentage of the Jewish population inside Israel has declined vis a vis Arabs that now have 2 million people with complete freedom compared to what a Christian would have in any of these Arab countries. So it's not going to work. And he's kind of doing the Josh Shapiro idea. I deplore anti Semitism, but he doesn't speak out against it. Why didn't he just stay in the United States and give a big press conference right in Chicago and say I was mayor of this city and we are now insidiously prejudiced against Jews. We rough them up. They have the highest group of as victims of hate crimes. There are no penalties. We have a Democratic Socialist Party. Mr. Mondami himself, his wife has participated in a book where the author called Jews Vampires. He has members and his appointments that said the Jews, they're horrible. He wouldn't protect Jewish facilities in New York and he won't do that. So he thinks he can go all the way overseas and peep up a little bit, a little murmur about he's a moderate and he took on what the Netanyahu government. How popular is the Netanyahu government in the United States? Republicans? It's popular, but that's a win win. That's an easy thing to do to go over there and trash the Netanyahu government to the Israeli left, which is crazy as our left and then come back over here and say, I spoke truth to power. No, you didn't. All you have to do is have a press conference of the National Press Club and say, my party has been hijacked by anti Semites. See how far that gets you. You will never be nominated. And the thing is, you'll never be nominated anyway. You think you can deal with these people, Rahm? They are anti Semites. The people who control your party are Islamicists, communists, socialists and DEI crazy people. And they don't like Jews. They do not like Jews. Everything they've said, everything they've done shows that. The mayor of New York said he would arrest Netanyahu on sight if he came. If he came. So you should not do that. You're just making a fool of yourself. All your little op EDS that you write periodically for the Wall Street Journal. I'm a moderate. I kind of. I'm kicking back against my own party. It's not going to work. No. If you're going to go down, you should go down with dignity and courage and take on your party. Don't go over to Israel and take on the Israel Israelis and then come back and say, I'm a Jew and I took on Israel, therefore you can. I'm okay. You won't. You don't have to do the anti Semitism, anti. With me. It's not going to work, you know.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

It's got so many historical precedents that don't work. It's like somebody in 1935 saying, I, I think it's getting dangerous in Austria and Germany, but I have an Iron Cross and I fought gallantly in World War I. And these people, rational people.

[Sammy Wink]

You mean a Jewish person with an iron cross? Yeah, exactly.

[Mount Titano Media Announcer]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And all I would say is the Auschwitz buckets were full of iron crosses. They ripped off the neck of heroic Jews as they put them in the gas chambers. You can't deal with a hardcore anti Semite. And that's what this party is.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, Rahm Emanuel doesn't have much.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Does he have any idea why Graham Platner put a Totenkov? That was the last thing a lot of people saw when they went into the gas chambers. They saw a SS officer with a Totenkopf tattoo. The Eisen Groupen camp people. And a lot of people who were killed by death squads were attached to the third Panzer Division, which was a Totenkopf division.

[Sammy Wink]

Wasn't that on their caps or their uniforms in some way? They didn't need to tattoo it on themselves.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Some did but they had. The official insignia was on their caps or their Paul epaulette.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah. All right, Victor, so let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about George W. Bush and James Madison. Stay with us and we'll be right back.

[Narrator (Declaration of Independence Segment)]

We must all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

[Ryan Reynolds]

They knew that this would be regarded by the King and Parliament as an act of treason.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

So the people who signed that were basically saying, we're revolting against the most powerful country in the world.

[Narrator (Declaration of Independence Segment)]

The Declaration of Independence reminds Americans who they are. Its words are ingrained in our memory. Its virtues are etched into our character. Its principles are impressed upon our destiny. Its signers carved out a new nation in the new world. For 250 years, the declaration of Independence has inspired their descendants to defend their liberties.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Liberty doesn't want paths from one generation to the next through the bloodstream has to be fought for, defended, won with every generation.

[Mount Titano Media Announcer]

There's nothing more important for which we

[Pepsi Commercial Narrator]

would give our lives.

[Narrator (Declaration of Independence Segment)]

But history has a way of making the unthinkable seem inevitable. But the Declaration of Independence was never inevitable. The Declaration of Independence is the culmination of one of the greatest political dramas in history. As ideas clash, as armies gather, as the fate of a country continent hung in the balance, the hopes of millions wanting independence rested with a small group of statesmen willing to risk everything they had. Their lives, their fortune, and their sacred honor. This is the story behind America's Declaration of Independence. The story of how a Declaration became a nation. Sacred honor, the Declaration that defines a nation. Available now on the Daily Signals YouTube channel.

[Sammy Wink]

Welcome back. Victor Davis Hansen, in his own words or a subsidiary of the Daily Signal. And the Daily Signal has lots of other people and other articles and other podcasters. So you should take a look at what they produce and you'll find Victors shorts, his short videos there. They're about eight to 10 minutes long. And these longer form podcasts will be linked there too. So please come join us.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And we have the Counter Revolution coming out on September 8th. September 8th. You can order it right now at Amazon or a website.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, so Victor has lots of new things. His website, his new book coming out,

[Victor Davis Hanson]

it's not the Rise and Fall of Donald Trump. It's the Fall and rise of Donald Trump in the Magna Movement.

[Sammy Wink]

Yes. All right. So Victor, go ahead and take it away with James Madison.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And James Madison was our fourth president. And if you look at all of the founders, I think his fingerprints are the most ubiquitous on every aspect of the creation of the United States. He was in his young 30s. He was known as kind of a genius. And he was one of these eight presidents, I think four of the first five presidents, Washington and Jefferson and Madison and his successor, Monroe, all came from Virginia. They were all there from the 17th century. They owned slaves. And so that was a big. That's why some people have attacked them more recently. But they were all wealthy, they were all classically trained. He was a wonderful Latin scholar. Madison. We know him from the Federalist Papers. I think he wrote over 80 of them against the Articles of Confederation for the Constitution under the name Publius, along with Hamilton and John Jay. Those were the three primary authors of the Federalist Papers. And he was Secretary of State. He was kind of Trumpian in the sense that when he became president, his idea was that we're going to expand the United States. Jefferson had bought through the Louisiana Purchase all this land, but it hadn't really been developed, developed. So he said, we claim everything from the east coast to the Mississippi River. And then he acquired through coercion from the Spanish and sale most of what is now the modern Southeast, Alabama, Georgia, Florida. And he was an enlightened scholar. So he felt like Jefferson and most that Native Americans could be taught to farm and acculturate it, but if they were nomads, it wouldn't work in a country that was being settled by the United States. He wasn't a Jacksonian who wanted just take them off and kill them, or, you know, that's kind of brutal, but remove them by force. He helped create the reservation system. He bought land at a very cheap price, I should add. But he was also the architect of the War of 18, 1812, which kind of could be avoided. But he sided with the French, and I don't think he quite understand that. 1812, the French were on their way to losing, that they were bogged down in Russia, and that wasn't going. The stronger power would be the English. And so the English, of course, burned down Washington. They tried to do the same to Baltimore. And then they were repelled in a series of battles, most famously by Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. Of saved his reputation because he won. We were. Even though we lost. The White House was burned down and all of the iconic buildings. He was the one that, even though the battle happened after the treaty again, where it had already been settled, but he is responsible for writing out in longhand most of the Constitution. And once Jefferson outlined his ideas for a Bill of Rights, then He wrote them. He wrote the Bill of Rights for the most part with Jefferson and others input. He lived. All of these guys lived for a long time. He was another one, you know, Adams I think was 86 and Jefferson was 82 or 83. He was 86 too. He suffered from depression and epilepsy. Madison, at certain periods he'd just get exhausted, mentally exhausted, because he worked himself to death and he would just go to bed for long periods of time or he'd have an epileptic seizure. We know him because sort of like Abigail Adams, his wife Dolley Madison was very, she was kind of a renaissance woman. Was very important to his success. He retired, he lived 20 years at his Virginia estate. I'll just say that part of the problem in the American Civil War that the Union had during the secessionist period, the Confederates claimed the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and slavery as part of their legacy. And so they said, you are traitors to Washington, you are traitors to Jefferson, you are traitors to Madison and you're traitors to Monroe. And they were all men of the south that came from the Piedmont Virginia area. They had slaves and they did not manumit all. So that was a really hard thing for the Union to deal with because the southerners were picking the most illustrious of the founders and claiming them by birth location and ideology as their own, which I don't think they were because all of them as enlightenment people renounced slavery. And the problem was they renounced slavery, but when it came to freeing actual slaves, they were not so good at it. And he was also vice president for eight years under Jefferson, so 16 years in government, executive branch. So he left an imprint, I think. And he was a little bit crazy. He and Jefferson were the most brilliant of all of the founders. And maybe with friends, Franklin even more so than Adams.

[Sammy Wink]

I know he was not imaginative, but

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Adams was maybe the best educated and disciplined. But I'm talking about just pure genius, natural genius. Yeah. Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison. And Madison was a workaholic. And he went through stages like Jefferson did in his 30s. He was nursed on Rousseau, Voltaire and the French Enlightenment. Also the British Enlightenment. John Locke, he was a deist, meaning that he was an observant ritual Christian. But I'm not sure he believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ or didn't really live a life where that was important to him. But he thought that people who did believe that were important to the country because they made better citizens than agnostics or atheists. But he was a very Talented person, and we were very lucky to have him. If you look at George W. Bush people, his reputation has gone up a little bit because he broke with Trump, the next Republican. I'm not sure he voted for Trump and he made his peace with Obama. There were three things that people fought Bush for. I'm not sure he was responsible. Number one was the Iraq war. Number two was the Afghan war. Number three was the 2008 financial meltdown. I think he was the most conservative Republican president that we have had since. He was much more conservative than his father, George H.W. bush. He tried to do a lot of things. I think part of the problem was they thought they could deal with the Democrats. So they did things like prescription drug entitlement and things in education that didn't work out, but they thought that the left would appreciate that magnanimity and they interpret that as weakness. So when you look at Iraq, on the plus side of The Ledger, after 9, 11, we were told that they were going to, you know, they were going to blow up airliners, 10 or 11 of them in the Philippines starting, you know, that was. We uncovered a lot of Al Qaeda plots and there were a lot of foiled efforts. And for all the false WMD narratives about Saddam, we really never knew what happened to the D. We knew he had it. And it might have gone to Syria because we know it was used later by the Assad government in Syria. But that hurt him when Colin Powell went before the UN and said this, this is wmd and they're going to do this and this and this. But that being said, Iraq never quite degenerated like Afghanistan. So today they actually are working with the United States to expel Iranian influencers. And they do have elections. And we have Americans still there advising the Iraqi government. Was it worth all those deaths and mayhem and problem? Probably, I don't know. We'll see. But I don't think it was. I supported the war, and I'm someone that supported it to the end. The only thing that was very bad for Bush is the people who really had called for that war was the New Committee for the New American Century. That was a bill. Kristol Fareed, Zakaria, Robert Kagan, bipartisan effort. And almost all of those people, people turned on the war, not so much as Richard Pearl did or David, all of us neocons did. And then, you know, as Matthew Ridgway said, the only worse thing than a bad war is losing it. So Bush was orphaned is what I'm saying. There were a lot of Conservative scholars, neocons, that said, you've got to go and deal with this. And then if you knock him out and you put a consensual government, it will spread like wildfire. That didn't happen. It did. It did corral Iran for a few years. And then the Afghanistan thing, it was a brilliant campaign. We removed the Taliban in eight weeks. We had a government there, the Karzai government. Everything was going well. And then we diverted a lot of resources to Iraq. But the problem was everybody said the Afghan war was the good war because it was stable and the Taliban were in hiding and regrouping and Iraq was the bad war. Why didn't we just get a Karza? Why didn't we just do it like Afghanistan? Well, the problem was Afghanistan was always the problem. It was landlocked, it had no ports, it was in a terrible neighborhood. The terrain was terrible, the weather was terrible. The Taliban were completely fanatic. They were being supported all around their borders. We had to deal with the Chinese, with the Russians, with the Pakistanis. Iraq was flat, it was arid. The weather was clear. We had access to a port. And the Iraqi people were somewhat industrialized and educated compared to. So once people kept saying that Afghanistan was a good war. But when Obama just pulled out all the troops out of Iraq, and then Iraq had a bumpy period, it was stable. When Obama took office, there were fewer people, Americans dying in Iraq than the accident rate each week. It was stable. And then he pulled it out and he said that don't WORRY ISIS or JVs and the ISIS people took over. Then we came back in under Trump and bombed the blank out of them. So Iraq is a work in progress, but it's better than under Saddam Hussein. But I don't know if it was worth the cost in American lives. I think Americans feel that not one American would. Is worth what? When you see the stuff that's going on in the Middle east and the idea that we're going to go over there and try to change their minds, I don't think so. It's more worrisome that they're coming over here and trying to change our minds. And then very quickly, the financial. That was a democratic project in Congress. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and two.

[Sammy Wink]

You mean the 2008 crash financial crisis.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

That was the idea that we needed to get the homeowners ownership up over 60%. And we had these subprime loans to people who were not qualified. And the interest sometimes was adjudicated because they were bad risk. So they couldn't make the interest payments anyway. It was all speculating on people on Wall Street. Barney Frank was right at the middle of that. He was in the House Banking Committee and he was basically calling people racist who was opposing these reckless loans and the speculation. So all these banks were making these loans and then they were saying they were guaranteed by the federal government, but the guarantees of the federal government covered what, 5%, 2% of the loan portfolio. So when one started to go, everybody wanted to, they all started to default. And then the people who were covering the default didn't have the capital and the government had to step in. And that said people forget sometime that happened in September. So there was the end of September, October 2, November 3, December 4 and January 5. When Obama came back into office, things were stabilized. If he had just let the actual market forces continue, we wouldn't have had that 9% unemployment and 0 or 1% growth for his first five years. He made it a lot worse with all those crazy, crazy pro cash for clunkers Obama phones, those huge deficits. It didn't do any good at all, among other things. So Bush did some good things on the conservative side. The only thing that I really disagreed with him, he had tax cuts and he came in with a surplus that the Ginridge Clinton compromises for the last four years under Clinton had given three and a half years had given us a surplus. He came in and we were in kind of a mild recession. Kind of the dot com boom had busted and so he thought tax cuts would spur, but he didn't insist on budget cuts. So we started this cycle where we were working to pay off the debt and he cut taxes and he actually got some more revenue. Revenue for a while. And then all the spending, like prescription drug, no Child Left behind, all these massive programs, it wasn't representative. I hope Trump looks at that. I hope when this midterms are over, he really recalibrates and reboots doge and then if he's going to have these big tax cuts and they've already hit, we're going to have deficits unless we start cutting. Cutting.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah. Well, Victor, we need to go to a break and then go.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I should say one last thing that George Bush was treated, I think very unfairly by a lot of American people. They call him. All this idea that Trump is unusual and he's a. We've never called a president a fascist or a Nazi. Al Gore said they were Bush. Cheney wore digital brown shirts. Merkel said it was the old Nazi thing. John Glenn said that that was mainstream calling. He was the first president that they really called a Nazi. The left hated George Bush and they hated Cheney. And then, as always happens, when the next Republican came, they transferred their hate and said, trump is now the new Nazi. And those other guys, they weren't that bad. We like them. And they said that exactly about George H.W. bush. He said, he's a wimp, he's a fascist. But compared to W. We like him. And they said the same thing about Reagan. He's a fascist. He's horrible. He's terrible. But compared to George H.W. bush, who's a meanie and went to war, we kind of like Reagan. And that's what they always do. Remember that everyone don't believe a word they say when they're Nazi fascists. It's only about the president in the White House when Trump is out of office. And if J.D. vance were to win the election, they would say Trump was kind of a realist. I look back, he was transactional. He wasn't an idealist, a MAGA person like J.D. vance.

[Sammy Wink]

All right, Victor, let's take a break and come back. And I have one more question on George W. Bush for you. Stay with us and we'll be right back.

[Narrator (Declaration of Independence Segment)]

We must all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

[Ryan Reynolds]

They knew that they this would be regarded by the King and Parliament as an act of treason.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

So the people who signed that were basically saying, we're revolting against the most powerful country in the world.

[Narrator (Declaration of Independence Segment)]

The Declaration of Independence reminds Americans who they are. It's one. Words are ingrained in our memory. Its virtues are etched into our character. Its principles are impressed upon our destiny. Its signers carved out a new nation in the new world. For 250 years, the declaration of Independence has inspired their descendants to defend their liberties.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Liberty doesn't want paths from one generation to the next through the bloodstream, and has to to be fought for, defended, won with every generation that there's nothing more important for which we would give our lives.

[Narrator (Declaration of Independence Segment)]

But history has a way of making the unthinkable seem inevitable. But the Declaration of Independence was never inevitable. The Declaration of Independence is the culmination of one of the greatest political dramas in history. As ideas clash, as armies gather, as the fate of a constant hung in the balance, the hopes of millions wanting independence rested with a small group of statesmen willing to risk everything they had. Their lives, their fortune, and their sacred honor. This is the story behind America's Declaration of Independence. The story of how a Declaration became a Nation Sacred Honor, the Declaration that defines a nation. Available now on the Daily Signals YouTube channel.

[Sammy Wink]

Welcome back. Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. And you can find Victor on X. His handle is Hanson. And on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup. So, Victor, I just had one question about the George W. Bush experience and maybe as something that might inform Trump as he tries to bridge these midterms. But George, George W. Bush had wars going on as he bridged two administrations and so got reelected in 2020, 2004. And I was wondering if there was, you know, how he managed wars and reelection at the same time. If there's any lessons to.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Well, you got to remember he that's not quite accurate because in 2004, Afghanistan had been stabilized by November 2000, 2021. And it was pretty quiet and it was actually used as a model.

[Sammy Wink]

You mean 2001.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

It had been stabilized from 2001 to 2004. That was not the critical period. The critical period came in the Obama when we first yanked out troops and then we put them back in, but we gave a deadline when they would come back out. That's when it all started. And then Iraq by 2004. This was, this was before the insurgency had really taken off. It had started. Remember in March 2003, we toppled the statue and by April, it was 90% of American people were in favor of the war. Chris Matthews said we're all neocons now on national tv. So it was getting worse. But it didn't get into these terrible 2006 and 07 when we had to have the surge. So we didn't have the shape charges coming in from Iran. We didn't have the Russians and the Chinese and everybody trying to arm the insurgents. And then we had Karl Rove. People don't like Karl Rove. He's a genius as far as political campaigning. And he ran that 2004. And John Kerry thought he was going to march in like an aristocrat. Everybody was afraid of Howard Dean. You know, we're going to go here, we're going to go Yahoo, we're going to go to Washington. He was a nut. And Kerry was a sober and judicious guy and they thought he might win because Bush was unpopular. But when they got done with him, he came across, they showed him in his spandex on his wind sailing, going both ways. I was for the authorization. I was against the authorization after I was for it and I was for it before I was against it. And then they, they did the Swift Boat thing where all these People said, well, you know, he says he went into Cambodia, but he never really did. We were on the boat with him. And they poked holes in all of his stories. And then they made fun of the way he said. They used all those tapes of when he testified as a Vietnam vet against the war, when he tried to. And then what we were doing is analogous to Jingus Khan and Jingus. And they just did things like they had done to Dukakis. And that was really the last time the Republicans had won an election where really people thought they couldn't win that. And they did. And by the way, that election for everybody, election denialism. The Democrats tried to stop the election. There were about 30 or 40 in the house that voted not to certify the Ohio record. And by the way, earlier, the Democratic Party and people were recruiting people all over the world. There were ads in British newspapers, go to Iowa and defeat the Bush Cheney war machine. And so the irony of this whole thing is that never had we had so much vitriol against an American president. When they left office, the Cheney name was the left. It just incensed them. Dick Cheney had read a book that I had written called Carnage in Culture, and he held it up and he said, this is a good book. I thought that was very magnanimous of him. For the next five years, I would go places and people would say, cheney's warlord, Cheney's guru, and you know what I mean, it was just kiss of death. But he. In any case, when they got out of office, then people started to kind of feel. Looked in the mirror and said, we call these people Nazis and everything. And they were Republicans. They weren't. And then when Trump came in, it was useful for the Democrats on the left to say, compared to Trump, da, da, da, da, da. They were reasonable people. And then nobody in their right mind thought you would see Dick Cheney in a cowboy hat in Wyoming with Liz next to him, both on record saying they were going to oppose Donald Trump and Liz vote for Kamala Harris and campaign for her. And then when asked George Bush, he kind of just was mute. To his credit, he didn't come out and say that he wasn't. He did say at the 2017 inauguration, when Trump gave the MAGA thing, he said, man, that was some weird shi. And he kind of became a philosophical guy, became a painter, a dirt bike rider. He had a lot of vets, and he stayed. I admired his post presidency. It wasn't like Obama bought a house in Washington, stuck his nose and everything. His whole idea was, I Did what I could. I tried to stop terrorism. When I left office, they had not hit us after 9, 11 again. And we had progress in the Middle East.

[Pepsi Commercial Narrator]

East.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And that's all I can do.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And I'm going to retire and paint and help veterans and keep out of politics.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah. Go back to Texas.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I wish Obama had gone back to Chicago.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And not build that monolith. Yeah.

[Sammy Wink]

Let's talk a little bit about California and Mondami Momdami first. He's really showing in very subtle ways, ways where any sort of candidacy and posts that he held in government would go by. He took Little Italy off of the map of New York City and he left the Irish, the Italians and Jews off of an immigrant.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Those are the people he hates the most. Yeah. His whole idea was, I'm a stealth, smiling. I'm a smiling radical, socialist, communist, communist, Muslim. The thing about it, everybody shouldn't expect any logic with these people. The people who hated Islam the most were the Communists. Right now, as I speak, China has a million Muslims. The Communists hated Islam more than anybody. There's a million Muslims in China in camps. Stalin dealt pretty tough with the Muslims. And the Muslims don't like atheism. They went after the Ba' Athist who were secular and atheist and communist. So it's very strange for this socialist communist to incorporate Islamicism. But he's trying to be a national candidate when he's mayor of New York and he's commenting on every foreign policy issue. Ice. And he makes these declarations that are just ridiculous. ICE can't come in here. We're not going to do the. You can't. He thinks he doesn't understand the Constitution. He has no right to stop a federal force going anywhere it wants. And then he's trying to create a climate in which the 35% of New York who were not born in the United States feel that it's their city. And he keeps talking about the immigrants built this city and their calloused hands built this city. I wrote an article that July 4th that he delivered on the 3rd of July was a disclosure, Grace. It was basically a racist rant against the founders and white people. It gets down to the idea that they elected. I don't think they knew who they elected. They elected a Nepo baby who came from a settler, colonialist, wealthy, privileged community in uganda, the Indian community, 1%, 60% of their GDP, who then immigrated via South Africa to here. And both of his parents were hardcore socialists and very wealthy, wealthy grant grabbers and academic Grabbers, they knew exactly how to work the system. They mouthed the American anti American stuff. And then he just, from the ages of 21 to where he is now just floundered around as a rapper, as a political activist in the New York legislature. But he was basically a very, very wealthy, privileged, spoiled kid. And then he thought he was to going, going to smile his way in. And it worked. And he's now trying to transform New York into kind of an international socialist, communist, Islamist hub and drive out everybody. The problem he has is that all of his free grocery stores and all of his free bus rides and all of that stuff requires taxes. And the people who pay the taxes, he's slurred and slandered and threatened. And a lot of them are leaving. And more importantly, the people that he prize, he doesn't understand that New York is ungovernable partly because the welfare state is so large and we have no idea who's renting what and getting paid. And the idea that you were to control the New York City school system or the welfare system is impossible. And he can't do it because he's praised these people as being noble and underpaid. And the fact is that if he were to go in and try to reform welfare and get it on a sound financial basis or the terrible public schools in New York, he couldn't do it and he wouldn't want to do it. He likes the chaos anyway. And when you have crime in New York and in the cities, he's so slandered and smeared that the police, I just don't think, they just go through the motions. Their whole attitude is, I gotta survive this guy before he destroys this city.

[Sammy Wink]

Well, Victor, we're near the end. I just want to make a note of an excellent article in the New York Post by John Fleischman. It's an op ed and he wrote about how the public employees unions are very powerful in California politics. And he demonstrates how they have their power. The California Teachers association and the questions about what should be done with COVID is his case example. I suggest everybody go to rev.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I was a member when I joined the California State University system. You didn't have a choice. You were automatically made a member of the California Faculty Association. Well, at first you did and then you didn't. As far as your dues were taken, they took your dues. But Arnold Schwarzenegger thought he could beat the unions when he went up for re election. And he did win re election. But then he thought he was going to impose physical sanity in California. And he called them girly men and all this stuff. And he thought, I'm Arnold Schwarzenegger, I'm a blockbuster actor and they're going to bend to my work. They crushed him every day. They had those commercials. Mr. Billionaire and his cigar. They showed him with a big cigar and he got on his private jet, went down to la. He's too good to fly private like us. He did it and when it was all done, they had him in the palm of their hands and he was talking about green New deal stuff, all this stuff. So new, you know. Anyway, new green deal, whatever you want to call it.

[Sammy Wink]

All right, Victor. Well, we're at the end of the show, so I want to just read one mailed in note to you. I'm reading just part of it because it is a long letter. But here at the end he says, you are a hope and light for us all the knowledge you share and your passion to share it, delivering it all in a way that even someone like me can understand. Earlier he says that he's a blue collar worker inspires me to look further and to do my own research. You are proving through history and facts that most of this, if not everything has happened before and the results were never good. A rebirth, a rebirth of God, country, family, respect, love, honor and dignity is desperately needed. I still feel there is hope, but not sure we have the stomach to really fix it. And that was from Michael Ferrari. Not sure he wrote it in script. So Furoa I think it is. Anyway, I thought that was a really excellent note. He's right. We've got to fix it. We've got to do.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

That was very nice of him. I appreciate that. And we try to bring as much history as we can into these shows.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah. So thanks to our audience who join us here on the weekends and thanks to you, Victor, for all of your analysis. Everybody in Washington, this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Davis Hanson. And we're signing off.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

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