Victor Davis Hanson: The ‘Schumer Shutdown’ Gains Traction Each Passing Day

Summary

Podcast Summary: “Victor Davis Hanson: The ‘Schumer Shutdown’ Gains Traction Each Passing Day”

Victor Davis Hanson | The Daily Signal | October 31, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor offers his distinctive analysis on political gridlock in Washington, the current state of the Trump administration, shifts in American culture, global affairs (with a spotlight on Russia and China), domestic lawfare, growing anti-Semitism, and the spectacle of contemporary American media and politics. With a blend of historical context, personal candor, and mordant wit, Victor addresses how the political, social, and international currents of the day fit into America’s longer trajectory.

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Key Discussion Points and Segments

1. The “Schumer Shutdown” and Political Stalemate

[02:09–05:39]

• Victor critiques Congressional minorities for shutting down the government via filibuster, saying it signals their lack of electoral mandate and an admission of defeat.
• Shut-downs follow a distinct pattern: briefly, the party in power takes the blame, but as public assistance is delayed and frustration mounts, those blocking government reopening (in this case, Democrats) are increasingly seen as responsible by voters.
  • Quote: “The party that shuts down the government by filibustering… is basically telling the American people, we did not win your trust in the last election.” — Victor [03:07]
• He forecasts that public opinion is swinging against the shutdown architects, dubbing it the “Schumer shutdown.”
  • Quote: “The Schumer shutdown is gaining currency. They're blowing up the process by not participating.” — Victor [04:24]

2. Trump’s Foreign Policy, Domestic Progress, and Political Image

[05:39–13:56]

• Trump’s recent trip to Asia is described as a success, drawing attention to improving relations with Japan and South Korea and increased foreign investment in America.
  • “He’s beloved [in Asia]… he should just focus on what’s working”—Victor [11:45]
• Victor credits Trump for:
  • A secure border
  • Increased domestic energy output
  • Lowered crime
  • Record foreign investment, and the cultural shift turning “DEI” into a pejorative
• He urges Trump to continue focusing on positive achievements and avoid reactive, bombastic online battles:
  • Quote: “If Trump would just troll them in a different way — by talking about how great America is now… he would be [at] 55% approval.” — Victor [13:53]

3. The “Revenge Tour” and Lawfare Accusations

[13:56–26:29]

• Responding to Gerald Baker’s Wall Street Journal editorial, Victor rejects the notion that Trump’s legal actions constitute “lawfare” for revenge.
• He distinguishes between Trump's actions and the previous administration's conduct, insisting many Democrats benefited from legal “exemptions.”
  • “We can’t say Trump is on a vengeful tour when these people have been beneficiaries of a weaponization of the government.” — Victor [18:17]
• Examples include the lack of prosecution for John Bolton, Letitia James, Fani Willis, and others.
• High-profile prosecutions (like Martha Stewart) are explained as deterrence, not revenge:
  • “Sometimes you go after people to remind people… [to] have deterrence.” — Victor [25:05]

4. Russia, Ukraine, and Geopolitical Calculus

[30:42–36:31]

• Analysis of Vladimir Putin’s “colossal blunder” in Ukraine, mounting Russian casualties, economic woes, and the impact of Trump administration sanctions.
• He outlines Putin’s three choices: negotiate and cut losses, escalate in desperation, or halt unilaterally (deemed unlikely).
  • Quote: “If [Putin] was smart… expand Russian territory a bit, declare victory, and pivot to triangulate against China.” — Victor [32:07]
• He assesses that Russia’s threats of nuclear force stem from growing weakness, increasing NATO unity, and the latest long-range missile tests as bluster.

5. China, “Sex Warfare,” and Tech Espionage

[38:08–44:36]

• Discussion on Chinese and Russian espionage via “sexpionage”—with salacious accounts of spies luring U.S. tech professionals.
  • Victor singles out public cases (Eric Swalwell and Dianne Feinstein’s staff) as failures of judgment:
  • “Eric Swalwell… has to be the most arrogant, stupid person in Congress to fall for that.” — Victor [40:14]
• Victor sees the U.S. as strong compared to China in long-term innovation, provided it doesn’t sell out its tech secrets.

6. Domestic Culture Wars and Political Characters

[45:36–58:08]

• Reviews the New York mayoral campaign, calling Mandami a “pathological liar” and lamenting the electorate’s attraction to increasingly radical figures.
• Discusses AOC, Bernie Sanders, and the phenomenon of political branding, skepticism of authenticity, and leftist virtue-signaling.
  • “When somebody tells you they’re not crazy or sane, the more people listen…” — Victor [52:26]
• Observes diversity and assimilation through the lens of the World Series, celebrating baseball’s Japanese-American ties.

7. Obama’s Media Campaign and Political Legacy

[60:24–70:18]

• Victor analyzes Obama’s strategy of making late-stage endorsements only for presumed winners and assesses his waning influence.
• Critiques Obama’s shifting stances and role in redistricting battles, highlighting the left’s inconsistencies.
  • “They said democracy dies in darkness… Now they gerrymander to get rid of opposition and call it democracy.” — Victor [70:00]

8. California Politics and Political Storytelling

[71:51–74:41]

• Discusses Gavin Newsom’s attempt to recast himself as a self-made, underprivileged candidate despite his privileged background, linking it to broader trends of “log cabin” campaign stories.
  • “Everybody appreciates authenticity more than even ideology.” — Victor [74:41]

9. Viewer Mail: Anti-Semitism and Generational Trends

[75:16–83:54]

• Responding to a millennial commenter, Victor and the panel express concern over rising anti-Semitism across generations and its presence both on the left and now increasingly, troublingly, on the right.
  • Outlines the roles of cultural, political, and media influences, including rap and right-wing podcasts.
  • “It’s a no-brainer… Israel is a democratic constitutional system… It’s a natural empathy, especially when it’s beleaguered.” — Victor [79:11]
• He laments once-libertarian figures drifting into anti-Semitic rhetoric and the harm of ideological tribalism.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Political Shutdowns:
  “The party that shuts down the government by basically filibustering… is basically telling the American people, we did not win your trust in the last election.”
  — Victor Davis Hanson [03:07]

• On Trump’s Communication Strategy:
  “If Trump would just troll them in a different way—by talking about how great America is now… he would be [at] 55% approval.”
  — Victor [13:53]

• On Lawfare Accusations:
  “We can’t say Trump is on a vengeful tour when these people have been beneficiaries of a weaponization of the government.”
  — Victor [18:17]

• On U.S.-China Tech Espionage:
  “All we have to do is not hand over all our technology to these Chinese operators and… get tough on them.”
  — Victor [42:53]

• On the “Pathological Liar” Mandami:
  “He is many things, but among them is a pathological liar.”
  — Victor [45:21]

• On Anti-Semitism:
  “It’s a no-brainer… Israel is a democratic constitutional system… It’s a natural empathy, especially when it’s beleaguered.”
  — Victor [79:11]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Timestamp | |:------------------------------------------ |:---------------:| | Schumer Shutdown Discussion | 02:09–05:39 | | Trump: Asia and Domestic Achievements | 05:39–13:56 | | “Revenge Tour”/Lawfare & Legal Inequality | 13:56–26:29 | | Russia and Ukraine Analysis | 30:42–36:31 | | China’s Tech Espionage/Sexpionage | 38:08–44:36 | | NY Mayoral Race & Left/Right Virtue | 45:36–58:08 | | Obama’s Political Legacy & Media | 60:24–70:18 | | California Politics & Political Storytelling| 71:51–74:41 | | Viewer Mail: Anti-Semitism Discussion | 75:16–83:54 | | Episode Close & Personal Notes | 86:46–87:36 |

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Tone & Style Observations

• The episode is explanatory, historical, and occasionally acerbic; Victor’s tone is dry, critical, even sardonic at times, especially about establishment politics, media hypocrisy, and virtue-signaling.
• The dialogue includes panel interludes, jokes, and off-hand asides that bring warmth and humor despite the serious subject matter.

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For New Listeners

This summary distills a wide-ranging intellectual review of today's most salient American political and cultural debates. Victor Davis Hanson's analysis is deeply rooted in both contemporary observation and historical perspective, making it worthwhile for anyone seeking intelligent, candid, and occasionally trenchant commentary on the direction of the nation.

Transcript

[Victor Davis Hanson]

The party that shuts down the government by basically filibustering and not voting in the minority to give a Senate 60 vote margin is basically telling the American people, we did not win your trust in the last election. If everything Trump says about foreign investment cut it in half and it's still a record 8 or 9 trillion dollars. So everything is going well. If you look at the culture.

[Jack]

I don't know how he did it.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I mean that sincerely. I'm not being rhetorical, but he basically turned DEI into a pejor.

[Jack]

Bolton was told by a federal judge.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Do not publish this.

[Jack]

I can't stop it. It's already in circulation.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

But you have harmed your country.

[Jack]

I'm almost quoting verbatim. And you are going to be subject soon to civil and criminal exposure by using classified information. Foreign.

[Sammy Wink]

Hello, and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. This is our Friday news roundup. So we've got lots of news on the agenda. Russia, Mondami, Trump in Japan and South Korea and also just some reflections on the shutdown. So stay with us and we'll be right back with those stories.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Right is still right, even if you stand by yourself. Mr. Chief justice, may it please the court.

[Hans von Spakowski]

This is Hans von Spakowski, host of the Case in Point podcast, which looks at the hottest cases affecting politics, culture and everyone's daily lives. But we talk about them without confusing legal jargon. And we have interesting guests like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. And we end with reviews of classic Hollywood movies relevant to the topic. Case in Point, the podcast available everywhere you won't want to miss.

[Sammy Wink]

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor is the Martin and Nealy Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History and at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, Victor Hansen.com and the name of the website is the Blade of Perseus. So, Victor, I thought we would start today with the shutdown since it's been so it's coming on a month now and Donald Trump and his crew are trying to find money for the soldiers and women with infant children to keep those programs funded. And while the soldiers paid and the programs f the WIC program funded. And I was wondering, oh, and last thing Politico has said they think some moderate Democrats might sign in. The thing that needs to be done, everybody, is to have the bill signed, voted in in the Senate. So what are your thoughts on the shutdown?

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Well, if you look at shutdowns, Democratic or Republican, they have a pattern to them and that is the. The party that shuts down the government by basically filibustering and not voting in the minority to give a Senate 60 vote margin is basically telling the American people, we did not win your trust. In the last election, you voted for.

[Jack]

The White House, in this case the.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

House and the Senate. And we have no political power. So we're going to shut down the government in our frustration and create enough anger that you will blame the people who are in control of government.

[Jack]

So we can say, well, they're in control of government.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

They can do whatever they want. And usually for a three to a week or two week shutdown, that works.

[Jack]

But finally the money starts to run.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Out as you get up to a month where we are, and that is checks don't go out, people don't get assistance. Each year we go through this, there's more and more people on public assistance as the federal octopus gets bigger. And so what you're starting to see is people who depend on government checks for entitlements or salary, they are saying, well, the Democrats, they're shutting down the government and why we blame Republicans, all they have to do is just win an election. So you're starting to see, I think Harry Anton on CNN showed that, that it's starting to change. The Schumer shutdown is gaining currency. They're kind of blowing up the process by not participating. And they've got a midterm coming up where some of the polling is not as good as they would like. The generic popularity of Republican Democrat in an off year for a president for the end of nine months, but it'll be an off year is not as bad as it usually is for an incumbent. So I think they're going to crumble.

[Sammy Wink]

Well, I think so, too. Eventually they have to.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

The longer it goes on, the worse.

[Jack]

It is for them.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Shorter it goes on a short one. The Republicans would take heat.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Had they just, you know.

[Jack]

But after a while, people say, you guys shut it down. They did.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah. Yeah. And the people see that. So. Well, Victor Trump has been on quite a trip to Asia and his experience with the Japanese was very good. We got some promise for investment in America. And interestingly this morning, and we're recording on Wednesday, Donald Trump was given a replica of a crown in South Korea for his work in peacemaking. I thought that was very generous of the South Koreans to make note of that. But what are your thoughts on his trip?

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Well, at this point, nine months after January 20th of 2025, if you just take a deep breath and you ignore the shutdowns, the ICE rioting, the social media, trolling by Trump, just get it all out of your system. And you look at a series of domestic and foreign affairs issue. The border, it's secure. The wall is being resumed. There has been 2 million deportations and self deportations. Crime is down and Trump has got the higher ground that he wants to. He's the one that made Washington D safe within two months. And then you look at energy, where we have a million barrels more than Joe Biden didn't at this time. GDP in the third quarter, second quarter soared, it's going to be about 3%. Inflation's about 2.6 for the four years that Biden did it, on average it was 5.3, I think.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

So you look at record foreign investment. If everything Trump says about foreign investment cut it in half and it's still a record 8 or 9 trillion dollars. So everything is going well. If you look at the culture, I don't know how he did it. I mean that sincerely, I'm not being rhetorical, but he basically turned DEI into a pejorative word. She's a dei, he's been dei. It's almost a verb and noun, an adjective that connotes something non merocratic. He did that. He also stopped basically the esg, environmental, social, governance, restraint on the stock market. Bill Gates came out the other day and said, we're not going to die from global warming the way Al Gore and AOC said, Basically there is no recruitment. 2023, we were short 41,000 soldiers. We have a surplus now in recruitment. So what I'm getting at is all the domestic, the transgender thing is now up for grabs. We were told that the future is biological males transitioning. That would be in female sports. That's not going to happen. So you look at foreign affairs, there is no to, there is no Afghanistan humiliation under Biden. No war has started in the sense that it started on Trump's watch. Ukraine started on Biden's watch and.

[Jack]

The.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Gaza war, the multi front war against Israel started on Biden's watch. October 7, 2023. He's got seven ceasefires, you know, Ethiopia, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Armenia, Aberrajan, Thailand, Cambodia, on and on. There is a ceasefire, believe it or not, in Gaza. If we had this discussion a year ago, we'd be talking about the inevitability of the nuclear program in Iran. Now everybody agrees that it's delayed or it's subverted for four or five, maybe longer Russia is not in the Middle east anymore. It is very weakened. China, for the first time, the world is rallying. They've just had another environmental disaster in Africa. Trump is checking their influence, as we saw with the Panama Canal and Latin America. Now he's going after fentanyl and the Mexican Chinese connection. Europe is rearming in the way they haven't done for 50 years. So what I'm getting at is culturally, socially, economically, politically, militarily, diplomatically, abroad, at home, he is riding high. But the Democrats look at that and say, well, he's only in the real clear politics.

[Jack]

He's only polling 45 to 47 approval.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And polls that are reputable, I. E. Trafalgar.

[Jack]

Rasmussen, he's now about 48 to 49.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

But the point is, they say all of these good deeds can be nullified by our hysteria. So the ice saying that ice is Hitler, Gestapo, Himmler, all the nighttime violence that's reminiscent of 2020 going after Tesla dealerships. The F bomb here, F bomb there, F bomb all of the. We're going to demand. Every Democrat who wants to run for president has to promise to destroy the Trump ballroom. They believe that that mayhem and furor undirected and is easily charactered as it is, has brought down Trump's ratings, even though everything he does has a 6040 margin. So they're going to keep it up. Now it is, well, why is he. Why is he helping the Japanese and forging new Reliant mutual reliance with America and Japan and South Korea and he's beloved. But he should be here because it's shut down.

[Jack]

Well, they shut it down.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

So that's a pretty pathetic argument. But I'm getting at is if Trump would just say to his team, and I'm giving some advice now, it's easy to do when you're a victor and I'm not on the farm today, as you can see, I'm in a temporary dwelling. But if you're giving advice without responsibility, which I'm doing, you just say, you.

[Jack]

Know.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Team Trump, you don't need to make videos of Donald Trump spraying his enemies from a plane with feces. They are using the F bomb. You don't need to use the F bomb. They are trolling you every day. The sombrero thing is funny.

[Jack]

It's like the garbage truck, it's like the McDonald's.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

But you don't need to do that now. All you need to do is say each day, here's how many barrels of oil were being pumped under Biden here's how many.

[Jack]

Now here's what the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was when he took out 200 million barrels.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I have got it back up to.

[Jack]

406 and I'm planning to fill the whole thing.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

This is what the border was like.

[Jack]

This is what it's like now. This is what the economy is doing.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

No 9.1% per annum proflation, like 2022.

[Jack]

Just go through the record and he will go back up. He's got natural affability. He's funny. The people you see, the Japanese Prime Minister, she, he was bragging on. She started jumping on up and down like she was a cheerleader.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, she was, she was very cute.

[Jack]

Japan has never been closer to us. And then he's very magnanimous, you know, he said, go buy a Toyota.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I mean, and the way he said, I'm going to make Iran great again. So he has all of these natural advantages and we'll talk about the so called revenge tour in a minute. But if he would just troll them in a different way, troll them by talking about how great America is now and what he's done rather than go back with F bombs or weird videos, I think he would be 55% approval.

[Sammy Wink]

Oh yeah, easily. And if the polls weren't still weighted towards the left, he would probably be much better off as well. So. Well, Victor, there's also speaking of Trump and some of the trolling, or in this case it's crit criticism of Trump, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal today about or by Gerald, sorry, Gerald Baker, and it was. His argument was that Trump is engaging in lawfare against the left and his interest is not so much the law as to get retribution against his enemies.

[Jack]

I have to state at the beginning.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I have a conflict of interest because.

[Jack]

I know Gerald Baker and I really, really like him. He's very fair, he's astute, he's just a wonderful person.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

He's a British subject and I think.

[Jack]

He'S an American citizen, dual citizen now, if I'm not mistaken.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

But he writes well, so I agree with him 90%. I just disagree with him here, politely so and respectively, why what Trump is doing now is, is 5% compared to 95% what they did. So Joe Biden is an ex president. His, he, his home is not being raided like Mar a Lago. There are not 25 red states in coordination with the White House that are trying to take the Democratic nominee off the ballot in 2028 as they did to Trump. The White House is not bringing in the conservative Equivalent of Nathan Wade. Or appointing a Jack Smith to go after his opponents, Federal prosecutor, special prosecutor. Or having the third guy in the doj, like Michael Cole, Angelo, come in from Letita James, go out to Alvin Breck all the same day, November 18th. So they're not doing that. So then the question is, what are they doing? They're targeting certain people. Were they enemies of Trump? Yes. Did they conduct lawfare or attack him unfairly? Collusion, disinformation? Yes, but that doesn't mean that. Does it mean that if Trump were not president, they wouldn't have been given special consideration? Maybe, maybe not. But here's my argument. They did get special. It's not that Trump is going back to zero, that they were just innocent people and they were just minding their own business. They just said they didn't like Trump.

[Jack]

And he was vindictive.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

No, no, no, no. What's happening is they were given exemptions.

[Jack]

What do I mean by that? John Bolton was told by a federal.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Judge, do not publish this.

[Jack]

I can't stop it. It's already in circulation.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

But you have harmed your country.

[Jack]

I'm almost quoting verbatim. And you are going to be subject soon to civil and criminal exposure by using classified information. This is before anybody knew that he was transmitting it on an unsecured email and was tapped by a foreign government. Yet the Biden administration knew that if.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

It had been the normal old John.

[Jack]

Biden, he'd be in prison by now.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

But they didn't go after him because they considered him a useful, I'll be frank, idiot that they used in the 2020 to promote him as he did commercial. They felt that he was valuable, so they gave him exemption. So Trump is saying there's no longer an exemption.

[Jack]

Number one.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Same thing with Letitia James. They knew, knew that she had. Everybody knew. She had a house and she was a New York Attorney General and she was claiming that that was her primary residence for tax and mortgage purpose. She got an exemption. Fannie Willis got an exemption. Everybody knew that Jack Smith had taken Freebie Legal Services and did not report that as income. He got an exemption. Everybody knew that John Brennan lied twice under oath. James Clapper once, Andrew McCabe four times under oath to federal investigators. James Comey, amnesia 245 times, took a confidential conversation with the president, memorialized it on an FBI device and then put the printout version in his private safe rather than an FBI custody. Everybody, they were given exemptions. So we can't say that Trump is on a vengeful tour when these people have been beneficiaries of a weaponization of the government. It's not like he's going out and saying I'm going after Gavin Newsom and I'm going to go after aoc.

[Jack]

No, he's going after people who have.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Done things criminally and he could go after aoc.

[Jack]

She has committed campaign fraud.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

She did not report donations.

[Jack]

That's more than they got Trump on.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Alvin Bragg said a non disclosure was a campaign.

[Jack]

Matter, federal campaign. He was a local prosecutor. He's not going after Iliana Omar. He could go after tomorrow and say you said that you were married to your brother and that's immigration fraud and how did you get to be worth.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

16 or 17 million dollars?

[Jack]

He's not, he's going after people who enjoyed a distortion. Number two.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

These people for the most part are going to were indicted by grand juries and they, they and future people will be indicted if the grand jury so moves where on the east coast between New York and Washington. Blue, blue, Blue, blue, blue. 70% Democratic constituencies. Then they're going to be tried by federal prosecutors in front of judges. What do we know about federal judges? Well, let's think of Judge Kaplan and the E. Jean Carroll who slapped contempt charges against Trump non stop, wouldn't let in any evidence that would have blown her sky high. That ridiculous fable she recited. What do we know about Jim? Remember Judge Engoron who always grimaced and smiled it up for the cameras and just gave Letitia James a blank. You wouldn't even let the Deutsche bank say that we have no problem with the loan. We made money, he paid the interest. It was a great deal we wanted. No. How about Judge Merchan, the Democratic contributor whose daughter made a fortune using her dad's name when they went after the in the. That was the Merchant case. Okay. And then my point is they're going to have a judge like that. So you're going to have a left wing jury and a left wing judge and you may have a prosecutor that's not a Trump appointee. We don't know. And the point is that they will either be found guilty or innocent. Not be not because of Trump but despite Trump. And what do I mean by that? They're going Trump if Trump finds these people guilty, Trump meeting the Justice Department, that is an amazing preponderance of evidence because they're going to have to prove that Bolton and maybe Clapper, if they get indicted or Comey, they, they are guilty. And I have to convince a left wing jury and a left wing judge. And that's going to be really hard to do. So the preponderance of evidence is much greater in Trump than it was with Biden. When Trump went into these same scenarios, the left wing judges and the left wing juries were mouthing a Biden line. It was much easier to go after Trump. So what I'm getting at is with a hostile media and a hostile judicial system, if he finds these people guilty, they are guilty. But with an anti Trump media and an anti Trump judiciary and an anti Trump jury poll in this particular region, when they found Trump, it didn't mean anything with Alvin Bragg, it was just a joke.

[Jack]

And so that's the second thing to remember.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

He can't run the judicial system. He's going to be in enemy territory, so to speak. And he's going to try to find people culpable, he being Pam Bondi's DOJ.

[Jack]

Culpable, who were given exemptions by Biden.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And a final thing, yes, there are prominent people who earn indictments at others. Don't.

[Jack]

Let's think about that. Oh, I remember Martha Stewart.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

She had an inside talk stock tip.

[Jack]

And she gave false information to an FBI agent.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

So who went after her?

[Jack]

James Comey in the Department of Justice.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Why did he go after Martha Stewart?

[Jack]

As the French said about the British.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Habit of hanging admirals, pour in courage l'. Autre. We're going to encourage the others. You pick a high profile person like Martha Stewart and you throw the book at her. You get in the, you get all the free publicity for yourself. That's what made James Comey. Everybody heard about him. He went after. And then you say your excuse is, well, they're high profile, they should have known better.

[Jack]

Well, all is equal.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

So yes, they do that. And that's what prosecutors do. They go after Scooter Libby. Scooter Libby was no more guilty of leaking the so called classified status of Valerie Plum. I know that because Colin Powell's deputy, Richard Armitage had already disclosed to Robert Novak that she was a CIA operative. And that was known, that was known to Patrick Fitzgerald. But he went ahead because he says, I'm going to get the scalp of Scooter Libby, I'm going to get publicity. But more importantly, it'll scare everybody. And that's what prosecutors do. So just to sum up, this is not a revenge tour. He's trying to rectify unequal treatment that was given to them. And sometimes you go after people to remind people that, that you want to have deterrence. And he's Got an uphill fight in a way that the left had a.

[Jack]

Downhill slope going after him.

[Sammy Wink]

What surprises.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

That's all I have to say about that.

[Sammy Wink]

As Forrest Gump says, what's surprising to me is that a person like Gerald, Gerald Baker doesn't realize that he, if Trump does absolutely nothing with all these liars and frauds and, and people who are engaging in lawfare, it's just going to go on again. While you were talking, I was thinking what's going to stop these people the next time they're in to just go ahead and do this again? And that's.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Yeah, he's trying to restore deterrence and he's trying to say these people likely broke the law and they likely got special treatment because Biden wanted them to break the law, because they used it for political purposes to sabotage me, his opponent. Yes, I'm involved. But if we can find these people guilty of the alleged crimes and sentence them, then people will have a second thought about ever doing the collusion, disinformation, lawfare again. That's true. Absolutely.

[Jack]

And.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

So that's what that, that's what he's trying to do.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And I think it's, I, I think a lot of them are going to be, more are going to be indicted, but I think there's going to be people who find. Find them guilty.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And by the way, I'm not because I like Mr. Baker so much, but I'm reading the National Review and all. A lot of people on the center.

[Jack]

Right.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I didn't see the same anguish when they went after Trump. The National View has a habit, I.

[Jack]

Can say that as writing 20.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

They think their job is to police their own ranks. And then they kind of virtue signal where Buckley got rid of the John Birch Society and we're going to get rid of the Paleo, you know, that kind of stuff.

[Jack]

Yeah, I can see that that's valuable. There's a lot of nuts in the right.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

We can talk about the Neo, and.

[Jack]

They'Re not even Neo, they're anti Semites. The Nick Fuentes is and all those people, you should, you should monitor them and you know, etc.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And if they continue, get them out of the, out of the mainstream.

[Jack]

But you have to have some sense that the other side is what they're doing. And they never, they, their interest is not so much in showing that they.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Almost ruined the federal, state and local.

[Jack]

Judiciary systems and they made it.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

They went after everybody.

[Jack]

They really did. And they tried to destroy a lot of. They tried to destroy Cleta Mitchell, she was a wonderful lawyer, had a great reputation. All she did was sit in on a call in Georgia. When Trump asked, he said, there's a lot of votes there. I know they're there.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Find them.

[Jack]

And then they went after everybody who was on that call. And they, what they do is they, they threaten you with an indictment. There's nothing there. You got to get an attorney. You'll have to spend two or three hundred thousand dollars at a Washington attorney, one thousand, two thousand an hour. And they make you sweat it out. Sweat it out, sweat it out. And then they drop the word among all the liberal law firms, don't ever hire this person again. That's how they do it.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, that is how they do it. It's very sad. Well, Victor, I'd like to welcome the Hoover Institution to sponsorship of our show. If you listen to VDH in his own words, you care about where America's been, where we are now, and where we're headed, that's exactly what Freedom Frequency is all about. It's a new online publication from the Hoover Institution, where Victor is a senior fellow. It's designed to cut through the noise and bring clarity to the issues that sh our country's future. Each week, Freedom Frequency delivers serious, accessible analysis grounded on research and guided by the American values of liberty, democracy, free enterprise, and the rule of law. You'll hear some of Hoover's most respected thinkers, people like Condoleezza Rice, General Jim Mattis, General H.R. mcMaster, economist John Cochran, and of course, Victor Davis Hanson himself, providing clear thinking and principled solutions for a complex world. As we approach the 250th anniversary of our nation, there's no better time to dig deeper into the ideas that built America and will determine its freedom. Subscribe now to Freedom frequency on substack. That is the freedomfrequency.org and join the conversation that's lighting the way forward. That URL again is the freedom frequency.org and we'd like to thank the Hoover Institution for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. So, Victor, Russia is on to our next topic. Russia is now testing a 870 or, sorry, an 8, 700 mile range nuclear missile. And there's two conflicting stories here. The Daily Telegraph has informed us that the economy is getting so bad in Russia from sanctions and policies of Trump that Putin is starting to maybe see some resistance in Russia itself. So one good story, one bad story on Russia and I was wondering your thoughts.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Well, Vladimir Putin understands he made a colossal blunder when he tried to Decapitate Kiev on February 24, 2022. Thunder Road, you know, shock and awe. It didn't work. So then he thought he would wage a conventional meat grinder. World War II on the Eastern Front of Ukraine. Almost four years later. Million and a half. At least a million Russian dead, wounded, missing. Soldiers that are wounded on the front often kill themselves.

[Jack]

They can't get medical treatment.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

They have 200,000 people fled Russia of military age. They were doing okay as long as.

[Jack]

They sold oil to India and China.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Trump is going to stop that. Ukraine has now long range drones. They've knocked out 30% of Russia's oil refinery capacity. So gasoline is getting scarce. The economy is in trouble. So Vladimir Putin has three choices.

[Jack]

If he was smart, if he was.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Smart, he would say to Trump privately, okay, I got everything I want. I institutionalized Crimea, I institutionalized Donbass. There.

[Jack]

Ares.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I'm going to announce to the Russian people that Ukraine will never be in NATO. Great. I expanded Russian territory 75 to 100 miles and we'll have a DMZ and I'll settle there. And then I'll say, but if I do this, and I promise security guarantees, I want access into the US model. And I'll help you triangle triangulate against China. I'm more scared of them than you are. And we'll have kind of a Mexican standoff. Three people each with a gun, China, US And I want trade deals with you. He can do that. That's what he should do. And then he can go back and brag that he got these concessions from Ukraine, or he can say, I don't have enough. They're going to kill me when I go back.

[Jack]

An oligarch or these billionaires have all sorts of resources. I've killed too many people. I've killed people on the battlefield. I've eliminated their friends. One of the oligarchs or generals is going to have a couple kill me. So I just can't, you know, I can't stop.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I've got to keep going.

[Jack]

If I stop, they're going to say, you blew it, Vladimir. If I keep going, I've got to get. So that's, that's a choice, and that's where he is right now. Or the third, he can just say this was an ungodly disaster and stop. Just unilaterally stop. That's not going to happen. I don't think it's going to happen. To make a deal with us, it's in his interest to be smart. He's going to do choice Number two, he's going to think, I got to get another hundred miles into Ukraine. I can spend another 500,000 lives, another trillion dollars and maybe it'll be worth it. And I think if he continues with that choice, he's either going to die. He's 73, he's not in good health, he looks stressed out, or somebody's going to take him out.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

But how does that strategy working? He can't make enough progress westward to justify what he did. So any DMZ will put him in trouble back at home. So he needs more territory. But he doesn't have the military capability. And he has now galvanized NATO out of its slumber. NATO is sending sophisticated weapons.

[Jack]

It's going to rearm.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Finland's in it, Sweden's in it. And Trump is not gay. Trump offered him a way out and he slapped and humiliated Trump. And Trump said, every time I talk to him, it seems like it's going good. And then I get off the phone, he bombs somebody. So Trump has had it with him and now what he wants to do is threaten a nuclear holocaust. So he always talks. He has his generals, media people, functionaries.

[Jack]

Say we're going to use bombs against.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Britain, we're going to bomb Poland, we're going to bomb Ukraine. We have hypersonic missiles. We have a torpedo that we're developing very many megatons. We're going to launch it from a submarine that's going to go into a.

[Jack]

Western port and blow up and contaminate everything, everybody. And now he's talking about these long. He's got about 4,000 deliverable nukes, about 6,500. We have about 6,538 at anything over 500. It's all academic.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

So he knows the United States.

[Jack]

Has parity with him. Nuclear wise, we have enormous advantages over him. Conventional wise, we're not going to get an Iraq, Afghanistan war anymore. That drains it. And he knows that France has 300 nuclear weapons. England has 250 nuclear weapons. Israel has probably 100 nuclear weapons. There's not anybody else in the world, not Pakistan, not India, not North Korea even that's going to come to his aid. So he's, he's going to be forced to make a deal now that Trump has decided to have a secondary boycott of India and China.

[Sammy Wink]

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about sex warfare. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. You can find Victor on YouTube and rumble and on Spotify. He has the audio available on Spotify and Apple podcasts it. Remember everyone, Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. So please come join us.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Yes, it's important because as people have been reminding me, we have a competitor for rankings in our Apple and Audible and advertisers and this awful competitor. His name is the Victor Davis Hansen Show. And those compose, you know, we were doing four a week. Yes, it's 200 a year for almost five years, four and a half years. There's 900 of these little competitors and they're on another platform or former platform.

[Jack]

And they have ads.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

So I have people saying, well, you're rated this, but we like this. And I'm thinking, I want to strangle this.

[Jack]

What do you call it?

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Doppelganger.

[Jack]

So, yes, just, just blank out 900 episodes, everybody, and watch Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Anthony Evil show.

[Sammy Wink]

Yes, that's right. And which is associated with the Daily Signal. And we're happy with our new partnership and so we hope everybody finds their way to Victor Davis Hansen's recent shows in his.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Yeah, you can go to the website Victor Hansen.com VDH and the Daily Signal platform.

[Sammy Wink]

All right, Victor. So in addition to the missiles in Russia and the war in Ukraine, Russia and China probably, I'm not sure if it's more China on the west coast than Russia, but are sending sexy women to seduce. And this recent new news is especially our tech experts to get tech secrets and that they're not just seducing and they are marrying them and having children with them. And so it's gone quite far, far in the.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Why do you think they're doing this?

[Sammy Wink]

Well, hold on a second. The article I was reading is said that this is costing taxpayers somewhere around $600 billion the theft in the tech industry. So why. Why are they marrying or why are they sending sex?

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Why do they think they can get.

[Sammy Wink]

Away with the secrets? What was that?

[Victor Davis Hanson]

There's a reason why they think they can get away with it.

[Sammy Wink]

Oh, I'm not sure why that is. Why?

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Because they think that these people in.

[Jack]

Silicon Valley are as stupid and gullible and arrogant and narcissistic as Eric Swalwell, whom Fang Fang seduced when he was on the intelligence committee. And I had that little anecdote. She came up to my office when I was as an aging male. I don't think that young women that come up with boots and tight Levi's and two buttons on button from the Chinese Communist Party do it. Because I have a full head of hair and I'm a dynamic person. I think they do it because I was writing columns negative to China and they wanted to influence. But how could you be so stupid? Eric Swalwell, I mean, he has to be the, the most arrogant, stupid person in Congress to fall for that. He never paid any price for that. He never denied it, that she had seduced him.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

So they must have thought, well, if we can seduce a California congressman with a woman who's just obviously had a reputation of going to every little democratic function all around the Bay Area. But then I have to be fair to him. I mean, they put a communist spy for what, 10, 15 years with Dianne Feinstein, her chauffeur. He heard every single conversation. And then we were supposed to believe the FBI has investigated this. And yes, the chauffeur was a conduit to Chinese communist intelligence, but he didn't hear anything of any importance. We're not stupid like Nancy Pelosi saying she ended up with $100 million because she didn't really use her inside trade or knowledge to profit.

[Sammy Wink]

And Victor, I think you're being very harsh on affairs of the heart and the human species. It's very difficult not to want to be deceived in such matters.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

So, you know, I tell you this, everybody's saying China is producing three nuclear weapons a month. They're going to catch up to us. China's billing has built, built or will build two fleet carriers. Chinese China has a fifth generation jet.

[Jack]

It's just as comparable as the F35 or F22. Yes, yes, but every time I investigate those stories as you readers do, and you look at these platforms, they look like they just Xeroxed our jets, our tanks, our carriers, everything. They're missiles. So China is not a threat. They can't keep up with this because they control all of their research. And you don't get the best people when that in that type of environment. And so I mean it's, they get a head start when we're sleeping. Kind of like Germany in 39 and 40. But once you rev up the United States, we made the, by the 1945, we had the best air. I know people are going to get angry. We had the best four engine bombers along with the British. We had the best fighters along with the British. We had the best carriers. We had the most. So we could defeat China easily in an arms race. All we have to do is not hand over all our technology to these Chinese operators and just say when the Communist government in Chinese China says, you're a racist. You're a racist for calling us the embryo of the COVID virus at Wuhan. You're a racist for expelling 100, 200 students. Yes, we had a colonel in the.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Chinese People's Liberation army at Stanford. And yes, she, we didn't tell you that, but she was a sophisticated researcher in neuroscience. Just forget all that. Just get tough on them. Just say, we gave you 300,000 and if we catch five more, it's going to be 200. Five more, it's going to be a hundred. We don't need them here. Chinese nationals from that communist country. Same thing with fentanyl. We're in a very strong position now.

[Jack]

With Trump vis a vis China.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

The world is sick of China. The Europeans are finally saying we're sick of China. Japan is rearming. Australia is rearming. South Korea is rearming. They are hated now in Africa, they just had a toxic waste pawn blow up in Zambia, and it's polluted with toxic mercury and arsenic. And you know, it's going to destroy hundreds of thousands of acres. And they're not doing anything to help the people. Same thing in Latin America. So all we have to do is just tell the truth and not, you know, we're in such a strong position. Trump is now negotiating about fentanyl. All he has to do is say, if you send fentanyl into the United.

[Jack]

States, the following is going to happen.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

To you and do it. Because there's no way in the world that they need fentanyl.

[Jack]

I mean, it's, it's a medicinal drug. I, they gave it to me after my recent surgery, but unknowingly.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

But.

[Jack]

You can stop it because we're in the powerful position. With Biden, we were in the weaker position, but not now.

[Sammy Wink]

Well, speaking of something kind of related to sex warfare, the Manchurian Candidate. We have Mondami this week, and he had to sort of backtrack on his aunt, I think her name was Massuma Mondami, that he said was afraid to go onto the subway in New York with her Hijab on after 9 11. So she was the victim of 9 11. But our researchers have found out that she was in Tanzania from 1999 to 2003 doing investigating sexually transmitted diseases. I believe that was.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

He is a pathological. He's many things, but among them is a pathological liar. He said he was never for defunding the police. He was right. After October 7, he was demonstrating against the Israelis before they had even Lifted a finger to go into Gaza. He said his mother was treated, what, she had unfair looks at her at the subway or his aunt, excuse me, she probably was not even in the United States. But more importantly, they had just. Radical Islamists had just killed, murdered 3,000Americans. And what is his first reaction or his lasting reaction or 20 year reaction? Oh, you guys made it uncomfortable for my Muslim aunt. Well, what did you think? That Muslims, radical Muslims made it uncomfortable for 3,000 people. They incinerated them. Should be ashamed of himself. And then every day a lie comes out.

[Jack]

Every single day something comes out about him. Now his mother is on record that.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

She'S used a word to reassure the Hindu Muslim community, the Indian and Pakistani.

[Jack]

Communities of India and their expatriates that Mandami was never assimilated, that he's not a sellout Indian, that he, they have a word for it. It's kind of like the Armenian word odar, which means he's the other. He's not one of the others. He didn't, he's not an American Indian. He is a Ugandan Indian. So don't ever think that we raised him to be assimilated, integrated. We raised him as an Indian, Muslim, Ugandan. And that came out and he's just said all of the rest.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

He said that he couldn't even say Hamas should be disarmed. He said all sorts of things about Jews. He's just, he's, that's that smiling. But here's the thing that is really strange about it. The more that he lies and the more that he's caught lying and the more that he won't answer questions. You said that debate when they, Andrew Cuomo said, well, what's your position on this, this? And he said, I'm not going to tell you, I haven't made it. But here's my sneaking fear, suspicion. And it's simply this, that the more that he reveals himself to be anti American, pro radical Islam, a communist, not a socialist, free this, free that, free. The more that he attacks whiter neighborhoods, the more that he wants to drive out Jews, the more popular he gets that this 18 to 40 demographic, 65% of all people who are not born.

[Jack]

In the United States and the greater.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

New York are going to vote for him, the more popular. So he knows that. So his attitude is, I'm going to send codes, I'm going to sound like a radical, anti American, anti Semitic, anti Israeli Islamicist, and then I'm going to deny it when caught. But the, the word will get out to my youthful constituents and my foreign born constituents that I am really on.

[Jack]

Their side against America. And that's this whole strategy. And it's working. It's working in part because the Silwa.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Cuomo, Eric Adams, former candidate Adams, Yes.

[Jack]

It ensured that there would never be a Giuliani or Bloomberg centrist. And a lot of people who would vote for Cuomo will vote for Silwa.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Because of Cuomo's killing people in the.

[Jack]

Rest home and sexual harassment and just being an awful person. I don't know what I would do if I was in New York. It would be very hard to vote for Cuomo, but it would be easier than de facto by not voting for him, voting for Mandami.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, it does seem like he's going to get elected in spite of all of that. I, you would think that there couldn't possibly be any Jews that back him, but apparently there are Jews that back Mandami, or at least he had said.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

That again and again. Look at 1917 in Russia or 1959 in Cuba or in the 80s in Venezuela with Chavez. Once they know a communist revolution, that minority has taken over the, the means of government and the military, especially the military, then there's going to be a sizable minority of aristocrats, financiers, Jews, anybody that he hates that will make a deal with him and they'll say, you know what? I will suspend judgment. I will not criticize you. You tell me the campaign chest and packs I have to donate to. Who are your enemies, who are your friends? But I want some, I want to be protected. I want a concession from the government, I want a contract from New York City, that kind of stuff. And you'll be surprised how many in the next few days, how many Wall street powerful people will say they can work with Mandalami.

[Sammy Wink]

Well, another interesting thing about his campaign is that Bernie Sanders and AOC have come out to support him. And at a recent rally this week, AOC was caught on stage saying, we are not the crazy ones, New York City. We are not the. And she went on. But doesn't that seem to you a little bit of letting the cat out of the bag, as they say that in fact they are a little bit crazy. If you're supporting this.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Hello, everybody. I'm Victor Hanson. I work at Stanford and I'm not a snooty academic professor. Yes, exactly.

[Jack]

It was.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

There was that candidate. I know all my readers who reminded me of William Sapphire. Thank God.

[Jack]

God, one of my favorite columnists.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

When Jack and I temporarily forgot his name. But they will say, give her a name. But she was running as a Tea Party candidate, I think in Nevada for the Senate. And they were saying that she dressed up like a witch once. So she had to go on. Maybe it wasn't back east. Excuse me. It wasn't Nevada, I don't think. Anyway, she made these commercials, said, I'm just a normal person. I'm really not a witch. And as soon as she said that, it was like, what the. She's got to tell people she's not a witch. So when somebody tells you they're not crazy or sane, it's.

[Jack]

She's.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

The more people listen to aoc, the more that that original stereotype that.

[Jack]

That we all heard that she was.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

A barista and she was a know nothing and her degrees were empty. And what was her nickname?

[Sammy Wink]

Didn't she give a bad name to Millennial?

[Jack]

I mean, yeah, I met a lot with smarter baristas, but Alexandria Cosio, what did they call her? Alex or what?

[Sammy Wink]

Sandy.

[Jack]

Sandy.

[Sammy Wink]

Sandra used to call her Sandy.

[Jack]

She was always known as Sandy, just like Barack Obama was known as Barry.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And then she was ranting as a.

[Jack]

Bartender, and somebody took her seriously and said, you should run for Congress, Sandy. And then she gets up there and it's almost like when you see them together, she is like King Theodine of Rohan, who's in a trance and stupor. And then be. Bernie Sanders is Grima Wormtongue, and he's whispering in her. Remember the line here is free this and free that and get this and tax these people. I've done it for 50 years, Sandy. Yes. And she starts yelling, and he's getting more of a character himself. He's 82, and you've heard that gets his arms up like Dick Nixon. He goes like this. And then it's always the same boilerplate, taking over the country, and we gotta do that. Yeah, and you've got three homes, too. And your wife bankrupt a college and absconded with a big settlement as the college she was in charge of went broken. I don't know how. You got a house on a lake. You got a nice place in Washington. You got a nice place in Burlington. Where'd you get all the money, Bernie? You've been on the pay the federal payroll. You don't make a lot of money. How'd you do it?

[Sammy Wink]

And. And didn't he shut up really quickly after Hillary was made the candidate in 2016 and nobody could figure out why he shut his mouth. But he.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Obviously, he has a bad Habit of.

[Jack]

Saying, oh, I'm gonna go to the bitter end and I'm gonna.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And then all of a sudden he disappears and Hillary is coordinated. He disappears and Biden's coordinated in 2020. I'm not suggesting that some donors gave him some inside stock tips or something, but something happened.

[Jack]

And yeah, he's.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I don't know.

[Sammy Wink]

That's our socialist for us.

[Jack]

Yeah, well, it's just, you know, it's so weird.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

They can get. They can get, like Mandami can get 12,000 people or they can get Sandy and Bernie can get 20. And the New York Times goes gaga. They were 20,000. It's just amazing. And then Trump can pack in 50,000. It was. This is a disappointment. They were thinking they were going to have 80,000. Only 50 showed up.

[Jack]

It's so weird.

[Sammy Wink]

Speaking of crowds of that size, have you been watching the World Series with the LA Dodgers? Who are you from four LA Dodgers or the.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I'm a Californian. I'm an American and I'm a Californian.

[Sammy Wink]

Okay.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And that was the stupidest thing Ontario did, running those ads about Ronald Reagan, taking his clips out of context. Ronald Reagan had some tariffs too, just when Trump had settled down. And they picked a moment when they.

[Jack]

Had a huge American audience to trash the President United States at the national pastime day of the year, whoever, I guess that Ford is the provincial governor of Ontario. That was stupid. It's dumb. And Trump reacted as you think Trump would do. But I kind of like the idea that there's what, three or four Japanese. There's Otani and Yamamoto, and then Edmond is. The second baseman, is part Korean, Part Korean. And the coach was born on Okinawa to a Japanese Okinawan mother. There's another relief picture who's Japanese. So I. And I like the idea that we are the liberal multiracial. And then they're playing in.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Toronto and did you see the first. What the Toronto fans were, you know, we don't need you, we don't need you subtext. We only have our guys. You have to go get Asians. It was. I think that's what it meant. So they were the illiberal ones. But I like the idea that there's so many nice things about it because the Japanese diaspora is a. Got gone. It's like the Greek diaspora. It's fully intermarried, assimilated, acculturated since 1890 to 1920. During that period of immigration, when I grew up, in every little small town.

[Jack]

Where I grew up, there was a.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Japanese Buddhist temple and I would say.

[Jack]

In my graduating class, there must have.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Been 30 Japanese Americans, and they have all intermarried and no one speaks Japanese. It's just like Swedes and anybody else. So to see this new tie redeveloping with Japan, it's kind of interesting. I like that. And I like the new prime minister.

[Jack]

Jumping up and down.

[Sammy Wink]

She said that her, she and Donald Trump were late to a meeting because they wanted to watch the World Series.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

They're very happy and proud.

[Sammy Wink]

They're so happy. Of all those Japanese I like, they're.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Basically saying, you introduced baseball to us, but we gave you the best player in the major league and maybe the.

[Jack]

Best pitcher as well.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And it's. It's really interesting to watch.

[Jack]

It really is. I like the, the cut, the celebrities.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Ms. Sweeney was there.

[Jack]

Everybody hates her on the left because she's center right, apparently. But she's beautiful, and she's unabashedly proud of being buxom, curvy. That's not supposed to be the look for young professional women. But, yeah, as Aristotle pointed out, imprinted on everybody's brain is the prime, or Plato, the prime directive, or one of the first principles. We know what is beautiful and what is not. When we're born. The first second, you know, we see a beautiful old oak tree with beautiful foliage, strong roots, and we see a sickly amber. Amber or a poplar tree, and we think, I like the oak tree. Why do I do that? Why aren't. Why are leaves better than no leaves? Why is. And so when she. You see her, forget the color of her skin or eyes, just.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

That'S what people react to. And the leftist taught us that beauty is constructed, and it's all created by European, racist, sexist, chauvinistic people. And that, you know, weighing 300 pounds, if you criticize that, you're fat, shaming. And that's just as beautiful as just a construct that you people have been indoctrinated. And then she comes along and thinks, okay, I'll just play by your rules.

[Jack]

And make a little commercial. Wow.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Wow, I've got 30 million people following me or something.

[Sammy Wink]

She did, and she sold a lot. I can't remember the Jean company that she was selling for, but I'm sure they made a pretty penny on that. All right, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about Obama in the media. Speaking of being in the media, him. We'll be right back. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. So please come join us at The Blade of Perseus. You can join for ultra material at 65 a year or 650amonth if you want to. Just put your toe in.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

So I'm going to have a talk to this guy who's imitating us, this Victor Davis Hansen show. He looks younger, too.

[Sammy Wink]

Oh, yeah.

[Jack]

Stronger voice.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I'm gonna find him and do him in.

[Sammy Wink]

Okay, so back to the news. Obama this week has been in all sorts of news, not only in the news, but also commercials, since you're speaking of it, and the yes on 50 proposition 50 in California commercial, which would allow redistricting in California so that they could get more Democrats in. Everybody knows that, but I thought. But in addition to that, what was interesting is there's a new book out by Jonathan Carle called Retribution, and he seems, he writes in it that Obama was angry at Pelosi for immediately jumping on the Kamala Harris as the candidate because he, in fact, wanted to see more of a choice process gone through with the Democrats after Joe Biden stepped out. And I was wondering if you, what your thoughts were on that.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

He didn't get the message in 2016. He had come out of the Tea Party imbroglio, the big midterm defeat of 2010. He, he had that reelection 2012, but people didn't like his border policies.

[Jack]

They didn't like Obamacare, and he was.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Pulling where Trump is or even a little bit lower. And then a big bright light bulb went on off in his head once.

[Jack]

Hillary started to square off against Trump. And it said, you know, people don't like me.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I am a phony.

[Jack]

They're sick of me.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

But Donald Trump and Hillary are polarizing people. So my last year in office, I'm just going to phone it in.

[Jack]

Like I once said that I wanted a third term if I could just.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Phone it in from the basement.

[Jack]

So I'm just going to do that.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I'm going to go play golf. You're not going to see me. You're not going to hear me. And the more people do not see.

[Jack]

Or hear Barack Obama, the more they like him. They'd like the idea of a suave, charismatic, first African American president, but they don't like to be lectured, hectored, sermonized by him. And they're sick of his stupid voice is, you know, modulating it when he talks to an African American, what you be doing.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And then he has, when he talks.

[Jack]

He'S like Hillary modulating the accent. Aoc, by the way, does the same thing. So he should have known that. So as Long as he was either in his Martha Vineyard estate or visited every once in a while his Chicago up digs or, you know, went to Martha's Vineyard, which should have, according to him, been washed away because of global warming on the coast or his new multi, multi million dollar Hawaii palace. People liked him. You know, he just popped up on David Givens yacht or something and Michelle did her podcast and kind of trashed him and said he was messy or he, and, but he, he can't do that. He can't be like George W. Bush. People like George W. Bush now. He paints, he doesn't weigh in, he doesn't trash Trump. They like, I mean, they like Carter to the extent he was bait, but when Carter started, you know, weighing in, they didn't, they didn't like him. So he should have known that because when he, every time he weighs in people, it has the opposite effect because he's condescending. He goes and tells young black activists that were working for, don't make the mistake. You don't know what's good for you. Don't suffer from Marxist false consciousness and vote for Donald Trump. And then he tells the Hispanic community, well, a lot of you guys, you know, worried about price of gas, your business, maybe a Chrysler Energy or a new car, that's not what you should be doing, voting for Trump. Well, yeah, they worry about gas and the price of a truck, but you don't because you cashed in with your Netflix and you're worth $150 billion. Don't tell people what they should be doing as if they're stupid just because they're minorities. So now he's doing it again.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

He's telling people in California every night I turn on television, you know, he's got to stop Donald Trump. Vote yes on 50 and don't let him take over tomorrow. In other words, we are redistricting the California congressional districts because right now 17%, nine seats go to Republicans even though they had 40% of the national vote. And we want to eliminate that to 4 seats or 9%. And that's democracy. And opposing that is not. And then he's weighed in, in the Virginia race and said, we were told that if you were black, you had to vote for Kamala Harris and not to be fooled and voted for Trump. That's what Obama said. Now he's in Virginia saying, don't be fooled and vote for a black woman over a white woman.

[Jack]

So what is it, Barack?

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Some ways I'm happy because he's relegating race and he's voting apparently on the person who's the most left wing regardless of list.

[Jack]

That's admirable.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

But I'm not sure that it's consistent and I think he doesn't like his view of black conservatives is they haven't sufficiently appreciated all the wonderful things that white liberals and black professional di people have done for them and therefore they owe them.

[Sammy Wink]

Can I ask something though? He is being asked to come on these advertisements by people who think must think he has some ability to influence people. So he there they must be on the left at least out there. What he does, he is very influential.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

What he does, what he does, what.

[Jack]

He does, what he does.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

He always does one thing. He endorses someone and comes out late and when that everybody says he comes out when they're in trouble. No, he comes out when they're still ahead. He's came out.

[Jack]

When Camila Harris was still polling on the night of the election, the NPR poll had her up four points beyond the. So he thought she was going to win. Then he was going to come out and push a little bit and take credit for for it. He came out, he didn't come out for Prop 50amonth ago. He's coming out now because it's ahead and he's afraid that the margin's going down. But he would not come out if it was behind. He's coming out against Winsome Sears because she's coming up a little bit but she's still behind. He always picks what he thinks is a sure winner. Sometimes he's wrong because the polls are biased.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

We will see.

[Jack]

But it's not some brave guy and I don't think he has much clout anymore. Everybody's sick of him.

[Sammy Wink]

Yes.

[Jack]

I mean he gave everybody these lectures about being civic minded and you know, at some point, why do you need money? What are you going to buy a. You're gonna buy two houses? No, you're gonna buy four. Barack. So he was just a contradiction, walking contradiction. They're just tired. They're just so tired of Al Gore and the view and Barack Obama lecturing people. You've got to think this, you've got to do this. And now it's Donald Trump took their.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Little balloon and he blew it all up.

[Jack]

Bill Gates says the world is not going to overheat. We're spending all this money. We don't need to do it. We don't end up like Europe. We got to do AI AI, AI. I got to make another hundred billion. How can I do that when I'm advocating wind and solar. We need nuclear. I want more money. That's what Bill Gates is saying. And you know the same thing with dei, it's a dirty word. Now, dei, dei, it's just, it's a synonym of non merocratic. And nobody's saying we need to let in 10,000 people illegally.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

So he, he just gloms on to popular, what he thinks are popular issue. I don't see him going out there and saying we need to open the border. I don't see him thinking, oh, you gotta. I, I said right after George Floyd, we might have to think about defunding the police. Gotta think about that. No, you don't say that now, do you?

[Sammy Wink]

I agree with you, but I'm still concerned that there are people on the left that see that he has great influence and they're willing to pay him to do these advertisements because they think that that influence is going to help their position.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Think that. But empirically, I don't think there's any evidence that when he comes in to endorse, I can't think of any losing candidate that called him in who was way behind in the polls or behind that. He's saved every single cause he came in. His person or cause or issue was either ahead of the polls or dead even. But most end gaining. And his job was to ensure that a sure winner didn't blow it. And he didn't, he didn't work with Harris. It did not work. And I don't think it worked with Hillary Clinton in 2016. And I don't think it's going to work necessarily, necessarily with. We'll see.

[Jack]

Yeah, but.

[Sammy Wink]

Well, the governor's office must feel like they are winning the battle on Prop 50 because there was a vote. Well, there was a Secretary of California State ad run on the World Series and I thought that was interesting, that everybody needs to get out to vote. And for all of you who are not in California, the only thing on the voting ballot is Proposition 50. So they want to make sure everybody gets out and votes. Yes, although they didn't say that on Proposition 50. And they. Yeah, that's millions of dollars in ads.

[Jack]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

The argument is so weird. This was the, the party that said democracy dies in darkness. Trump is going to destroy democracy and we are going to rig congressional districts to look like jigsaw puzzle pieces. And we have already done that. We have ensured that only nine of 52 seats will be Republican, but that's not enough for us. If they had voted 40% of the seats you would have 17, 18 seats that were Republican. So they already gerrymandered down to nine. And now they're saying that's not enough. We got to destroy our opposition and get it down to four or five. And that's called democracy, and that's a hard sell even for people. But they're going to vote for it. Maybe, maybe not, but we'll see.

[Sammy Wink]

Well, last thing before we get to comments from our viewers is since we're in California, we might as well finish up with Gavin Newsom, who was on a podcast this week and was telling tales about his hard childhood, raising himself, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and eating Mac macaroni and cheese, and that he was basically, as I said, raising himself as a young kid and wonderful things on the Internet, showing him among his very wealthy friends when he was growing up.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Well, we know that's not true. His father was a state appellate court judge. My mother was when she was 55, everybody was gone out of the house. And I can tell you that their income increased and they went from middle class to upper middle class because appellate court judges were paid well. So his dad was paid well. And more importantly, he was a protege or client of the Gettys, Gordon Getty, who bankrolled all of his entrepreneurial schemes. So he never went out. He said he was hustling this. Maybe he worked hard, but he was kind of considered entitled. Nepo baby. He had a drinking problem, he had a adultery problem, and he bought all these companies with Getty money. And now he's running and he's doing the old I was born in a log cabin. Everybody does it. You know that. Just think about it. Hillary had to have boilermakers. Was it in Bowl?

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, In West Virginia, I think we.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Were not Barack Obama. I never went to prep school, that kind of stuff. And everybody, all these candidates say, except one Donald Trump, fantastic. I'm going to make you as rich as I am. You know, gold everywhere. Trump Tower. He's not ashamed of it. He doesn't try to say, oh, I was a poor little guy, that my father only gave me an allowance or something. He speaks highly of his father.

[Sammy Wink]

That. And that was kind of refreshing. It was campaign to not have the I was born in a log cabin.

[Jack]

Argument, which is it's an old American tradition.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

There were two old American traditions of presidential race.

[Jack]

One was raise a bloody shirt.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I bled at Shiloh. My candidate was shirking behind the lines. That was one. And I was born in a log cabin. But it's, I think everybody appreciates authenticity more than even ideology if they're authentic.

[Sammy Wink]

All right, Victor, so let's turn now, as we always do, to comments. This was on YouTube. One of these was, and I think the other one I got off of your website. But this is from end rche and he says I'm, I'm a millennial and when I talk to young people my kids age, I can assure you the anti Semitism really is happening. And then he puts in parentheses, not my kid. Talk to these kids. This is a real problem and it really has to be addressed. And thank you.

[Jack]

It does.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I. I have mentioned in the past I was a good friend of Tucker who was kind enough to have me on his show. I felt that he had a lot of good views. But, you know, as early as this year, he was warning people that Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens were heading in anti Semitic territory. And Nick Fuentes was. Now he has Nick Fuentes on his show. This is a person who more or less says he doesn't like Jews and here's why. And we should be. One day he says we should have been friends with Hitler, the next day Stalin. He's had David column on there. I don't know who he is. He's a Cornell chemistry professor saying that maybe we should have had an alliance with Adolf Hitler, the greatest anti Semite probably in history. And then we've had Daryl Cooper who basically said Churchill was a terrorist and we were fighting the wrong war. So I don't know where this is all coming from on is it. And there I like to. It's not the Christian right because they hate the Christian right. They're calling Tucker said one of the people he disliked the most was Mike Huckabee and Phil Ted Cruz and said they were Christian nationalists. So I don't know if it was a Netanyahu government that set them off, but when I was on his show, I never heard him say that. And now he's got people who are openly. That's what's strange about. They're not as money as. I mean, anti Semitism is the creed of the left now, but the right is looking at it and thinking, well, the left kind of made it okay to be anti Semitic, so maybe we.

[Jack]

Can do it too.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

This group of young people that get.

[Jack]

Their information off podcast or the Dark Web, but it's part of a larger this.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I was reading these accounts of Tucker's interview with Nick Fuentes.

[Jack]

It's. I don't like to use these words misogynist, but it's Kind of hate women.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I don't know if it's quasi homosexual or what, but it's an idealization of men. It's fure at Jews.

[Jack]

And it's this idea, Tucker said that our most toxic, I'm trying to be fair. Our most toxic relationship is with Israel and we inordinately. What if somebody said we inordinately pay.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

17% of the NATO budget?

[Jack]

That's not in our interest. Yeah, it is because we're fighting over there and stopping things that came over that involved us in a war before.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And we don't have it over here.

[Jack]

And these countries share similar values. They have democracy, they have free, supposedly free speech. So does Israel. But I don't understand, you know, we support Australia, we support Japan, we support South Korea and Israel's at 11 and a million at all. In a sea of 500 million people, can anybody, when they say, well, there's.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

A. I support Jews and Israel but.

[Jack]

Not a Jewish state, well then you don't support any Arab government in the entire country because it is a national religion, it's called Islam. So you cannot. If you're a Coptic in Egypt, you're in big trouble. I know a lot of Coptics and they fled here. And do you think you can open a church and go out on a Sunday best in Saudi Arabia. Do you think you can go into the west bank in Gaza and say, I want to have a synagogue just like the Arab mosque in Israel? You can't. So Israel is a democratic constitutional system of free speech, a judiciary, a legislature and a prime minister dash president. And they have open, transparent press and elections. Could somebody tell me anywhere else in that critical region that supports or produces 40% of the world's oil? Not that we need it anymore, but our allies need it and our enemies want it. Just. And this has been the incubator of Al Qaeda and ISIS and radical Islam that's killed a lot of Americans. And you can come up with every conspiracy theory you can. You want that Jews have killed Americans, Jews from Israel. But there's not. I mean, there was an incident in the 67 war with a mistaken. That's, you know, the pueblo. There's all kinds of conspiracy theories, but Israel does not attack the United States. Israel does not. It's just, it's a no brainer, you know what I mean? You go to Tel Aviv or Haifa or Jerusalem, you feel it's a western country, that you don't feel that elsewhere, anywhere. So it's a natural empathy, especially when it's beleaguered Same thing about you have a natural empathy for South Korea and not North Korea and not China. You have a natural empathy for Japan in a way you don't for Russia. You have a natural empathy for Armenia in a way you don't for Azerbaijan. That's just because they reflect our values, more of our values. So I don't get this new anti Semitism on the right.

[Sammy Wink]

No, I don't either.

[Jack]

And the writer is correct. You can't have credibility and say that the left is anti Semitic, which it is. And all these campus demonstrations which I saw for a whole year at Stanford were completely anti semitic. 900 page report by liberal professors at Stanford. Found out that it was entrenched anti Semitism and not come away with it's a problem.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, he seems to. The commenter seems to be suggesting too that it's probably starting, and I'm putting my words to this, it's probably starting at very, very young ages because it's his kids and he's a millennial himself.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

So it's coming from these podcasts, coming from the dark web and podcasts and rappers especially. That's another thing we haven't even discussed and cannot discuss in polite conversation because.

[Jack]

You'Ll be called a racist.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

But the black entertainment community rapper are anti Semitic. They have all sorts of going back to Al Sharpton. That's how Al Sharpton became somebody. I can't think of a major black figure who has not expressed an anti semitic political figure. Al Sharpton, Crown Heights. Right. Tell them Jews to put on their yarn and come over here. Reverend Wright, the personal pastor. I can't talk to Obama anymore. Dim Jews are doing it. Jesse Jackson, Jaime. I'm on my way to Jaime town. Right, go on. And Farrakhan. It's a gutter religion, so no one talks about that. But that's part of the left. But that's not a reason that that anti Semitism and minority communities would affect millennials on the right. It's coming from podcast. Right wing podcaster.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, so unfortunately Tucker Carlson is entertaining.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

There's another motivation too. If you're a young 18, 20, 25 year old, 30 year old, when is the cut off between generation X and.

[Sammy Wink]

Gen Z and I don't know, millennials.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Are what, 35 to 55?

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, something like that.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Yeah. I think also all of those younger generations saw that it was cool to be pro Palestinian on campus and wear Katifa, wear the, the garb and mouth river to sea.

[Jack]

That's what the young people did.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

So they said, well, we don't like left wing people, but we're going to.

[Jack]

Do the same thing on the right.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Because it's kind of trendy, and then.

[Jack]

They'Ll kind of leave us alone. If we're anti Semites too, we'll have our own brand of anti Semitism.

[Sammy Wink]

Well, let's hope that that changes in the future. Hopefully the Internet will equally help people see the truth about things. And your podcast is doing, you know.

[Jack]

You'Ve listened to that. You read Power Line. Scott Johnson is increasingly exasperated because he feels that no one criticizes Tucker or no one criticizes the anti SEM. They do criticize them. But I think one of the reasons that is surprising is that.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Everybody knew.

[Jack]

Tucker pretty well and they knew he was. When I, he came out to Hoover 20 years ago, I would call him a libertarian. He was for the Iraq war, but he turned against it. I think he might have voted for Ralph Nader, as I remember, but he can correct me on that. And he was kind of Jon Stewart kind of yelled at him on Crossfire on cnn. And, and, but my point is he was kind of a libertarian Republican. He wore a bow tie. Was, you know, he was. And then he got more conservative. He got a little bit more Paleo when he got on Fox. But there was no hint that he was anti Semitic. I never saw it. And then all of a sudden he started to, you know, when you go to Bethlehem and you say that the Christians were driven out by the Jews when it was the radical Palestinians that drove them into Israel and they deliberately went into Israel to seek protection, and the person that you're talking to, the Palestinian Christian, is a megaphone for the Palestinian Authority. I don't. Or you go to Moscow and you see a beautiful supermarket and you compare it with some of our inner city ones or maybe. But you don't go out, you know, 100 miles out into the Russian countryside and see what it's like. So I don't, I understand that he's angry at neo conservative, not because he thinks they're mostly Jews, but because we use blood and treasure in ways that fail, in other words. And I feel that way, too. That's two of the reasons. I mean, I went over to be embedded twice in Iraq, not for a long time, but three or four days the first time and five or six, seven the second, just to see what was going on. And it, it was heartbreaking to see all of these sacrifices that we were making and the lack of gratitude by the people who we were supposedly helping.

[Sammy Wink]

Well, Victor, we are at the end of our show, so I would like to thank you for what most of your readers, speaking of other comments, a lot of welcoming you back for your common sense and calm commentary on the day's issues.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I'm working on my frog.

[Sammy Wink]

Thank you. This one as well. What was that?

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I'm working on my frog voice.

[Sammy Wink]

Oh, yes. But you're not too bad.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I know you came from that operation. My maxillary sinuses were enlarged and it caused some kind of something. Yeah, I don't think has anything to do with the lungs or anything or breathing.

[Sammy Wink]

It sounds just fine.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Oh, good.

[Sammy Wink]

So no worries.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I've had people write me when I was on Fox and say your froggy one accordance.

[Sammy Wink]

Oh, well, it doesn't sound that bad. I'm not sure about that. But we'd like to thank the audience too for joining us. And thank you, Victor.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And thank you everybody for watching and listening to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words.

[Sammy Wink]

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen and we're signing off.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Thank you. 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 [e-mail] and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.