The Merits of Joe Kent’s Resignation, the Democrats’ Anti-Israel Shift, and America’s Blue-State Decline | Victor Davis Hanson

Okie dokie, let's rock and roll and hello ladies, hello gentlemen. Welcome to Victor Davis Hansen and his own words on the Daily Signal Network. I'm Jack Fowler, the host, but you're here to get wisdom from Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. He's a, I forget, a senior contributor to the Daily Signal. And he's got a website, The Blade of Perseus. Go to VictorHansen.com, check it out, subscribe, 65 bucks a year. It's, come on, you got it, do it. We are recording on Tuesday, March 17th, which is St. Patrick's Day. This episode, though, is up on Thursday, March 19th. Victor, that's St. Joseph's Day. Later on in the show, we don't want to get too religious or front. I'll tell you. We had a very controversial conversation about the spate of what Joe Biden would call ultra-maga converts to Catholicism. So I think we should leave that topic alone. We'll leave it alone. I do have to apologize for something, but we'll do that at the end. Nobody's here to listen to me. They're here to listen to you. Catholic and my grandmother was, she was supposedly Swedish, but she was outed. My grandfather, who was Swedish, as an Irish Catholic, and my grandfather married her, my Swedish grandfather. You know what they did to him? They kicked him out of the Kingsburg, that's the Swedish town we've referenced before. They kicked him out of the Kingsburg Masonic Lodge in 19, I think it was 1913 or 14. Well, back then, I think it's still maybe applicable now, but you are not supposed to be Catholic in a Mason. It may have been excommunicable or anathema at one time. He went to World War I when he was 20 or some six, and he got his lungs, this is kind of germane to me, the bottom half of his lungs on both sides of bottom loads were destroyed by phosphine and mustard gas. He was a life long, he was a wonderful man. I said to him once, there's a beautiful Lutheran church in Kingsburg, it's just stunning, and his father and others helped fund it. Father came, he was impregnated in Sweden and delivered in Chicago on the way to Kingsburg. Getting off the topic, but very quickly, he said to me, I said, how come, because his wife, my grandmother died before I was born, cancer of course, in my family, but in any case, I asked him once, I was 15 when he died, but I was kind of an obnoxious want-to-be-know-it-all. So I said, well, was your, wasn't grandma a Catholic? Yeah, she was, she was a Catholic. And let me tell you something about the Catholics. You said, I had my favorite horse and three nuns were driving to the Catholic church, and the horse was just minding his own business. Dirt road out in the middle of the road, yeah, all bad, and they hit him. And I walked in and I said, oh my god, we take him to the vet, no, we got to get to church. No, we get the mass. This is us. And so they left my horse dead on the side of the road and wounded, and then they went to the mass. And I said, Brown Paul Frank, you've told me that story like 25 times. They had to get to mass. They had to get to mass. He was, he made his living breaking horses, breaker of horses like Hector and the, he was Hector and the Iliad, Hector, breaker of horses. Was he in the trenches? He was in the 91st Evergreen or Pine Tree Division. I have his helmet in there. It's got, still got his, I have his helmet and his gas mask. And my brother, my twin brother has his 30, 40 crag training gun. He was a teamster because he would break horses. And he was a fabulous horse breaker and teamster. That's how he made his living. And he went over and African-American troops were logistical. They weren't allowed, you know, they're segregated. And he, he trained them and he had a very high regard for African-American rural farmers because he said they were very good teamsters. I remember he said that to me. And he, and then all of a sudden the Muse, Argon offensive and they drafted everybody. I don't mean drafted, but they transferred everybody in the logistical corps. And he went and he was had a Lewis machine gun, I guess, or the American version of it. And he was in the offensive and I talked to him when I was a kid. My father said, go talk to your grandfather. He had it rougher than I did. My dad flew, you know, 40 missions on a B-29, pretty rough. And he said, I got so tired of shooting 70 year old Germans and 15 year old Germans. They were all running. That was the spring offensive. And he said, we just chased them and we chased them and we chased them. And then he got ahead of his unit and they had a counterattack and he and four or five people were trapped and they were gassed and they found some type of cow or they were starving. They ate it and had gas in it and they swallowed it and it vomited and the gas destroyed their esophagus and part of their tracheon lungs. And he spent, the war was over November 11th and he spent an entire year in a Brussels hospital. And he loved the Belgian people and he loved, I don't know how he knew, but he knew German. Or at least he was a translator of Swedish and German. He knew two languages. I don't know how he did that, but he loved the Germans and he loved the prisoners. After he got out of the hospital post war, they had people they were still repatriating and he was assigned to, I don't know, talk to them or something. And he said he loved the Belgian, but not the French. So I think we were fighting the wrong people. He was a wonderful, wonderful guy. I don't know how he made a living. He was disabled his whole life. Gives me inspiration. If I have, if I can get through this lung thing and lost half my lung, I think myself, well, your grandfather, you saw him break a stallion when he was 76 years old with two half lungs and jump on it bareback and ride. I met Slim Pickens. I met Slim Pickens there at his house. I mean, his little 40 acres. He was a rodeo clown when he was young. He was Swedish too. You mentioned that. Yeah. My grandfather really liked him. Crossfree won't talk about... That wasn't his real name. I'll remember his real name. People in Kingsburg, if they're listening, they'll know his real name. He moved out of Kingsburg and then came back for a while. Kingsburg had a lot of very famous people, Slim Pickens, but also Rayford Johnson. Oh, the Olympian. Olympian and his brother Jim Johnson, the 49er. They were both Kingsburg High School. Well, there's a lot of very talented people in the San Joaquin Valley. Trust me. Even just in Selma alone. Brother Antoninas, the Catholic monk, famous William Everson. He came out here and my grandfather said that he used to hire William Everson. He was very tall and he was a very good peach tree thinner. He was a stick when he was a young man. I met him. He was a professor at UC Santa Cruz and I went up to him and I said, did you remember Reese Davis? He hired you, my grandfather. He was very famous then. He said, he's a very honest man. I hope you're as honest as he is. So not all farmers are honest, but he paid me every cent he owed me and he gave me a bonus of a full tank of gas. Okay, so thank you. Once more. Be the grandpa. And I hope Brother didn't hit any horses as he was going to mass. All right, Victor, we're going to talk about Joe Kent. We got to get back to the real world and shut Victor up. No, look, this is lovely. We're going to talk about Joe Kent, the Trump administration official who just quit. What else we have? Some polling. Oh, we got a ton of things. We'll get started with all that when we come back from these important messages. If you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, you might enjoy the Daily Signals flagship show, The Tony Kinnit Cast, the same common sense perspectives you love weekdays at 7pm Eastern. And unlike some of the other evening shows, we work up until show time to bring you the latest breaking news, analysis and good old American star cast. Tom Tillis, I'm pretty sure might have been useful at one time as a doorstop. Find The Tony Kinnit Cast on YouTube, X, radio, TV, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Happy St. Patrick's Day. Happy St. Joseph's Day, whatever you choose to celebrate if both. So Victor, here's the news. I put the darn thing. I can't say damn. That's what you say on other podcasts. Let's not get into these feuds that are going on among our friends and their rights. They're using a vocabulary that should be reserved for the opposition. Yeah. Locker Room Hate is spilling out in broad daylight. Here's a counterterrorism official, Joe Kent previously argued. He quit. He stepped down. Previously argued Iran was a threat to the USA. So he resigned from his national security post over opposition to military action against Iran. Follows earlier public statements in which he warned about threats posed by the country and supported striking its ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities. In announcing his resignation, Kent said Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation and said the war was started, quote, due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. I do admire him. He was a Green Beret combat veteran. He worked for Tulsi Gabber. So I don't know what her attitude because she has made it very clear she doesn't believe in forever wars. This is not a forever war, but I don't understand imminent threat. So what I would ask with all due respect to Joe Kent is would you have supported the Jews support the Soleimani assassination? And was that an imminent threat? I think it was, but there was no precluding. They just saw him there and they knew that he had blood on his hands when. Well, almost a decade earlier, more than a decade when he was responsible for the shape charge shipments. He came up with the idea, I think, that killed, they say 600 Americans, somebody, people in the military will tell you 2,000 and more wounded. Should we have hit them then? Should we hit them when they organized the Tanzania? Clinton didn't go after Iran. Tanzania and Kenya? How about, I don't know, Cobor Towers? Those people were organized and funded probably by Iran. How about the embassy in Beirut, the 241 people in the barracks? It's not that, I don't know what imminent, they've just been doing it and doing it and doing it. And they'll continue to do it. And at some point, every president said, they're not going to get a bomb on my watch. And they get more missiles and get closer to the bomb. And finally, one president said, you know, I'm done with them. I will negotiate with them, but they won't want to negotiate. So all he said was just don't use the missiles, don't build the missiles, and don't get a bomb. And just live peacefully. Just be like Dubai or the UAA, you know, or Kuwait. They have militaries that protect themselves, but they're not trying to be aggressive and take over the Middle East with an ideology. And they said, nope, not going to do it. And so Trump said, okay. And we're in, I don't know, what, 16 days, 17 days? We've tragically lost 14 people, 13? 13. And I understand we're spending a couple of billion dollars a day. But in the long history of warfare, if Trump is able to, as I said earlier, there's three outcomes. There's the Venezuela solution, a strong person comes in and works with us and gets rid of the theocracy and may or may not transition. And then there's the popular uprising, the most desirable, where you so waste their assets. And now we're doing tactical strikes on individual Republican Guard checkpoints and things. We just killed Larry and Johnny. His, his daughter, remember, was a professor at Emory University. They hate us so much. And we think there's where they were so decadent that they send their children to be educated and then hope they can be professors at our schools. And the third is that, it might as well talk about that in a larger context, the third is that they do so much damage that they feel that they have neutered Iran for a decade. That is not a very inviabil choice, in my opinion. We're getting very close, I think, to pushing them over the ledge and letting, we're just wiping out, Israel's wiping out the command and control and we are pretty much destroying their assemblies, factories, naval, their military assets. And at some point, I think the people will, will take it in their own hands, especially if something simultaneously happens in Cuba. So I think would be very dangerous to stop now is what I'm suggesting. Well, wouldn't it, and likewise, Victor, maybe not likewise, would it have been dangerous not to do anything at all? I still cannot get my arms around the thought that sooner or later, and that, and if it's either, that's true. It will be sooner or will be later, but it will be. They would have done something catastrophic to the U.S. They reached their apex of influence and power during the Biden years. They basically ran the Red Sea. They took their transport planes and they supplied the Houthis with thousands of missiles and drones. And the Houthis under Biden controlled the Red Sea. He didn't do anything. They attacked, I don't know what the, I hear 300, they attacked two to 300 American installations in Syria and Iraq, the Iranians through their proxies. We didn't even do anything. And everybody's look, put their finger in the wind and said, they are the strong people and the Americans will be out soon. Let's not get near the Americans. The Abraham's Accord stopped. And then Hezbollah bragged that they had 200,000, I don't know if that was true, missiles and rockets. And they were going to have a ring of fire. They said it every week, we're going to have a ring of fire. We're going to blast them on the North and the Houthis will come across the desert and then Hamas. They thought they had three Iranian proxies plus these people in Syria and Iraq. And everybody in the Arab world was terrified. And Joe Biden said, please, please, please get back in the Iran deal. We have to, no, we're not going to do it. Okay. Well, if you don't want to get back in the Iran deal, then we're going to lift all the sanctions. How is that? And let you make them another $100 billion on oil. That's what we're going to do to you. And that's what he did. And that was their highest point of influence. And they're 40 at that time, 43, 44, 45 year history. And they had Chinese and Russian. China was in knee deep in Iran. Russia was running Syria. And North Korea was supplying all of the nuclear technology via China. And there was no stopping it. And so we knew what it was going to be. And Trump came in and he, the first, he tried the 10 days, they was raised to the 10 day strikes. He did the 24 hour stuff when he thought he had nuclearized them. He thought he sent them a signal and don't continue. We set you back on your nuclear. And what did they do? They shifted their attention to building another thousand missile, ballistic missiles. Well, when the, even the Biden administration says, don't, don't has to have a, has to have a follow up. I don't know what Kent means when he's, they tried to kill Trump. They tried to kill Pompeo. They put a, they put a hit out on John Bolton. They tried to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington, DC. This isn't aside from what they're doing. They just killed 30,000 people. They butchered them. And we were told that there was genocide and all this going on in Gaza was a war zone. This wasn't a war zone. They just took and went in and slaughtered their own people. So there was a lot, there was a lot of provocations. And I, I don't, I don't, I don't see why a person joins an administration when you know what the administration is going to do because the internet, as we're reminded now, Jack, is a wash with clips of John, of Donald Trump going back to, have you seen these things? I have. We've got to take out a right, right at 1980. He should have taken out Iran after the hostages. You've got to take Carg Aylona. He's been saying it for years. And he was never a mega isolationist. He never said that. He said forever wars that were fought stupidly. He was a Jacksonian from the get go. No better friend, no worse enemy, don't tread on me. We don't want to go in there, but you keep pushing it, pushing it. Soleimani, ISIS, Baghdadi, keep pushing it, keep cutting people's heads off, keep killing Americans. We're going to hit you. And then we're going to say, make you great by sea. It wouldn't want to be you. And we don't want to get an endless ground war. That was what he always said he was going to do. I don't understand it. You get your take in a second on some of the ongoing analysis, but first, I want to tell our listeners and viewers about Hillsdale College's Learn Like Charlie campaign until his untimely and tragic death conservative activist Charlie Kirk was a longtime friend and student of Hillsdale College president, Dr. Larry Arn. Charlie understood that learning shapes character, creates courage, and changes your life. And this is true for every American, but before he could lead, Charlie Kirk learned. Although Charlie never earned a college degree, he was relentless in his pursuit of the truth. With the help of Hillsdale College, he studied the classics, the American founding, and the Bible through Hillsdale College's free online courses. These are real-cost courses taught by actual Hillsdale professors. The great Victor Davis Hansen, I think, has two or three of such courses. Charlie's faith, courage, and character were shaped by the things that he studied and the free online courses he took with Hillsdale College. Start right now with Hillsdale College's brand new course on logic and rhetoric. Learn from real Hillsdale College professors how to speak masterfully and make a powerful point and how clear thinking leads to better decision making and more effective speech. Go to hillsdale.edu slash vdh to enroll. It's totally free. Pick up the mic, carry it forward, learn like Charlie. Start right now at hillsdale.edu slash vdh. And we thank the good people from Hillsdale College for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. At the risk of our listeners having to hear, continue to hear my voice, Victor. I want to get your take on this piece by Mohanad Salum. It's an Al Jazeera. The headline is the U.S.-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. And here's why. So this is what he writes, two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the dominant narrative has settled into a comfortable groove. The United States and Israel stumbled into a war without a plan. Iran is retaliating across the region. Oil prices are surging. The world is facing another Middle Eastern quagmire. U.S. senators have called it a blunder. The cable news has tallied the crises. Commentators are now warning of a long war. The course is loud and in some respects understandable. War is ugly. And this one has imposed real costs on millions of people across the Middle East, including the city I live in. This is I being Mohanad Salum. But this narrative is wrong. Not because the costs are imaginary, but because the critics are measuring the wrong things. They're cataloging the price of the campaign while ignoring the strategic ledger, final paragraph here. When you look at what has actually happened to Iran's principal instruments of power, its ballistic missile arsenal, its nuclear infrastructure, air defenses, its navy, its proxy command architecture, the picture is not one of U.S. failure. It is one of systematic phased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades. Boy, a nice wrap up there to me. What's your take on that? Well, two things. The first, he's absolutely correct. If you and I had this conversation three weeks ago and I said to you, Jack, I think Trump's going to go into Iran and I have a prediction to make. And you'd say, well, what is that? I'd say in the first two weeks, he's going to kill Khamenei himself and Lauren Johnny and the Soleimani that is running the Ptagesh version of the Revolutionary Guard. And he's going to get rid of most of the military commanders. He's going to destroy their entire air force, all of the missile defense, along with Israel. They're going to make it almost impossible for an Iranian leader to show his face because he'll be dead and they're going to destroy his navy and they're going to destroy most of the remaining nuclear project and the, not just the 3000 missiles and say eight or 9000 drones, but the subterranean fabrication assembly plants. He's going to do all that tragically. We're going to lose 13 people and that's going to be the first two weeks work. And then you would have said, man, what are you just nutty victory? You can't go into Iran and take on a country of 90 million people and do all that in two weeks and not suffer. That's what we suffered in one afternoon in Iraq or Afghanistan. So it was a pretty, he's right, but the question is more interesting. Why is he writing that? Because he lives and writes and and breeze Al Jazeera, which is a construct of the Qatari government, which is a triangulate. It's right across the Gulf from Iran and its basic attitude frustrates Americans because they've got all this money and they give it American universities and they triangulate. They hate Israel. They don't like the United States, but they're terrified as is Kuwait, as is Saudi, as is all of them, Oman, because they're right next to this lunatic Shia regime that hates Sunnis and hates their money and hates their success. So as long as Iran was, what's the word, marketable, flexible, fluid, and they paid them off, Al Jazeera said, let's not have a fight. These are fellow Muslims. We get along with Iran. It would be very unwise because they know Iran would slaughter them and destroy them. I understand that and they have oil to ship out. But as soon as the war started, this article would not have been written the first week. It's written after the second week because Iran decided not just to hit U.S. bases, but to destroy the oil income of Ghathar and the Emirates and Oman, et cetera, et cetera, and their tourist potential hitting hotels, hitting airports, and then lying as they always do by saying, we're only going after Americans. So they're looking at this and they're thinking, take the finger and the wind. Who is winning right now? Oh my gosh, these crazy Shia Persians are breaking their word. They're hitting this. They're going to destroy our economy. We can't get oil out. We don't have a pipeline like Saudi. This is terrible and they've ruined our tourist industry and we're, let's unleash Al Jazeera and we'll do this because we're afraid that the Jews in Israel and the United States might quit. And if they quit, we really like what they've done. We haven't praised them yet. But if they quit, they might not come back. We might get another Biden or Obama. So we've got to jump in and risk everything and praise them to the skies, not on what they're doing, but how they are doing, how brilliant it is, how successful they're just almost there. If they just push a little bit, they can destroy this menace and overthrow that government and then we're safe. And that's their ass. That's what they're doing now. I don't blame them, but that's what they're doing. It happens to be true, but the truth never bothers the Qataris. They're allowing the truth to be expressed because they think there's a good chance now that Iran could actually fall if, if, if another two or three weeks the Americans increased, increased the stakes and they don't leave. But if they leave, they're terrified. So they don't want them to leave. And that's what that article is saying. Why would you leave? You're very successful. Don't listen to people. You've been doing a great job Americans in Israel. Just keep doing it and protect us and get rid of that menace. And then maybe we'll be friends and not triangulate and go behind your back and pay people off and unleash El Zerah on you. And as far as the Palestinians, we never cared about the Palestinians. They're just useful. So you know what? Forget about the Palestinian. You know who cares about Palestinians or our Democrat party voters. And we're going to get your take on that. Absolutely. Yeah. This is a new poll out. We'll, we'll get your take on that and more when we come back from these important messages. Since the founding of America 250 years ago, many things have changed. But some things never do. The commitment of husband and wife. The importance of passing along our values to our children. The faithfulness of God. Some wonder how we can ensure America will continue to thrive. As long as we keep first things first, we've only just begun. America, the beautiful. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words, recording on March 17th. This episode is up on Thursday, the 19th. Victor, here's the headline. This is an NBC news poll. Israel standing plummets among Democrats fueling primaries on the left. American voters feelings on Israel and Palestine territories have shifted dramatically in recent years and the sea change is transforming the Democratic party and shaping its primaries. A new NBC news poll underscores the depths of the shift. More registered voters view, view, view Israel negatively than positively. A change from a few years ago. The change has been especially pronounced among independents and Democrats fueling divided congressional primaries in 2026 and potentially shaping the party's 2028 presidential contest when asked whether their sympathies lie more with Israel or the Palestinians. 40% of registered voters say they side more with the Israelis while 39% with Palestinians. This split stood at 45% for Israel and 13% for Palestinians when NBC conducted this poll. Your last one was in reference to Democrats. Well, actually, by this, it's everybody. Yeah, that's what I thought. Yeah. Well, I think I said that a couple of times. That just face the reality. If you're a Jewish American and you want to be on the national ticket, I don't think you're going to make it. I don't think you'll ever see a Joe Lieberman run as vice president again. Josh Shapiro has no future in an anti-Semitic party. He can be as moderate as he wants. He can try to say he's a Mike Dukakis technocrat. He's not going to make it. He's right in the middle of an anti-Semitic party. And I don't think you'll see any major Jewish American. And Chuck Schumer thinks he's cute and he can deal with these crazy socialists in this party that are anti-Semitic and hate Israel. He's never going to be reelected. He can't be reelected. And that state, as far as the Democrats, belonged to AOC in Mondami. And they hate him. They hate him because he's Jewish and they hate him because he's not quite as crazy as they are. So that's what the party is today. They favor a terrorist organization that originally and till recently, and before they tried to camel in their constitution, said they wanted to destroy the Jewish state. That was Hamas over a constitutional government, parliamentary government, freedom. Any of those people go to the Middle East and they say, I'm driving around Jordan. We're going to go look at Lebanon. Oh, where should we stay tonight? Should we have a choice between staying in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq? Oh, why don't we stay at the King David in Israel? So everybody knows that. It's an oasis of freedom and protection and security, constitutionality, and everything around it is an autocracy and a nightmare. And that's who the Democrats like now. And they're kind of weird. They, it's kind of like the proverbial roll the ball up the hill. And they've tried so hard to legitimize all these people who kill Jews and hate Israel. And now they're at the very top of the mountain and they're just letting it roll down gravity on the other side and it is picking up momentum. And it's got, it's affected a lot of them, the Republican side too, because all of a sudden people that you and I know that this summer praised the Trump strike or now they're defecting. And Kent didn't really have to say, all he had to say is I really, if he, all he had to say was I tried to run for Congress twice. I came close. I really appreciate what Donald Trump did. He went and endorsed me. He made sure that I had help from the national party. I served with the distinction and honor and director of national intelligence. But we have just a policy disagreement, but that does not, instead he had to say that basically Donald Trump was a pawn of Israel. And that tells me that he thought that there was some currency to be had. And so all these people now are looking, and there's another motivation that we haven't talked about, Jack, when let's say Tucker, if you look at the people that Tucker's had on his show or that he has highlighted or promoted, I think 30% of them you would call leftist. You know what I mean? And when you're on the right, and Candace too is popular among many circles on the left, when you're on the right and you start insidiously and continuously bringing up Israel and do loyalty, all of that, people on the left say, well, there's two nice things I like about this. One, they're useful idiots in my view, because even though I don't like them, and they're useful in splitting apart my enemies, but number two, they kind of have been persuaded by us. And we're going to give them avenues. We're going to put guests on their shows. We're going to let them talk to people on the left. And a lot of the people in the Arab community love these people now in the radical Arab community. So if you're a MAGA person and you decide that you're going to come out as a person who believes that Israel pulls the strings and the United States controls the Trump administration, and Jews in America have due loyalties and they're conspiratorial, you know that there's going to be people in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, ABC, CBS, CNN, MS, all those people, university campuses, they're going to like you. If Tucker gave a talk at Columbia, I don't think they'd storm the doors as they would nine months ago. No. But if a pro-lifer came, they'd, oh my gosh. You know, it's very strange, just analytically, it's very strange to watch this thing. And it gets back to Donald Trump. And when I said he has about two or three, he, we're at a crisis of wills right now. Iran is saying we are a rope-a-dope strategy. We don't have high rises. We don't have your decadent Western lifestyles. We can live with nothing. And you can turn our country into rubble, but we'll still be here because we shoot people, we rape people, we put the fear of God in through our own people. And we, whether we like death and death better than life and you like life better than death, and that's the difference. And we are saying, Trump's saying, well, we'll see about that. We're going to break you and let the people vent their wrath at what you've done to them for 47 years. But I have constraints. Number one, the midterms. If we lose this, I'm just imagining that I'm Trump now. If I'm Trump and I lose the midterms, I'm going to be impeached, which will derail my whole last two years. That's not, they're going to get every subpoena. They're going to go after Don Jr., Eric, all the people around them, they're going to bring them in and saying they're profiting, cryptocurrency, defense contracts, Middle East. That's going to be, that's going to make the Hunter Biden circus look amateur, what they're going to do, those guys. And then in addition, there's going to be no legislation. Trump will be impeached if he loses the midterms. Second thing, if gas and oil, I mean, nobody says right now, gas is still cheaper than at the high point of the Biden administration when nobody yelled at Biden, but it is. It's gone up about 50 or 60 cents. But if it continues to go, there's going to be pressure for Trump to stop because of the economy. The thing that will save him in the midterms are two things. If he can get out of Iran and see that government either so mauled that it's toppling or it is actually toppling, plus a quiet revolution in Cuba where Cuban Americans basically take over the country again, and Venezuela, and then you get the economy going, he will survive the midterm. That's number two. That's that constraint. So he's got to get the streets of Ramos open. He's got to get the oil moving. He's got to get, and then he's got the maga schism. He's got to get everybody united for the midterms. He's got, and for the next, his successor. And you cannot win in this 50-50 nation unless you get everybody. But if you get everybody on the same team, you've got some problems. Because a lot of people on your team believe that Nick Fuentes isn't that bad of a guy. And so you've got all these pressures, and then you've got the Europeans and all the triangulators, the allies. And Europe, as we saw, said, you see, Sturmer, what do you say? We are going to watch this situation closely and protect our interests and Cyprus, but this is not our war. It's not your war. It was not our war during the Falklands in 82, when you went halfway across the world to maintain British supremacy and the reputation of the British Navy over what? Mr. Sturmer, are you British trying to tell me the Falklands were more strategically necessary to the world than Iran was? Because you went to war with that, and you had nuclear tip porpetos and rockets on your submarine, and you were out of fuel. And we gave you two million gallons of fuel. It saved you. And then we gave you the most sophisticated intelligence, satellite intelligence that told you where every Argentine asset was. And then we gave a marine carrier. We put it on ready. So if you lose one of your carriers, this is yours. Take it. We gave you everything. And that really hurt our interest in Latin America, because we were trying to get the Soviets out of there and restore the Reagan version of the Monroe Doctrine. And you repay us and say, this is not our war. Trump was right about that when he said, you know, I'm getting sick of NATO. And then Spain kicks us out. And then all of a sudden we Trump should say to them, well, Ukraine, I guess that's your war. Huh? It's your war. You negotiate with Putin. You do that. You rearm. Do all that. He's not going to do that. He's going to go and try to help NATO as he should. And he's tried, you know, try to recreate deterrence and scream and yell at them so that they defend themselves. But gosh, Victor, if you were picking sides, it's a schoolyard. It's going to be a basketball game in the nations of the world are playing. And America is picking its first teammate. Who is it picking? Who? Yeah. Would it be Israel? Yes, I was just going to say it. Yeah. Israel is this little country with 10 plus million people. It has 300 front line fighter planes, best pilots, except for ours or maybe comparable to ours in the world. They've got more fighters in Germany. They got more fighters in Italy. They got more jet fighters than does France. They got more jet fighters than Britain. They have a better army than any of those four countries. They know how to fight their masters of military technology. They're pro-American and they understand what existential wars are about. And sometimes they don't like what we do. And this is really gets me when people on the right say that they engineered the Iraq war of 2003. They didn't want that war. They kept saying, if you want to win a war, go after Iran. Saddam is not a mortal enemy compared to the Iranians. But the point is, when they disagreed with us, they didn't really grandstand. If you said the America was at war with Iran and Israel did not want to participate, believe me, the Israelis would secretly stealthy allow us to use their bases and stuff like that. So yeah, that's our ally. And then we have some good friends like Argentina temporarily. And we have the Japanese are good. I think the Australians, if they get a conservative government are very good. And the South Koreans can be good if they have a conservative government. Yeah, the days of, I mean, we would have thought the days Britain and Canada were, that's another thing if I could rant just for a second. It's your show. We have this myth that we were just alike and we were friends. And then Trump came and destroyed the Canadian, American special relationship. If you look at what Canada has been doing, it didn't act like if ally or friend, it really didn't. It was critical. It had a year EU criticism like attack on the United States. It was running up $61 billion in surplus trade in a supposedly idealistic free trade zone, kind of a post NAFTA thing. We're not supposed to do that. There were what 32 nations in NATO. It and Spain had the lowest contribution. It wouldn't even spend 2%. The Canadian attitude was, well, that's North American Treaty Organization. Well, it's mostly Europe and the United States represents us. And we don't have a Navy. They had the fourth largest Navy. They were wonderful in World War II. They had no Navy. They have no, they don't even have the F 35s. They've reneged on that or they're not going to get them or they can't get them. Who knows? And we asked them to get ice cutters and help them deliver, defend the so-called Northwest Passage or they won't even do that. Now they've got what, what was it this year? Our former colleagues at National Review pointed out they've had 83,000 euthanasia deaths. One out of every, 5% of everyone who dies in Canada, it dies from the MAID program. And then you look at their health system. If you want a brain surgery, it's about a year wait. If you want what I had, if I was a Canadian right now and I said, I have a 7.3 centimeter ground glass opacity with a three centimeter invasive tumor in the middle, can I get it out? Yes, yes, of course you can. It'll be six months from now. I would have been dead. It's a warped system. Yeah, it is. And then you get the impression that one of the reasons they like euthanasia is a person comes in and says, I have stage four breast cancer, but I've heard about this immunotherapy in the United States. It can give me two or three years. Is there any chance? Nah, you know, that would just be miserable. Why don't you just sit down here in this couch and just think all day about it and we'll save a million bucks and you'll, you won't have to go through the vomiting and the chemo or the immunotherapy reaction. That's what they're at. That's, that's the subtext of it. So, and then you get with the open border and then their immigration policy. I mean, that truck driver who killed what, 16 people in Canada, Canada, did you see his defense? He said that he didn't want to go back and be deported because his kid was three years old and would have to breathe Indian air. Your kid is breathing. 16 young kids are not breathing because of you. So everything about them has their end, their end. I love Canadians. I know a lot of them, some of them in my family, but my point is they're indistinguishable from Europeans as far as their attitude toward us. It's condescending. It's sort of, well, you're a rough, rowdy Roman legionnaire and we're a Greek philosopher and we'll tell you how, what you should do with that power mostly because we are more strategically analytical than you are. And that's how they, they act toward us. They don't pull their weight. They could. So I think what Trump, why they hate Trump is not that he polarized them, that he took off this scab and he tore it off and he said, this is a scab, but you don't know what's underneath it. Once you understand euthanasia and once you understand their immigration policy and once you understand their attitude toward NATO and once you understand their trade surpluses and once you understand all of their asymmetrical laws and once you see this state sponsored anti-Americanism, you'll be very upset and I'm going to expose it to you. They haven't had a normal man, prime, anybody in governments in Stephen Harper who was a wonderful prime minister. I guess it was there what, nine years and longer. He was, he was a absolute world-class leader. He was pro-Israel. He was pro, he tried to rearm the best he could for NATO and then what do they do? He was the last Canadian, put it that way, I'm, I'm concerned, the last old Canadian of old Canada and we're not going to see anybody like him. Well, Victor, we're going to, we're going to head south to America and even further south to some red states, but first, first for our viewers and our listeners, if you've studied enough history, you start to see a pattern. Nations don't lose their way overnight. They drift through debt and division until one day you realize the foundations you thought were permanent were never permanent at all. Today, America is spending at levels once reserved for wartime. We've normalized deficits that would have stunned earlier generations and policy makers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention, more printing, more distortion. Here's the historical truth. Every society that's pushed its currency beyond discipline eventually paid a price. The wise never waited for collapse. They prepared for the correction and that's why so many thoughtful Americans, especially those nearing retirement or in retirement, and we hope those who watch and listen to the show, are reallocating part of their wealth into something that has outlasted every paper experiment in human history, physical gold, not only a speculation, but as insulation. The reputation here at Victor Davis Hansen and his own word matters to us and that's why we're partnering with Allegiance Gold, a company distinguished by integrity, reliability, and an A plus rating for the Better Business Bureau for years they've guided Americans through transparent education and longstanding relationships built on trust. 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Victor, I'm going to cram these headlines together just to get your take on it before we go to our final break and then another topic, but no surprise, I think, to anyone who listens or watches the show. Here's two headlines, one from both from the Daily Mail. Two more Wall Street Giants flee blue states as they head south. So it turns out the Yamaha Motor Corporation, which is based in Cyprus, California, is moving to Canisaw, Georgia after nearly five decades, and Exxon Mobile, which is technically headquartered in New Jersey, is heading south to Texas. And then another headline, Woke Seattle kills its golden goose. A Starbucks is accused of plotting a huge office move to deep red Tennessee. It's got office space there for several hundred, but the belief is that Starbucks is actually getting thousands of spaces now in Tennessee and might as a precursor, it seems, to moving the whole damn operation. There's no proof that it's read, but why would a corporation state in Seattle, in New Jersey, in New York, in Connecticut? I have a really brilliant colleague at Hoover, Josh Rau. I think you know Josh. He wasn't either head of the Trump Economic Advisors in the first term for a while. Very prominent. And he wrote a very incisive article calibrating what California is going to lose in revenue by exiling these billionaires. And it's in the 20, 30, 40 billion dollar range. It's scary. It's going to cost the state a lot of money. But you know what's happening is, it's kind of reminding me of 1850s in the United States when the Missouri Compromise and all of these great compromises really made the situation worse because they created this self-selection of settlers and places like Missouri especially. But every state that was a border, a potential border state, whether it was Kentucky or Missouri or as Joe Biden bragged about his Delaware being a slave state, I think it was a border state, people started to self-select to go try to move and change the ideological tempo of that particular region. So the South, people in the North who were sympathetic with slavery and there were a lot were going South and the people in the South who knew that if you were a Republican, you were doomed, were going Northward. And this was over a 30-year period. It was getting more and more polarized. And what's happening in this country right now is in the blue states, because they're rife with fraud and they will never ever prosecute the people involved, partly because of DEI, but partly because they're high in the Democratic Party, they're broke. And their answer to that is not cut, cut, reform, reform, save, trim, but tax, tax, tax. So they're losing the billionaires and they're losing the upper middle class professionals, 300,000 of them in California. And it's just not a matter of money. When you, my wife and I were talking the other day, I went into a lab and I had an appointment and they said, you don't have a prescription. I said, I do have a prescription. She asked me my name and everything. So they wouldn't give me a blood test. It was pretty important blood test. And I got back and I called the national office of this particular lab and they said, well, she used my middle name. It was in the computer. I was already in all she had to do was just say what, I gave her my driver's license. So she didn't even check. She just said, well, there's Victor Hansen and I said, well, I'm Victor Davis Hansen. Maybe they, no, no, you can't go, get out basically. But what I'm trying to say is there's people at all levels in California, they're incompetent. And that's because year after year after year, doctors, lawyers, engineers, technicians who are making a hundred to 300,000 and they're not wealthy given the housing prices and cost here. They just, I can't take it anymore. It's not just that they tax me. They hate my guts. The more they tax me, the more they revile me. These people are crazy. I'm leaving. I'm leaving Illinois. I'm leaving New York. I'm leaving Washington state and they're going to places and places like Texas and Tennessee and Florida. They come on down. The more you come with all that capital, the less likely it is we're ever going to have an income tax and we're going to let you to create more wealth. And the red states are getting more conservative and entrepreneurial and libertarian and free and the blue states are, but the question is not that they're changing alone. The blue states, of course, are getting more socialist and communist and they'll start confiscating people's money as Mondome will probably do pretty soon. He's always saying he attacks white people more on their property, but they'll go after their 401ks or something. They've already talked about that. When I wrote the Dine Citizen, I read about four articles where people were saying, let's take some 401k money and give them social security credit at a bad deal. But the thing about it is it's not just that they're changing, but one model works and one doesn't. And the problem is the more that the blue model doesn't work, the more it doesn't work. It's impoverishing them and the red states are getting wealthier and more successful. And so it's not sustainable. It's not sustainable. And I don't know either one of two things are going to happen. Either some blue state people are going to say like in California, they're going to elect us, Steve Hilton or somebody. I don't know. They'll have to have a radical change, but it wouldn't be enough because the legislature, it's gerrymandered. Or it's going to be like 1850s, bleeding Kansas and bleeding Missouri and Kansas because they're not compatible systems. You're going to have judges in all of these blue districts that are going to interpret the law in ideological fashion. You're going to have strict construction with some of the red states. You're going to have the same thing with DA. So if you're an American citizen and you go on a subway and you let somebody on fire or you rape a young minor and you happen to be illegal, if you're in a blue state, you're not going to be punished much. If you're in a red state, you're going to be put away for a long time. Can I tell you a headline here on that? Just on that? 20-year-old Muhammad Bakari Shai, this is in Minnesota, Rochester, Minnesota, gets 180 days in jail. He did go to jail. What did he do? He raped two girls under the age of nine. You know what the headline would be. Confused immigrant, bewildered by the intricacies of American popular culture may have aired in some ways and now is a victim of retribution, retributive justice. That's what it is. It's not sustainable. I don't know how it will finally end, but I won't be here. You won't be here, maybe, being much younger than I am. I'll go out fighting. But it's getting scary. It's going to cut families in half and there's going to be... California has 27% of the population was not born in the United States and there's no buddy like Gavin Newsom. He says, celebrate diversity. He doesn't say this. This is an existential challenge, everybody. We've got people from all over the world, different languages, religions, but we have to unite them with one thing, English, American culture and values, and we're going to have a K through 12 civic education. He's not going to do that. Well, let's talk about that based off of a big piece you just wrote. And we'll do that, Victor, when we come back from these final important messages. Hey, folks. We're back. Victor Davis Hansen in his own words on the Daily Signal Network. Want to remind you again, Victor's website, the blade of Perseus, victorhansen.com, where you can read this article that Victor wrote. It's titled, Our New Ungracious Immigrants. Here's just one sentence, the question, the final irony, why do so many criminals believe they can enter the U.S. illegally and get away with murder? But Victor, given what you were just saying, why do so many Americans, born here, born bred, no question that they're Americans, why do they hate America? The solution can't be, if the existing Americans hate the country, they grew up in. Because they'd never been assimilated. So you had the two Afghan and Turkish Americans, whose second generation, their parents came from Turkey and Afghanistan, and they know that if they make two IEDs and go to New York to kill a bunch of people, first of all, they don't think they're going to get much sentencing because they feel that somebody will say it's Islamophobia. And they got, they absorbed in their school that they are protected species under DEI. And they know that when a Muslim shouts Allah Akbar, then somebody is going to contextualize that and say it's not a hate crime and they're not going to serve something. And they said, this is, I'm not being sarcastic or ironic. When they did this, those two, they said they wanted to be more famous than the Boston Marathon Bomber Brothers, a Sardinia. And they said that not just because they killed three in Boston and wounded hundreds, but because Rolling Stone put the surviving brother on that photo with photogenic like he was sexy, sexy, on the cover. And they know it because people in that community know that when Major Hassan at Fort Hood, who had given years of evidence that he hated the country that he was born in when his Palestinian parents were naturalized, when he yelled Allah Akbar and shot 13 dead of his own fellow soldiers and wounded, I guess it was 30 something, he knew that that would be contextualized. And what did the Obama administration do and the Pentagon? There's no evidence, Jack, that this was a politically motivated terrorist act. And what did George Casey, a fine soldier, had a chief of staff of the US Army? What did he say? Well, as bad as this tragedy is, it would be as equal a tragedy if this imperiled our diversity, equity inclusion program. No, it wouldn't. It would be a good reason to get rid of it and assimilate people. And you could so that's the problem that the message has gone out that you can be an opportunistic American. So if you're Mr. Lara and Johnny, I should excuse me the late Mr. Lara and Johnny, the terrorist kingpin that was basically ruling around and you hate the great Satan so much, you send your daughter to the United States. And she's educated here. Of course, you're saying that every woman in Iran must have covering, head coverings and can't be exposed. And you're sending your daughter to a place where it's the great Satan, whether it's pornography or whatever. But that's okay, because she's going to get a Western education to be prominent. And she may be a vital asset to the Iranian cause. And then she's hired. Who would ever hire her? They hired her at Emory University. She's the daughter of one of the most cutthroat persons who'd right before he died, threatened to kill the president of the United States. He said, Trump better be careful, we're going to kill him. And yet she's a professor for a while at Emory Medical School. And the answer is because she and her father sized up Americans. They don't care. And there's people in the United States that hate the United States. And we asked nothing of the Dearborn community. So we had people from, and then we had that protest in your city, New York, where they were protesting right in the middle of the war on behalf of Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran. I, I, of course, I agree with you who couldn't, but I guess my desire is to put more attention on the people that hate America, include Americans, right? Which you've said is not only this. These were all, Jack, they were all Americans. Well, true. But the white liberal girls who were rallying in hares colored purple and, and, you know, tattoos galore. They were tweaking, give them credit. They were tweaking an ice office the other day. Very beautiful young women. Yeah. Do they like America? No. They hate America also. So that's why they've been running the education system for 50 years. And don't think it is. How, how that works out in the real world. The Iranian surviving, if there are any surviving leaders say, you know what, just keep it up. Just rope it up and rope it up because we've got a lot of allies over there and they, they're going to put so much pressure on Trump and they like us better. John Kerry likes us better. We remember that he helped us when Trump was president the first time he was negotiating behind Trump's back. Come on. Come on. Come on. That's what, that's how they, they view it as an asset. And why wouldn't they when we have a citizen, a naturalized citizen? So we get, Aileen Omar comes over here and her father was a, an elite, a wealthy crooked corrupt general who was participating in the genocide perpetrated, perpetrated by the Somali government. She comes over here. She says she surprised how trashy the United States is. She probably allegedly supposedly purportedly married her brother. She never has said, I didn't do that and I'm willing to take a DNA test and he will too, to show we're not related. She won't do that. But she probably violated immigration law. Somehow she ended up with $30 million of network. I don't know how her sister was knee deep in the Somali welfare extortion fraud, whatever you want to call it. And she has said, let me think what she said. She said that the dictator ship in the United States elected government, of course, is just as bad as in Somalia that we're one of the worst countries in the world. It's all about the Benjamin's baby, Benjamin Netanyahu and the $100 bill, Benjamin Franklin, and so on and so on. And she's the face of the new Democratic party. She's an out and out anti-Semite. She hates the United States and she probably came here. This is what I don't understand when I say she probably came here. Why did the Sarnab brothers come here? Why did she come here? Why did Rashida Tlaib's parents come here? Why did the person that killed that heroic ROTC instructor, why did he come from Sierra Leone here? Where his parents did? Why did he want to be a citizen? Why at the Old Dominion? Why did the person who rammed the car in, in Michigan, whose brother in the New York country? Well, he did it because his brother killed it. No, they were Hezbollah terrorists. Why would we allow a Hezbollah terrorist family member to come into this country? And why did we let this guy from Afghanistan's parents and the tur- what- why do we do that? And why do they do this? Because they think, A, there's not going to be any consequence to it, and B, there's half the country on the left is going to praise us for doing this, and three, we're on the victimized oppressed side of the binary, and therefore we get special attention and deference and exemption. And that's how it works out. Lots of cash, lots of cash related to it. If they just had one judge that says, okay, we found you guilty of putting two IEDs, and I have sent you to 50 years with no parole. And then you had a governor of the state, it's a federal, I don't know if that would be a state or federal, say a federal crime, then the federal, this person will never be commuted or pardoned. That would be a deterrent, but they don't think that's going to happen. You know, really don't. New York under Cuomo as governor, he created this terrible, he's talked about parole, this terrible parole board. And I think they have released 40 to 50 cop killers over the years. If you've killed a cop, you should have been executed yourself, but there's no capital punishment in New York. Okay, life in prison, there's no life in prison anymore, even for a cop killer. Look at the, what was the name, DeCarlo's Brown. He was let out. He killed the Ukrainian woman that slid her to the throat. People stepped over her like she was a piece of trash, walked on by while she bled to death. He won't be in prison long. Yeah. Well, Victor, we're going to wrap up. I just want to make, mention one thing. I'm happy for you in one sense. Not happy the reason you don't fly anymore is because, be a medical reasons, but you're kind of sick of flying. You've told us many times about your terrible experiences, but Victor, if you were still in flying mode, Mama Mia, the lines you'd have to be waiting on at, in these airports today would, would pop. It's not funny that Donald Trump had reportedly in the fourth quarter, approximation of 5.2 economic growth, GDP. And you see, it was vastly downgraded due to the government shutdown in the fourth quarter, which was by design. Longest shutdown in country, only one purpose for it. And that was to punish Donald Trump. So the economy would go into recession before the midterm. And now we have this other shutdown has nothing to do with department. ICE or any of the border controls, they're funded for three years. They know that it will not, they say they're doing it for ICE. Originally they said they wanted to negotiate, but their price was pretty high. They wanted the firing of Kristi Noem. And they, she basically was forced out and they said, ah, that's not enough. And they're doing the same thing. They want a shutdown. They want chaos because they have no agenda. And if they do have an agenda, which they don't, nobody would vote for it. So their attitude is, I got to create so much chaos that you, American voter, get in a fetal position, put your hands over your ears and say, make it all go away. Oh, worked in 2020. Yes, it did. And we'll find an old Joe Biden from Scranton. Maybe it'll be Gavin. It won't be Shapiro. Yeah, it won't be Shapiro, but it might be Gavin. We'll, we'll slap him around and say, no, no, no, you're Edmund G Brown, Jerry Brown, you're a midstream old Democrat. You're not a radical. You can be as radical as you want when you're going to be, when you get elected, but you're going to fake it. Like you're going to have, remember you had Charlie Kirk on your podcast, well, you'll have those podcasts once you get nominated. That's what they do. And then, barring that, they will open the borders like you won't believe if they get elected. They'll just open them and they'll say, we want not 12 million, we want 30 million. Because they look at all of these groups and they think, wow, if I was out, I'm Karen and I'm, I don't want to use that term. People have written me not to disparage their name, but this certain profile of a white affluent, urban, suburban, radical, leftist that is foul mouth, then can't even talk about Trump without going crazy and has all of these ideological left-wing ideas that never pertain to herself. As far as their own, her own lifestyle, she's got a nice car, a nice home, exquisite taste, but she goes out in the street and she looks and says, well, these, these poor immigrants, they're burning the flag of the country. They don't want to go back to, I mean, they want, they're burning the flag of the country. They want to stay in them. They're waving the one they don't, this is my kind of people. I'm going to go join them and protest. Very funny, they're, they say they're on behalf of Mexican illegal aliens and South American, but every time I see them on television, they're spitting, yelling, screaming at somebody who's Mexican American and ICE. The demographics of the ICE, it's, it's in the Border Patrol, it's well more than 12% of the Mexican American or 10% of the demographic, it's about 20%. And let's just say it's Spanish speaking ICE agents are very patriotic, they're very courageous, and their main antagonists are wealthy white suburban women who spit at them and yell at them and curse them. Miranda Devine was mocking on ex this Thomas Friedman article in the New York Times about going back to Minnesota and being so proud of what was going on there and the, the, the tremendous things these people were doing to fight ICE, including like women trading breast milk, you know, for the kids, like this was some side of civil society on the left and how they take on and fight ICE. These people are just, they're whack jobs, but they're dangerous whack jobs, they're dangerous. It's, it's like when they had that alternate, they had that show, you know, when they wall walked out and those guys were dressed up in puppet uniforms and they were this, that one guy who had crashed the, the church and tried to disrupt it, he was on the stage screaming and yelling obscenities. And then we saw, I mentioned this, I'll be kind of frank, I'm not judgmental, but I wouldn't say she was especially attractive, but she puts her rear end in the face of an ICE agent and then torps her rear end as if she's sexually desirable and filthy minded and this is supposed to, I guess send the message, I am so desirable, but I'm untouchable, so I'll get right next to you and arouse you, but I'm forbidden fruit. And he's probably thinking, oh my God, I don't really know if I can engage in sexual relations for 50 years. Poke, poke my eyes out, please. So it's, it's tragic. And where do these people come from? They come from the university. That was one thing about Trump, you got to give him credit. He, unlike the first term he said, you know, we dealt with symptoms, not causes. We didn't deal, we just tried to cut out tumors. We didn't deal with the DNA. The DNA was the media and it's the universities and it's the corporate boardrooms and it's the foundations and the big blue chip law and he understood that. Universities are mostly the culpable. They're the ones that train our high school, grammar school teachers. They're the ones that take, they can take any farm kid from the San Joaquin Valley and turn them into a communist in a year. Right. Yeah. The ones that give the finger at the Pledge of Allegiance. Hey Victor, we've come to the end here except for the usual end of the show business. I have a couple of comments I want to read. One is from Jimmy Olsen Blues who writes, I love VDH and Jack and this insane upside down fallen world. God bless you both for being angels of wisdom. Jimmy, there's one angel of wisdom here and that's Victor, but I appreciate your kind words. Then there's a common sense 20 who writes, I enjoy hearing about Victor's Swedish ancestry. I can confirm that Scandinavians even in the current generation don't show much emotion and do not get excited about much. My ancestry is mostly Norwegian with Swedish and German mixed in. I lived in northeast Iowa on a farm that has been in our family since 1854 and still attend the same church all my ancestors attended. I feel very fortunate to have such a strong connection to the past. I hope I can hold on to the farm and we'll be able to pass it on to my children. Thank you for another great episode. And then along the same lines, Kevin Mujah 8105 writes, I enjoy what Dr. Hansen says and the common sense of it, but I absolutely love the family stories. One of my favorites is the uncle that cut off his thumb and went back to work and Dr. Hansen's father had to take the uncle to the hospital. Personally, I would pay for at least one entire episode dedicated to family stories. I can tell you that my twin brother ground off his finger tip and he went to the emergency room and we were packing fruit and I looked around three hours later, there he was. Back to work. Back to work. Can I add in with an anecdote? I want a question because I'm interested in this catholic question. Oh, yes. What color are devils? I thought they were red, but we're talking about childhood stories. I was at Eric White Grammar School and it was a predominantly Mexican American students and there was a very bright girl, Lydia, I think she's still around. So I won't mention her last name. And one day she came back from catechism. On Fridays, the entire school was bust to catechism. There was like 20 people who were Protestant and they let us have the run of the school. We called you the public school kids. Yes. And we got frozen fish sticks on Fridays because you couldn't eat meat. So we all love the Catholic kids. But anyway, she came back and she had this book and she said that the devils were green. And I was like 12 and I had been pulling pictures off of Dorey's illustrated, you know, black and white cutouts of Dante's Inferno. And then I'd asked my mom, what color are these? She said they're red devils. Don't you know what red devil fireworks and red devil. We know they're, so when she said they were green, I said, no, Lydia, they're red. And she said, no, devils are green. And our church and our priest and the nuns told me they were green. Is that true? I don't know that. Although I went to Chatra and I think there were some devils in the windows and there's a red green thing that came up. But I do forget. I will find out and bring it up. I want to know about that. Yeah. Can I, I'll just say two quick last things since we're talking about Catholicism. One is when you asked me the other day why people coming back to the church or whatever, I do want to say that there's one thing about Catholicism as we believe the Eucharist is actual Jesus and the blood is actual. And that is something appealing to a lot of people, the real, what we call the real presence. So that was an allure and I did not mention it the other day. And the other thing is, is, is the interesting thing of St. Patrick's Day we're recording and this on the, and the, and the show is up on the 19th. So the 19th is the feast day of St. Joseph, the father of Jesus. And it's St. Joseph's the patron of Italy and the Italians of New York always, they have many reasons for resenting the Irish. I'm half Italian, half Irish. But one was like that. Why was St. Patrick's Day such a big thing when two days later our saints, St. Joseph, who was the stepfather of Jesus of all people? How come we don't have the same kind of level of interest? But so there was always interesting little resentment here on my Paisons. I've seen a lot of people in New York that have your heritage, half Irish and half Italian. Yeah, well, they, the, yes, I know many of them. Megan Kelly just said that the other day about her Irish ancestry. Did you hear that? No, I did not, but she, I don't want to go, I don't want to wait into the controversy. But she was taught, people had been criticizing, she and Mark Levin were exchanging barbs. How's that word barbs? Barbs, it's a euphemism. Yes, it's a euphemism. But when she was pressed, she said that she was half Irish and she was, the Irish didn't let people push them around and they were street fighters basically. Yeah, well, that's, I mean, what group couldn't say that, right? You know, honestly, that's a, it's not be an excuse. I was once talking about being Swedish when I was a little kid, I'm Swedish, I'm Swedish. And my mom said, now wait a minute, your father's mother was not Swedish. She was Irish. I said, no, she's not. I asked, well, I think she was Irish and my mother was Irish. So you're more Irish than Swedish. And my dad came over and he took a baseball hat. He said, that's size eight Pauline. He is not a homo, he is not one of your family's homoculus. He has got a nice big square empty head. He was kidding. So it's a Max von Siedau kind of head. Yeah. So I love Max. You know, that I went to final thing, I was, they had Swedish writer and residents at Gustavus Adolphus and I came to speak there right after when he was there. And yes, and I had a lunch with him. He was the nicest guy in the world. Really? Oh, yes, I did. Well, it was in the cafeteria, but it wasn't a formal lunch, but I did get a hamburger and I saw him sitting there and walked over and sat down. Wow, this is a little better English than I did. You have led a very interesting, I wasn't going to say charm life, but you're just surviving cancer surgery. So you're really an interesting life, Victor. All right. Hey, go to civilthoughts.com, sign up for the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society. Every week, it comes out every Friday and 14 recommended readings. I know you're going to like it. Civilthoughts.com, Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus. If you're on X, Victor's handle is at VD Hansen. If you're on Facebook, Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club is something you should check out and VDH's Morning Cup. Victor, you've been terrific. You're always terrific. Thanks very much for all the wisdom you shared. Thanks, folks for watching. Thanks for listening. As Jackson Brown says, I think I'm running on empty, Jack. You are. Time to end this. Shut up, Jack. God bless everyone. We'll see you soon. Thank you for listening, everybody. I really appreciate it. I want to also thank all these cards. I'm just inundated and I read every one. They're so well written and they're calligraphy and they're witty and they're encouraging. And I'd say 99,999% mention the Almighty is having a hand in things. I just said that because a person called me who was a surgeon very quickly and he said, given the amount of blood that you lost and the number of transfusions, you're very lucky because people in your same situations have usually bled out. I'm saying people ask. I said, Victor almost died. I think that's true. I think it was through the intervention of people like that that were praying for me. I'm sure it was a Catholic saint. I have all these. Yeah, I mean, I think I have. I know the Knights of Columbus sent you a I've had so many Catholic groups. Yeah, they were so nice and the people and then the stories of people who have had all these cancer stories that would just crush you. Person wrote today and he said he had prostate stage four and then he had the lungs surgery like I did, but then they had a pulmonary embolism and then this and this and but four years later, I'm still here. It was so uplifting. You know, all these people live lives as a great novice at a quiet desperation. Well, and it seems to me, I'm just an observer here that there's a sense of a brotherhood that people feel with you anyway, but especially those who have who have endured cancer. I was very lucky. I didn't realize how lucky I was that that surgeon looked at that tube and saw all the blood and got an operating room and got another anesthesia got an anesthesiologist and went right back in. Had no idea where the two veins in the artery were found them. We opened everything, put all the cameras back in place, clipped them, cauterized them, got me all back and went peace. Well, we're blessed to have you here, Victor. All right, one more time. You're the best folks. We'll see you soon. Bye-bye. Thank you, everybody, for listening again. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhanson.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.