Victor Davis Hanson: Secret Service Needs to Prioritize Marksmanship, Not DEI, Moving Forward

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Half the missiles and launchers are still operational. How do they know that? LinkedIn. I don't... They don't know how many are there. They have no idea how many are there. So when you have that lower in the bar and plus all of the Hitler stuff, these people are going to keep coming out of the woodwork and everyone's going to think, I can be like Luigi Mangione only on steroids because look what they're making out of him. And he didn't even get killed. And Allen didn't get killed either. I can go and shoot the president. I might live. If I live, I would be like Hinckley or somebody. I'd be a hero to people. You mean we don't have capital punishment is what you're saying? So if we had some capital punishment, it might help deter... It wouldn't be a lie if they had been able to shoot straight. I'm not... I don't know what the angle of the shots were, but the five shots at somebody in the same room and you miss every one of them. So I don't know. You and Jack were mulling about the concept of limbo and somebody has an answer for you. Be mused, berserker says. Limbo was always a theological hypothesis and never really formal Christian doctrine. That's true. Practicing Catholic. I think you're going to go to heaven. You were Catholic, right? Yeah. And were you baptized? I was baptized. Yes. And I'm going to go... I guess I'm going to purgatory. Limbo doesn't exist anymore. Hello, and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Victor is the Martin and Nellie Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Mara Shibusky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhansen.com. The name of the website is the Blade of Perseus and just so everybody knows, we're having it completely overhauled and it should be ready in a couple of weeks. So we hope to be launching it sometime soon. So come and have a look at the new website if you have been there before. We have a lot on the agenda today. This is our Friday News Roundup and we're going to be looking at the war in Iran and OPEC. Some things are changing in the Middle East, maybe not as fast as some of us would like it, but nonetheless they are changing. So we'll start with that, but stay with us for these 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. Welcome back. So Victor, we have had a lot going on this week. Visit by the English King to Donald Trump, the assassination. I know you and Jack talked a lot about that. Maybe there'll be a few more things we'll say about it much later, but also OPEC, the United Arab Emirates is talking about getting out of OPEC, which is the Organization of Petroleum Producing Countries, I believe is what it stands for. And they're Middle Eastern countries. And OPEC, I mean, United Arab Emirates has said we're tired of the restrictions on how much we produce. So we might just leave this. And that is a huge change since 1973. And I was wondering your thoughts on it. There's 23, I think, producers in it. And they control about half the world's at world. And the key thing to remember is that what they produce and what they could produce, I think, are about in today's levels, seven or eight million barrels short. So the Emirates and Dubai, they've had some damage as has Oman to the refineries and pipelines. And they want to get it back up and running and capture this high price of oil. So they are saying, I'm not going to restrict, I think, in the case of Dubai, it's something like they're allowed to pump two and a half or something and they could pump four. And if that starts a trend, and I think it will, when Venezuelan oil is coming on the market, the United States is pumping more, Canada is pumping more, you could see the price of oil not go any higher, even though the blockade continues. And it could go lower and start a panic. Because again, if you've got 40% of the world's oil and it's 10% or 20% less production than it could be, if there's no more OPEC, then you would get to the situation there was why they formed OPEC. Why did they form OPEC? Because everybody was trying to out-produce each other and they drove the price down. So they created a cartel. So Saudi Arabia, I think, is the key because it's the biggest OPEC producer. The world's oil now is governed primarily by the three largest producers. The United States is number one, I think Russia is two and Saudi Arabia is three. And Russia is pumping like crazy. We're pumping like crazy. And if Saudi Arabia gets in and these other OPEC, then that'll be a spin-off on the war that nobody talks about. There's so many spin-offs from the Iranian war. I mean, if you think about it, if they break up OPEC because of the war, if the Gulf Council, all six of those countries starts to be in alliance with Israel and basically says, I'm more worried about Iran and you can help us with Iran and I'm not worried about the crazy people in Gaza, that's a spin-off. Russia is completely out of the Middle East now and it's out of Venezuela and China is out of Venezuela. It's going to be out of Panama and it's going to be out of Iran. So everybody who said that the war was a disaster, $50 or $60 billion to weaken some country that threatened the West in general, the United States in particular for 47 years and killed really thousands of Americans if you count what they did with their shape charges in Afghanistan and Iraq in addition to the terrorism. And if you could get rid of that government and one of the ways you could if they're losing, as estimated, $500 million in economic input per day and their oil is now maxed out and Karg Island is full, all their storage tanks are full, they can't get at their world fleet of tankers. Nobody can get in to buy it and take the oil off their hands so they're trying to find wreck tankers or trying to find anything to store it because allegedly these older wells, if they can't pump, then the wealth of the oil is going to be going down. The wealth collapses and they'll lose not just the oil production but the investment. So that could happen as early as two or three weeks. So a lot of people in the Trump administration are suggesting that he just go home and say we won. But I think if he would say at least two or three weeks, he'd still have five months before the midterm and I think the price of oil will go down and Iran will be desperate to make some type of concession. And so what everybody said when you read, read, read, the war was terrible, it costly, it wrecked the middle, it's all untrue. It's just a result of kind of anger at Trump for various reasons but not, we've never seen a more asymmetrical war in history. You know, speaking of the critics of the war, there is a CBS report out that the war was not as successful as the administration has presented it and this is what they say and I don't know what you think about this. Half the missiles and launchers are still operational. How do they know that? I don't know. They don't know how many are there. They have no idea how many are there. They say 60% of the naval forces which are all those small boats that are still operational. You're talking about three or four hundred million dollar ships. Over a hundred have been destroyed and these motor boats are probably three or four hundred thousand dollars. I mean, it's nothing and you can destroy them. What are they going to do when I'm going to go up to a destroyer or a carrier? They're going to blow, if they want to, they can blow it up the moment it leaves port. I agree. That's nothing. That's ridiculous. And then the last thing they said in this report, two thirds of the air force is still usable. Where they get that, I don't know. Where they get that, I don't know. They're in tunnels or something? I don't know. The air force in tunnels? Yeah. I mean, I've never seen a war, not even Vietnam when I was in high school. People really oppose the war. And a lot of them wanted the North Vietnamese men, but I've never seen people so overt that they want the United States to lose and they want Iran to win. And they want it to look like the United States is losing. Yeah. And it really has a lot to do with what the nature of the left is. It's like the sixties left. It's even creepier because it's got this Islamic element in it. But if you actually look at dispassionately and you look at the entire Middle East, 500 million Arab Muslims, it's hard to find a country that's not on the side of the United States, even with Israel as an ally. That's what's so strange. They all are terrified, this Iranian-Shia theocracy. And they're happy to see it defanged. And countries like Egypt or Jordan, they'll keep quiet about it. And the Gulf States will be quiet, but they're egging us on all the time, finishing job. They're giving us money to finish the job. They're helping the Israelis. They say, whatever you need will help you just finish the job. And the only Iranian strategy is delay, delay, delay. When everybody said, well, what are we going to do? What can't, that's the wrong question. It's what can we not do? You want to take out the bridges like Clinton did in Serbia? You could take them out tomorrow, all of them. You want to take out the power plants like Clinton did in Serbia? You could do it tomorrow. You want to take out all of the port facilities, destroy everyone? You could do it tomorrow. You can do anything you want. There's only one taboo, and that is nobody wants to put ground troops in there. And the other taboo is you don't know to what degree the status of the resistance is. So if you start to destroy stuff to hurt the regime, well, it hurts the resistance. That's the only consideration, but you can do anything you want to do. In fact, for the next three years, you could do anything you want to do if you wanted to attack Iraq. So when Chancellor Mertz in Germany, who's all over the place, two-faced, he's like a one-eyed jack. You flip him over and he's got the opposite of what he says. And now he says there was no strategy. There was no, just we went in there mindlessly. No, we went in there to do four things, and it was articulated again and again. We went in there to curtail or destroy their nuclear potential, to stop their ballistic missile and drone fleet, to stop their subsidizing of terrorist groups in the region, and to make them not a threat to the United States in general, and the United States in particular, and the West in general. And it seems to me that they're not going to be able to do much with their missile fleet if we're hitting the factories and the economy's ruined. They have enriched uranium somewhere. I don't know where we're going to... That's one thing we need to get, but we can always bomb that again and again and again. They don't have any money. If they're losing $500 million a day, the people are not going to allow that money to go to Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis, 50, 80 million a month. They're not going to allow that to happen. And they have a population that's on the verge of revolt. And they've lost all of their command and control first and second echelon. So I don't understand that we're losing or we haven't done anything. And we haven't suffered anything other than tragically 13 dead, period. That's it. 75% of the people who were wounded are back in action. So the left just keeps trying to glob onto things, but so does a lot of people on the anti-war right. The hot air had, the website hot air had a great article on the German chancellor. And they were talking about just that where he said, the United States went into this war without a strategy and you just addressed that. But he also had other things that he said, and I would like your opinion on these. He said, the US is being quote, humiliated by Iran. And he said to the second thing, Iran's non-negotiating position is a winning position. And I believe those are my words, but basically that's what he meant. It's hard to know what's driving him. It's hard to know whether his hatred of the United States is greater than his fear of Iran. Is he saying that you're going to leave the area and you wounded him, but it can recover and it's going to attack us? Or is he saying, I'm glad you got your nose snubbed after you berated us about NATO questions. But what he's really making the mistake is he's in a theater wide war with Russia and the Ukrainian resistance cannot stop Russia with European help alone. We've given them over $200 billion and Trump says he's cutting, but they're still giving them money and they're giving them satellite reconnaissance or giving expertise or doing everything. So does he just think that he can say all these things and then we're going to say, thank you, what do you need? No, he's not going to do that. And so when you look at all of these countries and they're glee that they thought the United States was bogged down, no strategy, impulsive, hurt Trump. But on the other hand, they want us to pay for 20% of the budget, but really at 65% when you look at the control, command, logistics, all the things we do for the Europeans in addition that are peripheral to NATO. So I don't know why he's, what's he's trying to do? He is at a 15% approval rating in his own country. And his economy, the statistics on his economy have just been hit really hard and the welfare state is creating such debt. He says strategy, you don't have a strategy. Trump said to him, you don't have a strategy. You've done four things to ruin the powerhouse of Europe. You had open borders. Now you have 16% of your population that hates your guts and does not want to assimilate, cultivate, integrate. And they're radically Islamic. Number one, number two, you took a cold, cloudy climate and bet your future on solar power and wind and you shut down nuclear plants. You shut down coal plants. You shut down oil and now you're paying twice the price of your competitors for energy. Number three, you created a new, I don't know what it is, postmodern cult, you Europeans. There's no children. It's 1.3 fertility rate. So the population is shrinking and it's getting older and older and there's few people to support them. And then fourth, they disarmed. When the war started with Ukraine, they had nine operable tanks in act that could work. And Israel has, I don't know, twice the number of fighter aircraft that Germany does, 10 million people versus 80 million people. So whatever the strategy was, it was a suicidal, nihilistic strategy. And you know what the sad thing about it is? If he thinks this is a divergence now, when you look at all the indicators, just passionately, energy, the United States can go, it's up to 14 million barrels. You can go up to 16 with new oil fields offshore and in Alaska that are coming on. It, nuclear, it's even now in our decline, we were the largest nuclear generating power. If you look at what they're talking about, they're talking about 100 nuclear plants in the next 10 years for AI. If you look at the military, they're going to increase the budget from one trillion to a trillion and a half. If you look at recruitment, 65,000 people over what were, it was in the military when Trump took office. So we're in a renewal and economically we're going to get stronger and stronger and stronger. And it makes no sense to attack the United States like this. You can see that Prince Charles, when he, or King Charles, when he came, he had to, he had to be strong, patriotic, nationalist, Britain, but he was a min, I mean, he was not a beggar, but he, he was, it's not Churchill Roosevelt. It's not even, it's not even Thatcher Reagan. It is a colossus that's striding over the world and then you've got this diminished Britain that has done the same thing as Germany and it has no navy to speak of anymore. The Royal Navy is, is not a, and it doesn't have a sophisticated air force and enough numbers to make a difference. So it's, when you look at its potential enemies, they are Iran, which we neutered for them. They're North Korea that can reach them with ballistic missiles now. They are China, which they couldn't do a thing about of China. It got entangled in China and they got, and it's Russia, which they couldn't handle without the United States. So I don't understand why Stormer and Mertz and Maloney and now we had, it wasn't just Macron, but the former ambassador to the United States from France, Arun or something. He's been mouthing off and saying that this United States is in terrible shape and Trump is horrible. It's the wrong time to do this because the United States is just about showing the world with its military that has absolutely humiliated and devastated Iran. And the only problem is to what degree do you want to inflict a level of damage to make it inert? Because if you do, then you're going to run up world opposition that you're destroying the, there's nothing left to destroy basically unless you want to go after civilian dual use targets. But you couldn't inflict a greater level of damage by air than they have on the Air Force, Navy, Army, everything. And they can keep doing it at a very cost of benefit analysis. They're not going to lose airmen doing it. It's just a matter of do you only want to bomb them back to the Stone Age. It's all self-controlled. The restrictions and prohibitions are ours. They're on ourself. They're the midterms. They're a popularity. They're polls. They're people in Congress that come to Trump on the Republican side. Please, I'm in a purple district. You got to stop the war and get the economy on the front page. That kind of stuff. But it's not a military problem. No, it doesn't seem at all. Iraq was a military problem. Afghanistan was a military problem. Vietnam was a military program. We were using strategies and tactics that were not working. And they weren't Afghanistan. We couldn't control the entire country. We can control the whole country by air if we want. Well, Victor, let's welcome a backer sponsor, my patriot supply. There's a lot going on in the world right now. Escalating global conflict threats to infrastructure and supply chains, growing concerns about food shortages. 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Victor, I feel like it was an unanticipated response by these European statesmen that they were to come out so much and so hard against the war itself, when they could have just taken a neutral position of nothing, right? And yet they didn't. And there's something about this war that we hadn't anticipated with the Europeans. I think it's the subtext is when they saw, when we pushed back, that they were not letting us use their airspace, all they had to do was say, we support our NATO ally, period, stop, and then call up Trump and say, what do you need? You can use all the airspace you want and then just not talk about it. But they couldn't do that. They wanted to get on their soapbox and announce how they were resisting the United States. And that was for what reason? Because of their domestic constituencies, because they've got large Muslim populations, they've got these splinter parties, and they've got the left that is pro-Islamic. So they, especially in places like Italy and France, so they thought they were going to be really loud, United States wasn't going to listen, oh, this is just the Europeans letting off steam, and they were going to pander to their domestic constituencies. And then they thought the United States would take care of business, and they were going to have a big conference with Sturmer and Macron, and they were each going to give 10 ships, and then they were going to get this big pan-European fleet after the enemy was done, defeated, conceded, and then they were going to steam into the Strait of our moves and tell the world that they were occupying it. And then they were going to call us up and say, keep a carrier and air carrier, please, please. But when Trump said he was negotiating and he's, and there's still, that government's still viable, they haven't come. And then the question is why they haven't come. They can't come because they don't have any ships that could do the job. They don't. There's, there's navies have been decimated. What is the German Navy today? How many aircraft carriers does it have? None. What is the French Navy, one aircraft carrier? The British have two, but there always seems to be in port under repair. Where's the Dutch carrier? Where's the Belgian carrier? I don't, I don't see them. Yeah. They're all competing with China for just having one carrier that's a substandard usage. China has three. Do they have three now? And they're big, they're big, and they're copying everything we are. They've got everybody all over the United States. So when you see a Chinese carrier and they even have the, the colored uniforms of the people on the flight deck to usher planes in and out, they copy that. They copy everything we do. Because they're great copy artists. But sometimes copy artists can do a better job than the original. Yeah, that's true. Since we're on China, I just, I was wondering, because I saw an article about their helping to build a hospital in the Bahamas when Biden refused to help the Bahamas with this hospital. And it's part of their Belt and Road initiative. And the article was interesting because as we all know, the Belt and Road initiative, China's influence everywhere, but it specified things about this particular project that they were doing. And those things were that in making or helping third world countries or other countries, China requires them to use half of the labor in this particular case had to be Chinese. And so half would be, of course, from the Bahamas as well. They had to get loans and financing from Chinese banks and they had to use a Chinese construction company. Yeah, you do. So, you know. And they found out in Africa that a lot of the bridges they build and aqueducts aren't substandard. There's no code or anything. And they are pretty tough loan sharks because none of these countries, most of these countries think that they're going to outsmart the Chinese and not pay the loans back and then say, well, they're using us for geo-strategic reason, but they have a way of trying to get the money back. Believe me, they get the money back and exported goods or food or entered something. They're very unpopular, but all these countries, there's a big movement in Greece. People have talked about, they invited them into the Piraeus and they rebuilt the Piraeus and now they were building rail approaches to the Piraeus. And I think a lot of people in Greece are now saying, let's just buy them off and pay off the loan and get them out because they know what they're there for. They have a dual use choke point. They want dual use at Haifa. They want a dual use at Piraeus, at Naples. They would like to be, if they could, at Gibraltar, anywhere at the Panama Canal. They'd look at the map and they say, these are choke points. We can have tankers. They look like tankers, but they can be, in a time of war, you can throw the canvas off and all those cargoes are full of missiles. And we could launch 300 missiles from every oil tanker. We want them all over in the choke points. So the U.S. Navy can't move. That's what they want to do. We'll see what they do with all of that in the future, right? Well, the Royals came this weekend, so Charles and Camilla, and he gave a speech before Congress and I was wondering your thoughts on it. There were a couple of things that people have been highlighting that he seemed to want to make the point that the balance of power was especially important to checking and executives' power as obviously the revolutionaries in the United States threw off the king's power in such a fashion. And I'm not sure that that wasn't a tacit suggestion towards Trump. And then the second thing, as you kind of touched on that, he seemed to want to bridge what Starmer, the kind of rift that has been caused by Starmer, he even used a quote from Starmer where he said, our prime minister has said how end, quote, indispensable the partnership is between the U.S. So any thoughts in general, though? I think he knows that Starmer is the worst prime minister they've had in 100 years. He's got about eight or 9% approval rating. He's got to delay elections as long as he can. The first election will throw him out. He's anti-American. He's incompetent. He is deeply involved in all sorts of scandals, that whole grooming scandal he's involved in with not turning a blind eye to it. Mendelssohn, one of his envoys, is a complete crook, Epstein associate. So he's just bad news, but that's just the symptom. It's not the disease. The disease is if you look at Britain and you said 30 years ago under, say, Tony Blair, who wasn't that bad. I mean, I wouldn't have voted for him, but he wasn't that bad. He was in the mainstream. If you had said, I want to destroy Britain, what would you do? I said, somebody said to me, what would you do if you're going to destroy Britain? I would say, well, first of all, just stop drilling natural gas and oil and discovery and go green and just get wind and solar and get your kilowatt charges up by three full, number one, and that would make all of your products uncompetitive. Number two, bring in millions of illegal aliens, but predominantly those from war-torn Islamic countries and Pakistan. And then I would say, make no effort to assimilate, accultrate, integrate, no melting pot, carve out enclaves, and then get DEI and panor to them. Then I would say, disarm. Just disarm. Don't get rid of the Royal Navy. Get it down to, I don't know. There's 40 admirals. None of them have even a ship. There's only 30 major ships in the whole Navy. At any time, I think there's only 15 that'll float. So I would say disarm. I don't think they could send a division like they could. I don't think they could go to the Gulf War again. They surely couldn't do the Falcons now. So I would say disarm, energy, immigration, and then I would say expand the social net. Race taxes give more entitlements without restrictions to as many people as possible, especially illegal aliens, and become financially insolvent. And that's what they've done. It's almost like they willingly tried to do it. So when the King and Queen came by, even in the 50s, when it was losing the Empire, when Queen Elizabeth II and Charles' mother, she would get on one of their, one of those new battleships they made at the end of World War II, and they were kind of out of date. But they were big, beautiful ships or a British aircraft carrier, and they would sail, steam all over the former Commonwealth, Africa, Hong Kong, and they'd come and visit the United States. And they were very impressive. They were an empire in decline. But compared to now, they were confident. Now they came over and he was very eloquent. He made jokes that were really funny, I thought. But the whole subtext was treat us like we're just a little notch below you. Don't look at reality because if you looked at reality and you took away our glorious history together and you just looked at what we are, there are a lot of countries in Latin America and Asia that are more powerful than we are. And are ascended. Argentina is more ascendant now than Britain. In fact, as I said earlier, if they were going to fight that war again, except for the nuclear, I'm not sure they would win. And I'm not sure we'd help them. I think there'd be a lot of people in the United States would say, you want to, you think Millie is worse than Stormer? He's a lot better. He's a lot more pro-American too. So everything has changed and all the pageantry, all the titles, all of that is very impressive and as a big fan of Britain, I'm glad. It's impressive, but they have taken the wherewithal. So it's a facade. When Churchill came over here, when Thatcher came over here, it was the city of London under Thatcher was having a renaissance. It was the financial capital of the world. They made all those movies in the early 80s and late 80s about all these, you know, like, remember the one with Russell Crowe when he had a, he inherited a house in France and he worked in the city of London. He was a financier. A good year. Good year. Yeah. The whole subtext of that movie was these people are making a lot of money and they don't know what matters in life. But the point, well, you couldn't do that movie today. It's not the center of anything and it's very rapid, the decline. And I think the king kind of noticed that, or at least he noticed and felt that he was there to bridge any sort of wounds created by Stormer. I think he's basically, if he could say what he did, he would say the following. We've made a lot of big mistakes and we have a buffoon right now who's offensive to you. But just ignore him and just have patience with us. And we will never be as strong as we used to be. You were in World War Two with an empire, but we're going to have, we'll get back on our feet and make reforms and then we'll be a solid European friend of the United States. And that was the message. He interestingly said a little bit about the Ukraine war, how necessary it was, but he did not say a word about the war anywhere on. So there you have it. He was trying to stay out of that a little bit. The thing about Ukraine war is that Trump hurts himself because he snaps at everybody about Ukraine and we're not going to do this. We're not going to do that. We're not going to do that. But he never really articulates all that we have done, that he's done for them. He should say to people, when I came into office in 2017, Obama had canceled javelin missiles. If I hadn't approved javelin missiles, they would have taken Kiev. So he's done a lot for Ukraine and Charles should be very careful. And the British should all be careful. There have been a lot of people, Prince Harry went over there. That's really tragic or pathetic when a royal who is really a royal and not an outcast or pariah has an event, then Harry and Meghan, what's her name? Markle. Yeah. I don't know what I say that because I don't know what her last name is now. Is it the Duke of Duchess of Windsor? Duchess of Essex? Essex. I don't know what she is, but I don't know if she she's a Windsor or what. But anyway, my point is that whenever the royal family, the official, do something, then they try to steal the headlines. You know, she does a cooking TV show or they travel somewhere. So he went to Ukraine and he kind of gave a little tantrum talk. Well, why isn't the United States doing more? Now I'm thinking, when does a quasi official of another country yell at the major supplier of help and then argue that they're not doing enough when your entire country is disarmed? And if you really think the United States should do something, then why don't you do something? Why don't you reform your social estate, tighten your borders, drill oil, do something to create national wealth? But don't tell us what we have to do. And, you know, as I said before, I want Ukraine to win. I don't want the Russians to win. I want us to help Ukraine, but it's a psalm. It's a verdant. It's not like the Iran war where there is a definite movement fluidity and the Russians have lost a million and a half. So when people say to me or I've got critical email, well, you don't understand. It's you're just like Russia. You're in a jam. Oh, yeah, we're in a jam. We've lost 13 people and spent 40, 50 billion and they've been out for four years, lost a million and a half, probably dead. And 50% GDP is going down that hole. And so they're in a, the Europeans are in a jam. And they just, the Ukrainians are fighting heroically. They're innovative. The drones, they're much better than the Russian drones are creative, but they're being gradually worn down. And the European should be very careful what they say to the United States because, you know, one of my colleagues who will remain nameless kind of said, I think he was referring to people like me. He said, they don't get it that we were asking them to help us, but we were not engaged in NATO operations. And so I thought to myself, Falklands wasn't a NATO operation. That was a unilateral. Chad wasn't a NATO operation. That was a French unilateral. And then the two that had NATO powers were never authorized by NATO. It's the bombing of Milosevic in Serbia in 1999 and the 2011 bombing of Libya. Those were cooked up by whom? The French and the British. And then they came to us. We are moral philosophers and we have to stop the genocide and this ancient war between Muslims and Christians and the Balkans caused by the Ottoman Empire. And there's another tribal warfare in Libya and we're going to intervene because we're more moral than anybody and you haven't noticed how moral we are. But before we intervene, we're inviting you to do all the flying and killing and bombing and we'll explain it to the world. That's what we did. And so when somebody says, well, why would they have to reciprocate? For the same reason we did because half the country didn't want to go into Serbia. It's on the Europeans border and they were in a jam. They were terrified that Milosevic was either going to kill all the Muslims of Kosovo or there was going to be a, that war had been going on for almost a decade. It was going to spill over into Eastern Europe and they wanted it stopped and they didn't have the wherewithal. So they asked us to go in and then they said it's a coalition of the willing, not a NATO-approved intervention. Same thing with Libya. It's a coalition of the willing and Obama went in there and he really got into it. He bombed for seven months. He bombed the last day he was in office. He bombed up a camp in Libya. He bombed, bombed, bombed. No congressional authorization ever. Yeah. Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the assassination attempt. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Hey, I'm Bradley Devlin and just like you, I'm a huge fan of Victor Davis Hansen. Whether it's his long form podcast, Victor Davis Hansen in his own words, or his short form content for the Daily Signal, Victor Davis Hansen in a few words, I always leave an episode learning something new. I think they forgot the 1982 Falklands war. And in the age of clickbait and ragebait, that's a really good feeling, right? The media, thank you. You can leave now. Well, if you agree, you might like my show, the Daily Signals Long Form Interview podcast called The Signal Sitdown. Every week, we take you behind the scenes of the biggest battles in Washington, D.C. as they happen with some of the biggest names in politics. We explore big ideas and we analyze the policymaking process from an unabashedly and unapologetically conservative perspective. And that's important now more than ever with the Trump administration back in office because in 2024, you sent Washington a message it couldn't ignore. It's your government and together we're taking it back. So check us out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen or there too. And drop me a follow on X at Bradley Devlin to stay updated with what's happening on The Signal Sitdown. Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. You can find Victor on X. His handle is at VD Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup. So Victor, the assassination, of course, was well talked about by you and Jack and a lot of the, even the critics of that assassination, Kimmel himself. And I think I felt like the only thing that hasn't really been talked about very much in the press is that they had all those videos that were taken, like you could get all sorts of doing ones, but they had one in particular that showed the deities where Donald Trump was, Melania and Caroline Muvitt, I believe was next to her in the head of the conference was there too. And when the shots went off, you could see Melania was the first one that was looking like, oh, there's something going wrong here. I mean, she was immediately on top of it. And then she was immediately looking for cover. And I thought that was pretty impressive of our first lady and two things about her, that and, and the, she has a bunch of supporters who are now boycotting Jimmy Kimmel. She wrote a horrible joke about her. Yeah. She was the only one to, she was the first person to reply back. Don't you remember her jacket that she wore in the first administration? I just don't care. She doesn't care anymore. She's going, this is her, she doesn't have to run her husband has to run. She's going to say what she wants to say. And she knows that it's been two years in July. It's been not even two years, 2024 when Cook's tried to kill Trump, right? So three assassination attempts. If you count the Mar-Lago with the Martin fellow, the young kid went in there and tried to kill Trump, but he wasn't there. Four. At that rate, we're going, he's got two more or two and a half years. So we could see five more of these. Four. I'm not trying to be funny. It's tragic because on the one hand, I really thought from the videos that the Secret Service was really brave inside the actual ballroom. But when you look at that video very carefully, it looks like they were almost dismantling one of the, there was those Magnum monitors, those, but they looked like they were already, you know, closing up shop. People had gone in and they were going to dis, the other thing was, and I don't know if this is confirmed, he shot once and his magazine, I think had six shotgun shells and he had a bunch of pouches and maybe had 30 or 40 shells. He had a, sometimes people said it was a 45 or a 38. I didn't know what they meant when they said it was a 1911, 38. I thought 1911 automatics were 45s. But nonetheless, he had a, and he had a lot of knives. Yeah. He had taken selfies of himself all armed before he knew he had those pictures. He was a narcissist. He had a little wet tie on. But my point is that he's running fast and then they tackle. Why did they shoot five times? There were six shots and they couldn't hit him once. And why, when you look at the whole thing, I don't understand that he wasn't on the same floor. He had to go down into the basement to get to the ballroom. But that being said, what would be, what would have been so hard to say that for two days before the event, every single person who checked into that hotel would have to go through a magnetic, a magnetic corridor and have everything checked every time they went in and out just for, just to do that. He wouldn't have been able to come in there. And then why wouldn't they have a Secret Service person during two hours before the ballroom and during the festivities? Why wouldn't you have Secret Service people going up and down the stairs all the time? Because you thought if a guy wants to shoot somebody, I mean, you remember fugitive where, oh no, it wasn't, yeah, it was, wasn't it the fugitive where the guy goes, tries to burst in? No, no, it was a Clint East movie with John Malkovich. He was a psycho. And he was ready to shoot people. But the point is, even in the films and fantasy, people take, you know what I mean? They, they try to think what the person would do if I was going to kill somebody. So what I'm getting at is when you look at the breakdown with Crooks, the breakdown with Ruth, there's individual really great agents that are willing to, when that guy, as soon as that, he heard that shotgun blast, he stood up in front of everybody, in front of Trump, like shoot me, but don't hit the president. But my point is that I think maybe it's a carryover from the Obama Biden years, but, and the director under Biden, but I don't know if it's DI or what, but why don't they emphasize shooting ability all the time? It seemed like the old guard, the old breed and the 1960s and stuff, they were pretty good about that. I mean, there's a lot of assassinations, but my premise is this, they're in a unique situation that they have a president that has now been the target of three attempted assassinations in which shots were fired one way or the other. We've never had that in the history of the country. We've never seen this level of abuse, not against Lincoln, not against Roosevelt, not against LBJ, not against Nixon, not against George Bush. There's hatred out there and there's a whole, a whole series of little clips there on social media now about all the people who posted that they were crying, upset that Cole, Thomas, Allen missed, missed. Oh, he missed. Oh, he missed. It's really sick. So my point is this very quickly, why wouldn't you just say, we are in a red alert. We're going to look at every operation of the Secret Service because we've had three breakdowns. Cook should have never been on that roof. Ruth should have never been anywhere near that golf course. You should have had somebody patrolling the whole golf course on a golf cart with a machine gun, 10 of them. And we, this man should have never been in that hotel and especially not in the lobby areas. So they're not doing that. And if they don't do it, they're going to kill Trump. Because another thing is, when you read the guy's manifesto, he was even arrogant that he was giving them a critique of why they didn't stop him. He was making fun of how bad the security was. And then he talked about himself and all of these arrested development young men, they're sick, but they all have a feeling of, they all feel that they are going to be heroic. They're going to be famous. And when you have this nut, Hassan Piker telling everybody, you know, that, hey, somebody has to do it. Somebody has to do it. Oh, you know what I mean? Meaning Trump has to be killed. And then he says, you know, Luigi Mangione was a, he murdered, that was a social murder. That was okay. Meaning he was, we declare him an enemy of the people, Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare. So when you have that lowering the bar and plus all of the Hitler stuff, these people are going to keep coming out of the woodwork. And everyone, I'm just going to think, I can be like Luigi Mangione, only on steroids, because look what they're making out of him. And he didn't even get killed. And, and Allen didn't get killed either. I can go and shoot the president. I might live. And then if I live, I would be like Hinckley or somebody. I'd be a hero to people. You mean we don't have capital punishment is what you're saying. So if we had some capital punishment, it might help deter. It wouldn't be a life day if they had been able to shoot straight. I'm not, I don't know what the angle of the shots were, but the five shots at somebody in the same room and you miss every one of them. So I don't know. Get back to the range. Get back to the range, get politics out of everything and just constant. That was, you know, when I saw that they wanted to impeach Pete Hexeth, I thought, what do you want to impeach him for? He got 65,000 additional soldiers and when we were short 40,000 under Lloyd Austin, he helped organize the bombing of his Pentagon, the bombing, the first one of last June where there was nothing lost. They took out, he was oversaw the kidnapping or extradition of Maduro or this particular program. They're all, they've all worked flawlessly and recruits up and he's trying to get new sources of procurement and, you know, more is better than a few platforms. But the key to all that is he just got rid of all the ideology. We're not here to fast track DEI. We're not here to fast track TRANS. We're not here to do any of that. You use us because you don't have any of the Sturman drawing and none of the back and forth in Congress, you tell us to do it and we do it. So they look at the Pentagon as a fast track social network. And from what we've seen the last years of, especially under Obama, all the agents that remember in South America, they were being parting and they had to kick some off and drinking and carousing. You get the impression that, I don't know, there's other concerns other than I am going to ensure Donald Trump is not going to be shot. And when you add the other thing to the equation that no president takes more risks than he does, open rallies, talks, walking down a corridor, hey, Mr. Press stops, turns around, walks over, talks for 20 minutes, somebody else yells, talks, gets on the phone, talks to anybody. You know what I mean? He's everywhere. And so it's a, they need to be in a crisis mode is what I'm saying and not complacent. Yes. Well, Victor, we want to welcome back our second sponsor of this podcast, Patriot Mobile. 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Go to patreonmobile.com.vdh or call 972-patriot and use the promo code VDH for a free month of service. That's patreonmobile.com.vdh or call 972-patriot and make the switch today. We'd like to thank Patriot Mobile for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show. Donald Trump was actually a lot easier on his Secret Service and the others that were protecting him that night than actually you were. He was interviewed by Nora O'Donnell. He said in that interview, and this is incidental to other things, but, well, you know, things happen and nothing goes quite as you expect in life. And he was kind of philosophic about it. But I was wondering your thoughts on the interview. She seemed to want to bring out what the manifesto said by the shooter that Donald Trump was pedophile rapist and traitor. And he said, this is a shameful question to ask. Of course, I am none of those things and you shouldn't have this job. He was really combative. I loved it. And she asked him about the mocking of law enforcement, and that's where he was kind of good on it, by the shooter saying that this level of incompetence is insane. Again, it's not the individual officers. You could see the way they reacted tactically in that room. As soon as they heard the first shot, they jumped up. They dispatched people into the stairway, go downstairs. They could tell where the sound came from. They got everybody out. They protected them. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that if somebody's running by you and you have some agencer with firearms and you shoot five times and they're all missing, that's a problem. And you shouldn't be in that venue with Trump. I know it seats 2,500. I've been there for a White House correspondence thing. And it's kind of a maze, but strategically is the breakdown. They didn't have anybody to organize correctly a means of security to get in and out of that hotel. If that guy got off the train with a suitcase, with a shotgun and all that stuff, and he had to go through the main door of the hotel to check in, he wouldn't have been able to go in there. And if they had everything covered, all the exits he would not have been able to go in. You know what you're reminding me of? The guy in Las Vegas who got into that room and the upstairs, but he was there for an entire week before. You know, how long before would they have to? I think Donald Trump's right about building that ballroom on the White House. Yeah. Everybody said, well, it wouldn't have a hotel. I get so, there was somebody in National Review, I'm not trying to single him out, but he said, oh, you know, it's a terrible idea because it's a government building, you can't have private, come on. You can have a government, a related event by the White House, White House, White House, even though it's a private foundation, you can allow them to come into the government. They rent all sorts of facilities from the government. They can do that. And it's an advantage not to have a hotel, because that just gets a rid of a lot of your worries that you don't have to look at every single room. They all have to come to your place, bulletproof windows, cameras everywhere, completely designed for security. And I don't know why they don't do it. I know why they don't do it, but it's after this. As far as Noro Donald, I mean, she's been humiliated by so many people, I think JD Vance and people, but think about it. It would be as if FDR is doing a fireside chat and all of a sudden, I don't know, Edward R. Murrow in World War II says, could I read you something? Here's what Gerbil said about you. And he said, you, and this is, I'm almost quoting Verbal what girls would say. FDR, Rosestine, the Jewish puppet, is caused a whole war and attacked us and is committing atrocities and we're fighting the Bolshevik, communist Jews, all this crazy stuff. And what would Roosevelt say? Oh, let me reply to that. How could you reply it? So nobody would do that, but she was airing a manifesto that it's really weird because the press was always telling us when the trans shooter in Tennessee had the manifesto that basically said from the little bit that leaked out that trans was great and anybody who opposed crayons and they hated Christians, well, we can't let that out because it might incite people against trans. Oh no, but we can voice this thing because it will incite people because he's going to, I can get on national TV that Trump is the cause of his own assassination attempt. Trump didn't have to be, let's check it off, pedophile, rapist, traitor. And he wanted, she wanted to get that out. And then he's, she wants to say, how do you feel about basically if you translate what she was saying? Here's the subtext. It wasn't much. Hey, Mr. President, how do you feel now that you committed rape and pedophilia and you were a traitor, what came around, came around to you, went around and you got a boomerang? Do you feel like that was, that's what she was saying? Yeah, she was saying she agreed with this guy's manifesto because, and it in turn reflected hers, the lefts and ideas. And as I said to Jack, it was a Petrie dish. Where did she get this? Well, she got it from all these people repeating it ad nauseam, Jimmy Kimmel every night, Robert De Niro, Jeremy Raskin, Tim Walts when he went over to that commie socialist conference in Barcelona and he trashed the United States and trashed our military effort. Why were it fighting and said that it was fascism? That was the eighth time, seventh or eighth time he's called Trump a fascist. So if you keep doing that and doing that and doing that and you inundate social media and communications with all of these alleged stuff, then somebody's going to say, well, I want to be a Luigi Mangione because the coolest guy, Hassan Piker, he's got a weird little great Islamic first name. He's part turkeys. She's kind of DEI and he drives an $80,000 Porsche and he's a multimillionaire and his parents were multimillionaires and he's a commie. This is great. He's cool. Well, when they echo all of that, then they come out of the woodwork. And where did they get it originally? Well, it's a Petrie dish. If you go through the rapist, the rapist came from Judge Kaplan in the Eugene Carroll case. That was a complete travesty. And if you want to read about it, as I said to Jack, I wrote about it in Counter Revolution at Link. It was the biggest travesty of a thing I've ever read in my life. She's complete. They had a bill of attainer, which is illegal, the New York legislature, just to hurt Trump, passed a law that said for one year, there will be no statute of limitations on sex allegations, crimes, and that was for her. And then she immediately filed it and she didn't know the date. She didn't. Anyway, my point is that that thing was a joke and they acquitted him of rape. They said he was guilty of sexual assault and they don't know what happened in that. He said, she said, she said she accompanied him willingly to a dressing room and they closed the door and they engaged in contact, but she felt that he went too far. So they called that sexual assault. According to it, no witnesses, nothing. No, in a left-wing jury. She said her, you know, 10 years later, 20 years later, said her favorite show was The Apprentice and she had it and she thought Donald Trump was great. So when she saw him, he was a celebrity. She thought even then. But my point is that that's what the judge said. Well, he wasn't convicted of rape, but it was equivalent to it. It wasn't or they would have convicted him. And then Stephanopoulos got that and said, rapist, rapist, rapist, rapist, rapist 11 times. And lost that. They had to settle. That was CBS. I thought it was ABC. Was it? Well, he said that CBS was paying him millions. He was on 16. Donald Trump said- Yeah, they're both are, I think. And then pedophilia came from the Epstein files. All these people said he's holding the Epstein files. And they never said why Biden held it for four years. Well, there were a lot more Democrats in the Epstein files than Republicans. And one of the victims said that Donald Trump and Soded Maxwell had nothing to do with it. So with the sex crime, but they issued that Democratic talking point. Trader, that came from James Clapper said that Donald Trump was Putin's poodle. And so did Brennan. He said he was working with the Russians. All of them did during Russian inclusion. That was all bunked even by Mueller couldn't prove it. So there were all lies and she wanted to get those lies on national TV and then say, if you hadn't, Mr. President, if you hadn't been a rapist, a pedophile, and a traitor, you probably wouldn't have been shot. How do you feel about that? And that's what made him get angry. Yeah. And he didn't let her do that because he just said those are all come demonstrably untrue and nobody that was a professional interviewer would ever do that. You are the worst interviewer. It was a fascinating interview to watch. I recommend it to everybody. Yeah, she deserved every bit Donald Trump really gave into her. Everybody gets angry that he is, can be crude and uncouth, but just ask yourself real quickly, she would have done that with any other president that was a Republican. She would. She wouldn't have done that with any. If she could go, they did it. So I tried to do that with George W. Bush with the National Guard and they said he was a coward. And they tried to do it with George H. W. Bush. He was a war hero and they tried to, I think, a guy wrote an article in, I don't know which magazine he said he had bailed out too early and he got his two people killed and it was crazy. But my point, and if you look at what they said about McCain, he can't remember which, he has 11 houses, he doesn't know where he is, he's had an affair with Romney. They said he hazed people in high school, he put his dog out there, remember that, all that stuff. But none of them would have ever said to a reporter, you should be ashamed of yourself. That is disgusting. And that's why people voted for Trump because they were tired of the Marcus of Queensborough rules. That every Republican candidate, whether it's the losing track of Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney, or it was the winning track after Reagan of George H. W. and George W., they didn't want to get down and fight in the gutter. I'm not saying it's the gutter, but they didn't want to get dirty. And the last guy that wanted to get dirty was Lee Atwater. And he got dirty and he destroyed Michael DeCoccas and tore off his, he called it the bark, Boston Harbor ad, Tank ad, Willie Horton ad, and he got Bush elected. And then they thought, I'm never going to do that again. I would rather lose nobly than win ugly. All right, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back. And we'll talk about, what do we have left here? California, high speed rail. Stay with us and we'll be right back. 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. Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. We are a subsidiary of the Daily Signal and you can find this at the Daily Signal site and lots of other articles that you might find interesting in the conservative world. So go to the Daily Signal. Well, Victor, the legislative analyst's office finally came out with how much they think this high speed rail will ultimately cost and it's a price that the state can afford, $231 billion. Apparently it's already at $14 billion and projected $33 billion just to get from your said to Bakersfield, which not very many people travel or at least wouldn't travel on train. And so I was wondering your thoughts of, there's a lot of, there's a lot. There's some conservative or Republican representatives either in the California state or in the Congress that are saying this high speed rail should just be Jefferson. You haven't news since that. Can they get us there? But when he was mayor of San Francisco, it wouldn't work. He said that they wouldn't be able to build the whole thing. Yeah, he said he, that was before he was woke. But nope, it's not just a crime of commission. It's a crime of omission because the Santa Fe rail runs parallel to the Southern Pacific, which is freight, no longer passengers. That came right down the middle of the valley next to the 99 freeway. But the Santa Fe track is a much more scenic ride. And that's where the Amtrak is. But my point is it's mostly single rail. And I've been on that train. I used to take it, we had trips in high school and stuff. You could go to Hanford to Bakersfield or Hanford to Fresno or something. And you had to stop there. There's no two tracks. So if a train is coming in the opposite direction, they, you find a little sidebar and you sit there and there's no overpasses. So if I drive to the coast, you know, and I happen to cross that track as I do, you just have to sit there because the train's coming for a long time. But the point I'm making is they went out and they bought all that land and spent billions of dollars for imminent domain and lawsuits. And then right next to them, in some places, just, I don't know, a few thousand yards, hundred yards is the Amtrak. All they had to do was, and the Amtrak was pretty wide, they just had to say for $20 billion we can make from Bakersfield to Sacramento a high speed regular train. I don't mean high speed. I mean a regular Amtrak with two tracks, no stopping for, you know, opposite traffic and a brand new bed. And they could have, if they wanted to spend a little bit more money, they could have put a few over underpasses, et cetera. And they could have done that and you could have got from Bakersfield, if you drive Bakersfield to Merced, it's three hours, 172 miles or something. And they could probably have got you there in an hour and a half on Amtrak. And I think they're going to say they can do it in an hour and 30 minutes or something. But my point is all they had to do was do that. And they didn't do that. They caused so much economic damage. They plowed through all these little towns and they've destroyed farms and they've shut down cross streets. Here Mountain View Avenue has been shut down, it was shut down for four years. And it's, they've just ruined the avenue in front of my house. The truckers come in with 20 tons of gravel and sand to go down five miles to the high speed rail overpass. And many of them are what are part of the group that we're worried about, you know, that in California, the 40,000 drivers that were issued licenses couldn't speak English or read. And they go about 65 miles, 70 miles an hour. And you should see the condition of the road. They've just destroyed it. If you go 60, 75 miles an hour with 20 tons on a semi, it's really, I can be in my house and look at the chandelier and it shakes. It shakes. It's like an earthquake and they don't drive 55 miles an hour. And the laws on a country road is 50 miles an hour. And it's, everything about it was ill-conceived and arrogant and stupid and part of that green, crazy religion, you know, that is so intolerant and so destructive to people's lives. I was wondering the last thing, the Naval Secretary John Felham left his position. John Lehmann. Felham. Ph.D. Oh, I thought it was Lehmann, but maybe it's Felham. He left it, the guy that left his position and he was in disagreement with Pete Hayes. Oh, that person, I was thinking about Reagan's secretary of the Navy. Oh, no, no. He was, he left his position and the story is out there, he did it because of differences on a new expensive battleship that he was supporting and Hegzeth apparently did not. Now, I don't know if Hegzeth did not, but they said the reason he left was because they were in controversy. He wanted to build the Trump battleship and Hegzeth. A new expensive battleship and Hegzeth. So I was wondering if you thought that. Well, Trump wanted to build a new battleship. I think part of the problem is that we say battleship, traditionally in World War II, if you go by the 1928 arms limitation that tried to outlaw war, there were a series of naval treaties and they define what a destroyer, a light cruiser, a cruiser, a heavy cruiser, a pocket battleship and a battleship were. And something called a battle cruiser like the HMS Hood. And those don't apply anymore. So a World War II, 30s World War II destroyer was about, just placed on about 2500 to 3000. That's a little frigate. And a light cruiser was about, oh, 6000. A regular cruiser was about 10,000 or 8,000 and a heavy cruiser was 10. A battle cruiser was 15 to 20 and a battleship was usually 28, unless you're the Yamamoto, 72,000. But just because it's today called a destroyer doesn't mean it wouldn't be a cruiser. They're, in other words, they're inflated. And the biggest aircraft carrier, the Japanese built the biggest one. I think it was the Tau. Tau, it blew up. They turned the ventilation system on when they had a gas leak. It was about, I think it was about 45,000 tons. It was huge. But during the war, the Essex class was 27,000 tons. So we're building monstrous ships right now. We're not building any battleships because we're not building rocket of like the Artee Burke class or any of our, what are really heavy cruiser size. We're not going to the next level to build a ship. And Trump talked about a battleship. I don't know what he meant by that, but if he meant a $10 billion ship with cruise missiles and drones, I think the argument is in the other direction that for the same amount of money, you could build 10 frigates and displace them and disperse them. And that goes back to World War II when the Mushashi and the Yamamoto were the biggest battleships ever built in history, 72,000 tons. And we blew up the, we blew up the, we blew up the Mushashi, we bombed it. And the Yamato, we blew up off Okinawa. I had just enough fuel to get to Okinawa, but not back. So it was hit by air power. My point is they, it was at Rabaul. They called it the hotel Yamato, the Japanese. It was so expensive to run. It had 18.1 inch guns. It was huge, but when I wrote the book on World War II, I calculated what they could have done if they had spent it. They made the best destroyer in the world, the Japanese. They could have made 20 destroyers for that. So I think what we're getting at is we're in a mood now where we're starting to go back to the World War II paradigm and not the 90s. And I mean by that, make a lot of really good ships and disperse them everywhere with drones and missiles, but don't concentrate all your money on just a few big platforms that are easy targets. And we already have 13, we have 11 of them with the big aircraft carriers, 100,000 tons. So I think they need to have a lot more frigates and destroyers. And half craft, you know, there was a good picture of an Iranian ship they had built for them. And it was kind of a, I don't know if you saw it was stealthy. It was kind of flat on top and then underneath it was flat and you could fly in underneath. And it was a drone carrier. So it was kind of like an aircraft carrier, but I think we're getting, except that these people are talking about making something like 8,000 tons or 7,000 tons and have 400 drones on it. And they could go underneath and, you know, they could be protected and you can work on them and have a flight deck and just saturate everything. I think that's where we're going to, but it's very dangerous to put $13 billion into a carrier and, you know, 5,000 crewmen. And then one night have, Iran's not capable of it. I mean, they're very well protected with their carrier group, but in theory, you could send, the Chinese could send 5,000 missiles at two feet above the ground, about six feet tall, each one of them, aimed at its waterline. It would be very hard to stop all of them and they could send, you know, a thousand drones at once. So, and then you're taking out something that takes six or 70 years to build and you're putting 5,000 sailors on one platform. So I think we're going in the other direction is what I'm saying. Yeah. Well, Victor, we're at the end of our show and I have some comments. This time I took them from Rumble. Nora Nitz says, and these are on yours and Jack's, I believe. I don't know what is funnier, Victor Vane or Victor going to Costco for hearing aids. Thanks for keeping it real. Since 1963, he says, yes, I had a great aunt who said Norwegians hate Swedes. Funny thing is, when I had my DNA done, I'm more Swedish descent than Norwegian. Yes, I don't know it because they used to be one country, you know, and it's very funny about the diaspora. There's not a lot of Fens or Norwegians in America compared to Swedes and Danes, but August thought that Swedes, they were dour, you know, but they were always happy go lucky and they had a bad rap of drinking too much. Although my father drank and my grandfather drank and they smelt. And you and Jack were mulling about about the concept of limbo and somebody has an answer for you. Bimused Berserker says, limbo was always a theological hypothesis and never really formal Christian doctrine. That's true. The Bible doesn't say where the unbaptized infant or those that die and never accepted the gospel, where they go. Should those souls be condemned to eternal damnation when they never had opportunity to hear? No answer for that, of course. And he says, that's why Benedict the 16th ended the debate about it. And now the church's official doctrine is trust in God's mercy for unbaptized children and those that never had the opportunity to hear the gospel. So there you go. That's not official doctrine. Dante has limbo, you know, and that's why Virgil was everybody. Why is Virgil and Dante's Inferno the guide? Why did Dante, writing in 15th century, first really major work in Italian and not Latin? So why does he go back all the way to antiquity and get what? Go ahead. That's what he goes to antiquity because those were the things he learned from, the classics, right? No, but there was a lot of people in antiquity he could have used as the guy. Yes, but Dante admired him for his poetic verse, his skill. He admired Homer too. And Homer was translated in the Renaissance in Latin. He did it for one reason. His fourth echelon is called the Messianic. And he's talking about the new grandchildren of Augustus are going to be born. And that's where we get Novo order, Sichlorum. It's on our dollar bill and Annouet Coeptus. He nods on our undertakings. The founders took the fourth echelon, just like Virgil did. And they thought that it was a prophecy for a new country, a new order of the ages, the U.S. But in the Renaissance, they thought a new order of the ages was Virgil was given a divine message, even though he was a pagan and he lived 30, probably 40 years before Christ was born. So he was given a dispensation from God that gave him this supernatural Messianic insight that somebody was going to be born. And even though the people at the time said, well, he's talking probably about Augustus's two sons that are going to be the new co, you know, the leader of Marcellus, I think was one of them. But Dante reinterpret that as people in the Renaissance did. No, no, no, it wasn't, it wasn't topical. It wasn't, it was universal that Virgil was given a divine message from God, even though he wasn't, he never, Christ wasn't on earth, but to tell people that Christ was about to be born. Because if you read the whole echelon, it's about what's coming, a new age, and they reinterpret that. And that's why Virgil was considered, even though he couldn't go certain places, he can't go up to heaven. But limbo, the writer's right, there's no textual support for limbo. It was a church doctrine that appeared to explain when people asked practical question. And then, you know, I'll have to ask Jack that, but I think I have before, unfortunately, what if a person tries to, or does live a virtuous life according to Christian principles, and Protestant doctrine, I think, depends on the sect or church, and I know people, if you read the New Testament and the Bible, and you try to model your life on Christian values, and you believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, and you believe in the Christian God, and you're not baptized, or you don't go regularly to a particular, can you go to heaven? It depends on the religion. I don't think you can on the Catholic church. You have to be practicing. I think you're going to go to heaven, you were Catholic, right? Yeah. And were you baptized? I was baptized. Yes. And I'm going to go, I guess I'm going to purgatory. Limbo doesn't exist anymore. I haven't been baptized. I went with my grandmother to the Methodist Church. You weren't baptized? They never baptized me. But I read the New Testament. I taught it for 20 years in Greek. I just ordered it. I just ordered a New Testament in Greek, and then I ordered, I had worn out my other one. I ordered one in Latin. It's really good. I bought a new one 50 years ago. It was $10. It was $79. It's Greek text on one side and Latin on the other. Saint Jerome's fourth century translation. So it's really good to read it in Greek, the first page, and then you read John or Matthew, and then you turn it and you can read the next page in Latin, or you can read both in Latin and Greek, but it really helps your Latin and Greek. Yeah. All right, Victor. Well, thank you for all your wisdom. And it's the message. It's not for the linguistic. It's the divine message. Yeah. Thank you for all your wisdom today, and thanks to the audience for choosing to join us on this Friday News Roundup. Thank you, everybody, for listening and watching, and we'll be with you very soon. No, on this Saturday edition, this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. And also check out my own website at VictorHansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.