Trump’s Iran Strategy, Why China Isn’t Rising, and the Socialist-Islamist Democrat Party

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See BritishGas.co.uk slash verify for more. Hello and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. This is our Friday News Roundup and we've got lots of things on the agenda today. Iran, Victor wants to talk a little bit more about the Thucydides trap. We'll look into some of the policies in California and Newsom and then also the Senate races that the primaries they had on Tuesday, particularly, Tallarico and Paxton in Texas. So stay with us for those stories and we'll be right back. If you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, you might enjoy the Daily Signals flagship show, The Tony Kennetcast. The same common sense perspectives you love weekdays at 7 p.m. Eastern. And unlike some of the other evening shows, we work up until showtime 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 Kennetcast on YouTube, X, radio, TV or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back, Victor Davis Hansen in his own words for those of you who are new and are continuing viewers. Victor is the Martin and Nellie Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhansen.com is the URL. The name of the website is the Blade of Perseus and we'd love everybody to come join us there. Victor, so I know that there's a lot going on with Iran. Donald Trump is in the midst of negotiations that he is very positive about. I know that many of us in the commentary world are a little bit leery of the Iranians coming through on any negotiations. And in addition to that, this week there were attacks by the United States on mining boats, the Iranian mining boats and some in the southern part of Iran that were declared self-defense strikes. And the last thing this week, Trump says he wants Iran in the Abraham Accord. That's not going to happen on the trade. This started on February 28th, so we're March, April, May, June for almost 120 days. We've only bombed 38. So March, I should say, excuse me, March, April, May, not June. So we're only in 90 days, but only 38 of that. The majority has not been a war. So everybody talks about a three or four month war. It's not. It's 38 days of kinetic action. And in this process, we've seen certain traits of Iran. Number one, they view survival as equivalent to victory because they say that we're the great Satan superpower and they stood up to us. So unless they're completely neutered and their economy is in shambles and we force them to give up the bomb and open the straight, they're going to see that as victory. And a lot of people in the world, including the Western left, is going to see that as victory. The second thing, they don't see anything wrong with line. Line to a non-Muslim or Western country is considered strategic. It's not. So anything they say, you can't take it face value. Three. They actually respect and like Trump more than they do on Obama or Biden because they interpret magnanimity as weakness to be exploited, not to be reciprocated with the kindness. So that's another thing we've discovered. Number four, they don't look at the United States as the United States. They don't look at Europe as Britain or France. They look at Western powers as particular administrations. So when they look at us, they say consolidate, negotiate, take advantage, speed up under a Biden or Obama. When they see Trump, first term, second, you got out of the deal, they were worried that he was going to hit them. He took out Soleimani. They say, be careful. What does that mean strategically in our case? A lot of what they're doing is designed to kick in in two and a half years. So they're going to play somewhat compliant until Trump's out of office. And then they're going to try to go nuclear quick if we don't stop them. That's important. Four, it is true that the Israelis and us devastated their command and control. And there were four loci of power, the theocrats, the supreme leader and his henchmen, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which are kind of like the Waffen SS in Germany were, the army, the military, I should say, and then the elected officials, quote unquote. And we think we can't really negotiate because we don't know who's going to, when they say they want an armistice and then the president says we want an armistice and then they hit Kuwait or they go after, then what do you, but they may have schisms, but we shouldn't overinterpret that. They're playing bad cop and good cop. So they get together and say, restore deterrence, keep the Americans off guard, scare the golf states that tell them that the United States can't protect you, and then sort of say we're, you can't control us. That's what the so-called hardliners are. Then the moderates, so they're saying, yes, and we'll try to say we're exasperated. We don't know who's doing this, bad cop, good cop. Where does all this leave us? We, Trump has said again and again, he doesn't care about the midterms. People have misinterpreted that. It doesn't mean I don't care if the Republicans win. He means we're going to win as much as I can, but I'm not going to let the left leverage me with fear of losing and stop what we're almost completed. And that's been misinterpreted. So what are the avenues? Seems to me you have two choices. Actually, you have three. You can keep negotiating and negotiating with no time limits, and you will negotiate all the way until Christmas, and I wouldn't do that. I don't think Trump is going to do that either. You can negotiate some type of a settlement with threats of kinetic action. And maybe they will say they're going to stop enrichment during the Trump administration. They'll say they're going to do it forever, but they won't. But anyway, you can say that we, the United States, the Trump administration, I, Donald Trump, hurt them in a way that has never been hurt. They've never been hurt, and it will probably give the next president, or the next two presidents, Lee Wei, and that's an accomplishment. Came, you know, it's not a trillion dollars in Iraq or two trillion in Afghanistan. And we lost 13 lives, which is tragic, but on the calculus of the Middle East, that's, that's amazing that we did that. And then go home to say we'll negotiate and get a negotiation settlement and go home. The third and the trickiest, and I think the best, is we say it's 38 days we were at war, and now we've been 50 days of this, and we're sick of it. So here's what we're going to do. We're not going to go announce a deadline to the world, but we're just going to tell you that very soon, at some point, if you don't come to an agreement, we're going to do things that's going, you're not going to believe what we're going to do and tell them, give them a target list. We're going to take out your dual use bridges. We're going to take out dual use power plants. We're going to take out port facilities, and we can do this in two weeks. And if you launch the remaining caches or depots of your missiles at the Gulf, you're going to regret you never did it because we are going to take out, we're going to obliterate Cogge Island, and then we're going to go home and you can stew in your own juice and you deal with the resistance because history teaches us that once the Berlin Wall fell and communism was discredited, within two years the Soviet Union collapsed and shorter for the Warsaw Communists, maybe in some cases two weeks, but by six months they'd all collapsed. So we're going to let you stew in your own juice and we're going to keep the sanctions on, and we're going to leave a carrier group or enough ships to keep, we're going to blast through on the straits and we're going to open it. We're going to destroy all your ability. That's what we're going to do. And we're not going to tell you what we're going to do. We're just going to tell you we're sick of this delay. And I think that's what he's going to end up doing. Okay, so I have just a question that's kind of a sideline to this. When you listened to commentary about the Strait of Hormuz, they keep talking about it as, well, it's an international waterway if we all remember that, so that's open to anybody, but they keep talking about it like the Iranians can keep it open. The U.S., I know, is protecting it as an international waterway, so trying to keep it open for abroad. But it sounds to me this, that the Iranians used to monitor and prevent traffic going in and out for a long time now. Yeah, it goes back to Reagan. Yeah, so the monetary surprises me. But they don't talk about what they did. They don't talk about what they did. What they did in the past is every once in a while, they would attack a U.S. ship or take hostages of the sailors. They did it with us. They did it with the British. They would buzz around a carrier and try to make it inconvenient. They would board tankers and they did just enough aggressive acts so that these countries, in the most case, were giving them money. They were either giving them money or in the case of the Europeans, every time there was a terrorist act that they either used their surrogates, they were working with ISIS as well. Every time there was a terrorist act, they never ever cited the Iranians as the ultimate cause of it. And then also on the Middle East, over the last 40 years, every European country has shifted their position away from Israel. They were all forgiving money to Hamas through the UN and directly. They sold weaponry to all these horrific regimes. And all of that, the subtext was that they were in good graces with the Iranians. And they were lucrative. They were selling them weapons. They were selling them the ability to become nuclear in some case, the expertise. So they were doing this along and it was just under the table. And we're just going to have to say that there's a reason why the Houthis are not stopping the Red Sea traffic like they thought they could under Biden. They're not doing it under Trump because we've told them we're going to take out everything. We're going to take out their port facilities. The Israelis already did that for a while. Their airport, everything. And there's a reason why Gibraltar is open because they have told the Moroccans or anybody on the African side don't try to do what these people are doing. And when you don't do that, then you see that American ships were waiting off the Panama Canal, why China controlled the entry and exits basically. They weren't honoring it. And the South China Sea is now because of these Spratly Islands that they, it's not, they can control the traffic in there. And so you can't let that happen. And they're not strong enough to do that anymore. That's the thing. You got to remember that they equate survival with victory, the regime survivor. But you can lay the foundations. If you tell them we're sick of negotiating, you're going to give up your, in restoranium A and you're going to, you're not going to interfere with the straight of our moves. And you're not going to send missiles at Israel and the Gulf. And you're not going to give money to these terrorists. And if you do, that's your choice, but you're not going to have an economy. You're not going to have an infrastructure. And it's going to take you 20 years. And some presidents going to come again and do what I did. Because they're not all like, well, Biden, I'll say it all Biden, the two of them, they're not all like that. And then you can go home. And you'll still have a time, there's five months, you, if you can do this in a month, you'll have time enough, the price of oil will crash. If they can get the straight open and they can tell the world that this regime cannot close it and doesn't have a nuclear weapon and it won't have enough missile and just keep doing it and they can do it. So it seems to me that the United States may have to leave a force there because the way the commentary goes, it sounds like, oh, you know, we're negotiating so we can return to normal, but we don't want the straight back to normal. Well, we never have three carriers. We have 11 carrier groups and we don't want more than five or six out. It takes an enormous wear and tear on the tarmac or the ship. I was on one for three days, the USS Kennedy, and I watched maneuvers and off the Atlantic, off the Georgia coast. And my gosh, watching those planes land every minute and take off for three days, it takes a lot of wear and tear and tension. So you only want five or six of them around the world at once. And the others are refitting and shortly even regrouping. So we had three of them, but you can leave one, can come in and out and you don't need necessary, we have enough bases in that area that we can always hit them. But we can leave a carrier group in the immediate aftermath of any, either in a final negotiation or any final strike and we can keep doing it. And there's nobody going to come to help them. The Chinese are not going to help them. The North Koreans are not going to help them. And the Russians are not going to help them because they're all in dire straits. That's something that people keep in the left and the Palae of the new right. They don't understand. China is in a much weaker position than it ever has been. We are the greatest producer of nuclear energy, natural gas and oil in the history of civilization. They import 11 million barrels of oil a day. Our GDP is so much more dynamic than China. We produce, they produce, I should frame it this way, only 60% of our GDP, despite having four times the population. They're falling behind now in AI. They don't have the ability or the brains to do it. They're falling behind on satellite rocketry. They're falling behind on space exploration. Their fertility is flat, 1.0. They cannot remain a competitive technological dynamo without sending 300,000 students to take STEM courses in our university. Our universities are bad. I can tell you though, when you meet a Stanford engineering professor or a Harvard geneticist, they're left wing probably, but they're good, the best. So they're sending all these people over here to put, we can stop that. And even though they do that, their system is not conducive for innovation. It's a closed system. Their military has three carrier groups. We've been doing it for 100 years. They've been doing it for 15. We've got to dispel this whole, I'm now drifting into the Thucydides trap. Yeah, and I knew you wanted to talk about that. So go ahead. Well, as I said earlier, the Thucydides trap is a myth because ancient and modern, it's fallacious. I'm not trying to disparage its author in a very influential paper in 2015 in a book, Graham Allison. He's a very good political scientist. I'm just suggesting that in this case, he had not studied the text of Thucydides. Basically, the Thucydides trap says on the eve of the Peloponnesian war, Sparta preempted and invaded the Attic countryside to start the war. And they did this because on two places in Thucydides texts, the historian says, although basically he has a little throat clearing, although there were other, I believe the greatest cause, the truest, he has the superlative of Althaeos, Althaea truth. He says, and not the prophosus, the excuse, the idea, the real cause was, Sparta was afraid of a dynamic Athens and it was going to lose its hegemony to Athens. So it preempted. He took those two passages and said, throughout, I think he gave 16 examples. That's not very many in history. And he said throughout history, when you have a rising power, i.e. China, and you have the United States, the established power, it tends to be more bellicose than it needs to. And it may, we may have to lash out, but it was kind of from a leftist point of view, the problem. That was the third incident of Athenian Spartan rivalry. After the Persian wars, they had combined at the Battle of Platea to defeat the Spartans after the Athenian, but they had, they fell out. They had dissension, a Cold War. Then in 460 BC, they had the first prelipid, 15 years long. It wasn't about the Ucidides trap. It was that they were different societies. Sparta was rural, parochial. It had a helot or surf system. It was oligarchic. It was Dorian. I could go on. Athens was an Ionian city-state. It was radically democratic. It had chattel slavery. It was cosmopolitan, and it was a sea power. And that made natural tensions. So the third time they fell out, the Ucidides gave this, but the other problem is he either died in 411 in the harness, so to speak, on the saddle. He didn't. There's evidence now that internal evidence from the text that he was writing, he may have written the end of the Peloponnesian war sometime around 404 after the war, or maybe even some people have argued there's an inscription that suggests that a Spartan that he mentioned was not dead. There's an epitaph that he wasn't dead until the 390s. The Ucidides, remember, was born somewhere around 460 BC. So my point is he was writing everything as it went down, and he died or stopped, and he never revised it. So he gave all these other reasons why they went to war. And you can read them in the text in the first book of the Ucidides, the Spartans. They explain exactly, the Spartans explain exactly why they're at war. And they say the Athenians are too restless. They're troublemakers. Not that they're getting powerful. They're just different than we are. So then the other thing very quickly is it doesn't work because the established power, if he were to be right, won. In other words, Sparta won the Peloponnesian war. So that would be the United States, if he says the Thucydides strap, it wouldn't be a trap. The United States would win. The Ascended Power usually loses. Hitler said it was the Ascended Power. It was going to take on the British Navy. It lost. Japan said it was going to take on the U.S. It lost. Right after the Cold War, right when the Cold War started, the 1950s and 60s, there was something called the German miracle. And when Germany started to get its act together in the 1960s, its GDP just creamed the French and the British. And people said, oh, it's the Third Reich again. There was a thing in the Atlantic, it was called their back about the Japanese and German economies. Nobody preempted Germany, Britain didn't, France didn't. The other thing is when you have two nuclear powers, it's a very different game. Nobody's going to preempt. And so there's a lot of historical illusions that were wrong. Just to sum up, the text of Thucydides does not support an overall cause of the Peloponnesian war that he editorialized just two times, given the bulk of where else where he explained why they fought. Two, China is not an ascendant power. China is a rival, a new rival that is descending in power relative to the United States. Go back and look 10 years ago, they said that its GDP would be greater than ours. We're $31 trillion. They're still about 21. And they're more dependent on oil. They're for, they got so many intrinsic problems. So they're not really ascendant. And I don't think the nuclear world allows one superpower to preempt another. So if anybody's interested, our friend at Powerline, Scott Johnson, has an essay on it today, a little site, he cites things. He mentions Donald Kagan. I mentioned Donald Kagan, by the way, when I was talking about an influential article that Robert Kagan, his son wrote, who used to be a stalwart in the first Bush administration, the Elder Bush, George HW Bush. He was an expert with Elliot Abrams on Nicaragua, Contras. And then he came back in prominence. His wife, Victoria Newland, who was a Democratic liberal, had worked for Clinton. She was, during the Bush administration, NATO ambassador. And then he was very prominent. He wrote, you know, United States, a book that were from Mars and Europe, some Venus. And he was a big hawk on, and then he, along with David Fromm and George Will and others, turned on the Republican party due to Trump. So he wrote a very critical essay saying, Trump is basically a fool, blundered into Iran. It won't work and we're defeated. And I just mentioned that I didn't want, I know him, I liked him, but it was completely wrong. But he is a son of whom I think was the greatest American ancient historian of his generation, Donald Kagan. I say that, not just because he wrote a four volume history of it, huge magnum opus, but he, Of the Peloponnesian War. Yes. It wasn't just he was a good scholar and he knew Greek and Latin and all that. But he had, he grew up poor from an immigrant family and he had a very common touch. He had an accent. It was either the Bronx or Queens. I think it was the Bronx. He had an accent of working class. He was athletic director for a year at Yale when they needed somebody. But when he looked at problems, he'd been out in the real world and he knew exactly how people think, like Thenians or Spartans. And so when you read that book, it's very common sensical and it's approachable. The other thing about him, he was a remarkable teacher. I met him in 1991 when we were at a Stanford together. I was a visitor. So was he. And of all the academics there, he was the most approachable, he was the kindest, just a wonderful person. And I really miss him. And he trained some of the greatest scholars of our generation. He trained Paul Ray. He trained Barry Strauss. And he was just Williamson Murray, the late Williamson Murray was a great guy, very good thinker. He was a Kagan student. There were things called Kagan students. And they were all practical good scholars, great scholars. Yeah. I've heard good things about him even from out there, not from you, but from other places. And Fred Kagan, the other son, is a really accomplished guy. He wrote a brilliant first volume of the Napoleonic Wars. And his wife, Kimberly, is very good too. And they run the, it's a center for war studies where General Keane is based. But they've done some remarkable things on Ukraine. Victor, let's welcome back my Patriot supply. If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that the systems we rely on can fail. 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And we'd like to thank my Patriot supply for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show. So Victor, I just have one more thing about the Iran issue. Mush Taba Kamenei has put out a press release and he is calling for the oppressed Muslims of the world to unite against the U.S. and Israel for whom he says death to the United States and death to Israel. It sounds like an AI produced news speech, I know, completely inspired by the Western world. Blah blah blah. Against everybody is so done with that. So you turn on the TV and there's a bunch of people shaking death to America, death to America, and you say, and what else? And then what do they do? They send some people over to kill innocent people. That's one thing. Given that, that's, I've mentioned before very carefully and I think politely and fairly that I used to really, you know, I was on Tucker show and Megan Kelly's and I knew Steve Bannon a little bit. I met Marjorie Taylor Greene. But what I don't understand is this complete reversal on their attitude toward radical Islam or Muslims culture because they used to be very critical of it because of the treatment of women, treatment of homosexuals, treatment of minorities, treatment of apostates. And now given their hostility toward Israel and their anger at Donald Trump for intervening in the Iraq war, they've lost sight of what, who do you think has been saying death to America for 50 years? Who blew up the Marines? They weren't there to take over Lebanon. They were there as peacekeeping forces to keep the Palestinians and the Israelis apart. Who blew up our embassies in Africa? Who blew up 3000 Americans? You saw those people jumping out of the window. Who did that? An ideology. Who, who was in San Bernardino? Who was in Fort Hood? Who were the Sarnay brothers? What, what motivated them? I could go on to this for five shows listing every time this has happened. But more importantly, when they make this equation that they have now learned new information about Israel, they should ask a series of questions. And I've been to Israel a lot. I've been to almost every Arab country with a few exceptions. Do you really, really believe that if you stand on a corner in Israel today in Haifa, say, and you say, I don't like the Jews, I'm here as a Christian mercenary, a missionary, and I don't like the Netanyahu government. What's going to happen to you? Nothing. I've seen people do it. Now take it, and I've seen churches in Israel and I've seen mosque in Israel and 21% of the Israeli population with freedom is Muslim and Arab. Now go over to Saudi Arabia. Or if you think that's too extreme, go to Algeria. Go to Kuwait and just get on a corner and say, I don't like the royal family. They should abdicate. Take a deep breath and said, I was a Muslim once and now I'm an apostate. I've left Islam because now I'm an evangelical Christian and come to my church at this location and see what happens to you. That is a no-brainer. And then why don't you take all the incidents where there was Jewish Israeli terrorists that have hurt and killed Americans versus us versus the Islamic world? It's just ridiculous. And if that's not enough for you, take the amount of donations that come in from the Arab world, from the Gulf states to take one example and ask yourself, who has more influence on the United States? And I don't care if the administration is Republican or Democrat, ask people where they get their money when they revolve out of office or during office. Where was Hunter Biden? Where are people today going that are associated with the Trump administration? It's to the Gulf. That's where the money is. And there's a certain conditions on it that if you want to invest in there, you have to be pretty much not liking Israel. You don't have to go to Israel and say, I hate Arabs to get an investment. You can do it. But if you look at the influence at universities and if you make the argument that the greatest motivator of elite opinion, which is the opinion that determines our lives, people with PhDs, unfortunately, it determines our lives. I'm not condoning it, but MBAs, PhDs, JDs, they come out of universities. And universities get about $50 billion, $50 billion they've gotten from the Arab world. Israelis don't have that kind of money. And so why did they think 30 years ago, the Middle Eastern Studies program at each university was about two professors? And it was maybe 60 years ago. And it was sort of like history of the Middle East, the nature of Islam. You know what I mean? They were legitimate courses and now they're 10, 12 people and they all have endowed professorships from Kuwait and Gutter and Oman and Saudi. And they're the most richly endowed programs. And they've got these, all these Middle East students and they're viewing them with hatred of Israel. And that's what's really creating public opinion. So I don't understand that. Well, all of a sudden, in the space of six months, so many people on the right are coming out and attacking Israel and suggesting it's one, it's running a cabal of influencers that affecting Donald Trump. And then they've suddenly woken up and say, Oh my God, I didn't know that Islam is really no different than any other religion. And we've got it, we've been influenced by nefarious forces to think otherwise. And there, no, it's a different type of religion. I'm not condemning it. I'm saying it just has different tenets. And one of the tenets is there is no such thing as conversion, religious conversion. You can't do it. You can say you're a Muslim and go through them, the motions and then be secular. I know people who do that, but they don't ever come out, at least in a non-Western country, and say, I am no longer a Muslim. I mean, Ayah and Hersie Ali did it. And her life was threatened for it. And she was in a Western country. And it is, I can tell you, as a fellow Hoover scholar, her life is still threatened. So you mean there's no apostates in Islam? I mean, you can't. It's in the Quran. To choose to... No, you can't. And there is no rival. I mean, who took the greatest church for a thousand years in Christendom, roughly from the mid early sixth century AD, all the way to 1453, Hagia Sophia, what we call in Latin, Santa Sophia, Saint Sophia, Saint Wisdom, and took that beautiful church, 1453, slaughtered a lot of the inhabitants, took over that ancient Christian city, made it the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and then slapped on the minarets. Okay. Even then, given the sultanate, when it crashed in 1917, 18, and the young Turks took over, they were secular. And it became a UN conservatory. It was one of the protected places in the world where it was not... It wasn't an active church. It was a museum. And what did Erdogan do? He's turned it into a mosque. And he's wiping out, if you go over to Turkey today, he's wiping out insidiously all Christian influences and presence. And he's being praised for it. He wants to be the new sultan. And this is going on at the same time that Christian countries, to the extent there is a Christianity in Europe, are welcoming in people from the Middle East and giving them special privileges under the DEI exemption laws. So if you're a Pakistani groomer and you are sexually exploiting young native-born British girls, you are not going to face the same level of extubration that Tommy Robinson will be just for voicing his opinion. So I can't see that. That's not... What I just said is not controversial. I know it's not controversial because the people who now don't say it used to say it. That's all. Right. Since you went there, let's turn to the DOJ has brought a case against UCLA for not preventing the anti-Semitism, the harassing and assaulting of Jews on campus when the pro-Palestinian protesters took over parts of the campus at UCLA. So we finally have a case being made by the DOJ. They were slow to action. It took them, I think, three weeks before they did anything. But the DOJ is finally there. So those universities... We gotta remember about universities. The proper metaphor is a hot house plant. It's... They live in a little greenhouse with controlled temperature and environment. That's the equivalent of giving a lifetime job, showing up nine months to teach a year, teaching one or two classes a semester. Nobody audits how you spend your time skipping out on office hours. Once you get tenure, it's very hard to remove you so that many of their... Much of their scholarly output sinks. And it's a very bizarre place where you have an elderly, 30 and above who are constantly, for the next 40 years, surrounded by young idealistic kids, kids with no training. You put all that together and no one has been in the real world. There's no consequences. So if you're a dean and you know that some of these pro-Hamos and anti-Israel demonstrations are pushing Jews and making it almost impossible for them to walk across campus, then you say, I'm a hot house plant. I can't function in the real world. But in my little greenhouse, when they feed me everything I want, like tenure and a title, and I have an unlimited budget and I've connived to be a president, there's not very many presidents like Larry Arant or Max Nikias, believe me, none. John Silver was, but those two guys are exceptional. Pete Peterson, we mentioned at Pepperdine School of Public Policy, but they're very rare. Most of them have made compromises to be dean, assistant provost, provost, and they go seven or eight times to where they want. And then when this happens, they write this, this is not who we are at UCLA. This is not who we are. Yes, it is who you are, but they say that, but they never say, let me make it clear. If you are a UCLA student and we can verify that you engage in anti-Semitic activity, whether physical violence or intimidation, we're going to have a hearing and if the evidence is clear, we're going to expel you forever from this camp. It would stop tomorrow. But then the dean said, oh my gosh, on the one hand, I could do that. But on the other, the faculty might have a vote of no confidence because they're all left like me. Oh my gosh. Maybe if I was walking across campus, the head of the Middle Eastern might yell at me or if I was in my parking lot and I was backing out, the students might surround my car. Oh my gosh. I might not ever get to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke. It would terminate my, my cursus anoria. I can't do that. So the Trump administration, thank God, looks at these people and says, you're not going to charge us overhead 40% on grants anymore. Sorry, it's not going to happen. And we're not going to subsidize federal student guaranteed loans when you're half the people are not graduating in four years. And we're not going to keep allowing you to run up $1.7 trillion in student debt and have these dead beats making $100,000 that don't pay their student loans. We're done with it. And then have this star chamber court where you, if you're accused of being a transphobe or homophobe or sexual or racist, you can't have a lawyer. You have no due process, no evidence, no cross examination. No, we're not going to do it anymore. And that's, that's one of the best things that the Trump administration is doing. Yeah, absolutely. And the left can't handle it because they are always said, we don't believe in racism and discrimination. And we stopped anti-semitism. That was what they always said, but now they are the problem. They are the party of anti-semitism. The new democratic party is really, if you think about it very rationally, don't get emotional. It is now at the best description of this, not a democratic party. It is a socialist-islamist party. Ask yourself what they all have in common. What is the Michigan Senate, kind of, El Sayid? His main thing is socialism and Islam. How about Mondami? Socialism and Islam and anti-semitism. How about Graham Plattner? Socialism and, well, Nazi tattoo, it's a little extreme, but I think we could say anti-semitism. And the crazy woman that lost her, she won the general primary, but she lost the runoff. Yeah, Maureen Galindo. Maureen Galindo wants to put prosinus in camps and have them castrated to boot along with a pedophile. And they are not the only people. I mean, you've got major people in the squad, right? The whole Black Caucus is anti-Israel and it's socialist. And Bernie Sanders was a kook. He was a complete misfit. They all said, you go to Vermont. I used to speak in Vermont. I spoke at Middlebury. I spoke at the University of Vermont. It's a wonderful place. I had wonderful academic hosts. And this was 40 years ago, 30 years ago, I'd say, who's this guy? Bernie Sanders. Yeah, he runs for mayor every year. He kind of lives in the forest and walks around barefooted. He never had a job. He's kind of a kooky guy. We like him. He's kind of an affable commie. And then he won the mayor and then he won. He's a congressman and all of a sudden, he's normal now. And that's what, and that's Talarico in Texas. He says he has a girlfriend, but he can't tell us who she is. Yes, that was his one of his more recent things. And he says all these things about the Bible. And now they say the church that he has been officiating at has gay sex books and stuff in it, you know, that it's eligible for people in its library to read. And then he's in the beef capital of the world, the Texas Long Larns. And he says that we've got to all avoid beef, be veggies. This week though, he has, those things have been pointed out in the last few weeks. This week, he said that he is admits to his, and he called them this cringy comments, which were... Now, why do you need to do that? He only did that because they came out. Well, they came out, but they were out for a while. So I guess this is his campaign's effort to try to deal with... Because people said to him, they sat him down and said, you're the next Beto, and you're a better candidate than Beto. And we can knock off Paxton, because he's a little bit maga, a lot maga. And we're going to knock him off this... That is their... It's kind of like in boxing, the great white hope, or the unicorn. That's what they're going to do. They keep thinking they can do that. I don't think they can. And they say, we're going to pour money on you, but don't be Graham Plattener, not in Texas. Maybe in Maine, you can be a commie, but don't do it here. And don't talk about transgendered, and don't insult the oil industry, and don't insult the beef industry, and don't insult white people, and don't... He has. And so now he's kind of refuted this, but he's such a man of truth and honesty and transparency. So somebody there, they said, well, why aren't you married in Texas? That's a question, right? And he said he had a girlfriend, but he wouldn't disclose who it was, right? I'm not intimidating, emanating anything, but I only say that because he's like a... What do you call it? Pete Buttigieg on steroids, in terms of self-regard, sanctimonious, you know what I mean, lecturer. He's a bore, he's like scold, and I think he's going to go the way of Beto. Yeah. Well, I think calling his own remarks is kind of another nail in the coffin of his campaign. What the Democrats are scared of, everybody should understand that. We've got five months to go. They are scared there's going to be a resolution one way or the other within the next month in Iran. And that's going to create momentum abroad. And Venezuela will behave. It's already added 300,000 barrels. And polls in Venezuela, as you mentioned last time, show that the U.S. and the change is popular still. And they think there's going to be momentum in Cuba. Once we get out of Iran, there's going to be a strangle on... I don't think we need to do any military action at all. Just turn the Cuban Americans loose economically and financially, not militarily. And they're afraid that the fundamentals of the economy are great, massive foreign investment, great jobs report, record Wall Street highs. And to the degree we have inflation, it's still from the 30% rise. And Donald Trump has not raised it, but once the prices of oil get down, and it will crash, he's right about that. Because it's been speculation that's jacking it up. And when speculators feel that they went too high and they're exposed, they will unload that stuff. And China will buy every drop at a discount. You know what I mean? It'll just call and say, I want 100... It says I want a thousand million barrels of oil as quickly as I can get but I want to pay only 20 bucks or 40 bucks a barrel. That'll happen. So they are afraid that there's still time, and there is still time for Donald Trump to resolve favorably, geo-strategically favorably, and the Republicans will outspend them and they will run campaign ads, three types. They're going to say, this is the economy and it's good. Number two, on foreign policy, they will say, where is Russia and China? And look at Cuba and look at Venezuela. And this president was the only guy courageous enough to deal with, kind of like the Reagan-Barre commercial and the Russians. And then they're going to have, I hope it's going to be a Lee Outwater type revelation of what the Democrats say. I expect to see Graham Platner's stuff, Tala Grico's stuff, Jasmine Crockett's stuff everywhere, on trans, on the border, on ICE. They should run a really good ad showing that 50% of ICE officers are middle-class Mexican-American and Hispanic people. They know immigration better than any of these white... And they're out there every day getting spat upon by these Karen's, and we use that term, wealthy white Antifa types. And that doesn't go over well with the people that law enforcement officers of the federal government are trying to help solve this problem that Biden left us with 12 million people, 500,000 criminals, and these elite people who are never subject to the consequences of their ideology are hitting them. They do gross things like those plastic fallacies or they throw feces. It's just disgusting. And they can do all that. So the Democrats are riding high, but nobody's really turned their attention yet to who they are now. They're not the Democratic Party, they're Jacobins, and they are really obnoxious and off-putting. They should... And all these... I think people don't want to see on TV any more of these trans things as if this is a normal... They don't want to see people throwing stuff at ICE officers. They're kind of tired of it. So it's not set in stone, they're going to lose the midterm. Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back. And I have a few questions about that Democratic Party and how to... How they assess it. Stay with us and we'll be right back from these messages. Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. We are a subsidiary of the Daily Signal. Please go try out the Daily Signal. Lots of good conservative material there. Victor can be found on X. His handle is at V.D. Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup. So Victor, if you were to talk to somebody from the Democratic Party, these people seem like crazies to us in particular, but even to some in the Democratic Party. And I think that the only way they can possibly still remain Democrats is to say, that's the exception. Grant Platler is his own spiel. But I'm not going to desert the Democratic Party just because a Grant Platler had a Nazi tattoo. How do you refute that? You say that, but how would you refute that? I'm just thinking off the cuff. Just I would say, then can I ask you a basic question and that will solve the problem if there is no longer a Democratic Party. Hey, everybody who's running for Senate, a third of the Senate seats this year and everyone who's running for Congress will just say what the Democratic Party has always said it was from Harry Truman on. Therefore, I am running for Senate in Maine. I am running for Senate in Texas and I want to reiterate that we support the right of the Jewish state of Israel to defend itself and we abhor radical Islamic terrorism against it. They used to say that too. And we as Bill Clinton taught us believe in historical borders and legal only immigration, right? Say that. And three, we always in the Democratic Party, despite the McCarthy-esque slurs against us believe in the sanctity of private property and fundamental consumer capitalism overseen by audit and regulation. That's what we do. We're not socialists. We're not anti-Semites. Just say that. And how could you get elected? I don't think so. Yeah, probably not. Where would you get elected? Gavin Newsom thought he was going to do it. He said he was sort of kind of maybe kind of for Israel and kind of condemned now. And then he just flipped. Somebody shook him by the neck and said, Gavin, that's what you do when you're president. But you won't be able to be nominated in this party. But you've got to go hard left. Then you come to the middle and fake people out like Harris tried to do. She wasn't as good as you, Gavin. She didn't wiggle her arm like you do. Once you do that, because he's not very bright. So he thought he was going to get, you know, I got Charlie Kirk. I'm just a good old guy. No, no, Gavin. Your party is a hardcore neo-socialist anti-Semitic party. And you won't be nominated. So if anybody out there can say, well, I can tell you that both of our senators are pro-Israel and they're keen critics of socialism. And they're keen supporters of secure borders and legal-only immigration. You mean the senators from California? Anywhere. Any blue state? Okay. Anywhere. And I'm not talking about what they say to get elected in the general election. I'm talking about running in the primaries. Because that'll tell you where the Democratic party is. Well, there is, of course, John Federman out there. So he's one person. Yeah, one person. And he's well-maintained despised. And he has a choice coming up in two years. He's either going to have to run as a third party candidate or he's going to have to flip over to the Republicans. And I don't think he'll do either one. And I don't think he'll be renominated. That Act Blue and all of those Reed Hoffman type George Sorrell, they will bury him under... So you think that part of the reason the Democratic party cannot readjust itself back to a Bill Clinton Democrat is because of all the money that's being put into smothering the John Federmas. We get so sick of oligarchy, oligarchy, oligarchy, oligarchy, oligarchy. They are the oligarchs. Govite, I keep saying that. Govite... Is it Molly Bell's time essay when she said that we had all this money and we had the Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street and we had a cabal and a conspiracy and we changed the voting law. That was the Democratic party. Who do you think funded... And she's up in the news today, Eugene Carroll. That was the most bogus... I have a whole in the new book, The Counterrevolution, The Fallen Rise of Donald Trump and his mega movement. I have a whole section on that trial of Eugene Carroll. That was the most egregious sample, example of judicial mispractice from the judge to the... To that... Everything about that. But my point is, she flat out lied on her... Oh, she said that nobody was funding her. It was Reed Hoffman. He gave her over a million dollars. She bragged about it. Where did that come from? Where did Sam Bankman-Free give his money to? He gave it to his mother and who was she? She was a bundler to fund hard-left candidates. Hard-left candidate. Silicon Valley until they went after Silicon Valley. It was hard left. It was the dumping ground for former Obama people when they left EPA or whatever. They went to these companies. That's where their kids were all interning. And then they did something stupid. They got them all in a room and they said, you're going to do AI and you're not and you're going to be subject to Canadian and European censorship laws and you're going to give us this much and you're going to censor the news and not tell anybody about the laptop and people like David Sachs and Andresa and Horowitz and to a lesser extent Mark Zuckerberg, now Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk said, oh my gosh, these people really do hate us and they want to take our property and our money. They want to tax everything we build. This is crazy and maybe we don't like Donald Trump, but my gosh, he's their only hope. But until that, they have all the money, the big money. And so when Bernie Sanders says that and then he sends a bill in for $600,000 for private jet travel and he lives in three homes and his wife basically bankrupt the university she was a president of and left it in shambles and got a nice pension and settlement, it's just a joke. It is a joke. I just got back last night from Menlo Park, Atherton, Stanford Med and I can tell you that I live in a community that's 95% Hispanic working. When I go into Selma, I don't see a Hispanic driver stop in the middle of the road at an intersection. No, it wasn't an intersection. It was right in the middle of the road. Why Buffy or whatever her name child was, all decked out in beautiful clothes is going to get out to go to a coffee shop maybe, I guess, and they're talking. Like they don't think that they have to move. I've never seen that in Selma. I saw that. That was so frustrating and a car behind these people and they're just sitting there and talking and chatting like we're from Atherton. You know what I mean? It was just insulting. So what I'm getting out is that's who the Democratic, that's who runs that party. You can see it all over. There's signs everywhere. It used to be racism has no place in this home and then it was George Floyd and then it was Ukraine and then it was during the election, hate Trump and now it's ICE. You know what I mean? And that's who wealthy people are for. The wealthiest people in the United States are left-wing. The Republican party is the lower middle, middle, middle and upper middle class. The Democratic party is the subsidized poor who don't pay taxes and get enormous amounts of money from the government and feel that there's no oversight over it and the Democrats will give them all the federal taxpayers money and they will abscond with it and give donations to people who are running it and they're very wealthy. That's who they are. And I mean basically the 500,000 professional class and up. And they're not the truck drivers. They're not the sheeprock people. They're not the electricians. They're not the farmers. No, no, no, no. They're the lawyers, the media people, the investors, the consultants, the psych, all of them. The working class depends on a lawful society to make ends meet. Whereas the people you're talking about don't and they can support lawlessness. Go through Atherton and you see those homes. They have walls and a lot of them have walls around them and the ones that don't have private security and they walk out. I saw just that it's a stereotype and I admire people who keep in shape. But I saw a lot of women 50 to 70 with yoga pants on with a beautiful pedigree dog, walking at any time in the early morning or night through their nice shaded, no sidewalk, but luscious trees, Atherton. That's good. I admire that. But a lot of America can't do that. They can't do that because they'll be clubbed over the head. You're a Jew and you're living in the Queens. You can't do that. Not with the Arab people around, not these crazy people. If you're in the inner city in Detroit, you can't do that. And I'm not sure you can do it in areas where I live. Yeah. So there's a whole middle class that depends on law enforcement, ICE, everything. Law enforcement, transparent taxation. They don't have any write-offs. They don't have any schemes going to work every day. Yeah. Well, Victor, we did have some primaries this week and Donald Trump. We were looking at his record on the primaries 100%. Even Paxton, who he supported over Cronin, beat Cronin by 30 points, I think, or somewhere around that. So Donald Trump is the kingmaker in his own party. Clearly, obviously, part of his party. Donald Trump is a very astute politician. So he's asked himself, have you ever heard of a president after he was impeached twice? No one around. Tried as a private citizen to hound him and having a Republican Senator vote to convict me? That's what John Cornyn did. Have you ever heard of a congressman who's supposed to be on your side when you only have a three or four-seated bandage, and he votes to stop voter ID or the big, beautiful bill? He didn't say a word during the Biden administration about the Epstein files, and then he kept saying, Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, and then when it was revealed that 90% of them were wealthy liberal Democrats, he hushed up. That was Thomas Massie. Then he basically said, if these people are trying to stop this counter-revolution, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and if they have a principle that if they disagree with me on one issue, then it nullifies everything else I've done. And there's a viable alternative to them that can win. I'm going to go with a MAGA solidarity. So when these elections are over, I have only two years left in my life to be president, and we're not going to have a Thomas Massie or a Cornyn or somebody. And these are nice people, but they're not going to vote against me. Cornyn's kind of a tragic figure, because he started to vote. He's a much better man than Massie. Massie's an anti-Semite. He said that, my opponent, somewhere in Tel Aviv. So that said, what people didn't say is Susan Collins is running in Maine, and she's running against, I think, a Nazi nut, probably a socialist-ass communist from what he says, a Mondami person. Yeah, a grand-plot. Yeah. But Trump didn't try to primary her. He basically said, I know what Maine is like. It's a purple state. And Susan Collins at certain times has to come against me, but she usually comes against me when it's not a one-vote margin. In other words, she's not quite like Lisa Murkowski in Alaska. So she has to vote against me on four or five times, but you look at her voting record and 75% is for me, and that's the best you're ever going to get from Maine. So he's pragmatic. So I don't see why everybody said that this is cannibalism and it's stupid. What he's basically saying is I have no grudge against any Republican, but we are in counter-revolutionary times, and we have no margin of error. Country's 50-50. I can't afford one senator like Dr. Cassit, Kennedy in Louisiana, or John... These are red-hard states, or the most conservative district in the country, in Tennessee, congressional... I can't afford people in those districts when I can get solid MAGA people to be voting against me, you know what I'm saying? And that's what he did. Now the test will be, can these people get elected? And everybody's now saying, wow, I think Tal Credo. No, these people are crazy, the Democratic opposition. So, you know, Carl... Are you betting on Paxton over Toledo? I think Paxton can win if they raise money and they don't alienate Cornyn. And he did say nice things. He said he could say John Cornyn was a... He's a good man. He is a good man. He's a good man, but we differed, and I bear him no good will, and I'll do anything I can to help him in the future. No ill will, yeah. No ill will whatsoever. But if they try to gloat, haha, you're... Don't do that. Mass is a different story. They can win that district no matter what. I'm not saying to be cynical. I think he really should because, you know, you feel bad for Cornyn, but he shouldn't have... In a state like Texas, when the Senate only has three or four different seats. Maybe if you had 10 seat margin, you can afford a Cornyn. You can afford a Murkowski in Alaska or Collins in Maine because those states are now pretty purple, even Alaska, but not Texas, not Louisiana, not Tennessee. Yeah. Well, let's hope Paxton does well. I'm kind of surprised that you seem a little hesitant in the sense that I would hope in Texas that Paxton would just take it away from Talarico, who's not all of us. Well, he's controversial. He's had some personal problems and ethical accusation, and he tried to primary and knock off a sitting senator, and there's a rule in the Senate that if you're a Republican or Democratic senator, you do not campaign against a fellow senator in the primary. Right? And a lot of... So, I can't think of one... Maybe there was one representative. I can't think of one U.S. Senator that said he was for Paxton, who's in the Republican side. So, Paxton, he's got to speak very highly of Cornyn. They've got to unite the party. Trump has to... If I were Trump today, I would call in Rubio and I'd say, where are the choices ambassador ships left, and what are the types of things Cornyn would like to do? And I will appoint him. He deserves that type of retirement. Okay, Victor. Well, let's talk a little bit about the Human Resources Department in these big companies. The CEO of Bolt Financial has decided he can get rid of his Human Resources Department because they're causing more problems than they solve. And I was reading an article, and I'm sorry, I can't remember the publication, but they said that these HR departments have come in and they were supposed to prevent these companies from getting terrible lawsuits for sexual harassment and things like that. But they've come in and they've caused so much trouble by all of the things that they invent to go on. And so now the... I think what's interesting here is the company's making a financial assessment of these people are costing us more money than they save us if we were to get lawsuits against us, right? I mean, I can... I can go back on some old metaphors I've used. In the late Republic, people had large wooden... And people would build on top of each other. Juvenile has a nice sadder about how they collapse. I think he says... He mentions of Roman, he said he had very little thing, but his very little property, but his very little property went up and crashed. And what they would do is, allegedly, that Crassus, the richest man in Rome, would set fires and then he pulled up with his slave fire brigade. He said, oh, you have a problem? I will buy that property right now, but you have about five minutes before it goes up and I'll put out that. And that's kind of what these DI... They don't see enough... They know there's too many victims and not enough victimizers. And you know how you can tell that by the language? Always go back to philology. I had a great professor at graduate school at Stanford and he said, always look at the language. And I... It was very frustrating. I gave a report once on a Pamina on this in the battle of Lucdrude. Here's how he thought. You had to give... Read all the sources, Xenophon, Deodorus, Plutarch, and you gave this talk. And I was saying, a Pamina does strengthen the left wing. Left wing, you say? He was Austrian. Well, what is the word in Greek? I said, what is that? We have to ground your argument with textual support. I said, Keros. And then there was 50 shields. He linked them, the column, the 50 shields, very unusual. And what was the word for... What is the plural victor of shields? Are you going to use hapla or did he use aspides? Which source? So the point was, he was trying to ground everything in language. And that taught me something the rest of my life. I was only 21 years old. But why do they say things like insidious racism or microaggressions, microaggressions, insidious racism? I think they're more common term is systemic racism. Systemic racism, both of them. Systemic racism, trigger warnings. That tells me that it's sort of like saying you're all breathing air, but you don't really know that it's air until you hire me to have a meter. You're all out there and you don't know there's racism. You can't see it, you can't smell it, you can't tell it, but you hire an expert with a special little racist meter and ding, ding, ding. It's microaggression. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. It's a trigger warning. You have to be careful. And that's what they do. They invent, they're kind of like causing a fire so they can put it out. And people are sick of it. The other thing about it is Americans don't like racism of any kind. We are a multiracial society now. And it's not going to... We're going to be in Brazil or Indian territory like India if we keep this up. Democracy does not work with tribalism. But if everybody votes for people who look like them, then you're in big trouble. So it can't go on. Everybody knows that. So the reason is that when you ask people of any different ethnic background, you think race should give you an advantage or discipline. They say no. So there's no public support for DEI. And they're all inflated salaries. So it's a big overhead. And universities are really strapped because the fertility has really dropped to 1.7. And there's not a lot of 18-year-olds in the pool. The schools are closing and you got these bloated post-George Floyd people that are calling everybody a racist. And then these people are saying to themselves, this is a mirage. This is like the Wizard of Oz. All you have to do is pull away the curtain and there's some guy pulling levers and it's a joke. So I'm just going to give him at all. And I'll take one day of your erasis and that's it. And that's what they're going to do. I've met a lot of these people and it's sad because you look at their degrees and they're not in academic subjects. And at the same time, what I'm getting at is the university did all of these things slowly, but then after George Floyd, they were slowly going broke and then they did it quickly. And now they've got remedial math in every university and they think it doesn't affect their reputation. It's so weird for years they said, well, we're Stanford and we're Harvard and we only take people with perfect SAT scores, 4.5, because we have curricula that's nobody in the world could do unless you were that qualified. And then when we turn them out, they just shine and impress the law firm and the medical school because they're top, they're the best in the world. And then they said to themselves, that's a lie. We're just going to let in people with 200 points in the SAT lower than anybody else. And then we're going to water down the things. And then when they go to Amazon, they go to Facebook or they go to a blue silk stocking law firm, they won't know because they'll be branded with Harvard. It reminds me of that other similarly, I've beaten to death, but I'll say it again, a very smart guy and his wife, they were very, and they're knowing, if they're listening, they know who they are, but they're very brilliant, wonderful people. And I said to him once, and I had given a talk elsewhere, I said, you know, I want to be very careful because there were Stanford people, very successful, very smart and conservative. I said, you know, I'm getting to the point now where I've met these Stanford students, you know, and they don't know anything because they're, you know, they've let the SAT go way down. They don't even require it. It's about three years ago. And they're racially obsessed. They're only letting 9% of the classes with white males when they're 33%. There's not even room for, you know, anybody with a perfect, and I said, they just, there's an article in the Samozae Mercury where they were bragging, they turned down 65% of those with perfect SATs. I think you guys in Silicon Valley might question, and he said, where have you been? He said, give me any day a patriotic, hardworking, better trained engineer from Coder, from Texas A&M or Georgia Tech. And I said, really? And he said, it's not just really, it's they don't go to HR and have a psychodrama and say that they're suffering microaggressions and they want $100,000 and no work. It's not like we can all be Twitter and say, one day you'll have a salad bar and then we're going to give you a cappuccino, then a yoga mat. We can't afford that. I'm sorry. And Elon Musk will take over and fire 80% of you. Elon Musk, my gosh, more I read about him and everything, SpaceX, now the tunnel boring machines back in the news, they're using it more and more, and he's got more satellites launched every year than the European continent. Now he's got the super rocket, and then Tesla keeps going, they're going to go brought and it keeps going. If we didn't have that guy, we'd be in trouble. And why anybody would hate, it really kills me when these mediocrity left, he's never done anything in their life they take and make fun of him. He's done more and you know, I understand the power and danger of billionaires. I really do, but and I'm not a big fan of all of them, but man, when Jeff Bezos said, I have done more for humanity with Amazon than I did with giving billions of dollars for philanthropy and turning it over in the hands of leftists. He's absolutely right. Yeah. Well, Victor, we have these are comments from YouTube and they come from everywhere. That's the point of the first three very quickly. Life is important. Kate says, good morning to both of you and Jack. I am watching from London, UK at four, two in the afternoon. User in 5G3L says, good morning from the barely free Commonwealth of Virginia. Have a great day. And Jermaine Copeland 4650 says, good morning from Georgia USA. Thank you for your insights. And we often see ones and I couldn't find one today from down under, they like to leave that to you. I like Australians. I've mentioned a lot. And then I have a longer one that's a handwritten for everybody. Oh my gosh. Wow, beautifully that's written. Look at the paper. It's a nice thin paper. Beautiful. I know. Colored paper. Dear Mr. Hansen, thank you for being a beacon of hope and a font of wisdom in a dark and ignorant land. How well written. Yeah, I know. You are an inspiration to all of your many listeners as you demonstrate grace and fortitude while you face multiple challenges. Please know we also pray California and your family homestead will be healed from the recent leftist scourge that many... Scourge, that's a good word. That many more... It comes right out of Tolkien. That's a favorite word of Tolkien, a scourge. So that many more generations of your family may continue to love in your home. May God richly bless you and yours respectfully, Lou Ronhofer. It's such a nice letter. That's beautiful. I know I'm trying. I just got back from my five-month scans. Yes. And how did it go? I had a CT of my lungs and abdomen. The... Let me get this straight. The crass G12R mutation is very rare in the lung, and it's more common in the pancreas and brain. So Stanford being very cautious and that's good, said, we need scans for baseline. You're gonna have to be scanned every six months the rest of your life. So I had those and well, I haven't got the results yet, so I'm kind of nervous today. And I had a brain scan because my daughter died of leukemia. My mother died of a brain tumor, and I have a benign 9 millimeter, they found cyst, I hope, and they want to make sure that it's not connected to the lung mutation. But the funny thing was, Tesla has a new MRI. Very impressive. I'm not qualified. We'll have to get a world's expert on the brain and MRI, our friend Scott Atlas, who's a wonderful person. And I always consult. I think I bug him too much, but he's very affable. And in any case, it's supposed to really be a quantum step. I don't know what the number tests the six or something, but I've taken, I've had now 11 major operations. I must have, I glow, I probably had 50 CAT scans minimum MRIs, but I, and I can always, they, everybody said they kind of drive you crazy. You go in the tunnel and I go ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and then go boo. But it's sometimes they had headphones and music. There was not no big thing. I got in this thing. It was a magnitude of 10 times louder. And they only, they didn't have headphones. They just had little airline plugs. It didn't work. And then you're in the middle of it. And then all of a sudden a computer, you were tied up and injects you die. But I won't mention the medicine or where it was, but it's a state of the art. So I just, when I got out, they gave, took my blood pressure was like 160 over a hundred. I was like a wreck in my heart. So they said, how, that was very good. I said, could I ask you a question very politely? Cause the people who were operating it were wonderful. There was a guy from Uganda and another guy and they were wonderful. But I just said, I've never been subject to such torture. That's the loudest. I thought the state of the art would be, it would not only be way above the accuracy of current MRIs, but it would be almost no noise. This is 10 times louder. Has anybody complained? And they looked at each other and said, yep. And I said, I almost hit the button and asked for adiban. People do. So that was really a shock. And I haven't got that result back either. So I'm sure that with that new MRI, they can find a grain and sand. The only problem with this is so accurate that I think all of our brains and bodies have all sorts of cysts. You know what I mean? I know that my liver, when I got the regular MRI back where they diagnosed it had like cysts in the prostate, cysts in the liver, everywhere. But this thing, it'll probably show one grain of salt size. That's the danger of it. Back to way to go Elon. Yeah. And I think I've discovered something else, maybe controversially to say that about medicine. Radiologists are really good, but surgeons consult radiology, right? They're scanned, but they have an added advantage because they look at the scan, then they go inside the body and see what's actually there. And then they can collate that knowledge. So if they see X, X, X nodules, first hand, they can see what those nodules were when they went in there and they saw the color and they took them out and they buy up. The radiologists can do that, but second hand. So when a surgeon looks at a scan and they do hundreds of them a month, you get the impression that they might be as accurate or more accurate than a radiologist. So I keep that in mind. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Victor, thank you for the wisdom today and the energetic... Thank you. I went to the pulmologist and he said, congratulations, you went from 60% normal value to you're almost 80%. Yeah. And your color looks super... Does it? Yeah. I don't know about that. I got rash as a lot, but that's the only reaction I had to the dye. And I'm very lucky so far, but I won't know until the weekend what I'm looking at long term. All right. Thank you for those letters. I really... You know, that's funny. One last thing. I read them. I just can't... There's been hundreds of them and emails and stuff, but they do may have a great effect on me. I get really encouraged. And thanks to our audience for choosing to join us on this Friday News Roundup. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen and we're signing off. Thank you for listening and watching. We'll see you next time. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. 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