Victor Davis Hanson: Businesses Keep Leaving California, Passing of Gordon Wood, and Updates on Iran

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Lending is subject to status, eligibility criteria and T's and C's apply. California reached critical mass at that point. People said to themselves, this state is dysfunctional. It can't conduct honest, transparent elections with readily tabulated votes. More likely you should go to the polls and you should show your California driver's license again. And we don't do that. You people conduct elections and you have no idea who's voting. You give licenses to people here illegally. And that license is used to get registered vote, but you don't even check if they're at the address. They didn't release the name of the driver. Okay. Well, what Victor's referring to folks, and that's Victor Davis Hansen. And this is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words, and we're going to be talking about Gordon Wood, the great historian who died the other day, died because he was hit by a car and killed. This show is being recorded on Saturday, June 13th. It will be up on the Daily Signal and other platforms on Tuesday, June 16th. Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Moshe Buske Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. He's man with the website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHansen.com is the address. He is a senior contributor to the Daily Signal. We have this podcast, and then he also has a four times a week, a shorter show, but a very popular show, Victor Davis Hansen, in a few words. Tomorrow is Flag Day. In real time, as we're talking, Victor, tomorrow's Flag Day. I love Flag Day. Maybe we can talk about that at the end. Jay Clayton has been named the Director of National Intelligence by Donald Trump. Elliot Abrams has written a somewhat critical article of Donald Trump's foreign policy. Get your take on that, Victor. Spencer Pratt says I'm going to war. We have a great, I mean, an important piece of reporting by Washington Free Beacon about these Hamas is turning Gaza hospitals into torture chambers. And we have plenty more higher ed topics to talk about too. So we'll get to all these. We'll start off with Jay Clayton when we return from these important messages. For 250 years, America has been a bastion of freedom. As we look ahead to the next 250, we're reminded that freedom is ours to defend. Today, Alliance Defending Freedom stands in courtrooms across the country to protect those freedoms we cherish. Life, free speech, religious freedom, parental rights. These freedoms are at the core of who we are as a nation, and they must be preserved. ADF is approaching a critical fiscal year-end fundraising deadline. Your support today helps ADF defend these freedoms so they may endure for many years to come. Every dollar you give will be doubled thanks to a special matching grant while funds last. Visit joinadf.com slash Hansen or text Hansen to 83-848 to give today. That's joinadf.com slash Hansen or text Hansen to 83-848. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words where Victor is now in the beautiful Central Valley of California. It is, you just tell me ahead of time, what, 102, 104? 104, I think it is outside, yeah, 104, 105. It's very hot for June. Yeah, we're weeping here because it's 85 in mug heat, but we got up to the mid-90s last week here in Connecticut, but we can't hold a candle to what you endure there, Victor. So, it's dry heat, though. It's desert heat. It's not, I spent, you know, I was at Annapolis for a year, and I could take 105 here in the valley more than 85 there. Yeah, it's the mug, the humidity, you can't breathe. When I first, Sharon and I were first married, we moved, we were down in Fredericksburg for six or seven years, and New Yorkers are obnoxious about everything, but particularly obnoxious about southerners, and they're slow, right, we make fun of them. But having lived there, I thought, if you go through 12 days straight of high humidity and 99 degree heat, you're gonna be, you're gonna take it slow also. So that's what Aristotle said. He was trying to explain the vigor of the Northern tribes. Oh, and Romans felt the same thing, the Germans of the Gauls, they lived in such cold climates compared to the Mediterranean people, they were very vigorous. Like the Swedes, some of the great swiders, once upon a time, oh, maybe still are. I don't think so. Okay. Well, Jay Clayton has been appointed, named the Director of National Intelligence for Donald Trump. This comes on the heels of Tulsi Gavir's Resigning and a controversial temporary solution there. Any thoughts on Jay Clayton, Victor? Tulsi's kind of going out with a bang, isn't she? She's releasing a lot of things on UFOs and overreach by government people, some things on the election. It's exciting time. He's the ultimate, on the conservative side, professional, wasn't he? I think he was head of the SEC and he's a Washington lawyer. So he's a professional. And I think right now, in that administration, given they've had people like Matt Getz, who was not confirmed or had bad out, but it's more of a mainstream, less controversial appointment. You know what I mean? Kind of a, he's a very good guy, he's pro-Trump and all that stuff, but it's not going to be a Pam Bondi type appointment. And I like Pam Bondi. I didn't mean to put someone who's familiar with Washington is what I'm trying to say. You agree? Have I ever disagreed with you about anything other than how many archangels there are? I think I've agreed with you on everything, Victor. Okay, Gordon Wood, a great historian, 92 years old, well-acclaimed historian, and he was mowed down in a parking lot in Rhode Island this past week. He taught at Brown University. Victor, you must have crossed your historian. I met him two or three times. He was a consummate gentleman. When the 1619 Fuhrer came out, he was not grandstanding. He just sober and judiciously basically showed why it was wrong. And he was, he knew from A to Z the status of slavery and how it affected the founding fathers and the Declaration and the Constitution. He voiced his opinion. They were always excellent. I was curious about how old the person was, just because I was wondering if it was an older driver or young or what, how that happened. Because you don't hear of a person being run over very often in a parking lot. In a parking lot? No. But you would think maybe it's someone, a robbery, fleeing, fleeing something. It could be an old lady who well, could be an old lady. I don't know. You mean an old lady like my age, 72? I become a very sensitive now because of old man or cancer survivor. I got a lot of whole victim status qualifications now. Elder abused, Jack. Yeah, I accused someone in my company of they had to do something for me or would be senior. That would be senior abuse as an official senior. Hey, Victor, okay, well, let's, let's talk about something serious. Not that the, not that Gordon Wood's passing isn't serious, but I thought it was pretty long and detailed and critical piece. I published that national review online the other day by Elliott Abrams. It's titled, In Trump's Second Term, Things Start to Fall Apart. Now, just read here quickly. He has said in the 17th month of his second term, there's confusion and failure. The achievements of the second term in foreign affairs are real. The attacks on Iran in June 2025 and now in 2026 decapitated the regime, greatly diminished Iran's economy and its military power. Similarly, bolder the decapitation of the regime in Venezuela and the squeeze on Cuba. But in Europe, where the Ukraine war continues and in Asia, where Xi Jinping continues his threat against Taiwan, there are no achievements to list. In fact, relations with India, critical during the 21st century, have been damaged and President Trump seems poised to throw away the achievements he has made. I never thought of Elliott Abrams as someone in you know, Bulwarky, John Bolton, whatever Trump does is- No, I don't think he is. I don't think he is. But I would disagree. I mean, when you, he's talking about his second term, when we came in, the Chinese were running the entry and the exit of Panama. And there were a lot of communist governments in South America and Venezuela, he mentioned Venezuela, but I mean, it was, it has the largest oil reserves, I think it was the first or second in the world. And it was a, basically a captive of China. And all of a sudden, I mean, Cuba is inert right now. Conservative governments are being elected in Latin America. It's starting to return to its pro-American stance. The Chinese are shut out, basically, they don't control the Panama Canal in the fashion they did. Venezuela is good. We had the bombing last June of 26 hours that did some damage, a lot of damage to the nuclear facilities. We have waged, you know, 38 days of bombing. And then we've had 62 days of negotiation on and off tit for tat. But the accident rate in the U.S. military, Jack, is about, oh, I think it's about a hundred, maybe it's 50 a month or 60 a month. It's about one or two a day. So, you mean deaths? Yes, one and a half deaths on average a day. So, in 38 days, just by accidents, the U.S. military would lose, say, 40 people. We only lost 13 that were tragic. So by any standard, that's amazing given the amount of damage that we did. So I don't know what, I think his criticism is that he was excited that we did so much damage so quickly. And then we allowed them that negotiating style that they're infamous for, on and off, haggling, rug merchant type stuff. And now here we are all the way into mid-June and we don't have a resolution. And you can't trust anything they say. So Donald Trump is trying to, I guess, suggest to us he's done such a level of damage. When the other night they took out parts, I looked at some of the clips they had of, you know, they, we just casually say, well, they kind of went, hit the Republican Guard headquarter, you know what I mean, headquarter, you know, you think it's like a fire, I looked at the thing. I mean, it was just demolished. It was like a city block. It was just boom. So when they say that Israel did the, hit them in the Republican, and then the United States, these are really amazingly destructive things that we're doing even in a day, a night. And so something is wrong with this story. And I think something is wrong with it. Iran is much closer to bankruptcy. Given that people were predicting a month ago, they couldn't go on for two weeks, given the sanctions, freezing their assets and the blockade. But I think- It's like 400 million a week, right? Yes. Something like that. Yes. And there are, or some people were saying even a day, they're in bad straits. So I think what Trump is saying is that he was just, we thought that they were waiting us out. And he's, I think he and his advisors think they're waiting Iran out. In other words, they can recoup, pivot, get the price of oil down, address the midterms more quickly than Iran can bounce back. And Iran is at the ropes right now. And it's very close to utter bankruptcy. And that's why- And then the question is, if they're close to utter bankruptcy, and other than a few missiles and naval mosquito boats or PT boats that can disrupt the strait, what else can they really do? And not much. So I think that's his argument. The danger that Trump is having is that one third of the country, whatever he did opposed, and hysterically so, that was the left. One third was willing to overlook an incursion. They don't like, you know, it was kind of the MAGA fringe and some independence. If it was like last June, or like Venezuela, or like Solomani, or like Baghdadi, or like the Wagner group, you know what I mean? Or Venezuela. They're, you know, in, out, surgical, no, that's very rare in war, but that's, they were supporting that. The other third was supportive all the way down, but they were the hardliners. And he's losing support from them. And I think Elliot Abrams is, this is why I'm drawing that comparison. They want Iran completely neutered. And this was the chance of a lifetime to actually get an American president who wasn't afraid of them, and did so much damage to them so quickly, and then pause, hiatus, and then they made the Israelis pause. And so I think Elliot Abrams is saying, whatever they do, they're going to lie. And you know what they're going to do? They're going to try to get the bomb at some point. They're going to try to get their missiles back, and they're going to try to intimidate the Gulf and destroy Israel. That's what they're there for. And there, and I think Trump is, he would argue, and I haven't talked to him, obviously he would say, they're broke. They don't have a Navy. They really don't have an army, their destitute. And I can do this anytime I want. I have a carrier group in that area. We always do in that part of the world. One carrier group can destroy that country given its feeble status right now. And we're willing to do it if they break anything. That's what he's arguing. But the subtext of all of this is, the Iranian people will have to, they'll have to face the Iranian people in the sense that when it's all this negotiation is over, one way or the other, and they got income again, are they going to lower the price of gas for consumers? Are they going to try to fix civilian infrastructure? Are they going to go spend all the money on centrifuges and another Pikes mountain and Hamas? And if they do, I think they're going to have a lot of domestic turmoil. I think they're going to have domestic turmoil anyway. Anyway, yeah. But he's starting to lose support now from some of the hardliners. People like you and me that don't trust, I haven't lost support for him, but I'm worried that we need to know how damaged they are before you would trust them to abide by any agreement or how determined the administration is to hit them hard when they break it. And they will break it because they've never abided by any agreement. Yeah. Well, we are talking on Saturday. Donald Trump has said, and before we started recording this, but no reversal, but tomorrow, Sunday, the 14th, there's supposed to be a signing of this. Well, it's not a surrender document, but it's an agreement. But whether there is a signing or not, we'll discuss that when we record next show. It's going to be interesting too, because there are fee days, their credibility in the Shi'i world and the Arab world is acting insane and unpredictable and terrifying their own population. Are they going to sign this thing? And then tomorrow, death to America, we're going to kill the great say and do the whole boilerplate immediately. I don't know. We'll see if they start in and then they whip themselves up. I think we have enough assets to stop it if they try to launch more missiles in the Gulf or something. But getting back to Elliott Abrams, you know, I'd like him to give us the alternative. That's all. The alternative, we've have all these other scenarios. So after 9-11, we wanted to punish Afghanistan and we decided we weren't going to do what we're doing now in Iran. We weren't going to just bomb and we weren't going to, you know, just bomb them and then negotiate and keep them confined. So we went into Afghanistan. And once we went in there, we were there for 20 years and what, 2,500 dead and 15,000 casualties and $2 trillion. And what do we have Taliban with $50 billion of our equipment? We went into Iraq and I think Iraq turned out a lot better than Afghanistan. There are elections and there's some moderate people there, but we lost over 4,300 or something dead. And we spent another trillion dollars plus. So we haven't done that. And I think Elliott needs to realize that we took on the most powerful country in the Middle East, 93 million people. Every other country was terrified of it. So was Europe. And there's some, very quickly, Jack, there's some misinformation about the war. Number one is, they said, I heard Haikam Jeffrey say that, well, you know, the strait was open and now it's not. So what Donald Trump did was make it worse. Haikam. The strait was open because nobody dared touch Iran. Nobody dared touch their nuclear program. Nobody dared touch their missiles. Nobody in the Arab world, even Israel was very wary. Europe didn't do it. That's why the strait was open. The moment anybody or soon after anybody made that fateful decision that said, not just what seven presidents, I can't have a bomb, they will not have a bomb. They all said that. But once one person actually acted on it, of course they were going to try to close the strait. And then the second one is, well, this is no different than the Obama deal. Why did we get out of that? No, it's a big deal. Nobody's giving them nighttime $400 million in cash. They're sanctions. They're broke. And just take an aerial photograph of Tehran and its military complexes in Iran. When Obama was negotiating and do it now, it's a whole different situation. They are flattened compared to what we were negotiating with them before. And another one is, this is, he's ruined the mega base. It's a forever endless war. No, it was 38 days, about a little over half of what Bill Clinton did. Bill Clinton didn't get a congressional authorization. Bill Clinton hit hospitals. He hit museums. He hit schools. He hit bridges. He hit power plants. Nobody said a word to get rid of Milosevic in 1999. Seven months for Obama. 38 days is not a forever endless war. It's just not. And so there's problems with the war. And that is trusting these people. I tend to agree a lot with Jack Keen, what he's saying. And he doesn't want it to be true, but he's just said, given their behavior in the past, when you make a negotiation, any negotiation, you should be ready for them to break it because they have an agenda. They want a bomb. They want to bully everybody in the region. They want to destroy Israel. That's their agenda. Which makes it seem like actually signing an agreement could just be theater. I mean, it's something. It's something for the market. There's a lot of misinformation. I really like JD Vance, but he said something. Did you see what he said yesterday? No. He said, all wars end in negotiations. And he was defending the administration. He said, World War II ended negotiations. It didn't end in negotiation. I'm sorry. It ended in one, this was decided at Casablanca. It was decided and Stalin didn't have a vote on it. It was Roosevelt and Churchill, unconditional surrender, no negotiations. Japan, unconditional surrender, no negotiations. Civil war, US grant, Ulysses S. Grant, you know why they called him that? There was a joke, unconditional surrender grant. That wasn't what it stood for. The S. people argue what it was, but he got that name for not negotiating. And when Lee came to Appomattox and Joe Johnson came to Sherman, there was only one thing. Should you give them their sidearms? Can they have their horses and swords? But they have surrendered utterly. World War I, 11th hour, the 11th day, of the 11th month, it was an arm assist, but it was a surrender. They agreed to vacate completely France. And then six months later, that was the mistake. Six months later, we're 80% of the Allied Forces was out of Europe. But nevertheless, they went to Versailles and they signed the Versailles Agreement. And that was pretty much an utter unconditional surrender, especially the war clause, guilt clause. Maybe a lot of you listening say, well, Victor, that caused World War II. No, it didn't. It was not too punitive. What caused World War II was the elements of the Versailles Treaty were not enforced. Once they started building a Luftwaffe, which was forbidden, and an army over 100,000 was forbidden and had the Ange loose with Austria, which was forbidden, and the Allies didn't do anything, well, then there you have it. And we don't want that to happen with Iran. They reoccupied the Rhineland. Yes. That was just a precursor for it. First thing Hitler said, he almost fainted, and he said, they could have stopped it in 15 seconds. We have no army really. And they said, my fewer. And he said, I knew it. I knew it. But he was expecting to be stopped. And the Iranians are expecting to be stopped because the Iranians are in a situation right now, the Iranian to the degree there are still generals, they know that Donald Trump says, I'm going to hit them hard tonight. There's nothing they can do, nothing. Maybe they can send up some drones that will hit an Apache or something, but otherwise, they are going to lose. And if Donald Trump says, if you break this agreement again, we catch you mining the harbor, or sending missiles into Kuwait, we're going to take out five power plants. And they're going, they're thinking we are broke. If he takes out five power plants, we're going to be in darkness for 20% of the country and we're broke. And that's $5 billion, we have to come up with to fix that. And we don't have it. So that, let's get real about where they are. Well, I do have a follow up on what Abram said about India. But first, Victor, for our listeners and for our viewers for thousands of years, the great books of Western civilization have shaped the moral and political imagination of the West. And when we celebrate America's 250th birthday in a few weeks, we're celebrating a country founded on the principles and lessons found in those works. Our founding fathers learned those principles from the classics, and they use them as the blueprint to create the greatest nation to ever exist. Those works endured because they speak to permanent truths about human nature, virtue, courage, duty, faith, and self government. That's why Hillsdale College offers free online courses on the greatest works of the Western tradition. These are real courses taught by actual Hillsdale College professors. The course includes lessons on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and epic stories, the epic stories of Achilles and Odysseus that helped shape Western civilization itself. And this summer, Hillsdale College is releasing a brand new course dedicated entirely to Homer's Odyssey. Great Books 101 is the perfect way to prepare for the full Odyssey course launching in July. Start right now with Hillsdale College's free online course, Great Books 101, Ancient to Medieval. Go to Hillsdale College, excuse me, go to Hillsdale.edu. Let me repeat that. Go to Hillsdale.edu slash VDH to enroll. It's totally free. Read the classics, study the West, start right now at Hillsdale.edu slash VDH. We thank the good people from Hillsdale College for sponsoring Victor Davis-Hatson in his own words. And Victor, I think you maybe should take that course so you could learn something about the Odyssey. Well, you know, Hillsdale, for a college that size, 1600, 1700, it has the, I think it has the largest classics department and one of the best. And when Larry Arn't came there, that was not, they had some good people, but it wasn't necessarily true. So he has created probably the strongest classics department for a college that size in the United States. And it's a pretty amazing classics department. It's a pretty amazing history department. And it's top notch historians and classicists. And they play a very prominent role in that campus on committees and determining curriculum. I think I've told that story the first time I got to Hillsdale. I'd lectured there a couple of times, but when I was actually hired to teach there for a month in 2000, during my vacation, 2004 was my first year and I went to the bookstore and I looked at the course catalogs, you know, I wanted to see what books people, and I thought, wow, there's no word studies. There's no environmental studies. There's no black studies. There's no Chicano studies. There's no leisure studies. There's no peace studies. There's no anything studies. It's either, you know, history of World War II or Plato and Aristotle or it's St. Thomas Aquinas or it's great, you know, Dickens, great novels of the 19th century England. It was, it, it, were there just meat and potato stuff? They were all solid classes. Not one therapeutic course. Not one. Well, big schools with therapeutic courses are struggling deeply. We may not have time to talk about it on the show, maybe on the next, but Syracuse, big college Clemson, big college and they offer the courses, you know, women's studies, whatever the hell studies, and they are starting to circle the drain despite their, their reputation and size. I couldn't believe that you, you mentioned it before, but the UC faculty, this was not minor campuses, UC Berkeley. These, the faculty member who are 95% left said, we need the SAT. We're letting in people who cannot read and we as professors cannot assign, you know, they can't, 100 pages a week was not very much. It was one of the professors was quoted and it's like five and that was one of the reasons that I retired in 2004. I think I've mentioned I've had two or three students and they came to me and, you know, it was just like read the Odyssey in two weeks, read the Iliad in two weeks, read a play of Sophocles 1200 lines in a week. That was the kind of assignment, eight or nine things over 15 week semester and they said, we can't do this. I said, you can't do it because you're not studying. They said, no, we can't. So I said, you know how we're going to solve this, come to my office and you'll read out loud and they could not read a page in 10 minutes and they had been admitted and that once you admit somebody who the point is it's not an abstract standard. Once the university or college admits someone and they don't have the skills or they haven't demonstrated the skills to meet the criterion that you have established as a college that you have selected these courses, you have a general education committee, you have approved them, you've had them submit the reading list, you know the exam and that is your trademark, that's your gold standard. So you admit students that can meet this accelerated tough course load and curriculum and then you can guarantee a graduate law, a graduate medical school, a corporate employer, a high school, anybody that your person is stamped, branded with your Cornell or UC Davis, BA and they will have certain assurances from you. But if you, the universities say, oh well, that's racist, that's not fair, that's not equity, that's not DEI. So we're going to let in people without the SCT. We have no idea about the reading comprehension and if they have a straight A average from an inner city school and somebody has a B plus from Palo Alto school, it's the same and then you have them come in and then you don't, what do you do? If you don't want to be called illiberal, you either what, inflate the grades as Yale and Stanford does, stamp 70 to 80 percent A's and then that means nothing and then a graduate school looks, wow, another guy from Stanford or Yale or Harvard with an A straight A means nothing. Or you bring in new courses with studies on them, cartoons, Marvel comics, the Black Panther comic series, the X-Men, study disabilities and you can read X-Men comics. You can do that but you'll still not solve the problem or you can do what these professors are doing now, having the same courses but cutting them by two thirds and say, you know, introduction to Western literature and we're going to read one book. Well, I'm going to put that, we'll get to that India thing I mentioned before. Let's pick up on this then Victor because this, so folks if they want to follow this, they should go to the college fix which has an article on this. So it's the title, Learning Crisis. UC Berkeley History Professor cuts reading assignments by two thirds. So this Victor said they were used to it, were expected to read 100 pages a week two decades ago and now that's cut dramatically and this, the professor who wrote this, Carlos Norena says, we are now reaching a crisis point where if the number of pages goes down further, it's unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught. So that was one thing, Victor, also with California and troubling and it involves the UC system says more than 1000 UC professors, they want back the standardized tests because they're saying for the STEM students, they, let's see, observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics and other quantitatively demanding fields. So I'm going to a UC school, I'm going to be an engineer but I don't know that what one half plus one third equals because I don't know this math. Somehow or other though, I graduated with honors in math and and it's a t-ball philosophy. You put the ball on a platform and then everybody, you get as many strikes as you want and everybody's the same. There's no winners, there's no losers but there is losers because you're in a global competitive situation and our school system is shot, it's bankrupt, everybody knows it and I don't understand, you know, it's based on this proportional representation that we take the United States and then we divide it up by tribes, oh here's 10% Asians or here's 12% Latino or here's 11%, 12% black or here's 67% white or whatever and then we say, well you know what, if we were just to do SAT in grades, we would have too many whites and too many Asians. Notice what I said, not too many whites alone, too many whites and Asians who are considered by the DEI industry, you know, they're not white. So then what we have to do to be proportionally representative, we've got to let the other two groups come in to reflect at least prior to George Floyd, their demography percentages. After George Floyd, we went into repertory admissions. So as I said before, Stanford was letting in about 30% white males because they represent 30% of the population, roughly maybe a little bit more, but then they started letting in 9% to make room for other people who they didn't have to take the SAT, they didn't have to have a comparative standard applied to their GPAs and then the result was just as we see with UC Berkeley, only the Stanford faculty is much further to the left, they didn't want to talk about it. So they whispered, they whispered about it. Oh my gosh, my upper division literature class, I only got about six people and they can't read. I don't know what I'm going to do. I guess they got to get them all A's. I don't want to have a pattern, systemic racist pattern, giving certain people D's and C's. That was what was going on. And it's a very funny concept proportional representation. I think most people would say some of the most lucrative jobs in the United States and the most prestigious, surely the most exposure is the NBA is like we're seeing with the New York Knicks. Anybody on that 12 person or 15 person team is an elite in salary and prestige, but I don't think any of us say, wait a minute, there's no Asians. There's no white people. There should be a fourth, no, maybe a fourth should be white. That's mostly African American and some Europeans or foreigners. What's going on here? Nobody says that. Nobody says that about the, you know, the NFL or nobody says that. They do say it about the major leagues now. A lot of the left-wing sportswriters, there's not enough African American. Well, there are still more than 12% in the national baseball league, you know, major league baseball that they are more, they are overrepresented according to user language of the left, but they just don't have the same over-representational numbers and dominance they used to. So what I'm getting at is I don't know what the left means when they use these quotas, affirmative action or what they're trying to do to socially engineer or culturally engineer proportions, but they're very uneven and hypocritical. Anytime a particular group is overrepresented in one category, then it doesn't matter. But if they're underrepresented in another category, then we have to feel that it's systemic racism. Yeah. Well, black, white or, you know, any color, what's it going to be like in 15 years now, Victor, the kids going to school for civil engineering can't do the kind of math you and I did in the third grade, right? I can tell you that coming out of Stanford Medical School, being in the Stanford Med Center and talking to people, there was some worry. I got the impression just listening to people that they are using, and I think the Trump administration is targeting them now, they are using criteria other than the MSAT entrance test and GPA to determine the medical students there. And that's not some mistake because life is what human life is human life. We don't care what color a person is. We just want the most skilled people as doctors. We want meritocracy. That's what we want. Yeah. Well, Victor, we're going to take a little break. And when we come back, we'll get, I'll raise that into a question. We'll talk about Spencer Pratt and maybe something about Hamas. We'll do that when we come back from these important messages. 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. And 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, especially 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, we're there too. And drop me a follow on X at Bradley Devlin to stay updated with what's happening on The Signal Sitdown. We're back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words, recording on Saturday, June 13, 2026. This episode is up on Tuesday, June 16. We are published, if one can say that, published by the great people at The Daily Signal. Victor's got a website, excuse me, the blade of Perseus. I want you folks, please check it out. Still Time, it's not Father's Day yet. Great Present Father's Day is a gift of a subscription, it's $65 for the full year, $6.50 a month, if you want to stick your toe in the water. And why would you subscribe at all? And that's because Victor twice a week writes an exclusive article for the blade of Perseus. You're not going to be able to read it anywhere else and an exclusive video every week. And plus there's a ton of free stuff. Plus, when you go, they should go there anywhere you'll find the link to his Victor's forthcoming book, Counter-Revolution, The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump, and the MAGA movement. So please do check that all out. Victor, what Elliot Abrams, not to harp on him, but just the point about relations with India have been damaged. Do you think, what do you make of our relations with India? Have they been damaged? Are they critical? We talk about Middle East all the time, we talk about China, but India is so profound. I don't think they're damaged. I think he's talking about the tariffs and we're, I think he's critical that we are highlighting Pakistan as an interlocutor with Iran. But the reason that we're doing that is because Iran is a Muslim nation and we feel that maybe the negotiations might be handled better and Pakistan is an ally. Our relationship with India has been very ambiguous. All through the Cold War, remember India was on the Russian side and we back Pakistan as in that, and now I think that was a mistake. India was a democracy of sorts or was a democracy is. Pakistan wasn't. It had elections occasionally, but it's not as transparent as so. And then of course, I think we've been very fair to India. India is getting an enormous amount of redirected factor American investment out of China into India. It's an English speaking country. It wants the investment. We've been very cooperative with weapon systems. Modi's a good friend of Trump. But when Elliot says that, he should look at contemporary immigration figures. And if he did, he would say that India is the most privileged of all countries. HB1 visas, for example, and in actual terms of legal immigration and illegal, it's on a trajectory to pass people from Latin America. We are giving people from India an enormous latitude to come into the United States. And you know, it's, we don't have to do that, but we're doing it based on meritocracy in the case of HB1s and stuff. But there's a lot of criticism of that. That comes at the expense of American jobs. And we've had some differences, especially with the thousands of licenses that have been issued to seek drivers who came here illegally and didn't know English and the responsible states, New York, but especially California, apparently thought that it's street sign, you know, 100 miles to Bakersfield, exit Fresno, caution, yield were written in some language other than English, because they didn't ask these people. So they were privileged is what I'm saying. And if you look at today's results at the end of the week of all these elections that we've had, you will see that never, never have we had more Indian American candidates everywhere from Ramon to, you know, the second lady of the United States. So I don't quite get that that he's damaged Indian relationships. India has more influence with the United States than it ever had. And it has more of its own population, expatriate population here in the United States than it ever has. And it's clamoring and demanding more and more and more. And the United States has been very reasonable about that. So I think the more that when I read the article that he wrote, and I tried to digest what was the point, I think the point was that he that he was disappointed that he thought we were going to go in as we had done for 38 days and destroy Iran's ability to make war against anybody along with Israel. And Donald Trump all apparently thought that he had done that or done it sufficiently enough that with the addition of sanctions and bank freezines and targeted a blockade that he could bankrupt them without doing further damage to the countries so that there might be a stimulus for a, you know, revolution or something. So he disagreed with that. But I don't think that was a reason to suggest that we've treated India badly or as far as Taiwan, I think right now, unless I'm mistaken, China is not in a good position. As I said, it's lost its Western Hemisphere presence along with Russia that it's not going to have an influence with Iran like it did. The Assad government is gone in Syria. The Gulf States are very angry at the Chinese for selling air defenses and missiles and their client North Korea arming Iran whose missiles then hit them. Those were either Chinese or North Korean copycatted. And so I don't see that their presence has been enhanced by this war. They've lost sanctioned oil from Venezuela. They've lost sanctioned oil from Iran. When you looked at the quality of their weapons, their air defenses that they sold the Iranians were broken in a day, two days. They were pathetic. The United States, on the other hand, whether it's picking people up with drone boats or hitting B2s with bunker but we have been superb. And I just don't think China's in that great, its fertility is 1.0. They've got a million people in camps. They're importing 30% of their food. They're pointing, they have to have 11 million barrels of oil every single day. We're the greatest exporter of oil in the history of civilization and producer. So I don't get that that we've empowered China. And if we'd learned anything from the use of drones in the Ukraine war and in Iran, it's going to be very, very hard to go across 98 miles of the South China Sea from the mainland to go into Taiwan when Taiwan rearms and they're doing it frantically and the United States is there with, you know, can put 10,000 drones and it's not going to be easy to invade. So I don't see how they're emboldened or they're more powerful. I really don't. I don't think that Taiwan is weaker. I think they're in a much better place than they were. As far as Ukraine, Donald Trump, I would remind Elliott that Donald Trump was the president who green-lighted weapons that Barack Obama had stopped. He didn't want them to have javelins. If they didn't have javelins, they wouldn't have had Kiev. And Biden put a hold on it. Biden was the one who said he would react whether it was a major or minor invasion. Donald Trump, we got to remember, it wasn't, it was not the Bush administration. It was not the Obama administration. It was not the Biden administration in which Vladimir Putin did not leave his borders. It was only one administration that he didn't invade somebody. And that was a Trump administration. There was a reason for that. Trump was the one that said to the Germans, do not do the Nordstrom to pipeline. Just don't do it. You're just going to empower Putin. And if the Wagner grew, he killed more Russians than we killed during the entire Cold War, probably 200, 300 plus of the Wagner group. We got out of that asymmetrical missile deal with Russia. So I just don't get all this. All this stuff is boiler plates. Not empirical. They don't look at the actual data. And Russia has been weakened by the Ukraine war and the war against Iran. The winners in the war against Iran have been Israel and the Gulf States. And the loser is Iran and its patrons, China and Russia. And the loser in the Ukraine war, I don't know if they're going to lose that much land, but the loser so far is Russia. They've lost a million people and they probably lost a half a trillion dollars. So they're not stronger. The world is changing, but it's changing in the favor of the United States. Right. Not no pecs' favor either. Victor, we're going to get closer to home, California in a minute, but first to our listeners and to our viewers, American homeowners. The FBI has been warning about a type of real estate fraud called title theft. And your equity is the target. With just a forged signature, your ownership can be transferred out of your name. And without protection in place, you're left with an emotional and financial nightmare. And that's why you should visit Home Title Lock. So you can find out today if you're already a victim and protect yourself. Use the promo code victor at hometitlelock.com to get a free title history report, plus a free trial of their million dollar triple lock protection. That's 24 seven monitoring urgent alerts. And if you're a fraud victim, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it. And that's hometitlelock.com promo code victor or use the link in the show notes. Don't be a victim. Protect your equity today with home title lock. And we thank the very good people at home title lock. But once again, sponsoring an episode of Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Speaking of war, Victor, Spencer Pratt says it's war. On Friday, two things happen. One is his business mysteriously burned down. I know it did. Not so mysteriously. I think some of his political opponents supporters did, but who knows? Yeah. But he also put out a concession video. I'm going to read this now. This is from red state. And after Karen Bass, this is a watch it, they'll wish the mail ballot fraud scheme to elevate Ramon had never taken place. Pratt says he's moving on from the campaign phase of his mission to save Los Angeles to the next more interesting phase reminding people that his goal wasn't to become mayor but to expose the corrupt machine and that he's laser focused on just that. Do you think they can really get rid of me that easily says Pratt? Hey morons, I didn't get into this political power. I got into this to expose the corrupt machine. Nothing's changed. You enjoy your worthless meetings in city hall. I've been lighting you up every single day and now I don't have to worry about offending CNN viewers. I don't have campaign laws hamstringing me now. It's war. He has threats of he's got some videos and documents that are going to be very harmful to one of the two candidates. Victor, I think he's here to stay. I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, I think so. I think he's a reseller. I think what he's referring to is that every would be whistleblower or discontent is sending him material. He's the person to do it and he will air it and that's going to give him a lot of exposure and clout. But I mean, when you run for office in Los Angeles or California in general, what he's basically saying the subtext is, is it so hard to say that if you want to be a voter, then you don't just go to get a building permit or apply for disability and give your name and they mail to it. You just register to vote. You just go to a, you know, a state office and you take the initiative and you register and then you give an address. You show a driver's license, California driver's license, which is now not required. You must, you should have to have a driver's license or a state issued ID, one or the other. They mail it, you give them an address, they check it on a computer to see if you're actually at that address and they mail you one ballot and then you take that ballot and if you want to fill it out, we could call it an absentee ballot. Maybe you would be ill, but more likely you should go to the polls and you should show your California driver's license again and we don't do that. But we do if you want to get disability. I mean, I couldn't, I must have been to 40 medical procedure things for this latest, you know, bout with cancer. I'm talking about blood draws. I'm talking about X-rays, CTs, lung volume, every place I went, can I see your ID? Can I see your ID? Can I see your ID? But not to vote, not to vote. That's just crazy. So what he's saying is we, you people conduct elections and you have no idea who's voting. You give licenses to people here illegally and that license is used to get a registered vote, but you don't even check if they're at the address. You don't even check if they know English. They don't have to, nobody has to know it. How could you vote and not know the language of the country? By making an X, you can do that in California with a witness. And then what's so hard? I mean, India, you're talking about India, 1.4 billion, they don't take a week to tally the ballots. And what's the good of saying, well, we authenticate, well, you have to authenticate it because you have so many laxities built in the corrupt system. And even then, when you did that in the 2024 election, you only rejected 0.09 of the ballots. So you're not really auditing them. You're letting them go right by you. So the whole, I think the election exposed kind of a California reached critical mass at that point. People said to themselves, this state is dysfunctional. It can't conduct honest, transparent elections with readily tabulated votes. Nobody trusts it anymore. It has no confidence of the population. And we understand what's happening. Three to 500,000 people are leaving a year that are taxpayers in the middle and upper middle class brackets. When they go, then we have more entitlements and more people come into the state either legally or legally that are impoverished. And there's less and less money to pay for more and more people that want federal, state, local help in California. And therefore, we're going to do what? We're going to raise the gas tax. We're going to raise the income tax. We're going to raise the property tax. And then more people are going to go. And then more people are going to come in to get more. And that's where we're in a doom loop. And it's not going to get better. It's going to be a third, it is a third world country. It's falling apart. And when you add $250 billion of fraud and stolen monies, and I must say, trying to be as objective as I can, I've been following that story. And I would conservatively suggest that the names that are in the paper online pictures, I would say of the people who've been arrested, 60 to 75% are immigrants. So that's not a good look. People coming over there, instead of kissing the soil and saying, thank God, I'm in the United States, I owe so much to my host. It's not, it's, oh man, these people are stupid. They give away stuff. I'm going to get mine. That's the wrong attitude. Yeah. Somebody, hey, we flew them over here even at our own expense, so they could then rip us off is easy to connect those dots. There's an online publication out of Fresno, Victor, I just coincidentally saw it the other day. I think it's GV, wire. Yeah. And it had an article by two nonprofit leaders, people, Catholic organization, you know, they're trying to do the Lord's work and we're hurting in the central valley now. There are fewer donors. And the reason is people are leaving. People are terrible. People are leaving. I just last week, two people that I would say are in the high income brackets, they pay a ton of taxes. They basically said, I'm done. I pay, as one person said, with the federal income tax and the Medicare and the Obamacare and the California 13.3, I pay 58% of my income. And I get the worst roads. I get gang bangers. I get high crime. I get filthy streets. I get homelessness. And I get elections like they're in Los Angeles. And we're sitting on a bonanza of gas and oil. And we have $650 gas. We have some of the, we have second largest, third largest forestry industry. And we let it burn down. We have 60 million trees that burned up and we're, we drove everything out, except maybe two companies. We have rare earth men. We have everything. It's the most richly endowed state in the country and the most beautiful. And it's the most ill governed. So they're leaving. And, you know, I don't know what's going to happen. And you get the impression that people want them to go. It's like the Seattle mayor, bye-bye. And the dying citizen, I quoted an immigrant and he was quoted as saying, we're so happy you people are leaving because you're making room for us and we're taking over. And he was a Silicon Valley, HB1 visa person. And he said all this. He thought it was so cute, but he was right. They don't want people to stay here. And I don't know what's going to end up. It's, it's Los Angeles used to be, it's just 20 years ago, I would go downtown and it was in a renaissance. It was booming. These high rises were going up. It was immaculate. They had a downtown. It was, it was an exciting place to be. I remember I had a book and I went from the Jonathan Club to the California Club, the community. I would just walk back and forth downtown in the early afternoon and I didn't see one homeless person. MacArthur Park was clean 20 years ago. So I think everybody should keep that in mind because we're, you have to be very careful about presentism, the arrogance that history is morally or technologically better every single year. It's not. History is undulating. It's perfectly reasonable to think that a 1990 or 2010 things were better than they are now in California. That's historically how it happens all the time. And I think people, you know, Elon Musk, there was a good article that when he was 32, he went to NASA and said, basically you've had 14 astronauts have been killed. There's no rocket. You're paying 80 or 90 million dollars to the Russians for each launch. We don't even, Saturn five is obsolete. You mothballed it. You have a monopoly of NASA. Nobody looks at space other than just a government job. If you let me, I have a new rocket company and I'd like to bid. And he gave a testimony to Congress. And, you know, he was saying that it's very hard for me to launch a missile from a California Air Force base, even though it's unfed, well, you have to pay $10,000 to see if the sound hurts this, the sound hurts the seal. And, and now we learned that we drove him out and we were happy to drive him out. And you go online and people revel on the idea we drove Elon Musk out. Well, he has a trillion dollar, I mean, a trillion dollars left. It could have all been in California. All of that, Tesla headquarters, you know, SpaceX, all of that could have been here. Booming, exciting, but we wanted him out. And when you don't have that type, those types of people and you drive them out, what do you replace it with? Graham Platner? I mean, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, what are those people ever make? What, what, I can't think of anything they've done to provide jobs or revenue to the state. So maybe you, maybe you fell the jobs with perverts. So let me, let's close out with this Victor. I don't know, I captioned this. Why are we upset about Epstein when the Biden administration was a de facto sex smuggling ring? So I'm reading here from Ryan Fornir, who posted on X acting, and this is a story I'm sure most of our listeners have heard, acting AG Todd Blanche, just announced indictments for three individuals involved in a massive child smuggling ring. But the real bombshell is what he said next, the Department of Justice has officially uncovered over 15,500 super sponsor cases. Read that again number again, 15,500. Because of the Biden administration's disastrous and broken border policy, thousands of innocent children were essentially handed over to criminal networks, traffickers and abusers. They completely turned a blind eye while the worst of the worst exploited the system right in our backyard. Absolutely sickening. Something about the left Victor, it's let's sex traffic kids here in England, let's let these grooming gangs rape little girls. It's just something so perverse about the left. And any thoughts about this? What did we think was going to happen when we stopped construction on the wall and we led in 10 to 12,000 people a day, 10 to 12 million over four years, 10,000 a day? We did not have a health background. We had no idea if they had tuberculosis. We had no idea if they had COVID malaria. We didn't we know now that the some of these disease vectors spiked. We have 500,000 criminals, people coming that did we understand that they were emptying the prisons of Venezuela and other places that give us their worst that came up here. And they kept doing it. And then we had this toxic Mallorca's who kept, I mean, he was almost like Baghdad, Bob and the first Iraq where he kept saying the border is secure and you'd look around and 10,000 people were in line walking across the border. He just severely lied to us and everybody should keep that in mind because as much as you're disgruntled about the Iran war or the prices have gone up of her gas, that's true. And you it's legitimate. And I saw that Eric Erickson, you know, the conservative, I don't know him, but he did, he was the head of red state, I think he said he has a new name for Trump that he's a clown because he says everything. Yes, he does say the negotiations are going on there. They're off, we're going to bomb. Yes. And that confuses us. And that's unfortunate also confuses the enemy, but that doesn't, it's not, it's not the personalities. It's if you, you're going to get a choice in 2028. And believe me, these people who are running are going to put either themselves get elected, or they're going to push Harris or Newsom even further to the left. And you're going to get 10, 15,000 a day coming across. You're going to get 14, 15 million 15 million. We know that because look at those ICE demonstration. They're demonstrating, even when they know that ICE is arresting felons, that doesn't bother them. You're going to get trans thing, you're going to get the whole trans back at US Air Force bases back in library. It's all going to be back. You're going to get DI all back again. You're, you're going to get the green fanaticism. You're going to get all these corrupt foundations and NGOs with contracts with the government for homelessness, all the Somali problems back, all the stuff in California. It's all going to come back. And yet just because you disagree with him on the Iran war, or you disagree that he's all over the place, or you think it's gauche that he has this mixed martial arts arena coming up, or you're mad about he put his name on the Kennedy. Yeah, that, those are legitimate concerns, but it doesn't, it doesn't involve the existential question. Do you want the country to go further, further left? Or do you want it to stop and be more traditionalist the way it was? And that's it. That's all that matters. And this is not Bill Clinton. If this was Bill Clinton running, you could make an argument that he was liberal and the foreign policy would allow people to take advantage as they did. But you know, he's, he would balance the budget or he'd get more police officers or he said that he was against illegal immigration. He was going to close. This is not Bill Clinton. This is not even, this isn't even Barack Obama. This is something different, man. This is a weird socialist, communist, Islamist, extremist, Jacobin party that, and they are the, they are the driver of the democratic party. Yeah. Pro criminal, pro deviant, and hate America. That hate America. Look at the reaction to the Carmelo Anthony murder. I mean, there's a whole genre now online. I guess they're Photoshop of people urinating on the grave of Metcalfe. I mean, that's sick. And the whole community reaction, there's about half of the black community who really believes that Metcalfe was evil and their gravity was killed and they're online. And I, and you know, it doesn't mean, and there's people in the black caucus that are supporting that. It's, it's different than OJ, which is the other, you know, people will think back to that, but, but that was, well, he didn't do it. There was no evidence. Of course there was evidence. But that, but this case, the evidence of this kid sticking the knife in Metcalfe, there's no question of that. But the comeback from some people, you touch us, that's what's going to happen. Yeah. And then they write these, then they're intellectuals, these intellectuals write things where you misunderstand the black male that you don't understand you, when you touch it, that means something in the black community. No, it's not the black community or the white community or any community. It just means that when you intrude into a place in a partisan atmosphere and you're politely asked 15 times to leave and everybody in the tent wants you to leave and you say, touch me and somebody touches you to, to suggest you leave. And then you put a knife through the bone of his chest into his heart and somehow that's self-defense and it's racism. If he's convicted of murder, when there were what, four minorities on the jury. And the only reason that we're not black jurors, because they asked them, could you, if you found the evidence persuasive, uh, convict an African and they said, no, we don't want to put a black boy in jail and they were excused. So, for their honesty, apparently, but it's, I think, I guess what I'm worried about is that all these issues are sort of colliding like a perfect storm and it's getting to a point where the sinner's just not holding anymore. The whole tribalism came to its ultimate fruition. It was okay as long as you had everybody was on the same page for most people and you had the black panthers here or La Raza there or some crazy white supremacists there, but when you get everybody reverting to tribal affinities and you fuel it, jet power with this internet and social media and then it gets mainstreamed into politics. Man, it is, it's, it's, it's very divisive and it's not going to work. It doesn't work in Indonesia, it doesn't work in Brazil, it doesn't work in India and I'm talking about democracies of large countries, 100 million and up that have strong minorities, majorities, tribals that whose first allegiance is to their particular religion or their tribe or their first cousin and they don't, that's why they don't work and I say that because when people in India want to come here, people in Brazil people from Indonesia want to come here. I don't see a big group of Americans of any tribe that want to go to India or Brazil or Indonesia, I'm sorry and the reason is it's a meritocratic society and yeah and I'm most probably stink relatively to everything, everyday life, right? You can really see it with Elon Musk. I've talked about Hezia's concept of good and bad envy but he was, when this IPO came out of near a trillion dollars, there was two reactions to it. Most people on the conservative or ledgers were admired him for what he did to the country and if he didn't have that amount of capital, we wouldn't have had the best rockets in the world, the most satellites in the world and be ahead in the space race and then there was the left and that was how do you get so much money? This is terrible, he's horrible, he's, he's, and of course he's a racist, that has to always be thrown in but if you think about it, this country attracts people like that because they, they sense it's a meritocracy and there's not a government person that's going to call them up on the phone and say okay here's a concession but I want 30% or they're not all going to be brought into a room like Joe Biden tried according to many of the Silicon, I think Mark Andreessen had a good interview when he detailed the atmosphere when okay here's AI and you're going to do this and you're going to do this and there's not that, we don't pick winners and losers. So, imagine if he had stayed in South Africa, what would have happened? Nothing would have happened. Nothing, he wouldn't have, he wouldn't, we wouldn't have had SpaceX and they wouldn't either and now we have it and it launches more, it launches half of the satellites in the world. We have more satellites by SpaceX than all of Europe put together and if you look at Europe 25 years ago when it was just starting to get radically socialist but they still and the borders were still secure and immigration was about 3 to 5% of the population. It was not that far behind us and now it has no space industry, it has no defense industry, it has no defenses, it has no space exploration, it just canceled its Eurofighter, can't even do that and it's got a big war in its borders and they're paranoid because they've so characterized the United States and they've so, you know, we lied on us to defend them so they can experiment with the socialism that's costly that they're worried that they can't defend themselves from anybody. So, this is a very unique country and when people come here, we benefit from legal merit karate but we do not want people to come here and say the first thing they say is how do I gain the system, how much are you going to give me and this is a blank, blank country and I wish it's not as nice as I'm quoting almost Iliana Omar literally. Yeah, we want immigrants who are going to steal and marry their siblings and send money back to Somali but we don't want immigrants who are going to create space sex. Yeah, I just don't think that's going to work Representative Omar, I don't think you come over here as a young child and your family has been involved with a genocidal dictator and your father was a colonel in his army and many of the people who accompanied you came the United States because they would have been butchered for being on the losing side of a genocidal war and you get over here and then you marry allegedly your brother to get him over here and violate our laws and then you're given generous scholarships to get a education free and then you plug into DEI and get all sorts of scholarships from a magnanimous host and then you're elected to Congress and the first thing you start to do is spout, I don't know, something happened Jack on 9-11. She said that and then the anti-Semites of Benjamin's baby and then you start, you know, your sister is involved and you start, you are the protector of a nine billion dollar fought against the country who welcomed you in there's no gratitude and we're supposed to say, oh well you're a poor refugee, you're, you qualify for DEI, we're not going to say anything because you would call us right, I don't, I think that day is over, I don't think people care anymore about what you call a person, they're just going to be empirical when she's been a net minus when she came to this country, she's produced nothing but animus and divisiveness and fraud, she's been either a complicit with flawed or she's been a force multiplier of it by her indifference to or her active shielding of it and that's not talking about her own personal involvement in trying to warp immigration law for her brother. Yeah, I know it's kind of related but is it Brandon Gill, is he this? Yes, he's the Texas up-and-coming young Republican. Yeah, he had something on X about this, we've seen this data before something like this, it's like 80, it's almost like 90% of the Somali community worldwide is on, yeah, the leading welfare recipients whatever country, yeah, I think in the Netherlands, Sweden, it's all the same, they, they, it doesn't go away after they've been here a few years, they've maintained. The funny thing about all this, it's not funny but Europe has no history of multi-racial equality like we do, you know, they didn't have a civil rights movement, they didn't have a large minority population and they're new to this game and they inherited DEI from us and they went a whole hog with it and they let in up to 15 to 20% of some of these populations now have people from the Islamic world and North Africa, et cetera and they're not used to it and they're not going to react in a way that you would think that liberal, sober, and judicious utopian Europeans react. They've got the Catholics and the Protestants together in Ireland, yeah. Did you see the clip from the priest who gave that inspiration? Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah. And when he said whatever differences we had in the palace, we're the indigenous Irish people. Amen. And it's funny how they've used that word, isn't it? They've taken a left-wing word and we're not going to be, we indigenous people are not going to be colonized by foreigners. Well, all Palestinians now, I guess. We've come about to the end. I'm just going to read one listener, viewer comment from Jalli bus 6060. I just want to say I really appreciate this man that's you, Victor, and anything he has to share. I'm glad there's not music in the background. Jump cuts or tagline drama. We need this. Bless you and your health, Victor. And I just, I'm going to show this because tomorrow in real time is flag day. And this is a flag, and my mother is a Girl Scout in 1941. I think she's, she is so to glory into this. She's still kicking my mom. She's 90, super 93 on 4th of July. Victor, for anyone again, following you on X at VD Hansen on Facebook, there's VDH's Morning Cup. There's a great friendly group there, the Victor Davis Hansen fan club. Again, Victor's website, the blade of Perseus, victorhansen.com is the address. If you go to civilthoughts.com, you can sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. It comes out from the Center for Civil Society. It comes out every Friday. It's 14 recommended readings. You're going to love it. So thank you, Victor. Thanks to the good people at the Daily Signal. Thanks to our sponsors. And we'll be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Thank you everybody for listening and watching.