Victor Davis Hanson: NEW Book, Trump’s Endless War Agenda, Ilhan Omar Immigration Fraud Explained
89 min
•Mar 31, 20262 months agoSummary
Victor Davis Hanson discusses his new book 'Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Trump and his MAGA Movement,' analyzes Vice President JD Vance's recent controversial statements on immigration and foreign policy, and examines critical issues including U.S. military readiness, ammunition shortages, and the breakdown of law and order in major American cities.
Insights
- Trump's legal challenges paradoxically strengthened his candidacy by forcing opponents into untenable positions—either defending lawfare (appearing partisan) or criticizing it (appearing to support him)
- The U.S. faces a critical military-industrial complex problem: expensive, sophisticated weapons systems prioritized over quantity, creating ammunition shortages and inefficient defense spending compared to WWII-era mass production models
- Major cities are experiencing a governance crisis where progressive policies (no-bail release, non-enforcement) have created a feedback loop where police disengage, crime escalates, and citizens flee to conservative states
- The media's selective reporting on crime perpetrators (omitting race/ethnicity details while printing inflammatory comments) is radicalizing public discourse and driving people toward extremist online spaces
- Affluence and leisure in Western societies have created a false utopia mentality among elites, disconnecting them from practical problem-solving and enabling destructive policies (DEI, homelessness enablement, transgender activism)
Trends
Weaponization of legal system as political tool—indictments, raids, and ballot removal attempts becoming normalized tacticsAsian American political realignment toward Republicans driven by DEI discrimination concerns and targeted street crime in progressive citiesDecline of institutional competence—inability to complete basic infrastructure projects (200-foot wildlife bridge taking 5+ years vs. Golden Gate Bridge in 4 years)Police de-facto withdrawal from enforcement in progressive cities due to legal/political liability fears and catch-and-release prosecutionShift toward decentralized, asymmetrical warfare requiring different defense strategies than Cold War-era weapons systemsMedia-driven radicalization cycle: selective reporting → inflammatory comments → public radicalization → extremist discourse migrationGenerational disconnect in work ethic and resilience—affluent generations unable to solve problems previous generations solved during Depression/WWIIImmigration fraud and border security becoming mainstream political issue with enforcement implications for visa fraud casesAmmunition and weapons production bottleneck threatening military readiness despite technological superiorityRegime change as unstated war objective creating strategic communication problems and undermining stated limited intervention goals
Topics
Trump's 2024 Campaign and Legal ChallengesJD Vance Vice Presidential Role and Controversial StatementsU.S. Military Readiness and Ammunition ShortagesDefense Contractor Revolving Door and Military-Industrial ComplexIran Military Campaign Strategy and MessagingImmigration Fraud and Ilhan Omar AllegationsCrime and Law Enforcement in Major U.S. CitiesProgressive Urban Policy FailuresMedia Bias in Crime ReportingAsian American Political RealignmentInfrastructure Project InefficiencyWWII vs. Modern Military Production ModelsFluoride in Water Supply DebateBorder Security and Deportation PolicyInstitutional Decline and Governance Competence
Companies
Amazon
Trump's forthcoming book 'Counterrevolution' will be available for pre-order on Amazon
Raytheon
Mentioned as one of the Big Six/Seven defense contractors with revolving door of retired generals
General Dynamics
Major defense contractor with retired military leadership on boards influencing Pentagon procurement
Northrop Grumman
Defense contractor mentioned in context of expensive weapons systems and military-industrial complex
Lockheed Martin
Major defense contractor with influence over Pentagon weapons procurement decisions
Boeing
Defense contractor mentioned in context of military aircraft and weapons systems production
Hoover Institution
Victor Davis Hanson is Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at this think tank
The Daily Signal
Podcast host and publisher of Victor Davis Hanson's work; brings the episode to listeners
National Review
Conservative publication where host worked; mentioned in context of Spiro Agnew bust ceremony
People
Victor Davis Hanson
Main guest discussing new book, military strategy, and political analysis
Jack Fowler
Interviewer conducting the podcast episode
Donald Trump
Primary subject of discussion regarding legal challenges, campaign, and policy agenda
JD Vance
Discussed for controversial statements on immigration, Netanyahu call, and Ilhan Omar comments
Ilhan Omar
Subject of discussion regarding alleged immigration fraud and marriage to brother
Joe Rogan
Discussed for endorsing Trump and receiving call from JD Vance about immigration claims
Benjamin Netanyahu
Subject of JD Vance's controversial phone call regarding military campaign expectations
Gavin Newsom
Criticized for failed infrastructure projects and progressive policies
Linda Colfax
Criticized for releasing killer of Thai grandfather on probation
Antonine Watson
Subject of San Francisco judge's controversial decision to release on probation for murder
Barack Obama
Discussed regarding immigration policy and border security record
Hillary Clinton
Discussed regarding immigration policy and border security record
Ron DeSantis
Discussed as 2024 primary candidate disadvantaged by Trump's legal challenges
Nikki Haley
Discussed as 2024 primary candidate caught in dilemma over Trump lawfare criticism
Kamala Harris
Discussed regarding 2024 campaign strategy and media engagement failures
RFK Jr.
Mentioned regarding fluoride warnings and health policy advocacy
Spiro Agnew
Historical reference for vice presidential role of taking political flak
William Safire
Credited with coining 'nattering nabobs of negativity' phrase about Agnew
Pat Buchanan
Possibly credited with 'nattering nabobs' phrase; conservative political figure
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Referenced for 50-year discussion of Black family structure and Great Society impacts
Quotes
"Counterrevolution. The fall and rise of Trump and his mega movement."
Victor Davis Hanson•Opening discussion of new book
"If they criticize the lawfare against him, then they're aiding his cause. But if they say that he brought it on himself, then they are termed on the left side leftist."
Victor Davis Hanson•Discussing DeSantis and Haley's dilemma
"We know what the medicine is, but we feel it's worse than the morbidity."
Victor Davis Hanson•Discussing urban crime and policy solutions
"You couldn't calibrate it well. It could have side effects, but the fact that ether wasn't a good sedative anesthesia, but there were certain advantages of it."
Victor Davis Hanson•Discussing medical treatment in Libya
"We're going to build shermons and you're going to be able to take the transmission out in three hours and they're going to be in a fraction of the cost."
Victor Davis Hanson•Discussing WWII-era military production model
Full Transcript
Well, hello ladies and hello gentlemen and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words brought to you by the daily signal our happy home. Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson senior fellow with the Hoover Institution. There he is wearing that daily signal hat. He is a senior contributor at the daily signals. He's a syndicated columnist. He's got an essay every week at American Greatness bestselling author soon to be bestselling author again. Victor, I looked the other day to see if there was advanced sales yet on Amazon for your forthcoming book, but but not yet. But as soon as it's, we haven't picked the cover yet. Oh, yes. I'm sorry. We have picked the cover. Is it? I had the picture of when he says fight, fight, fight, you know, with the blood, but they thought that for a variety of reasons they didn't want that, the publisher. So they picked the one where he's going like this pointing at someone. Oh, well, whatever. Tell us the title again. What is what is going to be the official title? Counterrevolution. The fall and rise of Trump and his mega movement. Okay, folks, you heard that going on Amazon when it's up? The first half of the book starts at January 6th. And it goes through all the polls and what everybody said about him and that the consensus that he was all through what what Rhonda Santas, Nikki Haley were pulling out. He was completely written off and then the series of events, the aging Carol, the Fannie Willis, the Latita James, the Alvin Bragg, the Jack Smith, the getting him off the ballot, the Marlago raid and examines all those in detail. I think I have some some new stuff in there too. And then it says and then as I described that the second half of each of those chapters is how he rises in the polls. Yeah, the mugshot helps him. Everything helps him. And he puts DeSantis and Haley in a very strange position because if they criticize the lawfare against him, then they're aiding his cause. But if they say that he brought it on himself, then he's they are termed on the left side leftist. So it really made their candidacies. I don't know if it was by design. It was hard to say it was by design, but Trump adroitly was able to frame it that he said that if they think that I deserve it, then they're on their side. And so when they said he doesn't deserve this, Nikki Haley tried to kind of square the circle and saying, well, what they're doing to him is unfair, but he should have never been in the position where they were able to do that. That didn't work. And then I started in with the primaries and then the campaign, why Harris lost? And then I tried to do his first term from January 21st to December 31st, 2025. I couldn't really update because it was already impressed when the war, for example, happened. Well, being nonstop book in that case, but to me, that Mar-a-Lago raid was just horrible. Yeah, bridged too far, even for people who wouldn't necessarily like it. It's always going on here. It's always a position simultaneously with Joe Biden and he had taken these documents out for 30 years and unlike the president, he had no discretion to declassify any of them. And then the worst of it was he had a ghostwriter, had no security clearance and he's on tape discussing classified material. And then the speechwriter knows that when Robert Hurr's appointed and then he erases it all. Yeah. And that was going to be subpoenaed. And all the Hurr says, all he says as well, he didn't mean it. And he said, I did it so I wouldn't be hacked. That was such a lie. And they wouldn't release the oral record did not match the transcript and then Jack Smith. It really helped in a weird way. It helped. Yeah. The destruction of evidence. Hillary did it with her wiping the drive clean. The January 6th committee. What happened to all this? Yeah. Yeah, I go through all that. The destruction of the worst was they said that there was massive files at Mar-a-Lago that were cl- they've only found 102. 102 papers. They took 13,000 out of the house. 102. And then they came with labels. They came prepared with labels and they stuck them on the 102. It said classified. Yeah. And then they scattered them on the floor and took a picture of it. And that was not the way. And then they went into, you know, millennia's drawers and everything. It was, you then you juxtapose that, you know, at Mar-a-Lago, they have a security booth that you can't get in. And then you look at Joe Biden's garage with all that stuff. What was it? The only weird thing is on top of classified documents. The second half of the book is the rise of Donald Trump when it goes through the campaign in detail and then the first year. And, boy, researching that, I forgot. I saw it firsthand, but as everybody else did, but I didn't realize until I started how it's just inept. Camilla Harris was. Yeah. She didn't talk to me. 45 days, right? Without dealing with... 45 days she wouldn't talk to anybody. And then when she did, you knew why she didn't. You know what I mean? But Trump at the McDonald's and Trump on the garbage truck were just two hundreds of millions of dollars in free advertising. And then she ended up having to pay, I think it was Cardi B and Al Sharpton and Oprah. She was paying them money for the interview. That other interview, some influencer, I forget her name. I thought I ever remembered it, but they built a fake, her set. Yeah, that was right. That was a $150,000 fake set. Well, you know, there was so much in there, I couldn't get it all in. The book has, I don't know how many, gosh, I guess I got over 800 or 900 footnotes, 700. But I started it when I was ill a year ago. I started at March and boy, that was hard to write because I knew something was wrong, but when I was writing it, but I never had any idea that it was cancer. So I kind of wrote it. So when I went back and rewrote it, I could see that I... Anyway, I hope it's in good shape now. I think people will like it. We just mentioned, you just mentioned interviews Kamala Harris had, this one she didn't have. That's with Joe Rogan. We're going to back into Joe Rogan by talking about JD Vance. And we've got a bunch of other topics, including munitions in Iran, federal, not federal, a judge in San Francisco, letting a murderer have plus plenty of other stuff. But we'll get to all this and Victor's wisdom on these topics when we come back from these initial important messages. If you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, you might enjoy the Daily Signals flagship show, the Tony Kinnitcast, the same common sense perspectives you love weekdays at 7pm 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 sarcasm. Tom Tillis, I'm pretty sure it might have been useful at one time as a doorstop. Find the Tony Kinnitcast on YouTube, X, radio, TV, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen. In his own words, Victor's website is the blade of Perseus. You will find it at VictorHansen.com. Do subscribe because when you do, you'll be able to read the two weekly exclusive articles Victor writes for the site. He also does one exclusive video plus this tons of free stuff at $65 for the year. But if you want to just try it out for a month, it's $6.50 a month. You can go that route if you so desire. We are recording, I don't think I give the dates. This is Saturday, the 28th of March, and this particular episode will be up on Tuesday, March 31st. Victor, let's get your thoughts about JD Vance who has been much in the news the last few days. He gets into three areas. One, calling into Joe Rogan. Two, calling Netanyahu and chewing him out. And three, publicly attacking Elon Omar, congresswoman, for marrying her brother. Your thoughts on what Vance is doing and on these things in particular? Well, he's doing what the traditional job description of a vice president is. It's to go out, take flak. Remember Spiro Aik Agnew, nattering nabelbs of negativity? Negative is something I think. Negative, yeah, whatever. And so that's what he's supposed to do. He's supposed to shield the president and take the flak and detour his enemies. And this was a multifaceted week. So with Joe Rogan, people should remember Joe Rogan endorsed Donald Trump on the last day, the last day of the campaign. So he wasn't interested, and he had voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary of 2020. So that, and he was part of the entourage with RFK and Dana White and Tulsi, all those people at Madison Square Garden. So he's apolitical in one sense, but I would say that his heart is socially conservative, but maybe left wing politically. Victor, I don't think everybody knows essentially what he said. Yes, what he said was two things. One, that he was disappointed that the supporters of Donald Trump were either unintelligent or uninformed, and they were dorks. And two, he said that Joe, I'm going to get this straight, not Joe Biden, but Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had secured the border and done a better job in immigration. And that's what JD Vance then called him, and he was quite right about that JD and said, those are factually incorrect. Donald Trump inherited 12 million illegal aliens, and he has zero, on some months he has zero entrance. Neither Barack Obama nor what Hillary Clinton said she was going to do, nor Bill Clinton ever had zero. Both of them eventually supported mass scale amnesties. Dreamers, whatever you want to call them. Trump did not. And then more importantly, Trump deported more criminals than either one of them. It's true that before Trump's second term, Barack Obama deported more, but they counted people who were turned away at the border as deportations. And that wasn't so untrue. Trump's cases in every case at least. And then he addressed the dorks. And I don't know, I thought that was when he said they're unintelligent and uninformed. There's been a lot of studies that show that people who watch, say Fox News, know more about world events and CNN. I just, that Rush Limbaugh used to quote that data all the time and talk radio in particular. And I think, you know, when Johnny on Jesse Waters goes out to the beach and he talks to people, or he talks to people in the street and they know nothing, I don't think he's really getting a lot of conservative people there. Well, he's getting college students though, which is something about the academy. I'm not conservative, I'll tell you that, because if he talked to people from Thomas Aquinas or Hillsdale, they would talk his head off with data and facts and analysis. So that, I didn't, I mean he says they're dorks, but that was kind of a weird word to use because they have been libeled by the left as chumps. I'm going to say Biden called them chumps, garbage, dregs. Obama called them clingers with their guns and religion. Hillary called them deplorables and irredeemables. Those are all, Mark Caputo for CNN. CNN said that there was more teeth. He had more teeth than all the people at a Trump rally. I guess it was Peter Stroke text to the least page that he could smell them at Walmart. Whatever you, those terms of disparagement are not dorky terms. They're, they're kind of tough guy or they're, you know what I mean? They like guns. So I didn't know what he meant by dorks. Is that kind of like nerds or something? You could use, when I see and when I hear these people on the left, if I wanted to be a stereotypical, if I was searching for a stereotypical characterization, I'd say they had spaghetti arms and nasal voices or they sounded like they were an NPR. And, you know, if you listen to talk radio and the guy is for Trump, it's, hey everybody, I want to tell you, if you listen to NPR, it's, wow, it's very problematic. There's pros and cons everywhere. Now, while we're not political, I think it's by universal consent that Donald Trump tragically is the worst president in US history. That's that stuff. That's dorky. So I don't know. So, Dady called him up and he kind of did it lightheartedly. You got wrong on immigration and dorks. There's dorks. He said there's dorks in any group, but we have fewer than anybody on the left. And then he made another call, right, to Netanyahu. Now that is more interesting. And supposedly he yelled at Netanyahu for providing false information that gave an unrealistically optimistic picture of the resistance that would rise up. Sort of what people during the Iraq war, I think it was Richard Perl said, we'll be greeted as liberators and people got latched onto that. That was more problematic because, first of all, I don't think, and you correct me, and maybe your listeners will nod or in agreement or shake your head, no, but I don't think any vice president calls ahead of state without the prior permission of the president. So when he called Netanyahu and blamed him, it almost echoed what Trump inadvertently said about Pete Hexeth. He said he's the one that really wanted to go in. And that suggests to me that Trump feels like he thought it was going to be a three week rather than I think it'll be a six week. We're going into week four and six weeks, you know, could be six weeks. And he regrets that length of it. I'm not sure that he regrets going in there. I think it's been a spectacularly on the military side. We can get into that. Absolutely. But the politics of it, the explanation of it, I think needs work. Excuse me, Victor. We have Venezuela and you have the bombing in Iran last year. So it gives this impression of things are done immediately. Yes, what he needs to say is this, just in a parentheses. He said, I didn't say I was against war or conflict. I said I was against endless forever wars. And I'm talking about 20 years in Afghanistan and 10 in Iraq and the nine month bombing on and off of Libya by Obama. And so when I came in, I wasn't going to say no war because our enemies would take that as chamber and unlike appeasement and they would take advantage of it. So I had certain rules, opportunistic rules that I would use mostly if not exclusively air power. And I would take out existential threats like Soleimani, who was the architect of anti American terrorism. And I wanted to get rid of Baghdadi who had killed Westerners and beheaded them. And then I wanted to bomb ISIS and I did all of that quickly and abruptly. And then we were attacked by the Wagner group. I told my field commanders to reply disproportionately and wipe them out. I think they killed over 200 of them. All of those were not forever. They were one off. Then I was elected again and I followed my campaign promises. I went in to Iraq and to excuse me, to Iran in 26 hours of mission and I bombed the nuclear facilities at three sites. And then it was a one off. I said, make Iran great. We'll negotiate. And then I went and got Maduro. We lost no U.S. soldiers. We had some serious wounded. But again, it was one. Now I'm in a much more formidable situation. None of those scenarios involved the specter of intercontinental ballistic missiles, massive drone fleets, terrorist proxies, nuclear weapons. And so I'm going to try to abide by my no forever war and going in there for six weeks, if that's what it takes, is not forever. And I'm going to try to avoid the use of ground troops. Marco Rubio said he wasn't going to use them if possible. And so that's what he needs to say. This is not, it's not going to be nine months or seven months or eight months like Obama did with Libya. So he needs to say that. And then he needs to reiterate what he said on March 1st and March 20th. He said we had certain agendas. And that was to get rid of the nuclear threat. He needs to get the fishable material if he can get it. The ballistic missile and drone threat. He's working on that. The proxy subsidies to Houthis has belonged in Hamas. I think he's pretty much will finish that and then to stop the anti-American killing and terrorism of Iran and as a threat to the stability of the Middle East. And I think he's empowered, not just Israel, but vis-a-vis the Gulf States, they will be armed. They will rearm very quickly to the degree they haven't lost any of their offensive capabilities in Iran has. And then regime change. And he can say, he never said I'm going to go in there and throw out the government. He said help is coming. Sometimes in moods of enthusiasm, he said, we're going to get rid of this guy or that guy. And he just needs to say, ideally the threat will end when the regime is gone. And I have tried to do my best within the confines of not engaging in a forever war to empower the resistance. And I think the destruction that we in the Israeli Air Force have done to Iran will help that cause. Maybe not now, maybe in a month, but eventually it has weakened that regime internally. And that was one of my agendas. And I would like to see regime change, but that is not why we are fighting this war. And that's all he has to say. And the other thing about Vance's call was I was a little confused because I really liked JD Vance, but when he blames a foreign state for telling his president that the resistance was going to rise up and it would be easier than it was. Well, we have a director of national intelligence. We have the CIA. We have more intelligence agents, greater budget, more assets than does Israel. So you can consult a foreign country. But if everything that JD Vance said were true, and Netanyahu called up Trump and he said, look, you got to go in there, Donald. My guys tell me that the resistance is going to just, you know, just flower, flourish once you get rid of that command. And Trump said, really? Okay. Well, any president Trump included then would call up John Radcliffe. What do we have on this? Is this true? Tulsi Gabbard. Is this true? U.S. Pentagon intelligence. Is this true? And there's 17 agencies and he would call them up and verify it because it's our sovereign decision. You don't blame a foreign country for offering an assessment that you now post-factor will find less than persuasive. And anyway, I thought that was inappropriate myself. Yeah. Even if it wasn't true, Victor, that the cause for attacking was that they're at a point where they could create some weaponry that will really harm them. Exactly. As I said, the point wasn't regime change. It was the U.S. self-interest in stopping 47 years of harvesting Americans, killing them, and having the ability, apparently, our negotiator said, of the ability to make 11 bombs. And then now lying about, we're finding out that they have the ability to hit most European capitals and perhaps within a two years or three years. Us. And since none of them have missile defense, it only takes one nuclear weapon. And so I think, anyway, that I thought that misrepresented because what Vance was doing was then he was kind of confirming the West, excuse me, the left wing charge that Trump had decided that the primary objective of this bombing was regime change. Because when he says, you said they were going to rise up and help get rid of the regime. Well, that wasn't the purpose. The purpose was to denuclearize and defang. And it's working. The other thing very quickly, I think Vance knows that the bombing of Serbia was 72 days. We didn't lose any airmen, but we had, I mean, Serbia was a pathetic target compared to Iran. It was much easier. And we had a thousand plane NATO alliance flying with us, not just one country. And we lost two planes. We lost that F 117 stealthy fighter. We lost, I think an F 15 or 16. We haven't lost any combat aircraft at all. The first Gulf War, 1991 lasted 42 days. So we're not, I mean, that could be what this is 42 days. But the U.S. Air Force, if you just knock the total losses, because they were much greater than this campaign, they lost 20 dead. We've lost, I think 15. And they lost 67. I looked that up the other day, 67 aircraft. If you count helicopters and jet aircraft fighters, we haven't lost any except a logistical plane, you know. It's been spectacular militarily, but especially in the modern media age, there's two wars that go on. There's a military war and there's a political war. And they're not necessarily independent. And in a very sensitive democracy, and if you're a conservative president, it's not going to be like you can bomb Serbia for 72 days and the left wing will be quiet. Or you're going to bomb Libya for no reason in a disastrous campaign and the left will be quiet. You do anything and they jump on your back. So they've, politically, they have to be, they have, they're doing a brilliant job militarily, but politically, they have to do a couple of things. They need one to say, don't say 93% of the missiles are taken care of. 74%, 88%. And then you see a hotel window blown up in a room and gutter. Or you see American base hit. Or you see an Israeli town hall hit. It's much better to say Iran is a formidable, large country of 93 million people, one and a half times the size of Alaska. And we're going to get all of these drones, but they are scattered. They're in special enclaves with regional control and there's going to be vestigial attacks. And all we can say is the majority of the attacks will cease, but there's going to, it's going to continue. And that's what we're working on. They need to say that. And they need to talk about other wars. And you know, and said, we, this is how long the Gulf War was. This is how long. And we're right on schedule. And then remind people that regime change is a wish for result. A dividend, but it was not the original, the original agenda was the U.S. Interest in stopping this, this rogue country from killing Americans, causing international terrorism and getting a nuclear weapon with a ballistic missile to deliver it to us and our NATO allies. And that's what, and I need to emphasize that. And doesn't, when you say we've got 93% of the missiles destroyed and then somebody says, well, you didn't tell us how many they were 93% of what, 3000? That's several missiles that are still there. Or when you say we've destroyed 100 of the Iranian Navy warships, and that's 95% of it. But then you say, does that include these little kind of cartel high speed motorboats that drop mines and can be used as suicide craft? Or they have a torpedo on them because there's a lots of them, hundreds of them. They're not very expensive. So I think that they need to emphasize how difficult the mission was and how well they are doing completing it rather than getting defensive and saying we've almost, they gave the expectation there would be no more missiles by now or drones. And there will be because they have kind of a decentralized, kind of like a Borg or a honeycomb. They've got regional commanders everywhere. They're now isolated and can't communicate with Tehran, but they have been told you have nine missiles. You have 50 drones and you use them as you see fit whenever you want. And they have, they're in tunnels and they drag, you know, they drag them out and shoot, get back in the tunnel or they launch them and then they leave the site and go to the next cache. So it's going to be very hard to get all of those. And the same thing with the Straits of Hormuz. They need to say every administration has had a plan to block the Strait of Hormuz, I mean to unblock or free or liberate the Strait of Hormuz. We can do it. But what we're trying to hesitate, we want to do it with the least amount of collateral damage. And that's because, and that, and then they can say, and this is thematic of what we're doing throughout that country because of this resistance and because we believe as everybody does, the Iranian people have been captured by this 47 year aberration. If you believe that, you should say that and then say, we can't hit their water supplies. We can't hit their infrastructure. We can't hit their train station. We can't hit their radio and communications because your power generation, that will destroy the country, but we don't want to destroy the country. We want to destroy the regime that has captured the country. And that's hard to do. It's not like Germany where we say, you know what, in Germany, you guys voted for Hitler and we'd like you to throw him, but you tried to kill him and it didn't work. So we're going to bomb, you know, we're going to bomb Hamburg and Berlin and we'd like to hit targets, but you've got good fighter aircraft. You've got wonderful flat guns. It's cloudy. It's windy. It's impossible. We don't have the technology. We're just going to bomb. That's what the British said. You did it. You did it to us. We're going to do it to you. Yeah, look at Coventry. Hey, we got one of the JD Vans thing to pick up at first, Victor. Yeah, we got to do the third one. Well, but Utah and Florida just passed bills to ban fluoride in the water supply. So why are a growing number of states suddenly doing a massive U turn on fluoride when they've been adding it to our water for the last 80 years? Well, RFK Jr. has been warning us about fluoride for a while and the government now admits to the fact that fluoride is linked to lower IQ in a study done by a JAMA pediatrics, one of the top medical journals. Scientists found that the fluoride levels over two milligrams per liter of water caused more than two point drop in children's IQ scores. You've heard us talk about Cove Pure before. It's a water filtration system that sits on your countertop. If you're watching this podcast, you can see it over my left shoulder. I have it in my office. You don't have to drill any holes or call a plumber to set it up. Just fill it with tap water, plug it in, and it gets straight to work. They're ClearWave Reverse Osmosis Technology. This lab certified to remove up to 99.9% of impurities in your water. Anything that isn't water, meaning fluoride, arsenic, and forever chemicals. All of that gets filtered out, leaving you with pure water. And let me tell you, once you try Cove Pure Water, you're never going back. It's the best tasting water I've ever had. Actually, I say it doesn't taste at all. It's just refreshing. It's refreshing. The water we have here in Connecticut, Victor, I mean, you think you're drinking out of a Clorox bottle. Anyway, plus I love what I love about Cove Pure is it lets you have water exactly the way you want it. Whatever temperature you want. Just push a button. Cold, hot, warm, whatever. If you happen to like fluoride, that's totally fine. There are tons of ways you can get that through toothpaste or mouthwash. But the government should never force you to ingest it. So take back your right to choose. Click the link in the description box, CovePure.com slash VDH. And for a limited time only, you'll get a special discount of $200 off Cove Pure. Again, that's Cove Pure. C-O-V-E-P-U-R-E.com slash VDH. And we thank the good people at Cove Pure for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen. In his own words here on the Daily Signal. And I'm going to drink some of my Cove Pure water. Salute, salute. Okay, Victor. One more JD Vance thing that he called out. Elon Omar for Mariener Brother. Now that was, I think that was long overdue. I'm so glad he did that because I went through. When he said that, I saw it on, you know, on a site in the news site. So I just went through and I just Googled, Elon Omar Mariener Brother, evidence, things like that. And she has never once said, I categorically deny that I was ever legally married to my full brother. She's never said that. She said, you're a racist. You're a nativist. You're lying. It's not true. And then from what her surrogates are trying to say is the person that she married, they're trying to say is not her brother. You know, that he had a different name or he came in the family. Oh, it's so, why doesn't she just do this? She said, I resent what you said, Vice President Vance. And I want to show you that the man that I was married to, we all know, you can't say she was married to somebody legal. You know, you're a legal record and there is a record. It'd be very hard for that person. We have facial identification. We have all sorts of, we know who she was married to for a number of years. She lived with him and she was a student. All you have to do is say by testimony, by facial recognition picture, you were married to this person. We just want you to have a DNA of him and a DNA of you. That's all we're asking. And I would have said that instead of he married, she married. I would have said, I'm not, that's why I'm not Vice President, obviously. But I would have said there are a lot of speculation and rumor swirling around our representative, Ilyan Oma. I think it would be in her interest and especially our interest in enforcing U.S. immigration law. If you just come, become candid and say, this is the person that I was married to and he and I in a public event will both take a blood test and take DNA and you can dispel this nonsense forever. And when it shows you that we are not blood related, I'm going to sue for libel all the people who made those scurrilous charges. That's all she has to do. But she's getting more and more strident. And you know, in her reaction, she's almost hysterical and it's success to me that she knows that she committed a felony by engaging in immigration fraud. If that's true, when you look at the statute, she can face severe punishment or deportation. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, they shot George Satos, what's his name? The guy from New York. I can't remember his name now. George Stamos. Yeah. The Pulas. You know, what, what is his name? I'll show him. The Congress and they've got the boot. Well, anyway, Santos. Santos. Yeah, Santos. Well, we're going to keep on a military footing here by talking about getting your take on some of the reporting on munitions and we'll do that when we come back from these important messages. Since the founding of America 250 years ago, many things have changed, but some things never do. The commitment of husband and wife, the importance of passing along our values to our children, the faithfulness of God. Some wonder how we can ensure America will continue to thrive. As long as we keep first things first, we've only just begun. America, the beautiful. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words, but also on the Daily Signal Network. Victor's got another gig, Victor Davis Hansen, in a few words. You should check that out on the Daily Signals YouTube channel. Victor does four of those seven, eight-pine minute videos a week on specific topics. It's great, great stuff. By the way, you mentioned before, Vice President, put in mind people I think we're going to see some comments about, Victor, you should be the Vice President. And then also, Spiro Agnew, nattering the A-bob of Negatron. That was William Salfire. Did William Salfire write that? He did or Pat Buchanan. Yeah, one of them did. Yeah. I think it was actually, it may have been Pat. But I met Agnew once. He, National Review, if I may use that phrase, Victor, National Review way, way back thanks to Matthew Scully, who was the great writer and presidential speech writer also later. But he led this effort to get Agnew's bust in the Capitol. And every Vice President has a bust there. And Agnews had been overlooked. So he led an effort and they did it and they had a ceremony and I went represented NR on that. And he was a really nice guy. I'm a son of a... Yeah, he was. I was living in Greece when he came, you know, he came, correct me, I don't know, we have a lot of Greek Americans. I hope Max is listening, Max Nikias. Yeah. Because he's the expert on the Greek American diaspora. But I think his name was Agnosopolis or something. It was a long... And he was from a village in the Peloponnese. Usually, from my experience, and I think the data showed it, if you're south of the Isthmus of Corinth and to the... Except for the tourist areas around Naples and stuff, it gets very conservative. Much more... In Greece, it's kind of like blue and red states. The northern part, Thessaloniki and up in that area near the Balkans, what we call the Balkan states, is much more liberal. And the islands are much more liberal, at least most of them. But he was there and he was very... It was during the dictatorship. And he was, of course, very well treated. And when he never really pled guilty, he just said, no low contender. I remember I just don't want to deal with it. And there was always that great controversy whether... I mean, Nixon had picked him because he was kind of a terrifying or incompetent or corrupt, whatever you want to term him. And then you couldn't impeach Nixon because you'd have Agno. And then the left solved that by taking an old charge. Remember, it was very old that he, as a governor of Maryland, he had had payoffs for contracts. And then they dragged... They dredged it up and then they got Jerry Ford. And then they said, wow, we can impeach. And so that's what they did. Glory days of American politics. Well, Victor, let's get your take on this headline. This is from the Daily Mail. It's today... Well, can I just say one thing? Oh, yeah. That charge resurfaced and I made it too that that was the reason that Camilla Harris picked Tim Walts, the Agnu ploy, that if she was ever elected and we found out how incompetent she was, she would be preferable to Tim Walts because nobody would want to impeach her and convict her and have him. Somebody needs to write a book on vice presidential selections on the basis of incompetency to protect the chief executive during impeachment trial. Okay. Sorry for interrupting. No, no, it's your show. You talk about whatever you want. A headline from the Daily Mail today, Panic Inside the Pentagon After Staggering Report, Lays Bear, Tomahawk Missile Crisis, as Iran Keeps Stranglehold Upon the Straits of Hormuz. And there was another article from last week that I had thought of raising. We ran out of time and it was a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Seth Jones. The U.S. ammo shortage is worse than you think. So, Victor, is it worse than we think or is there a mix of... Is there a little bit of media overreaction here or what? Well, I mean, it didn't just happen. We're not making enough. And it came up in some conservative media during the Biden administration when we were talking about various types of artillery shells. You remember that to supply Ukraine, we had to go into Israel and take, I think, several hundred thousands in a depot and send it to Ukraine because we didn't make enough. And that prompted a new factory to build artillery shells. But nobody ever said anything like that during the Biden administration. Everybody should have said, well, we're short, Tomah. Because I don't know how many we've expended, 800 or so. And the problem is more existential in the sense that you don't shoot down a $30,000 Iranian drone with a $7 million missile. And we learned that with the Houthis. They were just trying to exhaust our supply. So we need to either do an iron beam type laser system or what the Ukrainians are doing with anti-drone drones that can... Cheap drones that can knock other drones out. But the idea that you're going to spend $7 million for the most sophisticated anti-ballistic missile to knock down a drone, or you're going to hit a site with a Tomahawk when you can use a $5,000 JDAM bomb, there's something wrong there and that's either that we don't have the right technology and we don't have enough of it so that we don't use these expensive, rarefied weapon systems. Or we need to ramp up production and do it in a much more economical fashion. In the meantime, I'm not so worried because you use Tomahawks basically from ships and things that are way off the coast because you don't have much less... You need air supremacy. You might have air superiority better than air parity. But if you don't have air supremacy, even with it, superiority means you're going to be in the air and you're going to see an enemy and you're going to have to shoot him down. There's none of that in Iran. So you can take all varieties of U.S. aircraft with very sophisticated targeting and they can use so-called old iron bombs that have been retrofitted to be smart weapons and you can do it for a fraction of the cost and with little danger to the pilot. So the purpose of a Tomahawk is to hit a very well-defended enemy in lieu of using air power that would endanger the pilot's life in a hundred million-dollar aircraft. But I don't think that's quite the situation now because if we get low on Tomahawks, we'll just fly more missions. I don't think you're going to really increase the risk to the plane and the pilot given that so far there doesn't seem to be very many anti-aircraft capabilities with the Iranians. But we should... You know, it's just part of this western laxity. You know, you just think you're at the end of history and... I don't know, I'm a NATO member or NATO's there and you don't really calibrate what you actually... Nobody sits down and said, how do we beat the Soviet Union? Oh, we had Pershing-Michels that were better than their scuds or whatever they were. Oh, we had this many tanks. Oh, we had this. And then we're at the end of history now. It's all over. Do you think you've talked a lot over the years of the generals and admirals retiring immediately into board chairmen's at defense technology companies? If that didn't happen, do you think the outcome on armaments would be radically different today? I have to be very careful because I know some of them, but I will say this. I'm a little... I'm a little surprised that we have so many generals now that are coming out of the woodwork again and are very critical of this war. And so many of them have been lobbyist or board members of defense. And I'm talking about the Big Six or Big Seven, you know, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop, Blockheed, etc. And they were integral in trying to... coming out of the Pentagon with a whole array of subordinates in procurement and positions of authority to buy weapons. And it's not that... it's not necessarily corruption, but they use their influence. Hello, Colonel. You remember me? I was your commanding officer. Hey, we got this new rocket. It's much better than Lockheeds or it's much better than Northrop. It's much better. And the result of it is the consensus was that we were... they were selling and the Pentagon were buying very, very expensive systems, but not enough of them to fight in asymmetrical wars with countries that had very deadly weapons for a fraction of the cost. And we should have been going to startup companies that came to us and said, I can provide 100,000 drones for $5,000 or a shipbuilding country. And so I can take a cargo ship and put a landing deck on it, a new one, and you can put 5,000 drones in storage and you can take them off at 50 at a time. And you can be 500 miles away from the target or something like that. And you can buy this ship for not $14 billion, but for $50 million. We didn't think like that. And I think that part of it as a result is the revolving door. I think it wouldn't have been hard at all to say that anybody above the rank of one star, one star to four star, when they retire from the Pentagon that they should take a hiatus of five years or 10 years from working for a defense contractor. We already have rules like that. You have to get a special waiver if you want to be in a civilian official like Secretary of Defense. I don't know why we don't do that. Just to protect them so that people don't make charges that impugn their objectivity. I just don't think that it's, you know, it reminds me of, I had a really, you know, I've had some really good doctors. I won't mention all of them, but one of them who was not a general practitioner, but a specialist said to me, there's a really good guy. He wasn't my favorite country doctor that I've mentioned before, Marshall Sorenson. But he said, I had a urology problem and he was talking about this particular drug and that particular drug. And he said, well, you go and they got it, sells me as an ex-doctor. And I said, that's good. And he goes, no, he's just trying to pet, he comes in and he gives me all these samples. And I don't know which ones are any good, but he's peddling stuff. And he's drawing on my friendship. You know what I'm saying? So it's the same idea. And I think the result of it is the United States does not have enough weapons and we need to go back to the World War II paradigm. We're not going to make tiger tanks that are 70 tons or panthers that takes a week to get the transmission fixed. We're going to build shermons and you're going to be able to take the transmission out in three hours and they're going to be in a fraction of the cost. And we're going to build mustangs and they're going to be really good engines and really good airframes. And they're going to be as good or better than the Falkwith 190, but we're going to make a lot of them and thunderbolt. We're going to just flood the zone. And that's what we did. We're going to make B-24s. It's not a great bomber. It's good enough. It's faster than B-17. It's harder to fly. It's more vulnerable, but we're going to make one an hour at will or run. That's what they did. And the Germans, I think it was Herman Göring's said, we can't beat the Russians because they're automatons. He said they've got these blank, blank American trucks, GM trucks and six-wheel trucks, a douche and a half. They call them tons and they had 400 divisions and they were mobilized, automated, in fact, the German term for putting troops in the back of a truck and going 70 miles a day versus the German army that was using horses. And that's what we need to do is just build lots of really good stuff and then have our... It doesn't mean we shouldn't have the most sophisticated fighters and all of that. I'm more powered to the next bomber that costs a billion dollars or whatever, but you've got to have... I think our whole bomber fleet is probably under 100 planes with B-1s and B-2s and B-50s. I think, well, maybe a little more. We have about 70 B-52s. I'm just doing this off the top of my head. We probably have, I don't know, 40 B-1s and I don't know how many B-2s, 30 or something. It's not like we have 500 bombers. Yeah, also if you had to replace them, let's say something... Remember the Ukrainians sent those drones and destroyed all those Russian planes? Exactly. What was something like that? That was a very timely... How long would it... Yeah. And we just had our main B-52 base in Louisiana. We just had a report there were mysterious drones that came out of nowhere that were immune to being jammed and they were more sophisticated than off the shelf. We don't know who had them, but I think we all have a suspicion that there's people in the United States from China that are doing things like that. Yeah. Well, we're going to get domestic in a second here, Victor, but first to our listeners and viewers, if you've studied enough history, you start to see a pattern. The Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Americans, the Italians, Well, how long did it, do you think it was, say, 1962 or 65 and there were parts of Germany or France that were still picking up bricks and rubble and rebuilding or how long did it, how long did it- Well, on East Germany, I mean, they were still East Germany, but West Germany rebuilt very, very quickly. I mean, the German miracle, the German miracle where they were achieving GDP rates of 7 and 8 percent, you know, and they were exporting Volkswagen's and Mercedes. That happened within a decade. They were really booming. And it was just, in Japan, was the same way, the Japanese miracle. I mean, when I was growing up, when I'm five or six, there was a term that people use, made in Japan. Made in Japan, yeah. Remember that? It was like a junk and it was like a little, you'd go to the Fresno District fair and they'd give you, hand you out little fake umbrellas, you know, a toothpick with a little thing on a hamburger or something. It's said underneath, made in Japan. But, and that would be my earliest memory, 1958 or 59, but the Korean War really jumpstarted the Japanese economy because that's where we based all of our troops and went to Korea and all of the munitions and that really jumpstarted. But I can remember being in high school, I could not believe it, where I had this, there was four nerds, we call them the four nerds. They weren't dorks, they were nerds. They were nerds. Imagine being at a very tough high school where fights were common and you had four guys, I think one went to UC Berkeley, one went to Caltech. They were geniuses and they all ended up very successfully. But they were, they were high IQ people and they were, one of them was a fanatic expert in cameras and I used to talk to him about it and he said, oh, I wish I could get a Nikon. This was like 1967. The Nikon lenses are so much better than, I saw Browning and all America, come on, no, no. And so they were, within 20 years they were leading the world in a lot of things, Germany and Japan. But the palace, we can't do anything here. And I'll give you an example. The Gavin Newsom, as I mentioned to Sammy, the Gavin Newsom Bobcat mountain line in Coyote Overpass on the 101 in North. Did that cost a billion dollars? No, no, 100 million, 114 million, but it's not done. It's, it's, it's already in its fourth year. It's not going to be done to the year. It might be five years. It's landscape. It has no honor off ramps. And it's, they call it the butterfly bridge, but it's basically, nobody cares about rats and mice. It's basically large predators that they're worried about in dangerous species, but it's going to bring them from a more isolated area into the backyards of very exclusive homes on hilltops, right? Where they'll poach their dogs and cats. But the thing is, in 1932 they started the, I mentioned that to Sammy, they started the Oakland Bay Bridge, 26,000 feet, and the Golden Gate Bridge, I think 55,000 feet long. This thing is 200 feet long, and they built both of them at the same time in four years. And so they can't, that generation who was poor, people were destitute, it was right in the worst part of the Depression, 32, they built together almost 30,000 linear feet of the two iconic bridges in San Francisco that are still there, and our worthless generation cannot build 200 feet at the pinnacle of our affluence for a bunch of animals that's completely unnecessary. And when you add that, I got to calm down, if you add that to Gavin Newsom's Mojave Desert solar plant with federal help that they're dismantling, I think that was a billion and a half, the Monterey Battery Factory that stores solar power at night, that's blown up twice. No need to mention the Cylindra Assembly Project that Obama and our governor said would produce limitless solar panels better than China, that's closed down. And you add this bridge, and then of course we have the high speed rail, 15 billion, 20 billion dollars, not one foot of track laid, Mercedda Bakersfield, add all of that up and compare it to what our ancestors, three generations ago they said, you know what, California has 15 million people, someday it's going to be out of water. And we get three times the state's water to the north of Sacramento, we only have one third to the south, but we have three times the population to the south and one third to the north. So we're going to go up and we're going to down the Klamath, the American River, their tributaries, and we're going to build an aqueduct. And we're going to take that water all the way down to the Central Valley, Central Valley Project for irrigation, California Water Project for water storage, and we're going to ensure communities as diverse as San Luis Obispo, San Abarbo, and but especially Los Angeles, we're going to pump it over the top of the Great Vine, I think still that is the largest lift of water in the world, and they did all that in I think 78 years, California Aqueduct. We couldn't even build a mile of that today. So you couldn't get the permits in seven or eight years. Yeah, there's a whole corpus of ancient thought. If you read Livy, Horus, Sputonius, Novelist, Dramatist, it's all the same. Leisure and affluence have ruined us. Catullus writes to himself, Catullus, you are lazy. Leisure has ruined you and Livy, he cannot live with a remedy nor the disease. And he's talking about that, Polybius. It would, I think it was Salus said it would been better that Rome lost the Carthaginian War than have destroyed Carthage and got that huge amount of slaves and money coming into Italy. Something about affluence, it just creates among the elite a false sense of utopia that they're so powerful or so wealthy, they're heaven on earth. Many of them are agnostic and atheist, so they don't believe there's a world beyond. They think that this is the here and now, and they're going to make heaven on earth. So you know what, worry are so sophisticated and we've got iPhones and we've got apples and now we're going to worry about Bobcats and Coyotes. Or I'm so well off and I can get in my Gulf Stream, I see that guy and he's injecting heroin, defecating, urinating, fornicating on the street. We're going to get an NGO to give him $100 a week to help him out for his drug habit. And they do things and then we have the average person that the more affluent and leisure they are, the less they work or the less they're not connected with nature. I can see it on myself. You know, I work pretty hard but compared to my grandfather or father, I remember he, I came to work when I was 15 to irrigate with him and I was there at 7 o'clock. He said to me in the summer, do you sleep in? I said, well no. And he said, well I've been out here since 4.30 in the morning. I said, well how do you see? He said, I have a flashlight. I said, well 7 is pretty early. And he said, well I've been working two and a half hours and I'm 76 years old. And he had one lung, right? That was my Swedish grandfather. He said to me, you should ride his, actually there's a song called Old Paint but he called it Paint. It was a dappled big horse. He was about 72 and it was completely wild and he had broken it. And he got on it and he could actually make it go in its back legs like in the movies, you know, and take his front, like he was boxing, 72 years old. He broke horses and then you know, he would just, he was the one that I think I told you, cut his finger off and a grind, my brother did in the grinder. But he did in a saw and then he put, he used to cut the horns off as billy goats, you know, he had a flock of them. So he took horned stopper, you know, that, and he just put it on his finger. And so we went down there. My father said, well what happened? Well you know, I lost the I lost the top of my finger. Well when did you do that? Oh I lost it this morning. He said, well you're going to get tetanus in fact. No, I put the horn stopper on it. So they took him into the Kingsworth hospital and they had to cut all this, was basically Elmer's glue on steroids. And then they had to tie off, I don't know what, and take the clean bone and then he came back that night and he showed me, we went down to see him and he had his trophy. Yeah, he was really, and I give credit to my twin brother. He was grinding. He was so busy. We were, it was late at night and he was trying to get a disc done and he cut the end of his finger off the next morning. There he is. Yeah, at work. No time off for the, for farmers and ranchers. No, farmers are in different sources. Well Victor, you're talking about leisurely people and I think I have one. I don't know that she is or not, but let's get, this is the local part and we'll round out the show with these two situations in big cities. Let me just present them in the new swing for the fences. The first headline here, judges outrageous reason for letting grandpa Vika killer walk free. I think it's Vika, how it's pronounced, but this judge is Linda Colfax from San Francisco and she, here's the story begins in the New York Post. San Francisco judge said that throwing the killer of grandpa Visha in jail would have been a quote, poor impact, end quote, on the violent attacker as she revealed her decision to let him walk free. Judge Linda Colfax explained her ruling as Antonine Watson, 24 was set to be released on probation for the 2021 killing during which he fatally shoved beloved Thai grandfather in an unprovoked attack. So where does this madness come from? And then the other story is about Chicago and this is either today's or yesterday's daily male headline, I think it was yesterday's nightmarish moment. Hundreds of lawless teens overrun downtown Chicago as stores looted and bystanders, standards maced and then this, I'm not going to read all this other than to say several police cars were stationed nearby yet they apparently failed to intervene. So this is what has become of the rule of leisure class over our major cities which are turning to- Oh, you're suggesting that when they break into stores they're not getting sacks of flour, rice, shovels that they're buying, they're hungry and it's all necessary. Yeah, they're after sneakers and jewelry and gold. I think there's two themes to these. The first on the Thai, I remember that the judge obviously believes that she is not going to be walking back from the San Francisco opera to her car and this fellow is going to be out and confront her. If she was or her daughter or her son, so she believes that she is part of a network that has indemnity that either she lives in a particular neighborhood or she has a bailiff in the courtroom or whatever. But I'm speaking as the son of a superior court and appellate court judge and although my mother was a Democrat, she would always say to me when sentencing, I have to think not only about the deterrent that we have to show people you can't do this, but I have to think about if I were the victim, if I were the victim and what that person must be going through and there has to be some recompense. The other thing is the Asian community, in this last election, voted more for Republicans than they had in the past. I think that was a combination of the idea that DEI, at least in the university realm, was aimed at a large part of them that Asians, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Korean Americans were being systematically discriminated and to an extent people from India as well and that the people who were doing that were left-wing. The other thing is in a community like San Francisco that has a large Asian population, there had been a number of these attacks in which a lot of these criminals view the Asian community as they do the Jewish community in New York, especially the Orthodox Jewish, that these are very law-abiding people, they are not likely to be armed with a concealed weapon, they are not likely to fight back and they're going to be vulnerable and they're going to be a little bit, and I'm going to go after them and that's what they did. There was about six or seven repeated attacks on Asians when this took place in San Francisco and I think these things are making the Asian community a little bit more conservative and so that was was an horrendous thing that they did and they do the same thing with the knockout game and the Hasidic Jews. As far as the riot and the tumult in Chicago, when you have an existential problem like that, it's the old nostrum. If I can't enforce the felony, I better make a big show that I'm enforcing the misdemeanor. So those police stood idle by and the government, what are you going to do with that? So what they're going to do with it, they're probably going to feel good that they pull over some guy that went 70 miles in a 60 and fill the book out of him. It's like, as I mentioned, I think with Sammy, Victor wants to put solar panels so they want me to get a plan of a building that's 100 years old and go through all these regulations when quarter mile away, there's gang members, there's been a shootout and they don't even know how to touch that. And so in that case, think Jack of the taboos if you were going to address that problem, that black teens say from the age of 12, 13 to 30, inordinately commit 50%, there are 3%, 4% black males of that age of the population. Population is 12% males are 6%, maybe 4%. 4% are committing 50% of violent crimes and murders in that ballpark. So how do you address that? Well, if you incarcerate these people for a deterrent effect like we did in California with 3, these people, I'm not focusing on African Americans alone, but anybody that does these things, you focus on that. 3% of the population we're told by criminologists, 3% account for about 75% to 80% of all crime. And they're 3 strike type people. And you put them in jails, we build all these prisons and the crime rate plummeted in California. And then a source people said, this is an inordinate incarceration of people of color. And this is draconian. And then we relaxed it until Trump started deporting people and now we've got the crime going down in some areas. But what would you do? How would you do it if you were a politician? What would they say? You're Jack Fowler and you say, you know what, we've got a terrible crime. We've got these bands of African American young men predominantly, not exclusively, but predominantly, and they assemble at certain points. And we've got to make sure that they we protect people, especially people of color in their own neighborhoods. First thing they'd say, you're a racist. You are a racist. How dare you? And second thing, what would you do? You tell your police, could you go? And they said, not this pig, Mr. Mayer, I saw what happened in the George Floyd. I saw Officer Shove and he did a police approved neck thing and maybe it was too violent. Maybe he went, but the perpetrator was passing counterfeit bills. He had a long record of violent home assault and he was on dangerous drugs. And I'm not going to be that guy. I'm not going to touch that. I don't want to go in there and try to use sufficient level of force to stop that rioting and gang activity. I'm not going to do it. They don't say that, but that was why they didn't do it, especially in a city like Chicago with a Soros prosecuting DA and to attorney and Mayor Johnson, he would turn right around if you caught one of those guys that was beating somebody up and they were almost killing somebody on the ground, kicking them or breaking into a store. He would let the person out. The police know that. They would let him out with no bail and then they would blame the police. So they're not going to do anything. So the attitude, as I understand it, of the general population from observation is what's going on in Los Angeles, Chicago. I don't want to get near this. I don't want to talk about it because for 50 years, starting with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, people have talked about the Black family. Thomas Solspen is life trying to show people that before the era of the Great Society that the Black communities of resistance had comparable, if not superior, rates of marriage. They were no more likely to have out-of-woodlocked what-legged children than any other community. And the Great Society that targeted them for all of this largesse, accompanied by an exemption from criticism, as Tom pointed out, Walter Williams did the same thing. It only encouraged the breakup of the family and empowered women to have children out of wedlock and then for an empowered men not to be responsible. And that was true of other communities as well, but it fell most heavily on the Black community. And so people, for 50 years, have said, we've got to talk about manhood, responsibility, and when anybody did that, Bill Clinton, remember, sister soldier? He had the sister soldier moment. He backed, that was, that got him elected maybe, but then he backed off. Barack Obama talked about, for about a week, about Black male responsibility. And Jesse Jackson got caught in that interview off Mike, so I'd like to cut off his blank blank. So that's, then Obama went back to the Obama, you know, it's everybody's fault, but the Trayvon Martins of the world. And so people just said, they went back to Patrick Moynihan, benign neglect, remember that term, that almost got him persona non grata for the rest of his life? He spent most of his life mea culpa, mea culpa. I didn't really mean it that way. And then he became a liberal Democrat, more than a conservative. But he was right when he said that you can't do anything unless people are going to be honest about it. And so if you can't be honest about it and say the problem is the Black family on the underclass, not all 50% of the Black community and the VAT fathers have enormous rates of single, I mean, there's single parent families and there's multiple children by multiple, all of this. And it can be addressed because half the Black community is doing very well. And the half that's doing very well have marriages and nuclear families at rates commiserate with other groups. But this underclass, we know what it's like what I said earlier when Libby tried to say what was wrong with wrong. We know what the medicine is, but we feel it's worse than the morbidity. We know what you would have to say and do and the policies you would have to enact and the previous protocols you'd have to reject, say they don't work. Great society stuff doesn't work. But to do that would require a level of vituperation and paranoia and slanders and smears and nobody wants to do it. So what the idea is move to Tennessee, move to Kentucky, move to South Carolina, but don't stay in Chicago. That's what people say. The destruction of Black communities that predates the great society by a generation. These slums, this neighborhood was a slum, we're going to tear it down. Are they tore down families and churches? It's very dangerous because when you read a story like this in any of the major, I don't care if they're conservative or liberal, you read these stories about subway and there's two things that strike. The official news account will not give you any precise information about the description of the perpetrator. They won't say Black, they won't say teen, they won't say anything. And compensation for that or as a reaction that you read the comments, New York Post comments, you won't believe the comments. They're not just critical, but they're almost unimaginably racist and stereotypical. And yet those newspapers print them. And so what you're seeing in the media is if you have a person of color who shoots somebody or rapes somebody or slits their throat on a subway or has been just let out and set somebody on fire or a recent perpetrator who goes on a pier, maybe for gang initiation, shoots a girl in the head, he's illegal. And what you hear and what the reaction is, they don't give his name, they don't want to tell you that he's an illegal alien for days unless they're forced to. And then you'll have an alderman who said, well, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And let's not base it. And then you read the comments. And the comments are you blank, blank, blank, these people do it. And you get the impression that the media thinks, well, I'm not going to take the hit by telling the truth, but I can really get circulation by not telling the truth because it's going to enrage so many people from so many different groups, and they're going to write such stuff that's way over the top. And I'm going to print that. So the average person is going to look at the story and spend a nanosecond to say, unless the guy is a white male, they're not going to mention his sex or his race, but I'm going to go to the comments because they're, that's how I'm going to invent. You're so, you're so right that looking at Reels on Instagram or wherever Facebook and you see something outrageous, increasingly drawn to see what are people, what are the comments? And so I saw some the other day that I could not believe. I mean, there were some that say, we should have picked our own cotton and that was racist. But then that is mild compared to what they're putting in the papers. I don't understand the attitude or the policy of these online famous papers. Why would you not describe in a way you would do to anyone else who was white or male, the description of the perpetrator, and yet you would print the store, the comments on your policy that are abjectly racist if the reason was not to jack up circulation and interest. It's really dishonest. If they had just told the truth, then you wouldn't get a lot of comments. And that paradox is typical of this. It's not just race. It's homelessness. It's transgender stuff. And what they're doing is they're taking incidents where common sense people think there's two sexes. You can't have a man beat the brains out of a girl boxer. That's just crazy. Or they're thinking, you don't walk down the streets of San Francisco and give $100 of somebody who's urinating and defecating and killing himself with drug. And yet they keep doing this and they put it under the guise that we're liberal and we're more moral and this reflects our superior ethics over yours. And they won't discuss it. And so what people do is they go subterranean and they go into dark areas of discourse, different sites. They get more radicalized. They're angry. And we're building to a really huge civil reaction, I think. It's coming. And it might be, you know, you might get a charismatic Bill Clinton or Barack Obama for a brief hiatus that might be elected if you have a poor Republican, but you're going to see, I just think people are so tired of it. They're just tired of the crime. They're tired of the line. They're tired of the lectures. They're tired of the universities. They're just sick of it. Well, Victor, we've got a long time here. You know, and it's talked about reading comments and I've read comments for our YouTube channel. When you say Victor, there's two victors. There's a Victor before I had this operation. And I know him as the old Victor, but the new Victor is a shadow. What are you drinking? I feel like I search for words. My voice fails me. No, Omelette, you have, dude, you're clueless. You are a rock star. And then people love it. And let me read some of the, let me read some of the love letters in the comments. And we thank the people who do take the time to comment. I've got five. I didn't read any of the other times. I'll be quick. There's one that's mildly, it's not even negative. It's, let me just read, Kitty, Kitty, 2005 writes, no Victor. Everything that Mr. Newsom touches does not turn to dross. It turns to feces. Even though I worked in a factory for 50 years, I'm not ignorant. I know what dross is and feces fits the bill. Thank you, Kitty. I tend to agree with him. Yeah, I know you. Richard T. Ardo, 5170 wrote, I recognized every player Victor mentioned, we were talking about opening day and your love for the giants. I watched the Red Sox. So I got to see a player, American League players, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and the rest. We're old. NoDak721 writes, listening to Victor Combs, my spirit, he explains things so reasonably and well. I can easily follow his line of thinking. Thank God. Robert Blakeman, 9978 writes, in the UK, loving to watch Mr. Hansen, the number one political intellectual on earth. You got to bear that mantle, Victor. And one more comment here. Leigh Cawke writes, what an incredible interview. This is you talking to the great Sammy Wink the other day. I've heard a lot of clips, but this is my first time listening to a full episode. What a blessing to be able to get this kind of high level thinking wisdom commentary so frequently. Also, speaking as an anesthesiologist, I really got a kick out of his last little story about his surgery in a foreign country. It illustrates a different, more old school mentality about human health and surgery. There's a lot of wisdom in the old ways of practicing, but that comes from with different sets of expectations and outcomes. That's a very good point. When I got back from Libya, I went to a specialist because I didn't know what had happened, right? He took a CT and he said, you know, they removed a lot of your colon. And I said, yes. And he said, this scar is much bigger than our laparoscopic scars. And I said, I know it. And he said, they didn't have section. I said, no. And he said, how did you have a drainage tube? I said, no, they just left three stitches open. I had a pad for a week. And then he had a little, he had a little, kind of like a squirt gun and he, it was kind of like a little, it did squirt. And then he had a silver tray and there was all the stuff that he collected. We didn't have suction. And ether and you know what he said to me? He said, you know, I don't empathize with you going through that. But the fact ether, it wasn't a good sedative anesthesia, but there were certain advantages of it. You couldn't calibrate it well. It could have side effects, but, and obviously you said you woke up, but it didn't have the lingering effects on the body. It was a gas that some of ours do. And then he said, the problem with laparoscopic is you can't always clean out a ruptured area as well. You can do it, but, and then he said, the problem with drainage tubes is they're very good, but they can clog at night, especially when the nurse isn't attentive. But the old day, when you just seeped out, it's more open to infection. But you said, I think you're going to have a quicker recovery because you didn't have all of this multifaceted anesthesia and you were actually almost awake. You didn't have constipation and you didn't have a laparoscopic process. You got it out and you got everything out of there. And then he just went down and he went two or three inches below he should have. We wouldn't have done that much of your colon, but it was a good margin. And he stopped the gangrene and I think you'll be fine. But he's, and he said, I'd like to, he said, you know, I'd like to see more of you people because he said, I forgot what it was like to in the old days with the, yeah, with ruptured appendix. He said, we sometimes can't even operate laparoscopically. And he said, sometimes we have to, we don't because we're afraid that it's such a volatile climate environment, you know, with the perintinitis that we use massive antibiotics first and kill every, then going, but he just went in and the danger is you'll spread it. But maybe by taking the toxic part out, he nipped it in the bud. So yeah, I did he get any cigarette ashes in your, he was smoking, but the anesthesiologist yelled at him. There was a trio, there was a Pakistani nurse who spoke some English and then the wonderful Egyptian surgeon. And then the Iranian student anesthesiologist with the gas. But I was very lucky. I was lucky there. And the recovery time was about, I flew three weeks later to Florence and didn't tour for four weeks. I don't think I could get in a car and drive one mile after three months. So maybe it was being 20 years ago. Well, you mentioned the word lucky, we are lucky Victor to have you dispensing this wisdom and insight. Appreciate it. You're terrific today. As you are every episode of this, Victor Davis Hansen in his own words and again, also on Victor Davis Hansen in a few words. So thanks for doing that. For me, Jack Fowler, I really appreciated folks. If you subscribe to what I do, Civil Thoughts, it's a free weekly email newsletter. Comes out every Friday. Going to come out this Friday. I'm just going to have 14 recommended readings. Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up, not selling your name, easy peasy to do. You're going to like it. You've been terrific, Victor. Thanks again. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. We'll be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Thanks everybody. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.