Victor Davis Hanson: Jeffrey Epstein May Have Been Too Calculated to Leave a Paper Trail

I just don't think when Bondi and Cash said that there was a whole list, I don't think you're ever going to find that. I don't think he had a notebook. I don't think he had anything. And I don't think that Trump will pardon Maxwell. And I think she's going to sit there the rest of her life. I'm not saying these people weren't creepy people. And I'm not saying they didn't traffic innocent young girls. I'm just saying that the idea that this is a massive trafficking with hours of incriminating tapes and, you know what I mean, with sex, I just don't think you're going to find that. He was too clever to do that. Hello and welcome to Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. Victor is Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, VictorHanson.com. It's called The Blade of Perseus. Please come join us there for lots of free stuff, all the things that Victor is writing in the presses, his podcast that you see here. And then you can join VDH Ultra subscribers and get the Ultra material, which is two articles a week. And he currently has a series on about all sorts of catastrophes that he has navigated in his life and a Friday video. So those things are available. And we also have ad free videos. These podcasts are put on to Victor's site ad free. So please come join us there. Stay with us. We're going to come back with some current news on the Guthrie kidnapping. And then we'll look at the Olympics with Victor. So stay with us. Welcome back, Victor. So we just had some current stuff this week that I haven't heard you talk about yet with Jack, and that is that they have video of the abductor probably since it was the night of the abduction, and they are now canvassing the area for other videos. They found two gloves as well. So I was just wondering if you had any current thoughts on, you know, I want to say the possibility. I don't want to talk about whether she's alive or not, but the possibility of even tracking down who kidnapped her. Yeah, it's almost impossible to separate the people who people person who kidnapped her and the people who are demanding ransom. Because we don't know enough knowledge. We don't know if they've given direct evidence to local authorities or the FBI that they have proof that she's alive and only they would have that proof. there's so many things that you know don't make sense there's a picture of this strange man trying to disconnect the ring and succeeding the next camera but he's very inept in other words he's putting he's kind of he's trying to break into the house and we have no evidence they haven't released any how anybody got into the house. They got in, but we don't know how they got in. There's no, I don't think there's a broken window or anything. That's what I think people haven't wanted to explain. But this guy, he comes up and he puts kind of foliage in front of it. You think that a master burglar or an abductor or kidnapper would have had tape or something. And then he takes it off, and it seems like it might be going as he's walking away. Does he know that? Does he know that the closer that he gets to the camera, they get an almost perfect picture of his glove? I'm sure they've gone through every Amazon, every store, and anywhere to match that weird type of shiny plastic or rubber glove. And then he kind of hunches over and walks funny. And you get the impression that it's not some professional or he's not connected with the professionals, that he was hired maybe freelance to break in. And so there's speculation, but the essentials of the case is nobody knows how they got into the house. Nobody knows where she is. Nobody knows why they took her, whether it was related to Savannah Guthrie, the anchor woman worth 20 or 30 million dollars, and they thought they could get money or it was just incidental. So it's kind of idle to speculate. Yeah, did you find it strange that he had his gun sheathed right in the middle of his cell, right? It seemed very strange. He seemed very unprofessional to me in that. Yeah, he did. He had a massive backpack on and nothing to deal with the ring camera at all in it, apparently. I don't know. Yeah, it doesn't seem like you knew what he was doing. and it doesn't seem like, I mean, if they were really, if they were part of a kidnapping ring, then you want to do it sooner and later. Do it meaning have the transaction. And you've been delaying, delaying, delaying. And so I don't think it suggests that they don't really have any evidence that she's alive or that they have her in their possession or they can explain why someone, I mean, there's thousands of people listening to us who are on medications that if they didn't have them, say, for four or five days, they'd be very ill, very ill. Do you think that there's a possibility that it was a home robbery and that he accidentally, in the middle of the night, he thought she wouldn't be anywhere, he was going to go in and rob, and then he ran into her? And so that's why he doesn't, he looks so casual outside. It could be. It could be that he ran into her and decided to kidnap her. It could be he ran into her and, I hate to say this, but killed her and disposed of her somewhere. It could be all those things. But I don't know why somebody would disconnect a door camera and then not go through the door. I know the door was a security type of door, but it's hard to know whether he came through the roof or he came somehow, he got into the house. And the whole thing, the subtext of all this, are these strange and unsupported and unsubstantiated rumors that somebody, like the brother-in-law, had something to do with it. I've been kind of surprised that they've been so promiscuous in the use of that allegation. You know, it's kind of a gossip. There's no evidence that the sister or her husband had anything to do with it other than he was the last person to see her. But you would think that somebody would come out and say, I can guarantee you, Savannah Guthrie's sister and brother-in-law had nothing to do. Nobody's done that yet. And so that just fuels more speculation. Yeah, it sure does. Well, let's turn then to recent comments by Ilhan Omar, who said that Trump is a pedophile and should be executed. She seems to not understand the culture of the United States, that even if she thinks he's a pedophile, he's innocent until proven guilty. And then the whole idea of execution, et cetera, is extreme. She has immunity as a member of Congress of what she says, I think, on the congressional floor. The last celebrity who said that said something similar was George Stephanopoulos. He said that I think 11 times that Trump was a racist. Remember in the E. Gene Carroll trial, the judge misspoke or he was so unprofessional when he said Trump was not convicted of rape, but sexual assault. But he said, what's the difference? But there is a difference under the, you know, a very broad sexual. You can touch somebody. It's a sexual assault. But so she's she should be careful because there's no evidence. In fact, she had pretty poor timing because, oh, about 48 hours before she said that, an archive emerged where Trump himself had called 2006 before Jeffrey Epstein was even convicted of anything. So he was saying, you've got to get this guy out of here. And the subtext was he had seen him with these young girls. And so it's pretty clear that he didn't go to the island. He didn't partake in what Jeffrey Epstein was offering. And yet she says this and then she says, you know, at least in Somalia, we execute pedophiles, i.e. like Trump. But then the point is, well, you've been accused of contrasting in a negative way the United States with this failed state of Somalia. You said that the United States was trashy and dirty. You said that the dictators were worse here. Why would you go back to that mammoth theme again that things are better in Somalia because you execute pedophiles? and you don't do it here, especially given your family's history where your father was a general who was one of the military hirelings, I guess it's President Barry or whatever his name was, that committed genocide, and that's how you got here. People forget that about her. She poses as a left-wing cause celeb, but she was from the elite of the elite government hierarchy that was conducting a war of death, and that's how they fled here. And I think a lot of the recklessness that she's speaking about, because she's getting very reckless now, and that shows me, and I think the people are listening, that she's desperate and she's afraid, and she's afraid and desperate for what? For two reasons. One, she filed a report, a financial statement that said she could be worth up to $30 million. dollars. And the year before, she had almost no money. So she married this person who she had been paying as a campaign operative. And then he had no money. And now suddenly we find out he has a winery worth millions of dollars. He's got all these businesses. And so the obvious implication is that there are people who were giving him money for influence with her. But we don't know that. But she needs to explain how she can be in Congress. I mean, Nancy Pelosi became worth a couple hundred million dollars, but it took she and her husband 40 years with inside trading and all that. She needs to say how she made $30 million in one year. And the other thing is, of course, the $8, $9, $10 billion Somali fraud is getting very close to her. She knows that she's the pinup girl for Somali. By her own volition, she wanted to be the face of the Somali immigrant. And, you know, 75% of the people are on public assistance, first and second generation Somalis. So if you go, you know, if you want to be the pinup for the Somali immigrant community, then when you think that in the post-George Floyd woke era that that's cool and neat and you're going to get a Somali mayor, which they almost had, and you were taking over Minnesota. And then when things go south because the real Somali community is disclosed, and then all of a sudden you say, I'm not, I'm not, I have nothing to do with it. Well, she did. And all of these people, everybody in elected office, Fry, Walsh, Ellison, either got money from the Somali community or knew what was going on. And that's one of the things we never talk about, DI. DI is a malicious, venal, toxic ideology. For one reason, it gives people exemption to go commit crimes and then say, oh, it's racist. So, Victor, I was wondering on your opinion on the Olympics. I know we've only started since Sunday, but lots of skiing and ice skating and speed skating, which is something I really like to watch, those speed skaters. But I haven't noticed any trans athletes yet, so I thought that was interesting given the summer games. Yeah, I think they're not going to repeat what they did in the Summer Olympics with the boxer from, I guess he was from Algeria or Morocco, beat the blank out of women, and now confesses that he was male all along. And so I guess it was Amber Glimm, she won a gold medal, and she was the one that kind of started it off. There's been four or five. I think there's two figure skaters and three skiers. So they wanted to make it clear that they don't represent, I guess, half the United States or Donald Trump because of ice, ice, ice, ice. The problem with all these people is they just say ISIS, fascist, but they never really tell us why they are saying that. They never give us explicit examples because if they did, they're all complex. They say, well, they just tried to kidnap a five-year-old boy. They don't mention that he was abandoned by his illegal father and he was out in the cold. Or they don't say that the two people that were killed, one of them was a professional protester. I know he was tragically killed, but he had a military-like pistol. It was silly to go to a confrontation and then deliberately go up. Ten days earlier, he had kicked in an ice car and broken the light. He'd spit at an ice officer. He intervened in an ice arrest, and then he comes back later. And they don't talk about that. And the same thing with the Miss Good who was killed. You know, all she had to do is when said, get out of the car, get out of the car. All she had to do, this doesn't mean that she should have died, but all she had to do was not try to hit an officer. And once again, they created the climate. We want you to go out and take their picture. These people are evil. Ice, you've got to go out and do. And they created this standoff. And we talked about last time what Trump should do for the midterms. I'm glad that Holman is saying, you know, we arrested hundreds, if not thousands of criminals, and we're done. But they're not going to get the 1,700 out of the jails, I doubt. We have over 30,000 here in California. And it's a very strange left-wing idea that when you know that you let in, you, the left, let in these people, and you destroyed immigration law. and then they went out and raped and killed and maimed and you've got 30,000 of them in jail in California and when their sentences are up they're still in violation of the law because they're here illegally but more importantly we know the recidivism rate is very high you would not want ICE to come and take them and get them out of the country it's and that's what's so strange about it it's incoherent. So then you had all of these Olympic athletes just mindlessly. It's like they were at the Grammy Awards. But the problem was the Grammy Awards don't represent the United States. These people do. They're the team. And there's thousands of people who compete locally, regionally, state to get on that team. And then when they get these coveted billets, and they're going to make millions of dollars, some of them on endorsements, the first thing that comes out of their mouth is they want to virtue signal that they're not part of the United States. Well, then what do they want? If you don't want to be part of the United States, why do you want to be part of the United States team? It makes no sense. And the other thing that was funny about it is it's a northern hemisphere sport, because unless you have large mountains like in Libya or something, You know, the Atlas Mountains or the Andes or the, you know, it's at either pole, northern or southern extreme to have enough snow. So you have athletes who grow up from five years old. So who lives in northern Europe, in parts of northern China, in parts of northern Russia? It's mostly parts of Japan, then way to Chile. But it's mostly then, isn't it, white people or some Asians. But there were a lot of people say, where's the diversity? And, you know, I mean, I think they could say that about the swimming team. But it brings up a larger question of can't people emphasize particular areas that have ethnic appeal and others can't? So, I mean, am I upset that 75% of the NFL is black or 69% of the NBA is black? No. As long as it's bureaucratic, I don't care. And if other people want to think that that's a participation that they want, that's an endeavor they want to participate in, they're welcome to specialize in it. I don't get mad when I go to California. Joe Biden got in trouble when he said he couldn't go into a donut shop without seeing. But when I go to particular places, the Hmong community were experts at bakeries. Not that they may have been over. I don't care. I go to a 7-Eleven or a stop. The people in there in California, in the Central Valley, are 75% either from the Middle East or India. I don't care. As long as they obey the law and pay their taxes. but it doesn't work the other way. So now all of these leftists are saying, well, where are the black skiers? Where are the Chicano or the Latino skaters? Well, then go do it. You have a lot of affluent people, and you go up to Squaw Valley or Heavenly Valley or somewhere and just ski and say we were a black development thing, as they did in tennis. Same thing. And then the gay woman who said that gays are having a rough time in the United States, that's why she spoke out. No. All you hear in popular culture is LGBTQ3 plus. I don't know where it is. AI plus, I think. And we had the pronouns and they and his and all of these. We've had more emphasis on the homosexual community in the last 10 years. And Donald Trump is the most gay-friendly president there is. Rick Grinnell, he doesn't care if you're gay or not. So the idea that Donald Trump has made it hard on gays is ludicrous. It's so weird. It's so disturbing about this therapeutic culture that we created that everybody, as the first sign of any resistance or hostility or opposition to what they think. They go, the first thing they do is retreat to victimhood. Oh, I made fun of the United States and I spoke out of turn. I'm obnoxious and people are mad at me and it might hurt my endorsements that I worked so hard to get. I want to be a multimillionaire, but it's only because I was a gay person who were under assault. Everybody's tired of that. It's just so sickening, the victimhood. Yes, I think so. Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back. I have a few more things about the Olympics to talk to you about. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Welcome back. So, Victor, I was thinking, did you notice that, or I've kind of noticed that of the skiers, et cetera, the participants in the Olympics, there seems to be for the American team quite a few people that have come out of Eastern Europe, either Russia or the Ukraine. I love that about we took all their athletes I think It kind of ironic because we have this one American uh goo is her name and her father was Chinese Her mother was non Chinese and she grew up as a U S citizen and she very pretty and she's modeling kind of, and she's, I would call better than mediocre, but not Olympic caliber, but the Chinese are really adept at propaganda. So they saw that and they thought, Oh, well, let's see. She's beautiful. She's photogenic. And we can turn her by offering her 23 or 24 million dollars. And then she'll ski for us. And even the hostility of the Americans that she's a traitor. And people have said that they've used that word will be good for us. It'll be kind of like, yeah, you know, girl that has everything doesn't have communist China. And we're happy to indulge her. And we don't really care if she wins or not. And of course, she was mediocre and she blew out and she didn't do anything. And then she mouthed off about basically saying Trump was contrary to, and Americans were contrary to the spirit of the Olympics. And here's a person who sold her country and soul to get rich and use the Olympics. And she's saying that other people are contrary. And again, it's the same thing. I'm a victim now. I'm wealthy. I'm privileged. I grew up wealthy. Now I'm going to be a multimillionaire by reneging on my patriotism and joining another country. But I'm not going to live there. And I'm not going to say a word about the Uyghurs. And I'm not going to say a word about the Wuhan lab and the 50 million people who died or the million Americans and the 30 million, including me, who got bouts of long COVID. I'm not going to do that. and uh it's kind of ironic too is that if you if you want the reason america has all these eastern in every area like skiing they get europeans and skating they get uh ukrainians uzbekistanian russians and in gymnastics they get russians romanians eastern europeans but there's a difference. They moved to the United States and they become citizens. But China can't do that. It wants, it can't, first of all, it's a racist country. It's monolithic. We knew that from COVID when as soon as the COVID broke out, they were putting signs on their McDonald's that black students couldn't come in as if they, they didn't create it. And black people in Africa did. So nobody wants to go there. So they can't attract anybody to be citizens of China the way we can. And so, you know, it's kind of weird. Americans are really angry that this American has been a traitor and joined the Chinese. But she's not. I mean, they're not inconsistent. They're saying if you want to be a traitor, you don't have to be a traitor. Just be an expatriate. Go to China. Become a Chinese, just like all these people come to here and they're on our team. But you won't do that. You want it both ways. Yes, you should go live there. You know, the last thing I noticed about the Olympics was, while some of the athletes have done, as you have said, tried to ride the fence, I guess, about their Americanists, there are in the audience quite often lots of Americans, and even some of the athletes that have really big and loud USA on them, and signs too, so I kind of like that. Yeah, they remind me of Peter Hitchens. He wrote The End of Britain. I like him a lot. But he was Christopher's brother. I don't think I ever met him, but I like what he writes. But when he wrote That End of Britain, he had kind of a contrarian take on World War II and Americans. They always said Americans are over here, overfed, oversex, and over here. And he basically said that The End of Britain came from Americans that were loud and rowdy and wealthy and imprinted their awful culture on Britain. But Americans are I like Americans. I like I like to see that, that they were very unabashed and unafraid to express their patriotism. Have you seen the shooter in Canada? He apparently shot up a high school and he injured. He killed eight, I believe, and injured another 25. He killed his own mother and brother. So he was psycho. I mean, the Canadians had to tell us he was they. It was a little weird because the transitioning, there wasn't any ambiguity in his case. He was a male. He had a beard. And he never really looked like he transitioned. You know what I mean? I'm sure he went through all of the stuff. And then when some people on the right said this is getting a little scary, that particular school shootings in the last five years, I think there were two or three of them, were trans people. The left went nuts, and of course they got the fact checkers out, which are not fact checkers. And they'll say, I was reading one, it's like, here's a list of mass shootings in the United States the last 50 years, you know, and three people in a parking lot. And trans people are only half of 1%, and they only make up 1.5%. And it was so funny because, first of all, they had to go back all those years when we didn't even know what trans people were. Nobody identified with them. They didn't want to talk about the last five or six years when we, you know, it's been a big cause celeb. And then they were trying to say that they were a very small percentage of the population. But we've been told that 30 percent of the brown undergraduate community was considering transitioning and 10 percent and all these false. So they just it's so pathetic. But there's something this comes, unfortunately, for the trans movement. I think there's a big lawsuit now, a couple of big lawsuits. There was an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal as well that a lot of people are saying, I was 12, I was 13, I was 15, I was 14. I was advised at school. I was advised at the clinic. I was advised by my doctor. My parents really didn't know what was going on or they were given false information. And I took dangerous hormones. I took damage growth-altering hormones. I got my breast surgically removed or my test. It's terrible. And now I'm 19 or 20 and I see that my problems were psychological. It's so indicative of the left. What they always do is they try to find an aggrieved group or create one. And then they hype it and propagandize it and magnify it and exaggerate it. And then they try to use that to leverage these concerns about an oppressed group that needs them to represent them. and they created this entire, I mean, if you go back and look at statistics, people had known that there was a very rare phenomenon called gender dysphoria and sometimes it was manifested as transsexuals who actually wanted to be operated. Christine Jorgensen was a big name that I remember when I was, and Renee Richards, the tennis person, or they were transvestites. They wanted to dress up in the clothes of the opposite sex, but they still remain consistent in their biological gender. So it was always known, always known that it was a very small, and all of a sudden it became, you know, we've done the civil rights for this group, this group. We don't have another group. So we'll create this imaginary 10, 5% huge group, and everybody needs to be considering transitioning without any worry that your political agenda is going to get a lot of people killed or sick. It's the same thing about the COVID virus. From the moment that came out, everybody said, you know what? COVID started in Wuhan. Chinese government, no flights out of Wuhan anywhere in China, but you could fly to Europe, LAX, JFK, SFO. Pangolin, it doesn't work. Bat, 100 miles away. Open food, wet meat market, unlikely. PLA, running the lab. uh Fauci Collins trying to hide amongst immediately their involvement in channeling money through Peter Daszak and green lighting scientific collaboration and instrumentation for that lab it was a no-brainer but when anybody said that it was oh you're racist you're it's a yellow peril it's the whole Japanese internment even though it was you know China's arch enemy with the Japanese. They used every single propagandistic, and that's what they do for these causes. DEI and woke. Anytime they want to make this point that a bunch of crazy yahoos from the Ozarks are getting us all killed because they don't understand what the science of how this wonderful Chinese people were struck by this natural pangolin or bat that jumped into it. And now they're going to get us killed by not wearing masks. And you stop that whole narrative and say, no, no, no, no. The genetics and the viable reengineering of that COVID SARS-Pathogen had certain choices that were like eight and nine and a million. It had to be engineered. And everybody knew that. And yet they couldn't they couldn't admit that because it didn't fit their political narratives. So you mean that no, no time soon are we going to hear the U.N. or the World Health Organization come out and say China did it. And they own that we're out of the world health. That was another thing that China was bragging that their GDP was almost catching up to ours. I think we paid almost 20 or 30 percent of the who budget and they were like five percent. They were free riding. No, no. In the U.N., we haven't paid a lot of our dues finally because of what they do with it. So I don't know. Everybody's going to learn about China. They're really going to learn that they don't kid around, that they're a murderous dictatorship, and they want to destroy the United States. All right, Victor, let's turn to Cuba since we're in the international scene. And apparently Cuba has told airlines that they should not expect to refuel in Cuba because they're running low on fuel because Trump has made it very difficult for Venezuela and Mexico to provide Cuba with its oil right now. And I think it seems like I know we're always embargoing Cuba or we always have some sort of sanctions going on with them. But this is seeming to amp things up for Cuba a little more desperate. People have misunderstood misinterpreted that. They think that we have a vendetta against Cuba. All the United States is basically saying is for years we were told by our left that this was paradise. They have great health care. And, you know, when you heard that the Cuban military was all over Africa, it was in Granada, it was in Venezuela, it was in the Middle East, nobody paid any attention. They said, well, it was the end thing for Hollywood celebrities to say he went to Cuba. But the problem was that it was all subsidized. It was a complete failed system. It worked from 1959 to about 1965 by stealing the money from all the successful Cubans and sending them all out. But when their capital dried up, they couldn't create any. They couldn't do anything. And then when the Soviet Union collapsed, they lost their free subsidies. So now everybody says, well, why are we blockading their oil? Well, for the most part, we're just blockade, blockade, embargoed oil or blockade. They're blockading oil from Russia, which is embargoed, and Venezuela. And we're saying that these were criminal enterprises. They're under sanctions. So they can't have their free oil. So then Mexico wants to give it free. And we didn't try to embargo that. We just said, okay, you want to give them free oil? Go ahead and do it. But we're not going to give you any free stuff anymore. And one phone call to Scheinbaum. And we know what Trump said. the following. You have a $170 billion deficit with us. Cut it. Trade deficit. Or he said, you're getting $63 billion in remittances. We only tax you now at 1 or 2%. I'm going to do it at 20%. How's that? You're getting another $20 billion from cartel money. Next time we get a shipment, we're going to send drones into the cartels. Something like that. And she stopped. He didn't say she couldn't do it. She just said, if you're going to do it, this is what we're going to do to you because you are subsidizing a dictator totalitarian government. We're not going to attack it. We're not going to blockade it. We're not going to do anything. We're just going to tell people for the first time, this is a cancer in this hemisphere, and we're not going to allow illegal shipments of oil to it. And if you want to give it free stuff, because they have no money, they can't create wealth. There's no money in there. It's a very rich place. It's a beautiful place. Hotel industry, tourism, sugar, all that should be booming. But it's communism. So it can't work. So the left is very angry and they're trying to make heroes. The problem is they don't have a charismatic fidel anymore. Raul Castro is a geriatric apparatchik. So they have nobody that resonates with the left. They just get a thug and they put him in there. And everybody's just waiting for it to fall apart. And meanwhile, in Miami, 90 miles away, there's some of the wealthiest people, most successful people in the world who know their kids have been either brought here as children or they remember from their parents or there's people themselves. you know they were 10 or 12 and they're now in their 80s they remember what it was like and they're eager to go in there with their own private money and turn that place into something like Dubai you know yes so close to the United States it's so big and it's so beautiful and I think they'll do it at some point and the left is terrified because we got the midterms coming up And they think they use the ICE thing to nullify Trump's chief ace in the hole, which was the immigration issue, which appealed to 25, 28 percent of blacks and 55 percent of Latino males. And then they turned that into he's killing people. He's a Nazi, not that he's arresting all these violent criminals. So then the economy issue is really going well. GDP was over 5 percent. jobs were not just 130,000, but more importantly, they were all private sector. And they came with a cut in federal jobs. And there's going to be a change soon with the Federal Reserve. I think interest rates are going to go down. Inflation went down. And we haven't seen the full effect of the $8 to $10 trillion in federal foreign investment, nor the federal leasing and the increase in the oil production that's going to go up to 14 or 15 million barrels. So the left knows that that won't be an issue. So they're trying to find issues and they're not going to find them. And they're really worried right now because on the foreign side, it's possible that Iran could fall before the midterm. We don't know what he's going to do there. We don't know if the plan is to get people inside Iran to organize resistance and you get another, and the world knows that he's killed 30,000 people and killing them now and executing them, he being Khomeini and the government. And the people go out on the street again. I think if they do that, there'll be a U.S. taken out of certain things. And what I'm getting at is you could get a peace deal in Ukraine, you could get the removal of Iran, and you could get the collapse of Cuba in the summer or fall, and that would be just unimaginable that people that have dreamed for that, and Democrat and Republican for years have said the world would be a much safer place If Vladimir Putin's country was neutered or neutralized and Europe started to defend itself and the Iranian kleptocracy, theocracy collapsed and this Cuban communist failure evaporated. But to see that all at once, that would be amazing. Yes, I was going to mention Trump's economy, but thank you for bringing up all those statistics. Boy, it is a wonderful boom that is just starting to happen out there at this time of year, which is unusual because the economy is usually a little bit slow at this time of year. It reminds me, people forget this, but in 1984, Ronald Reagan, as the year started, wasn't that popular because there had been a severe recession. and I can remember in 82, 83, and it was part of how do you stop Jimmy Carter's stagflation? You know, 20% interest, 10% inflation, 11, 12. You do it with Paul Volkler and you raise interest rate and you just break the back and get the bad stuff over. But that hadn't kicked in yet. I can remember here in the San Joaquin Valley meeting a lot of conservative, rugged farmers, you know, and the price of raisins in 83 went from, I want to be careful, $1,450 a ton to $440,000 a ton. And so people with little 40 acres, they were losing $1,000 a ton in income and two tons an acre, 2,000. And they were losing $80,000, $90,000 not of adjusted money, 1983 money. And that recession hit everybody. I can remember a family member came back and he bought a car. And none of us had any money. We were farming. And my dad said, well, what did you pay for interest? He said, I got a great deal. a great deal. I got it out the door for 16%, 16% interest. My dad said, well, that's not too bad. And then when I went in to negotiate a production credit loan, the guy said, well, you got some good, you have no money. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll loan you the X amount of money for 12%. That's what it was like. So my point was Walter Mondale had been vice president, and he was a very photogenic leftist. And in January, February of 84, they did some polls and he was almost equal with Reagan. And in some, he was ahead. And it reminded me of 1980 when Jimmy Carter was ahead of Reagan almost to the last three weeks, at least according to Gallup and other polls. And then Reagan, he was, I think Reagan was behind by three points And then he just buried him, partly because, you know, that debate where he said, there you go again. I won hold my opponent age against him He too young He was pretty good But my point is this that in the second third and fourth quarters of 1984 it all paid off He had done all this unpopular work Reagan He had cut regulation. He had slashed taxes down 28%. He had broken the back of inflation with high interest. And then it just kicked in. Wall Street took off and the economy grew 7%. 7%. And the rest is history. Mondale was toast. I think the same thing is going to happen. Wasn't the last month, December, a 5% growth rate or something for Donald Trump? 5.4, I think. Amazing. And that, we've got to remember, that was still the lingering effects of the longest shutdown in history. The Democrats thought they were going to cook Trump and side rail the economy, but it recovered. They're going to do the same thing now as we speak. They're going to try to shut down the government over ICE and see if they can stop the economic momentum before the midterm. Let me ask you then about another Democrat. His name is Gene Wu, and he's a Democrat representative from Texas and he came out and said that he's that yeah he's in the state legislature and he said that Hispanics African Americans and Asians all have the same oppressor and that and here's a quote from him we have the ability to take over this country because they're becoming the majority and do whatever is needed for everyone and make things fair their problem is according to Wu, is that these communities are divided rather than intersectional. Yeah, I mean, I don't have to be careful what I say, but I grew up as a minority in southwest Fresno County. And I can tell you the most racist things that I heard about blacks and Latinos came from within that group. You know what I mean? Yeah. So there is no intersectionality. Maybe Trump showed that. He had a higher Hispanic vote, male vote, than did Kamala Harris. So that was shocking. I think he almost split the Latino vote, Hispanic vote, 50-50. and he won it in some states that you wouldn't believe, swing states. So somebody who was born in China, as this guy is, and he comes over here and he thinks he's an expert on the long history of American minority participants. He's an idiot. The second thing is every time someone on the right says that this is a project of the left, European left and the American left, and it's a great replacement theory that they can't beat the conservative side at the polls because their agenda doesn't work and socialism, communism, nobody in their right mind wants. They say that they're going to open the borders and they're going to replace them. And when you say great replacement theory, the left goes crazy and said this is racist. It's a bunch of dying white people that don't have children that are paranoid. But the problem is that the left then writes books called Demography is Destiny or the New Democratic Majority where they brag about this. And I quoted them at length in The Dying Citizen, chapter and verse, people who said this on the left. Then you had this character Wu in Texas where he says it. He says he wants to get rid of these people because he can't defeat their ideas. So he thinks he's going to get rid of them. The Spanish foreign minister said that the other day. She used the word great. She was either a foreign minister or a high official in the Spanish government. And they wanted to give voting rights to 500,000 illegal immigrants. And she said, we want to replace all the white racists and all the white creeps and all. It was right out of the Spanish Civil War, you know, anarchists. It's like reading Orwell's Farewell to Catalonia. But in any case, this guy actually says it. And she said it. And the problem is, he comes from China and he says, we're going to make a new country. We're going to get all these people. But why did he come here? Because I don't know what year he came, but I'll just take some years. 1970, the country was 90% white. 1980, it was 85% white. 1990, it was probably 78%. 1995 was probably 75. 2000, I don't know. Now it's about 70. So, and the other phenomenon is that people are intermarrying. So what are they? And races for them is incidental. It's not essential to who they are because they don't know. Almost everybody I know is interracial in this area. So when he says that, it's so racist. He's saying that Asians are always going to be Asians and blacks are always going to be blacks and Latinos. And because we hate white people and they're horrible people, we're going to all band together and take over. And then we're going to do do what? Do what? Like that crazy leftist on social media who said after the Republicans win that she wants to ban all Trump supporters for four years from the Internet. Yeah. It's funny how all these leftist people get all these crazy concocted ideas that are fascist, and then they never think how they're going to impose them. We're going to take all the guns. And you think, so you're going to remember Kamala Harris had said that, I think, once. We're going to come and get them. And you think, so you're going to go into Jim Bob, Jim Billy Bob's home when he's got an arsenal, all legal, all registered. and you're going to go in the front door with whom? Spaghetti Garm Antifa people and take it out? I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think that's going to happen. His words were, we're going to do what is needed for everyone. And what I don't understand is the white people that support this racist agenda that he's got because they don't realize that they're going to be as white as anybody else, the people he hates ultimately. So I don't know. That's crazy. A very brilliant guy, Benedict, who used the term oikophobia. Yeah. And said white people suffer from oikophobia. Not just white people, but Westerners. They hate themselves. They hate their phobia, hatred. Oikia, oikos in Greek means house. They hate their own house, their own home. and I think a lot of white liberals feel that the more demonstrably they use the word white in a pejorative context, the more social reward, it's two things, they get psychologically rewarded that I'm white and I hate myself and then second, then they feel there's rewards that they're going to be accepted or they're going to be, the non-white population will take over and they'll be a useful idiot or something. But I don't think they quite understand that when you go down the racial road and you keep saying white, white, white and Latino, people believe that. So if you keep saying the Latino community, the black community, well, why would they want you? because you remember when right after George Floyd, there were all these marches with oppressed people and there were all these white liberal women and they said, get out, we don't want you. And then they cooked up this idea of these very intelligent black people did. And they had this con where very wealthy white people invite you to dinner, these special black guests. And then the black guests would call them names to get their tongue and say, you're a racist. And then they'd say, thank you. Thank you. But it's you don't want to go down that route. And what's happening now is I mentioned it a couple of times on a podcast. If you say toxic white, white, white, white, white, white, and they do all the time. And you have just when you're Jasmine Crockett and you say that from the floor of the Congress. white this and white this or this representative woo and it's or the squad omar says it all the time if you're white what do you say to yourself you say two things they don't like me and they don't like me because of my skin so they're racist and there are more white people who are poor. And if you look at per capita income by ethnic group, whites are, depending which survey, either eight, I think, or 15, and up at top are Indian Americans, Mandami. And then you get into Chinese, Japanese, Arab. And so you have all the, there's no demonstrable evidence that your skin color hampers you, is what I'm saying. Or that your skin color makes you an oppressor or whatever that is. One of the things that I grew up with and still here was the Oklahoma diaspora. So over a million people came to California between 1931 and 1950. And they mostly came to the San Joaquin Valley, which was the most affordable. And there was farm work here. And they were treated terribly. Oki was, it was, I can remember I was in a primary school where 70% Hispanic. And I was on a team and there were two guys we didn't choose. And one of the Mexican-American kids, we were all about 10, 11, or 12. He said, we're not going to choose Dennis. I said, well, he goes, I don't want his Oki, excuse me, ASS. I don't want his on our team. and I said why he said because he's an oaky trash and then I said well I'm I'm white and they said yeah but you're a good white person I said why am I good white person they said because you don't talk like he does I guess southern accent they they faced enormous uh they were very talented too and they faced enormous prejudice. And so I don't think everybody says white, white, white, white, white, had it made, but, you know, I don't think they had it made. They came over with nothing from Europe, nothing. And if you look at World War II or World War I, I mean, gosh, they died in droves. And they worked. Yeah, they were hardworking people too, which a lot of immigrants are, which is good. Those are the ones we want, but it's not always that way. I don't think people want to go down that road where they say we're going to have a black, white, basketball all-star like some idiot said the other day. I just don't think you want to do that because it's not going to work out well. And it's not going to be working out well for the racists who say they hate white people. They want to segregate. It just doesn't work well. No, not at all. At Hanson's Morning Cup. So come join, connect with him there if those are your news outlets. So, Victor, Pam Bondi was testifying before Congress, and they seemed to want to get her on the Epstein files. I did notice that she was pretty feisty fighting back against Representative or Senator Raskin, who she said wasn't even a very good lawyer, I think, was the gist of it. He's been wrong about everything. Or battlin as well. It wasn't a good week. The Clintons are going to have to go testify. And it came out that Leon Black and Wexler, the Vanity Fair billionaires, had given him sizable amounts of money. Almost everybody who's appearing now are more left than right. Donald Trump appears now in an FBI affidavit that surfaced that he was warning people, as we said, about Jeffrey Epstein before he was arrested. And a lot of the left says, well, it matters whether you associated with him before he was arrested for sexual assault, trafficking or after. We can see why you did before, but after you knew he was. And then now it turns out that Trump got rid of him before and called the FBI about him. And most of these leftists had continued their relationship, Reid Hoffman. But the weird thing about it is it's clear that he and Maxwell recruited young girls under 18 to come and live with them. And it's clear that he gave them certain educational opportunities. One he made into a dentist or allowed her to go to dental school. He gave them quid pro quos. And then it's clear that there were intimate friends of his that I'm not sure that he enticed them and blackmail like we all think, but he created a milieu where they wanted in on it. Okay. But so far, what's strange is they don't have a lot of young women yet who come in and say, I had sexual relations with this person and I was under the age of consent, depending on where it was, whether it was 18 or 16 or whichever one of his residents or locales. And therefore, I was, you know, Miss Guthrie, who had the auto, I guess, I think it was Guifra. Guifra, excuse me. She her testimony has been challenged in court so often before she died tragically, you know. So I'm not sure that she can be an accurate voice from the grave. and what i'm getting at is i think what's happened is they just say these people were all in on this sexual i mean they're obviously somewhere like prince andrew and but i'm saying that the idea that you're going to find in those files hundreds of powerful men who were having sexual relations with women under 16 or 17 i don't think you're going to find it for two reasons either they were more that they were that that number was very small and the small people who engaged in it and then got second thoughts cut non-disclosure deals or gave a lot of money and bought people silence and so there's people now who may have been underage then but may have got millions of dollars and they're not going to go out and say that they were you know trafficked But when you read more about him, what Epstein really was, was kind of a former high school teacher who was a mathematical whiz and an autodidact without a lot of education. And he ingratiated himself into the New York elite, and then he wined and dined them. and he may initially have been able to bring in young women that these powerful people had sexual relations with. And I don't know if he just said, I'm going to show this picture of you or not, but they felt that either he had special expertise on taxes or he was implied that he would embarrass them. And so they let him use their fortunes. I think that was what the Vanity Fair guy did. And he charged, you know, he mastered the tax code and he saved them millions of dollars. But then he used that entree and just kept building on it. And he was like a house of cards that he was just a phony. But he was very bright and he knew how to give gifts to people. And what comes across in all that, I read a lot of the exchanges with all these famous people. gosh, for people who are so wealthy, they were so greedy, like this chief counsel, this woman who's so famous for Goldman Sachs, all this, they give her a $10,000 bag, you know, I don't know if it was Verracher, and all of a sudden she's captivated, right? And then I could use this type of watch. And they're so wealthy, but they're so obsessed with style and little trinkets and stuff they'll do. It's just pathetic. And then they don't know anything. They just say, you got to get my son here or you do this or he says this or this is what they're doing. It's no independent thought. A person like Elon Musk, you get the idea that he's idiosyncratic and a free will thinker. You know what I mean? He questions everything for all of was strangeness. These people, God, they were a sorry bunch. But I just don't think when Bondi and Cash said that there was a whole list, I don't think you're ever going to find that. I really don't. I don't think he had a notebook. I don't think he had anything. And I don't think that Trump will pardon Maxwell. And I think she's going to sit there the rest of her life until she's 80 years old, dropping little hints that she's willing to open up about everybody. Most of them, the statute of limitations are over anyway. And it's just a question of, can I damage people's reputation or not if you don't give me a pardon? And I'm not saying these people weren't creepy people, but I just, and I'm not saying they didn't traffic innocent young girls. I'm just saying that the idea that this is a massive trafficking with hours of incriminating tapes and, you know what I mean, with sex, I just don't think you're going to find that. He was too clever to do that. And it's just it's more insinuation, flattery. And it really shows you that this wealthy class doesn't have independent judgment. No one seems to say in these, could you please tell me where you learned accounting? Could you please give me a 10-point plan how you're doing it? Can you please show me and your prior client how you were able to save them X amount of money? It was always so when someone said, I got a call from him. Oh, thank you for this bag. Thank you for these shoes. Oh, wow. I can use your jet skis when I go down to the island. I don't know how they made their money. They don't seem very bright. All right, Victor. I wanted to finish the show. This is our Saturday show. Just to ask you. Yeah, because today is actually Lincoln's birthday. And I know that this is airing on Saturday. But I was wondering if you had a reflection on the legacy of Lincoln. And this is my question. Was he riding the crest and leading everybody Or was he kind of a fence setter that was trying to dodge all and placate He was one of a kind He was probably the without doubt Washington was a great man but he was the best president we've ever had. And he knew from the very beginning that that slavery was not sustainable. And he knew from the very beginning that the South, they had a lot of great traditions. Virginia had produced the most presidents, for example, but they were a Scottish, Irish, martial culture, and they had a huge amount. This was the most money in the history of civilization up to that time because of King Cotton. And they had huge amounts of capital. and he knew that they were never going to give up slavery. And he knew that this North American project would not work if it ended up like Europe with 30 countries. You know, there would be nepolygonic wars, 30-year wars, 7-year wars, and it had to be united. And he knew that there was nothing in the Constitution about succession. It was only about admission. So there were people who said it's not treason to leave because there's no choice do they have. And so he was the one, and he knew that there was not support, broad support, for fighting the South on behalf of black slaves. Many people, when Sherman went into Georgia, half of the people in the regiments of Minnesota and Michigan had never seen a black person, literally. So to the north, I'm not talking about New England, but to the Midwest and the growing western, there wasn't a lot of support. They didn't, you know, to go down and get killed fighting these very adept southerners on their homes. But he was able to mold public opinion in a way that nobody else was. The other alternative, Stephen Douglas or George McClellan, who ran against him in 1864, they all were willing to have popular sovereignty. In other words, let's just let them go. Let them go. And he had to figure out how to say they can't leave their Americans and their insurrectionists and we want them back in and we have to get rid of slavery. And they thought of everything. They thought, well, maybe we can send Africans back to Liberia, create Liberia, or maybe we can buy Africans from Southerners and manumet them. And it wasn't going to work. The South was not going to play ball, and some of the abolitionists were not going to play ball. And he had a very strong base of the abolitionists who really pushed him, who wanted forcible liberation of African slaves, but they didn't think it out. They didn't say, we want to be like John Brown and invade the South, because that's what you're going to have to do. So he had to move the country along inch by inch, and some of the ways he did it were brilliant. He said, we own federal property. The federal government has post offices. It has military bases. It has Fort Sumter. You know, Sumner. He has all these things, and they're ours. They may be inside your territory. It would be as if somebody said in California, sorry, Newsom. Trump said, Yosemite is mine. It's the federal government. It's not California's. And that's the principle that he used. So he didn't have to do anything to start the war. He just said, don't attack federal property, and you have to obey federal laws. And he let it simmer. And they were the ones then that attacked Fort Sumner. And then he said, I need 90-day enlistments. The other thing he was really good at, he was very skeptical because he had been a Westerner, grew up in Illinois, and he was very skeptical, not envious or jealous of, but skeptical of the Eastern Blue Blood and hierarchy and the establishment. And that was a great advantage because he brought people around him. He didn't he wasn't kind of like Harry Truman. Harry Truman did not trust the Washington League, but he was willing to bring in blue stocking, you know, people in the Treasury and secretary of state and not be prejudiced against them because of their expertise. But he didn't trust them all. And that was very good because when he looked at the military, for example, and he had all of these people that were self-promoters. I'm talking about not just McClellan, but Hooker and Halleck and others that were Burnside, all these people that were supposedly brilliant at the New York papers. And then you looked at this from Galena, Illinois, Ulysses S. Grant, a drinking poor student. Or you looked at this brilliant guy named William Tecumseh Sherman. And he said he had a mental breakdown and he was going to, you know, they took him out after Shiloh. And he said that, you know, he said crazy things like it might take 300,000 deaths to win the Civil War. But my point is he knew those people. so he was committed to the two people who won the war and that was Sherman and Grant Grant and Sherman and five foot five Sheridan who was crazy too and he when he and then he when he uh when he found these people he felt that they were kindred souls when they came to him and said Mr. President Mr. President, Sherman's taken Atlanta. And he said, and he sent you a letter. Atlanta is ours and fairly one. We're going to win the election. But can he just stop? We don't know where he's going. And then they didn't get any telegraph. And he was somewhere in the middle of Georgia with 60,000 people. They asked Lincoln, what's going on? He said, well, he went in one hole. And I don't know what hole he's going to come out of. But I have full confidence in General Sherman. I always have. And then same thing about I don't think he said I can't spare the man he fights. I'm not sure Lincoln said whatever he's drinking, give it to other people. But he could have said that. But the point I'm making is every time in that horrible summer of 1864, they came to Lincoln and his wife as well, who is Southern. He's a butcher. He's killing people. and Lincoln just said he's putting pressure on Lee. It's going to crack. And he understood the terrible arithmetic that the North had three times, almost three times the population and five times the industrial. It was just a matter of time, if you had the right generals. And so. Well, Victor, I have a question from one of you. He was a brilliant president. He was very compassionate humanitarian. He was a great man. Yeah, I have a question from one of your listeners, but we're at the end of our time here. I haven't asked it. Are you okay? I know what I'm up. I guess somebody said that to me today. I've never thought of myself that way. They wrote me and said, congratulations, I know you'll be a successful cancer survivor. That's nice. I know. This is my first long. Yeah. So I got my heart rate up to 58. Oh, nice. That's where you need it, right? Okay, so this is from your website, a comment from your website, and it's a question. I'm sorry, Sean Ford, who wrote it. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I want the thing on the Civil War. So he writes, I've come to the conclusion that the shift to centralization in the United States government occurred during the Civil War. The centralization of power into the hands of Lincoln fell practically straight into the hands of leaders of the progressive era. Seems to me the right of secession was the final defense against the federal government's centralization of power. But since the war between the states, by which he means the Civil War, decided the right of secession was unconstitutional through an unconstitutional use of arms. So he's saying that the northern powers were using unconstitutional use of arms to stop secession, which was unconstitutional. So the unconstitutional was unconstitutional through an unconstitutional use of arms against the Confederate States of America on the part of the United States of America. The centralization of power into the hands of the federal government and the emergence of the deep state was inevitable since the Civil War, he's trying to say. I'm not sure he means that the South thought it was unconstitutional. Lincoln thought it was, but there was nothing in the Constitution. That was his problem that said there wasn't a clause that said Clause 5A, no state shall leave the union without the permission of the Congress or the majority of states. It's not there. It's only about being in there. So if he says that – if he means that the South had a right to succeed constitutionally, he's right. But then he didn't get to the second point, with all due respect, and that is there was millions of dollars of property, infrastructure, installations that did not belong to the South that was within the South. So did the South ever come to Lincoln and say, we want to succeed, and here are the number of post offices, here are the number of armories, here's the number of bases, here is an amount of Union northern investment in banks, railroads, and we want to pay all that? No, it was always going to be hostile. So Lincoln just sat there, I mean metaphorically, and said, let's see what they're going to do. And when they fired on – they said that Fort Sumner – they said, get out. And Lincoln said, it's a federal fort. And it has been for a while. And they said, don't supply it. And he said, we're going to supply it. And he made that choice. And they made a choice to fire on it. And then they went into exaltation at Bull Run when they beat – and they thought they really did buy into this idea that the Scots-Irish military tradition, agrarianism created much better fighters. They may have been right vis-a-vis – I'm not sure they were – about the abolitionists in the New England. But they had no idea about people in Michigan, as I said, and Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and Iowa. and Illinois, those people were not urban people. They were farmers, and they were pretty tough, and they were immigrants, and you read about the memoirs of Sherman and the people who marched with him. I mean, when they got into Georgia, they knew how to cook. They knew how to butcher cattle. They knew how to live outside. They thought that being outside in November in Georgia was a picnic, and they were the toughest people in the world. And I don't think the South really understood that, how many there were. They thought there was just a bunch of Bostonians that they were going to intimidate, and they didn't understand that. Two things about his question. Do you think that the use of force against the South was unconstitutional then when it went beyond federal lands protection? And then also, what do you think about his statement about centralization, that it actually went on from the Civil War? Well, he thought that they were insurrectionary. That was the whole premise. He thought that they were attacking the federal government and there had been the Whiskey Rebellion and prior presidents had put them down. So he felt that he had a constitutional right to protect the interest of the United States and that involved the investment of Americans that might have been confiscated or he thought with one qualifier. He felt that slavery was amoral and a special category. So the Supreme Court said that slaves were property and that they had a right to go into the North and get back their property. He didn't believe that. But my point is that if he believed that if you try to attack the property of the United States and you are a member of the United States and you try to attack its laws or its persons or its money, then you're committing treason and insurrection because there was nothing in the Constitution that gave you that right. The South said just the opposite. Well, there's nothing in the Constitution, so therefore we can do it. If those brilliant people in Philadelphia really thought it was wrong to succeed, well, they would have said they don't succeed or else, but they didn't. And that was the whole states' rights argument that Calhoun had used and the nullificationists. As far as the growth, he's right that there was abuses of the federal government. Lincoln declared no habeas corpus in parts of Ohio against the Copperheads. Andrew Johnson, following Lincoln, declared no habeas corpus to break the Klan in Tennessee. so he did suspend habeas corpus and ruled on martial law and he did he had to grow the government because i mean these armies had never been seen before there were more people killed at the first battle of shiloh than all the wars since 1775 nobody had ever imagined that nobody ever imagined And the United States would put 65,000 men in an army with Sherman and 110 with Grant and another army of the Tennessee. And then these were huge forces, four or five hundred thousand people. They had to be fed. They had to have munitions. They had to get them. That was all new. And so, yes, it grew the government. But if he's talking about the administrative deep state, I think we didn't have an income tax until 1913 or 16. It really came in, to tell you the truth, with Teddy Roosevelt and the reform movement and, you know, the government bureau. Some of them were good, Food and Drug Administration, things like that. And then Woodrow Wilson, partly because of World War I, he really abused federal power. He went after states and put people in jail, you know, and let them pass laws that said it was against the law to speak, to teach German and stuff. They put people who criticized the war in jail. But all that said, yes, the Civil War grew the administrative state by net necessary. Yes, Roosevelt was a Republican who could get away with it because they thought that he was, you know, rugged individualist. So when he wanted to be a progressive and create all of these government bureaus to help the American people, he got away with it. And then Wilson, partly under the guise of World War I, but he really created – but all of that was nothing until 1933, 34, 35, 36, 37, and Franklin Roosevelt. He was the one that created National Recovery Act, Civilian Conservation Corps, Federal Reserve, all of these things, and FDIC, all of these bureaus. And then the second, and Justice Coppola was Lyndon Johnson from 1965 to 1970. And that was the Great Society, Environmental Protection Agency, Division of Civil Rights, Great War on Poverty, EOP, all of that stuff. It was basically incremental. Lincoln did it to win the war. Roosevelt did it, he felt, to reign in the capitalists of the golden age of America, the roaring 90s. And Wilson did it because he was a socialist, and he was very influenced by Europe and the French. And Roosevelt did it after the Great Depression. He felt that he had a mandate to make the government run everything. And then after the death of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, later Martin Luther King, and the riots in the streets, L.A., Watts, Johnson thought he had as a Democrat to save the party from the segregationist. Got to remember that more Republicans in the House in percentage terms in 1964 and 1965 voted for those two civil rights acts than Democrats did. The Republicans were about 80 percent in the House and about 80 percent in the Senate. And I think the Democrats were only about 63 percent and 70 something in the Senate. And that was because of the solid South. And Johnson was terrified that there would be a and there was a George Wallace type of strong Thurman. 1948, the Dixiecrats. He felt that there would be a third party and the Democrats would lose the election. So he thought, even I'm a Southerner, I have credibility, I'm not a Northern liberal. Kennedy couldn't do civil rights because the Southerners would never go along with it in the Democratic Party. I can get their votes and I can get the Republicans' votes. They'll vote for it, for the civil rights, but I can grow the government with the Democratic Party and I'll hand out spoils to the South. And he got this 1964 was the last election in which Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, they all went Democratic. But it didn't happen in 68. And he was he saw that Johnson. So he basically said, I have a southern accent. I'm a conservative Democrat. And I am going to keep the conservatives in the party. and they're going to vote for stuff that they hate, but they're going to get a lot of goodies out of it. And we're going to retain power as Democrats. All right, Victor, thank you so much for that analysis and happy birthday to Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln. Yeah, Abraham Lincoln. All right, thank you for watching us and listening. And Victor, thank you as well. Wonderful analysis. Thank you, everybody, for listening. And we'll try to see how long I can. I have some medical, what's the word, rendezvous. Okay, coming up. Some of them are coming up, and I'm either going to be back here or I'm not going to be back here for a while, depending on the treatment. We're happy to see you in this episode of the Victor Davis Hanson In His Own Words show. So thanks, everybody, for listening. Thank you, 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 VictorHanson.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.