Trump, Iran, “War Crimes” Claims, and the Double Standard on Targeting Infrastructure | Victor Davis Hanson

So everybody got very angry and it's true that Trump could have used a better noun for civilization. The congressman, Ro Khanna, has insinuated that these war crimes, and he's specifically referencing blowing up bridges or industry plans as war crimes, and he's equating that to World War II criminal courts, meaning Nuremberg. We know of anybody at Nuremberg that was tried for blowing up bridges or military industry. The Soviets starved to death. They lost about 7 million people that were under German control. I mean, they had the two largest encirclements in history where they basically trapped 2 million people. 10% survived. They deliberately starved them. The critics who say that he's genocidal, he should be charged with war crimes, they know what he meant. Before we even went in, he said to the Iranian people, help is on the way. And unlike prior American wars, Donald Trump for over five weeks has not targeted civilian infrastructure. He has not targeted the civilization of Iran. I know that you and Jack spoke a little bit about the airman that was rescued, and I think that you guys obviously applauded it like everybody else who was smart did with the exception of the Democrats and the Europeans. I got to stop you right here. Are you going into the Candace Owens tweet? No, but you could go ahead. This rescue of the airman in Iran was very different from the Libya Benghazi. Misadventure? Yeah, misadventure, death of an ambassador. And the annex braved people at the annex. Hillary Clinton was warned that the consulate was not defensible. What difference at this point does it make? And once it proved not to be defensible, and they killed our ambassador, would be ambassador, our consular official, whom I met in Libya before he was consular. He was looking for sites in Libya, and he came into my room in a clinic where he was being operated on with a bunch of food, and he represented the United States informally. She was given memos that was not secure, but more importantly, there's a lot of controversy that at the moment that started, and the crowds formed and they threatened the annex and the consulate. There were people with special forces in Sicily, and as anybody knows about the geography, you can get to Libya in an hour, and they didn't call them. Hello, and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Victor is the Martin Nene the Andersen Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsh Abusky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhansen.com, and the name of the website is The Blade of Perseus. He's got all his work there, all his articles, these podcasts, both in audio and video, and you can find links to his books. So please come join us there, and we have a lot on the agenda today. This is the Friday News Roundup, so we're going to be talking about Iran, of course, first, the accusation of war crimes, perhaps a little bit more about the airman that was rescued. So stay with us for that story, and we'll be right back. Since the founding of America 250 years ago, many things have changed, but some things never do. The commitment of husband and wife, the importance of passing along our values to our children, the faithfulness of God. Some wonder how we can ensure America will continue to thrive. As long as we keep first things first, we've only just begun. America the beautiful. Welcome back. This is Victor Davis-Hanson in his own words. So Victor, I think we just saw it Wednesday, almost just about noon or a little bit before, and we just saw Caroline Levitt give a news conference, and she was addressing what has been accomplished and the ceasefire and how Trump has been dealing with Iran, especially his rhetoric on Saturday of blowing up a regime that has- Seize to exist, the civilization will be end. So everybody got very angry, and it's true that Trump could have used a better noun for civilization. But the critics who say that he's genocidal, he should be charged with war crime, they know what he meant, and they know what he meant for two reasons. Before we even went in, he said to the Iranian people, help is on the way. And unlike prior American wars, Donald Trump for over five weeks has not targeted civilian infrastructure. He has not targeted the civilization of Iran. What is he? He hit one bridge. He was threatening to hit dual use, dual use. These are assets that can be used militarily and for civilian. And he said, they're going to end tonight. But he said, your civilization, and he was talking directly to the theocracy. Should he- because he should have said, if he was a linguist or explicit or his advisors could have said, your fascistic Islamic culture that runs the country will cease. And there would have been no problem. But he gave his enemies an opening by being a little bit veggar. But here's the flip side. By saying civilization and by having his critics say that he was crazy, that he was on hinge, that he was Hitlerian. It may have strengthened the credibility to the Iranians. They may have thought, wow, he's gone way over. He's jumped the shark. He's talking about the existential destruction of the physical space of Iran. Oh my gosh. And they came to negotiations at least temporarily. So that brinkmanship reminiscent of Kurdish Lamae, we should bomb them back to the Stone Age in Vietnam, it worked. Is it a good thing to do? No. But they know he didn't mean it. They can't decide because on Monday after that tweet, they were comparing him to Adolf Hitler. By Wednesday, excuse me, yesterday, we're speaking on Wednesday, by Tuesday they were calling him a taco. Trump always chickens out. That was Bill Kristol and the new coalition of the Democratic Borg. That's what they are. They're a mindless mimics that are controlled by an overarching war room that feeds them their rhetoric. And then the vestigial elements of the never-trumpers, the Bill Kristol and all those people at the bulwark and partly in the dispatch. And then I would call them the remnant MAGA social media influencers. They can't decide whether he's Hitler on Monday or whether he's Neville Chamberlain on Tuesday, the appeaser. Now, we just like to remind everybody, I can't think of a war offhand where we didn't hit dual use. So here's my question. Will all you people on the left and the right go back to World War II and say we want to strip FDR's name off buildings and monuments because we obliterated why he was still president on March 11th, 1945, Tokyo and 11 cities that followed. And the argument was that they were assembling war materials in their suburban workshops. We dropped leaflets and said you should get out. We went in the next day after Dresden and hit all of the rail yards, locomotives. Yes, they were being used to supply the Eastern Front. They were being used to ship Jews. And I have no problem with it, but they were also dual use. In Korea, Harry Truman ordered all of the hydroelectric plants of North Korea to be wiped out. There was a movie, a great movie I thought with Bill Holden, Mickey Rooney and an array of movie stars and it was called The Bridges at Tokyo Ray about bombing the North Korean bridges. We knocked out all the hydroelectric civilian use in North Korea during Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson, Rowling Thunder, Richard Nixon, Operation Linebacker. Both of them went into North Korea and they destroyed bridges and roads and train yards and electric plants. What I've just talked about is a Democratic Roosevelt, a Democratic Truman, a Democratic LBJ, but that's not all if I could continue with your permission. Please go ahead. Okay. Then they said after Vietnam, they said we're going to go into the first Gulf War and that was the decision of George H.W. Bush, but his close advisor was Chairman of Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, who incidentally said when we spot the Iraqi Republican guard, Iraqi soldier, we're going to cut it off and kill it, annihilate it. Did anybody say at the time, well, General Powell, what if they surrender or when you kill some of them, you're going to kill it, you're going to destroy it and kill everybody? They wouldn't say that. But here's the thing, Mark Kelly, Senator from Arizona has been charging that Trump is a war criminal. He was a Navy pilot in the first Gulf War. I don't know the exact missions that he flew. I think he flew over 30 missions quite heroically. I have no problem. I think he did us a service, but those missions that Naval pilots flew included hitting telecommunications, hitting TV stations, hitting power plants, hitting bridges. I don't know what he did in each one, but it's likely that he hit dual use as he was ordered. We said, Senator Kelly, we're going to investigate you post-factual because you hit things that rob civilians of their civilization. Then we go to the Locus classicus. That is the 1999 bombing of Serbia to stop its war in Kosovo. That was the Bill Clinton adventure. He was asked by our NATO allies. The NATO allies always go on their misadventures first, Libya. Then they go into the Falklands, which was successful. They go into Chad, and then they ask us for help. Then they say now that you're going on misadventures and we can't help you, it's yours. They're going to find out it's a two-way street very soon. We go into Serbia and we bomb a European country. We took out every bridge on the Danube and paralyzed the entire city of over 1.3 million at the time. We took out all of the electrical grid for days, hours, every day. Did anybody say to the NATO pilots, and by the way, they wanted to start this and we ended up flying 80% of the missions. Did anybody go back and say, well, we're going to call the International Criminal Court, pilot, pilot, pilot, you hit a bridge. You hit the power grid in Belgrade and people were being operated on. They died. If that's not enough, we can then go to the 2011 bombing of Libya. That was cooked up by the French and the English with the coalition of NATO powers. Gaddafi was on his last legs. The Arab Spring was a mess. It wasn't the Democratic Renaissance they told us. I had visited the country. He was liberalizing it. He was turning over power insidiously to the next generation that were Westernized. But we decided to go bomb him because the French and the British said it was a humanitarian gesture and we had the triad, the three sirens, the three graces. If you could say it, we had Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice speaking for Obama. They said, we've got to go in and bomb these people. We bombed them for seven months. By the way, after 60 to 90 days, the War Powers Authorization Act ends. In other words, you can negotiate from 60 to 90 days about whether you need Congress's approval to make war. After that, it's illegal. Supposedly, courts have challenges, but Obama just said, no, I'm Barack Obama. I'm a left wing. You're not going to do anything because you control Congress. And they didn't. So he bombed for seven months. Did he hit dual use? If you look at some of the reports, they said, well, he didn't hit, he did. He hit TV stations. He destroyed the port facilities at Benghazi and Tripoli. He hit civilian ships that were transporting material to Libya and oil out of Libya. He hit TV communications. He hit government buildings. Did anybody say these people were war criminals? Those pilots are still around. Can we go try them? How about Barack Obama ordered 540 targeted drone assassinations on the Afghan-Pakistan border. And he killed four Americans. Not that they didn't deserve, in at least one case, killing. He was a known terrorist. But was there congressional authorization? It went on over 60 to 90 days. And what was, people are mad at Trump's rhetoric, but let's look at their rhetoric. Did anybody object that John Brennan went before Congress and put his hand on the Bible and swore that he was going to speak under oath truthfully and then said there was no collateral damage of these targeted bombing and there was along the border. And I guess you could call the drone assassinations collateral damage because we didn't get all of the terrorists every time. We blew up kids. We blew up Americans. Did anybody say we should impeach Obama? No. And then more or less, well, Trump was, Obama wasn't sloppy in his now news. Yes he was. He was at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and somebody, he made a joke about anybody who wanted to date his daughter. And he said, be careful. I've got predator, P-R-E-D-A-T-O-R, lurking. So he was joking about killing 500 people. It was a big joke to him. Nobody said a word. I wrote something about it. So yes, Donald Trump should have said the civilization of radical Islam, theocracy will end and that would have had no problem. And I know that he meant that because he is one of the only presidents except for the one bridge he hit who has not hit any infrastructure and no civilizational dual use targets as every other president has done. His problem is in art of the deal fashion, he uses bombast, exaggeration, crudity, all to confuse everyone and to stake out an existential crazy position and then he negotiates downward from it. And who knows? We don't know who he's negotiating with. Apparently, the theocrats have their own little counter proposals that are lunatic, fantastical, mythical, but I don't think they speak for, we don't know who's in charge. So everybody's freelancing. Some people say, regional people say we're going to close the straight. Some other people say no, the straight will be open. Nobody knows what's going on. And the chances are, Jack Keane and others may be right that the only thing that they will understand in that chaotic situation is to take out, start taking out bridges and then start unfortunately doing what Obama did in Libya and take out the TV communications, what Clinton did in Serbia and take out the power plants and what Bush did in the First Gulf War. The Second Gulf War, they deliberately had learned and they deliberately had avoided in Afghanistan and Iraq power plants, water, sewage, but they hit a lot of communications. They took out the communication system. They cook out a lot of government buildings that would, they needed, they re, they bombed stuff and then they had to rebuild it for this so-called replacement government that turned into chaos. Well, Victor, I have some questions on that. But first I want to welcome back a sponsor, my patriot supply. Everyone's focused on how conflict in the Middle East is raising oil prices, but there's another grim reality to this contention. Oil isn't the only source being constrained. About one third of global fertilizer trade happens through this region and with spring planting season on top of us, American farmers are sounding the alarm with some saying they can't afford to plant their fields. When one piece of the supply chain gets hit this hard, you know what comes next. 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And that one person at least is the Congressman Ro Khanna has insinuated that these war crimes, and he's specifically referencing blowing up bridges or industry plans as war crimes. And he's equating that to World War II criminal courts, meaning Nuremberg. We know of anybody at Nuremberg that was tried for blowing up bridges or military industry. The Soviets starved to death, and they had, it was a tit for tat. They lost about 7 million people that were under German control. I mean, they had the two largest encirclements in history where they basically trapped 2 million people in the Kiev pocket and outside of Moscow. And most of them, 10% survive of Russian prisoners. They deliberately starved them. So my point is, the Russians were on the panel, the judges. So the Germans mentioned it, the convicted war criminals, they said that their lawyers pointed out to Dresden, they pointed out all these things that took place. But the winners make the rules. And so, yeah, there was discussion that the United States, and the United States position was morally defensible, and it was consistent. They said, in 1941, we were not bothering anybody. You started it. You came over here and bombed Pearl Harbor. And then you began a reign of terror. You started killing American prisoners and civilians in the Batan death march. You started butchering Chinese. You killed over 16 million of them. So it's very rich of you to suggest that we shouldn't have bombed with incendiaries, wiped out 12 cities, and then the two atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Iwashima. So I didn't phase that generation. The same thing we said about Germany. We were minding our own business. You declared war on us. We didn't declare war on you first. December 11th, they had declared war on us. 10th to 11th. So we went over there, and you were in control of all of Europe. And then at great cost to us, 450,000 dead in the two theaters, we liberated Europe, and we defeated you. And we know what you would have done had you won, because we saw what you did to Poland. We saw what you did to other countries. So the way that we stopped you was we waged unrestricted what the British call area bombing. We didn't do it very well in Europe. We started with precision bombing in B-17s, the Swinefort raid of Balbarians, the oil raids in Romania, and it was a complete disaster. And then the earlier 1942, 1943 missions from England all the way into Germany without fighter escort. It was a complete, we lost 40,000 men. So finally we said, it only works because the Dresden bomb site is way oversold, especially in Europe with its bad weather, cloudy. So we're going to use what the British called area bombing. We'll try to get closer to the target. We killed 70, we, the Allies killed 70,000 French civilians. We killed more than the Germans did. That came up at Nuremberg. So I don't know what Kelly did. So I have heard people make the argument that he's a hypocrite because he was a Naval A6 Skyhawk pilot and their job was not air superiority, but tactical aircraft bombing. In other words, once the more sophisticated planes had achieved air supremacy, then they sin in the tactical aircraft that actually hit the targets on the ground and ground support, but also infrastructure. And I know that in that war, and I wrote about it, it was conducted much differently than the bombing of Iraq the second time. That's called the good war because it only lasted on the ground four days and 42 days in totality. But we didn't remove Saddam. We had to go back. We had the no-fly zone. But the point I'm making is there were no, everything was on target. The UN approved it. NATO wanted to participate. And yet they took out everything. They took out radio, TV, sewer, everything to hurt him and to hope that he would be dislodged. It didn't work. And, you know, I'm not going to go back and fault them, but for Kelly to be an active participant, I don't hear him say, as, I know, I have a lot of friends. I'd be very careful. But there's a lot of them have gone on social media and said, I want to warn everybody that once he said he was going to end the civilization, you have a duty to disobey that order. No you don't. If you're in the military and the order is done, is it constitutional? Yes. Is it the wrong word? Civilization? Could he have said culture or theocracy or? Yeah, he should have. But you're a soldier, so you know, at least you should know, that if you want to risk court martial by disobeying a direct order, you would first say, because you'd be put on trial for it, the first question you would be asked is, did you see any concrete examples in the last five weeks where Donald Trump tried to destroy the civilization of Iran, i.e. the civilian public? No, I did not. He hit one bridge. And why did you disobey that order when you knew that was a rhetorical flourish? And they would be court martial. I don't like all these civilians people telling military people to disobey orders. And Kelly, he suffers the charge of peddling in things that are not true, but he also suffers the additional wage, he's a hypocrite, because he was in that war and I know those plain Navy pilots and I know what the particular missions were and they often hit dual. And I don't know if his critics are correct that he personally in those 30-some heroic missions, I mean, he risked his life and we honor him for that. But I don't know if he hit, he was one of the particular pilots in that squadron that hit those things, but if he did, he was ordered to do it and faithfully carried out the orders to hit a power plant, a TV station, a bridge, a garage, you name it, a rail line, because he knew and his superiors knew they were used to perpetuate the war. And we were more worried about protecting our soldiers than we were putting Iraq back into the Stone Age, so to speak. And we did. We inflicted an enormous amount of damage from 1991. So when we came in 2003, I went to Iraq twice and I saw things that were destroyed and I asked people, wow, that looks kind of old. And they said, yeah, they did that 12 years ago. They still hadn't rebuilt it. Do you think that the Democrats are speaking, first off, I just want to reiterate that point that it's an abuse of history and I'm glad that you could bring it back to us, what was the truth about these things. But also, do you think that they're just speaking out of both sides of their house or if the Democrats get back into power, will they really try to run a foreign policy where US military might, a lot of things about it are off the table, so to speak as they suggest. There's no evidence. Yeah. The only way I can answer all these questions is historically. So I say to myself, Democratic president, FDR, unlimited warfare, Truman, atomic bombs, continued the fire raids after Roosevelt died and the atomic bombs. And then I say to myself, John Kennedy was willing to use nuclear weapons in a standdown off Cuba and try to invade Cuba with the CIA and the Bay of Pigs and got us into Vietnam. And then I look at LBJ and he was the one that accelerated. Nixon was the one that tried to get out. He inherited that war in 69. It had been going on since 63. And so that was another Democratic president. And that was the thing that the Republicans used, if you remember, in the 60s and 70s. They said, Bob Dole said that, you were the party of warmongers because he said, you got us in World War I with Wilson, you got us in World War II with Roosevelt, you got us in war in Korea with Truman, you got us in war with Kennedy and Johnson and Vietnam. That was the tag on Democrats. And then more recently, the so-called pacifist new Democrats, Bill Clinton, he wanted to really go into Serbia. I went to a Wall Street Journal op-ed supporting the NATO use to stop the slaughter of its innocent civilians in Kosovo. But I got a lot, I got in big arguments with a lot of my Greek American friends. And in fact, I went in 1999 to Greece and I went to the publishers, I won't mention any names, to a party for the book. And who was there? Milosevic's daughter. Very striking blonde, very attractive young woman with a mini skirt surrounded with security. And the security, believe me, looked pretty scary. And she came up to me and said something about I had supported bombing, very polite, by the way, but mentioned it. And so Democrats did that in Serbia and there were three liberal left wingers who wanted to go bomb Libya and Obama wanted to kill, he killed far more people than did George Bush in Iraq through predator assassinations. And he joked about it. So I don't see any pattern. And then you have Biden. You don't have Biden because Biden never knew where he was. He didn't know when he, he didn't know what was going on in Afghanistan, but they killed 13 civilians with a crazy bomb hit mistakenly. And Mark Milley said it was a righteous hit. It wasn't, it was a mistake. And then you could argue that the lack of security and the complete fallout and the military is not to be blamed because they could never get a coherent order from Biden. And we got 13 Marines killed. So Democrats show no reluctance to use force. The only difference is that when they do it, they have a media, academic, corporate, popular, culture, entertainment nexus that rationalizes and institutionalize it. As far as Roe Connick, he can't be believed as a credible person because he's not, he's not a serious person. He had tried to carve out a position that he thought might translate to a senatorial bid in California or maybe an appointment by the Biden administration so he could elevate himself from his congressional seat by being the left wing voice of reason. So he tried to be a little bit reasonable, not centrist. But he was on Fox, that's what I'm trying to say. And now he's decided that the party has been hijacked by the Mandami AOC and he's going to out-left them. So now he gets on TV with these crazy statements and it was so embarrassing to listen to these people. I just watched him. He was saying just two days ago he should be charged with war crimes and he's going to be impeached. And then today he said, this is pathetic, this peace effort. What is it, Roe? Do you want him to go bomb the infrastructure or do you want him to be impeached because he didn't bomb the infrastructure? And then there was Chuck Sumerud. Did you see his talk today? I never laugh out loud by myself. But he basically read this thing and he said, there is no solution. He has no strategy. What we need to do now is stop the fighting and enter into diplomatic negotiations. I'm thinking, duh, that's what Trump is getting hammered by the military and by a lot of people who with good cause don't believe one word, including the Arabic word, the, if it exists. And it's just great. You can't win with these people. As though Trump was not going to do that. Schumer was trying to say that. Did you see the biggest thing that Trump is ecstatic? We've got to bring him down to earth because he's ecstatic because almost immediately the stock market took off. And I had said yesterday in an interview with Steve Edgerson from GB news. I like him a lot, but he said that we were in a recession and we were, I said, all they have to do is get a little sniff of a negotiation that hence sort of kind of maybe those traits and all these people who were speculators, who were convinced by the doom and gloom media that this was going to go on for months and we're going to get global recession. And then they looked at the price of oil under Obama and it gone up to a hundred and today's dollars up to $170 a barrel. And they looked under Biden right before the midterms when he had to basically try to empty this strategic petroleum reserve to win the 2022. They saw all that and they said, this is worse. It's not going to end. It's going to spike. I got to get all the oil I can get at 110, 115 bucks. So they went into the oil market and they're buying like crazy. And now they say, oh my gosh, Russian oil is back on the market. Venezuelan oil is back on the market. Carg island is still able to export oil. The straight may be open. The United States is draining their reserve, Biden like, or at least a million barrels a day. They've got 14 million barrels of, what am I going to do? I'm going to get rid of it, sell it and nobody wants to buy it at that price. And they're taking enormous hit. The price is crashing as we're speaking. It can go up again, but I think what I'm trying to say is the left doesn't believe that the midterms are going to be a walkover because they're looking at internal polling and they see that their brand is more unpopular than Trump. And they have to have a civil war to tell these people to shut up that want open borders, legal immigration, trans, all that stuff. And they can't. They can't shut up. So they're going to keep doing it and they're afraid. So then they think, we got to go back to the playbook. Key Teslas run Tesla drivers off, fire bomb their sales, spit in the faces of ICE officers, call them Gestapo, have big shutdown. Get down the government three times. Anti-ICE will lead into no kings. Get violent in LA. All of that couched with periodic appearances of Robert De Niro or Jimmy Kimmel or Ro Khanna or Chuck Schumer or Heikham Jeffries is almost illiterate. I mean, he can't even finish the sentence. Every time I see that guy, he looks like deer in the headlights. His eyes start spinning around like some kind of, like, what am I going to say? I'm halfway through this sentence and I can't figure out the grammar under the content. But I'll just look around like a sound from the Twilight Zone. Come on, you can do it. You can do it, Heikham. They're not, they're worried because if this war ends and the strait is open, then people are going to be into a ram. They're going to look at that and they're going to see rubble. They're going to see a trillion dollar military devastated. They're not going to find any plant. They were, she was right to say that. They were flying 30 or 40 sorties every day in their jets. They're gone. Their missile assembly, they hit the steel plants. They hit the optic plants. They hit all of the military industries that are capable of replenishing on their own. Their mountains are sealed. The nuclear material have to be, somebody's going to go down in there and get it, but the mountain is sealed. And when you look at those posters, I don't want to laugh. It's serious stuff of all the theocrats and the revolutionary. The heads of the, that have been taken out. When you look at those, and you look at those people, there's none left. They've wiped them all out. So that's going to take them years to reconstruct. And that's going to be, that knowledge was, if they can stop this and get the straight open by hook or crook, by June or July, the price of gas is going to be cheap for the summer driving and the foreign investment, the golf, he's going to go over to the golf people and he's going to say to them, you know, he is, okay, I neutered Iran for you and you have 600 fighters, you six nations and you didn't send one, not one. The Israelis did with half your jets. So you promised five or six trillion dollars. I want to see it now. And if you don't, you can deal with the wounded bear yourself someday. And that's going to be a powerful incentive for them to invest in the United States. And then he's going to be in a very popular position vis-a-vis that Europeans are going to look stupid because the price of the straight will be open. And suddenly for the first time in years, there's no threat of a nuclear Iranian tipped ballistic missile hitting their cities. And that threat is gone for, I don't know, five or six, seven, eight years. If you have a good president that falls on them, it can be gone forever. But they're going to look stupid. He's going to be in a good position to have a fighting chance of keeping the house. I really believe that. Yeah, I think so too. Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back with a little bit more on this war. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Hey, I'm Bradley Devlin. And just like you, I'm a huge fan of Victor Davis Hansen. Whether it's his long form podcast, Victor Davis Hansen in his own words, or his short form content for the Daily Signal, Victor Davis Hansen in a few words, I always leave an episode learning something new. I think they forgot the 1982 Falklands War. And in the age of clickbait and ragebait, that's a really good feeling, right? The media, thank you. You can leave now. Well, if you agree, you might like my show. The Daily Signals long form interview podcast called the signal sit down. Every week we take you behind the scenes of the biggest battles in Washington, DC, as they happen with some of the biggest names in politics. We explore big ideas and we analyze the policy making process from an unabashedly and unapologetically conservative perspective. And that's important now more than ever with the Trump administration back in office because in 2024 you sent Washington a message it couldn't ignore. It's your government. And together we're taking it back. So check us out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen or there too. And drop me a follow on X at Bradley Devlin to stay updated with what's happening on the signal sit down. Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. You can catch Victor on X. His handle is at VD Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup. So Victor, I think that Donald Trump has the Iranian regime, their military, et cetera. He's got them all the way down, but he doesn't quite have the foot on the neck. What do you think are the possibilities for any negotiation? I like Jack Keen. Is that David Belovia, the Medal of Water winner, he has dark humor. He said, I'm going to really miss bridge and power plant day. He didn't mean it to be Macarv. I think he meant it to say that that's the quickest way to end the threat. This came up with General Sherman. He contrary to popular opinion, he did not attack and everyday things. He skipped the, what was the poor in the middle class. He didn't go out for people's homes or farms. He did, he did target plantations. He burned them down. He stripped them of their infrastructure. He destroyed armories. He destroyed rail yards. He really devastated the South. He said, I'm going to make Georgia how? It worked because he said, basically he said in so many words, we're not going to sit here where the army of the Potamac is losing 100,000 dead and wounded by the rich people in Georgia and the Carolinas still have their slaves and plantation and are feeding that war. So that he inaugurated this idea that those were legitimate targets. And he championed the idea of the indirect approach. Everybody should be aware that there's two schools of military theory. I guess you would call it die on the vine. Say you have a toxic fruit. Do you cut it off and get into the messy idea of it's messy? Or you just go cut down the vine at the stump and kill all the other good fruit with it. And so the indirect approach, it was championed by the general Epaminondas. He first created it. And rather than go fight the Spartan army, he said that the Spartiates, 10,000 of them don't work. So they can train all day and achieve a level of superiority that is on match on the battlefield, except for thieves eventually. But they get a lot of their food from the Messinian hellots. So he went over the Mount Tigeges pass and freed them all and created the fortified city. And at that point, there weren't enough hellots left in Laconia to feed the army. So they had to become productive citizens and that meant less war training. But the idea was you go, you want to save lives. So everybody said Trump is a work. I mean, Sherman is a war criminal, but there's a great argument. Who's the war criminal? Neither one was, but if you're a Confederate, who is the war criminal? Ulysses S. Grant, who ground your army down and you lost 300,000 Confederate soldiers, are willing to come to Sherman. They almost killed nobody on those marches. He didn't kill very many people all. He fought one or two battles and they were stand stills. And the final one, he was successful, but he avoided battle and he wanted to destroy the infrastructure, excuse me, especially the rail yard so they couldn't transfer units to the front. And so by the time Lee surrendered, he was under enormous pressure from the legislature of the Confederacy and the plantation class that we're saying to him, we're broke, our currency is worth nothing. The slaves are deserting, we're starving, these burned are beautiful, please stop. And that's why they stop. Lee was never defeated in the siege of Richmond. The Grant was never able to break through and then physically put him on his knees and say surrender. He surrendered because this huge army was coming from the rear, Sherman, and more importantly, the people of the Confederacy had tasted war and they didn't want any part of it anymore. And you can't blame them, they were destitute. No, I know. If we can stay on this, I know that you and Jack spoke a little bit about the airman that was rescued and I think that you guys obviously applauded it like everybody else who was smart did with the accession of the Democrats and the Europeans. I got to stop you right here. Are you going into the Candace Owens tweet? No, but you could go ahead. I'm trying to remember. I did read what she said. It was so stupid I couldn't keep my mind on it. Well, she left off with the Mrs. Macron Foulas conspiracy, the Charlie Kirk Mossad, the fake moon landing and she basically said the whole thing was fake and she said that... The CIA made it up. Yes, and they tried to... They tried to rescue a general with a capital G and I'm thinking Candace. That's easily demonstrably false because he was a colonel. Where's the general that they rescue? Well, you'll say that they're going to produce the guy that they rescue. They just want to make sure his family's safe and he's well. He'll have a press conference. Then what are you going to say? He's not a general, but they take pictures of those wreckages of the two planes and all this and they say it's just like the Carter rescue failure and look at all the debt. They blew them up themselves. If you doubt that, believe me Candace, there's 300 people were involved. There was 150 pilots and drone operators involved in addition to the 300 on the ground or maybe there was 200 on the ground and another 100 in the air and all of them know what went on and they're all going to talk as soon as the war is over. They're going to write books about, they're going to write articles, they're going to be consulted and you'll get the story out and you're not going to find out that the whole thing was made up. I'm sorry, you're not. Then she said that he was a satanic president should be impeached. I remember those pictures when she had a make America great hat. Then Tucker, I don't know what he's, he said that he defiled Easter because of some of the tweets and the whole thing is, I guess he is, I guess they've all just said they've abandoned their prior strategy that they agreed with Trump on 90% of his agenda, but not the 20% that involved foreign affairs. After the bombing in Iran and Tucker said it would be World War III, I guess he made the decision as did Candace and Steve Bannon and Joe Rogan and the others. They said, well, I can't agree with them with everything. So I'm abandoning everything. The problem with that is what's the alternative? If you can't get 80, you get 80%. I happen to support his foreign policy, but if you don't, you still get a good judicial appointments if they can be approved. You get a secure border. You get deportations of criminals. You have a historic low on crime. I think you'll see the end of the green agenda for a long time, the radical green agenda, the trans agenda, the DEI agenda. You're getting almost everything that you've railed about, but you disagree about the use of force and optional wars and therefore you know if I his entire presidency in candidacy and then what? You say you're a principal critic. You don't compromise your principles and you get what? You get Camilla or Gavin elected? Yes. That would be a nightmare, believe me. It would be and that was kind of where my direction of my question was going. That this rescue of the airman in Iran was very different from the Benghazi, Libya, Benghazi Misadventure? Yes, Misadventure, death of an ambassador and we know of course the Afghanistan and the Soviet team. And the annex, brave people at the annex. So if we did get Democrats in again, they would be back to I think the same old, same old with those kind of disasters. Well, I mean Hillary Clinton was warned that the consulate was not defensible and once it proved not to be defensible and they killed our ambassador, would be ambassador or consular official whom I met in Libya before he was consular. He was looking for sites in Libya and he came into my room in the operating, in the clinic where he was being operated on with a bunch of food and he represented the United States informally. But my point is she was given memos that was not secure but more importantly there's a lot of controversy that at the moment that started and the crowds formed and they threatened the annex and the consul. There were people with special forces in Sicily and as anybody knows about the geography, you can get to Libya in an hour and they didn't call them. They could have had drones come over there and helicopter gunships and they could have stopped all of that attack on the annex and those guys would not have been dead but they didn't want to do that. It's the same democratic idea. It's very strange. They want to go to war but they don't want to go to war to protect their own soldiers a lot of the times. You remember the Mogadishu Blackhawk down, they're all sitting there and they're waiting for the Pakistani tanks to come and you think, well where are the Abrams tanks? They didn't want to offend, I guess the Mogadishu rebels by escalating and they got those Americans killed, 19 of them killed. I remember one of the fathers of one was just, he didn't want to see Clinton at the retrieval of the bodies back to the United States, the flight in. They do that all the time. They do that. We hope they never get back into power to do it once again because I think they will do it once again. But Victor, before we go on, let's welcome back a sponsor, Allegiance Gold. If you've studied enough history, you start to see a pattern. Nations don't lose their way overnight. 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So I just wanted to conclude that if they do get in, we will probably have the same that we've seen with Libya, with Afghanistan. Even with Vietnam, for that matter. Well, I mean, the proof of the pudding is that Joe Biden, when he came in, the Middle East was calm. Trump had neutered the Houthis. They had sanctions. They were declared a terrorist entity. Hezbollah was in their box and Iran was broke. And all of a sudden, he lifted all the sanctions. He listed the terrorist designation, their so-called ring of fire around Israel increased. He distanced himself from Israel. The Arabs saw that. The Abraham Accords were stopped. He didn't want anything to do with them because they had Trump's handprints, fingerprints on them. And it wasn't more than a year. And less than a year, he had destroyed the whole 20-year Afghan idea. And Trump had left office with, we spent a billion dollars on the embassy. We have $300 million in Baguio-Mera Force Base. It's the best base. It's completely defensible. It's out by itself. And we have $50 billion of weaponry here. And we can get down to 3,500 Americans and defend that. And we'll have complete airspace and we'll make cut a deal with the Taliban. And that was all blown up by him in August. And then the Russians watched that. And people said, Vladimir, look at those Americans. They've got the tail between their legs and they're running out of our neighborhood. Just think what they'll do with Ukraine. You'll go into Ukraine. It'll be a walkover. The Europeans are neutered and impotent. And the United States, it'll be a cake. And then when they asked Biden, he said, well, it depends on if it's a minor invasion or if I'm going to react. And then he said, knock it off, Vladimir. That's what Obama said to him about the hacking. Knock it off. And then he said, Biden said to him, if you're going to hack, you know, basically don't hack hospitals and humanitarian sites. You didn't say quit it because he couldn't say quit it. And the next thing we knew, we had two theater wars on his watch. And we were, for a time, losing both of them. You know, I was thinking that about Trump's war here, that the absolute defeat of Iranian forces by the US military has really shown something to China because we're always talking to, oh, are they going to Taiwan? Will they not go into Taiwan? But China would hit right here right now, have to be rethinking its, you know, any plans it does have into Taiwan because they're the ones that provided the Iranians with a lot of their military that got decimated by the United States, which by extension would happen in Taiwan. You can put it in so many different ways. You're right. They see, A, how effective American air power is. B, that even a disabled, a disabled enemy with PT boats can stop the straight-hoover moves. And they're going to say, you know what, if we try to get a whole armada of half a million soldiers to go across 90 miles of the South China Sea, you don't have to have much to harass them. You could have a bunch of, you could mine the whole thing. We could never get there. And the United States Air Force in three hours could drop enough mines off the coast of Taiwan that they couldn't even get a ship near it. And if they tried to bomb it, then Taiwan is now being saturated with ballistic missiles. They could just say to them, we're going to take out the three rivers down. And that would cause the worst flooding in the history of civilization. So I think, and I think the reason that the Iranians are even thinking of negotiating is the Chinese went to them, no doubt, and I think it'll be confirmed. And they said, look, the price of oil is astronomical. We can't afford it. And you were always giving us barter. And you gave us good prices and we gave you, or it wasn't quite true, state of the art air defenses and missile, and we unleashed the North Koreans. We gave them the technology. They make the missiles, they give them to you. And then you give us oil at half price. And we need the oil. We're broke, not broke, but we need oil or it's too high. So you negotiate with Trump and you open those straights and then they'll go to the Iranians and say, okay, we're going to sail into Kargai Island and we want all the oil you have. They buy 80% of it. And then they say, well, we equipped your whole thing and we'll see what happens. But they are the ones that are wanting peace more than anybody because they want to restore this lost relationship with this subordinate. It's very funny, isn't it, that this so-called purely ideological, radical, theocratic Shia regime, Islam, Islam, Islam, Islam, its closest friend is a communist secular atheist country that has a million Muslims in reeducation and work camps, the Uyghurs, and they don't care one bit. The thing about all those people, when you look at, and we'll have no doubt talk about Soleimani's progeny, they're parting it up in LA, but it was at Lauren Johnny, his daughter was going to be a professor at Emory University and they rallied to get her out and she was mouthing off about, they have all this real estate in London, Washington, New York, Los Angeles. So they just robbed that country and then they claim they were these fundamentalist, ascetic, true believers, but they were completely cynical. I'm not talking about just the revolutionary guard, Islamic guard, I'm talking about all of them, the theocrats, they were corruptists. When you see those posters that the Iranian opposition is putting with Khomeini's son with the gay pride colors in the background, his picture, and we were told that he was completely well and he was up and around and now we're told that he's by the Iranians, he's unconscious. There were some newscasters today on Fox that were saying, and they sounded like they had information from somewhere inside that, in fact, Trump was negotiating with Mitzhaba, who is the new Ayatollah. Not Khamenei, Khamenei. Yeah. The son. The son. I think he's in his Khamenei. Yeah. Well, anyways, they they appear to believe the administration, I guess, from insiders. I think he has about as much cognitive ability as I did after I came out of two four hour surgeries, because I've been told that the surgeon came and another person came in the ICU and they gave me a detailed description of the unfortunate thing. And I have no recognition. And they said, I talked. All I knew is about what had happened is basically before I was discharged, they gave me an X-ray and I saw three big titanium clips on my arterial branches. And I said, what are those? You left them there. And the technician said, no, you had a bleed and aneurysms and they they put these on. I said, when do you take them out? Well, they're going to stay there forever. And then someone said, and you were completely apprised of that. When I said I wasn't. And they said, yes, you were. And I said, I was well, that's where he is. Yeah. It's called La La Land. OK, OK. Anyways, let's move on. Just one more thing about this war is I think in all of the ceasefire talk and war crime, rhetoric, et cetera, from the left, Israel's role has been diminished in the presses. Anyways, the things that they've been up to, they've decapitated Iran's oppression and terror forces, they took out the head of intelligence and they took out the head of the organization that does clandestine activities, meaning out like our CIA. That's how I understood it. And so they've been hard at work and I don't know how much role they had actually in the rescue of the airman. I would imagine they did. They called off all of their they called off all of their operations. And then they had the Mossad and their contacts give them information about what the local resistance was and everything. They were very instrumental. I think, you got to remember the Israeli left is as crazy as the American left. And they're very adamant that Israel lost, quote, unquote, lost the war. They didn't. They come out pretty well because of the contrast. So all of a sudden, the countries that did not want to participate in the Abrams Accord and thought it was too risky, Kuwait, Saudi, the other Gulf states where their money is. Now they're thinking, wait a minute, Iran attacked us more than they did Israel and aggregate, you know, and they were a fellow Muslim country and we're scared to death of them. And the people that we didn't trust, the Israelis were attacked by them too. So they're fellow victims. And then they went out and they wiped out and helped us by neutering that regime. And we had twice the number of planes that Israel did and we didn't do a thing. The Israelis did. And then we're trying to champion Hamas. Well, Hamas is just an Iranian puppet. It may be a Sunni entity, but they're no different than Hezbollah. They don't help us. They're getting money from the people that are hitting our airports and hotels and ruining our tourist industry and hitting our desalination plants. So who's not doing that? The Israelis are not. They're the enemy of our enemy. And in the Middle East, that makes us for now a friend. So they come out well and then they're contrasted with the Europeans almost every day. Somebody in the administration says, well, unlike the Israelis, the Spanish, the French, the Germans, the Italians, the British, blah, blah, blah. And so they come off as, as pretty good. Yes. And which they are, they are, they come off even better when their Prime Minister, BB Netanyahu gets on and posts that Israel is celebrating with the United States. Well, put it this way. With the airmen. Let's say you're much better than our left. Let's say you're an F-35 pilot and you're flying right now over Iran. And it's still, I mean, there's people out there with shoulder fired Sam missiles, right? They're not missile defense, but they're ad hoc. And they apparently shot an F-15 down. Would you and you have, you know that there's 200, and in given day, there's 150 or 200 pilots helping you from Israel. Would you say, well, they got us into the war. I would prefer Spanish pilots right now and maybe some Italian and French pilots at my side. I don't think anybody would say that. They're going to say, I know these guys and they're as good as we are. And the other guys aren't because I know what they did in the Serbia bombing and I know what they did in the Libyan. They called us in to help as auxiliaries. And then they went into the fetal position, cover their ears and said, we don't fly in the morning when it's foggy, it's too dangerous. We have to have our cappuccinos. So then they turned over 80% of the missions for the United States. And everybody knows that. And so if you want an ally in war that will stand by you, the Australians do it very well. Although they're, they're going after their most decorated soldier in the history of Australia. I don't know the details, whether it was just an informant or a spotter in a village that he tossed over the cliff or what, but In, in Afghanistan, I think it was, right? Yes. We'll find out about what actually happened. But he saved a lot of Australian lives. Some people who were in the Afghan army, working with the Australians who were killers and turned on them. And they came from particular villages in which there were people in league with them trying to warn them when the Australians were coming to find out who was doing what. The Australians, we're kind of off topic, but nonetheless, the Australians have a left wing. They do. That's as strong almost as Canada's, I think. It was. Yeah. It was for a while, not every once in a while, but commonly the Australians go full cock me. They go back to the idea that the people who founded the country were the dispossessed, the unfairly charged, the incarcerated, the lower classes. And they have a strong class. I don't know what the word is. Class is so different in the English speaking countries other than the United States. It's an envy. The poet Hezia in 700 wrote a poem. Everybody should read it called the works and days. And he talks about this word, thonos in Greek, which means jealousy and or can be translated envy. And he says there's two types, the good and the bad. The Americans have the good envy. So when they see a Porsche and a guy get a solid of a Porsche, at least most Americans, they'll go up and say, wow, that's a nice car. Would you buy it? How much did you finance it? But in the in the other English speaking countries, the lower classes that have been treated so badly and can never be upwardly mobile, no matter how much money they make because they are grandparents, didn't have a title or they don't own land or you know what I mean? They don't have the right accent. They come up and say, how did you get that? And then kick in the tires and envy anger because they think it's unfair that he has that and they don't. You know, Tocqueville said that pretty well. He said that most people in democratic societies, if they had the choice of all being better, off all being better off than they were, but a few being really well off, they would choose to go back to be all the same and poor. Everybody the same. And he said that what made the United States singular is they had all of this land and they champion a farming class where people were autonomous. Or as the Greeks called it, Art or Kia, the ability to be economically self-sufficient. And he said that middle class would save America from that peasant mentality. Peasant mentality means you're envious and angry or as they say in the Russian, the Russian peasantry when one person in the village got a nice wagon and he had a nice horse and he was hauling people think around and making money rather than hiring them out. They burned it and killed the horse. Okay, very sad, but he's probably right. And I'm glad we got a lot of the good kind of envy in the United States. Let's go to a Canadian that they're more left wing at times than the Canadians. The Australians are. I don't think so. Remember, Canada is just like Australia now. Their government. Yeah, that's what so the Australians sometimes seem more left wing than the Canadians. I don't know about that. I didn't mention Canada only by omission, not because it was more conservative. Remember during COVID though, when they had all their lockdowns, we had some real strict like we're not going to let people in, we're not going to let people out. That was left wing, did that? Yeah, yeah. So that's just as left wing as the Australians. Yeah. Well, no, the I'm talking about the Australians. When Canada did to look what they did to the truckers. Shut down the whole trucking industry. I'm allies them. They criminalize them. If you go in, if you go into Canada and you put a little shingle and say, I'm a doctor, freebie, they're going to go after you. If you go take, pull out of 30 out six and you're shooting that you're backyard out in the country, they're going to go after you. Yeah. Except in places like Alberta, maybe, but except for Mulroney and the wonderful, I keep praising him. I know him a little bit, Stephen Harper. They were all been left wing. All of them. In Canada. Yeah. And Canada. Australia. Everyone thinks that Trump caused this rip because of his bombast. I just said this. It's the same thing as NATO. He tore off a happy face scab and ripped it off. And there was a putrid wound of, you know, trying to get huge trade surplus with us. And then euthanasia with 5% of all their deaths and then open borders and then crazy green, uh, wild green ideology. And then pro Chinese with this nut carny who was citizen in three countries, globalist, and then of all the countries, given their heroic and distinguished prior military record, they were welching, completely welching on their NATO. They were like 1.7% on GDP because they just said, well, we're a really good NATO. We follow the wills based order and we don't like what the United States is doing. But they call up, oh, we want to make sure now that we're under your missile shield and we want to know, we want to make sure that if we go to, you're going to be supporting us. That's what they do. Yeah. The rhetoric sounds different. Yes. One we're going to have with Canada are not diminishing and they're going to be a parent under a democratic administration just as much because they, like Europe and at times Australia have pursued this left wing version of Western civilization and it leads nowhere. It leads to doomsday fertility, a shrinking aging population. It leads to open borders and the unsimilated people from antithetical cultures. It leads to completely being defenseless. So you're going to be, I don't know if the United States said tomorrow, they keep talking about Greenland, Greenland, Greenland when Trump's bombast, you know, did anybody ever think he was going to annex Alberta? No. Did anybody ever think he was going to invade Green? Carney said, if he goes into Greenland, we have contingency pride. You hear what he said? Carney, the prime, he said that he had contingency plans to help the Danish repel the United States. I'm thinking, oh, how's that going to work out? And talk about strange rhetoric, right? I mean, they're going to, yeah, but I mean, the so-called Northwest Passage is kind of opening up and there's going to be dads of Chinese and Russian icebreakers all through Canadian waters in the North. And they're going to be going around. If we get what Trump should say is, I was trying to help you with Greenland. I wanted to base US defensive missiles, but if you want it, go to it. And I will just pull back and get more defensive art content. And he will. But does Canada think and Denmark and these people think they're going to protect themselves from the Chinese and Russians when they start to probe their post-colonial possessions? Canada has a bigger area than the United States. Yeah, good. And they've always said it's too cold and nobody wants it. Well, not in the age of sophisticated travel and communications and shipping and rare manholes and oil and your Northwest, Northeast provinces up near the Arctic Circle. All of that's full of valuable resources for resource star places like China. I think they have 10 times as many icebreakers as Canada does and us too. Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back, maybe talk a little bit more about the Iranians in the United States, as you've alluded to. But there's a few more things to say about it. Stay with us and we'll be right back after these messages. If you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, you might enjoy the Daily Signals flagship show, The Tony Kennetcast, the same common sense perspectives you love weekdays at 7 p.m. Eastern. And unlike some of the other evening shows, we work up until show time to bring you the latest breaking news, analysis and good old American star cast. Tom Tillis, I'm pretty sure might have been useful at one time as a doorstop, find The Tony Kennetcast on YouTube, X, radio, TV, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back, Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. So Victor, as you were mentioning, there's a lot of the leadership in Iran sent their daughters and sons, et cetera, over here. And we've seen Soleimani's daughters. And many of you who are listening to this now have probably seen the pictures that are a little bit salacious and very skimpy clad clothes, et cetera, mother and daughter in very luxurious conditions. And what I was, but the thing that was added to that was not just the, whether you call it hypocrisy or the unbelievableness of them being strict Muslims, but also that they were posting rhetoric in support of the regime and calling the United States the Great Satan. I'll put it this way. If I bought in a room of 20 people, and I'm going to say to them the following, the Great Warmonger Imperialist United States has been in a veritable war with Iran for 47 years. Iran has killed more Americans than any other terrorist entity, but the chief culprit of that death cult was General Soleimani. He was the one that dreamed up to use Shia radicals in Syria and Iraq to attack American insulations. But more importantly, he developed from Chinese technology great stores of what we call shape charges for IED. And that means that they're able to penetrate any shield mechanisms or tanks even. And they're very deadly IEDs. The official people claim 600 deaths and maybe a thousand wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, but you've seen people on TV who have been there and said, no, no, it's been more like 2000. The Obama administration didn't really want to count the actual. So what I'm getting out is General Soleimani killed more Americans than any other terrorist, maybe as many as the 9-11 culprits. So now we hear that his grandniece and grandniece and grandniece of the biggest war criminal in our eyes, there was an Iran are living on absconded funds from the Iranian people in decadent Baghdad, utopia. It's not Baghdad on the bay, but it's LA at its worst. And they're living there with Iranian money and they're going on social media, trashing the United States and championing the cause. And by extension, their name is associated with the biggest killer of Americans, probably of any terrorist in history. And they're doing it with impunity. And people would say to me, you're crazy, Victor, quit exaggerating. Why were they ever allowed to come in here? Why have they ever allowed to, how long did it take for us and why? But the most important question is, why in the world do they think on green cards that they would go on social media right in the middle of a war and start rooting for Iran in general, in particular with their name of their killer. And against the United States where we're losing 13 soldiers over there. And the answer has to be that they thought that the left is so crazy and so anti-American and is rooting for Iran that once they got on social media that the Robert De Niro's of the world and the Jimmy Kimmel's of the world and the Nancy Pelosi's and the Chuck Schumer, but especially the Mondamis, they would be folk heroes. And the right would be so scared of that to say, where were they thinking? Well, I have a person to add to this. There is a Michigan candidate for Senate, Abdul El Saeed, and he has not condemned Hassan Piker who said the U.S. quote, the U.S. deserved 9-11. And that Piker has also critiqued Israel post October 7th. And this guy, El Saeed does will not condemn that. He said something else. He said, there's the same guy, they caught him in a strategy meeting for a Senate campaign and they asked him about the Iran war and what was his position about the killing of Komenay. Should he say something? And he said, no, that would go down bad in Dearborn. No, no, you got to realize this is going to be a close race. I got to hide what my real feelings are, but all my supporters were really angry that their hero, Komenay, who hates American wants to kill all Americans, was killed. So we can't mention that. That should have been disqualifying. If anybody in Michigan votes for him, you should have their head examined. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm thinking that he's also, I mean, it's a similar that that left is so crazy left that he doesn't even think he has to pretend. I like Hassan Piker. Every other word is about the Jews in Israel. So Stanford has just culminated a comprehensive review about two years ago of anti-Semitism. It's 900 pages long. I looked at it and it was compiled by two liberal, one of them from Hoover, liberal people. And it found systematic anti-Semitism all through Stanford in the classrooms, in the curriculum, in the professorate, in the speakers. And what do they do to dispel any knowledge? They invite to speak whom? Hassan Piker. He just came over to Stanford and I think he's the one that has given Nazi salutes and everything. And he's a folk hero. So at some point, I think at some point Americans are going to say, you know what, I am tired of Chinese national anchor babies putting IEDs at U.S. bases or attempting to I'm tired of drones coming over our B-52 bases. I'm tired of balloons coming across the United States. I'm tired of bio labs. I'm tired and Reedley and Las Vegas. I'm tired of Chinese nationals and our graduate programs bringing in some esoteric type of deadly mold to destroy our wheat crop. I'm tired of it all. I'm tired of the Confucius Institutes on campus. I'm tired of the PLA disguised professor. I'm just sick of it. Just go home, all of you. And the same thing from the Middle East, I think they're going to say, I don't want Larry and Johnny's daughter here. I don't want her in a faculty. I don't want the Soleimani girls here. I don't want anybody connected with radical Iran. You know who's been the best people? I'm not talking about everybody. I'm talking about anybody who has a tie to the Chinese Communist Party, even remote get out. Anybody who has a tie with their regime, get out. And the people who have been really good about it are the Iranian ex-patriots that are here in the United States. They spot all these people and tell us and then they're baffled. And then I think one of them, she was kind of the Tokyo Rose of Iran. Her son is in the United States and he's a lecturer. She was one of the spokesmen for the hostage takers. She used in the whole everything, the Afghans stuff, the whole thing. The job and everything. Yeah, the everything. And she was on TV, I remember it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Dr. McRid and spokesman and she's been a spokeswoman for the regime. She goes to international comp... Her son is in the United States, went to a United States and he's, I think he's a part-time teacher in the United States. Why is he here? It just doesn't make sense. It's like saying, well, it's 1941 and the Mussolini twins and Eva Braun's son is here and the Guring boys are here at Harvard. Oh, has anybody seen the Goebbels? The six Goebbels kids? Goebbels, I should say Goebbels brother. He's here. Oh, Tojo's son, he popped up. They wouldn't have stood for that for one second. No. So you're suggesting that eventually the American people are going to get a sane immigration policy? They're so tired of mass murders, killing people and walking out of the streets because some liberal guy in a secluded, wealthy area and never sees a criminal and lets them out. They're tired of all these big shoulders, small, wasted, muscle-bound, quote-unquote girls dressing and women's and destroying women's sports. They're tired of 10,000 people coming across the border a day and then telling, we've been told that these are, we're a nation of immigrants, why 500,000 criminals prey on the week? They're tired of all that and I have trust in they're being tired that it's not just conservatives. It's independence and they can poll all they want but when they get in the polls, I'm, I think there's a good chance they're going to say, I don't want that back. If the Republicans have the money and the willpower and the smarts to run good commercials, they should have a commercial every day in October, just a series of them. The first picture should be all of those immigrants coming across and then mug shots a second later of about 20 in a row and then they should show the Soleimani girl and then they should go into the killing in by Carlos, to Carlos Brown and the slit throat of the poor Ukraine and they should show all that. Chinese labs. Yes, Chinese labs. They should show all of the balloon. They should show Biden stumbling around. They should, all of that, just quick images and say, do you want this? You want it? It's, or just say it's back, Johnny's back, Demi's are back and I think people will remember that. Yeah, they sure will. Well, Victor, we have a lot more to talk about on Saturday episode, so be sure to listen to us on the weekend. As we do at the end, quite often, I have some comments. I went on to Rumble and YouTube for these. The first one, I kind of liked the name of the person, Mad Max on Rumble said, EU and the UK are fair weather friends. He put quotes, so I thank you and Jack must have said that. I hope when the weather turns bad and they call for help, we give them the same bum, bum's rush. Yeah, I think we'll do as I said last time to you that as some of my nephews and my son did, unfortunately, when they were taken by my cousin out for a lake Sunday visit and they didn't want to leave the lake and they were late and they were in the shore. The adults, yelling to my niece, nephews and my son, come back. We got to get out. Can't hear you. Can't hear you. Oh, the lake tide is taking us out. We can't get back for an hour. So that's what's going to happen. The French are going to have some imperial crusade into an African country or Haiti or something and the British are going to, at some point, want to do something with, you know what I mean, maybe the Argentine, maybe Malay will want the, if Malay right now went to the Falklands, can you imagine that? The United States would say, yes, take it. It's yours. Call it the Malvinas. Go Malay. Because we know one thing, Malay, you will have a free market economy and free speech and no illegal aliens and the Falklands will be sort of Western. And you'll be our friend. Yes. And I would not, if Sturmer, if he did that and Sturmer said, we need a carrier and reserve. We need Tomahawk missiles. We need 2 million gallons of gas. We need photo reconnaissance. We need to know where every ship is. We need your intelligence. We'd say, can't hear you. This isn't our war. Well, the Europeans look kind of stupid enough, not allowing for airspace and the bases that we built largely, as you and Jack pointed out. So, bemused and berserker is the second one. As far as I'm concerned, Ilan Omar publicly pledging her loyalty to the Somali government is reason enough for her immediate removal from office and deportation from the country. Same with any office holder that states or even hints that their loyalty is to a foreign institution. I wish this breakaway Somaliland government, as you hear what they said, they want an extra dire because they have relatives and friends that were butchered by the army of which her father was a leading officer. So, basically, you get a tyrannical, wealthy, exploitive elite from Somalia who is despised by most people there. And then she comes over with her money and resources and then plays the refugee poor girl. And then Mary's talks about all the evil white terrorists and Mary's this white guy that has 30 million bucks mysteriously after being working with her as a consultant. And we're supposed to buy this that she's the face of the oppressed when the people back in that area of the world feel that she and her family were war criminal. It's just only in the United States because you believe that story. Yeah. Well, I have to hand it to her. She's as smooth as butter with the lyes when she goes on to television. She's not smooth though. She loses her temper about two seconds in and then her face tightens up and she starts screaming. She hates white people. She always, well, not all white people, obviously, if they have money and she can marry them. But there you go. But she always ends up about white terrorism and all this stuff. I have a last comment by Ketterin Johnson 4 4 1 6. Oh, and this is from the Dominican and from the millennial millennial generation. She says, I'm from the Dominican Republic. I love VDH, my favorite political commentator. Please keep going. You are of great value for my generation, the millennials. As long as I can read, I'll keep talking. Thank you, Ketterina Johnson. Some days that's easier than other. Yeah, exactly. And thank you to Mad Max and be mused bzirker and to our audience for choosing to join us on this Friday news roundup. Thanks everybody for listening and watching. I'll make a final comment. When you have liberal, crazy places like France or Europe and you meet conservatives there, they're smarter than us because they're in hostile territory and there's nothing quite like a French conservative intellectual or British intellectual conservative. Are Dominican? Yes, Ketterin Johnson as well. Anybody in an area where socialism is predominant, they have to be at their wits peak. They have to be very astute. They have to be well spoken. They have no margin of error. They're targeted and they're very brave people. Thank you, everyone. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen and we're signing off. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. Please like, share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, an audit dread. It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place and cuts audit prep by 82 percent. Less manual work, clearer visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance or call it calm compliance. Get it? Join the 15,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Get started at vanta.com slash calm.