Victor Davis Hanson: Tulsi Gabbard’s Legacy in Review

WA Police Confidential is true crime in real time. We've got seven good suspects. Did a packet of beef jerky help you catch a killer? You can hear the screams coming from the window. He could not recall how many people he had killed. Every week we take you inside real active police investigations. How do you solve a murder without a body? How do you catch a professional hitman? All the latest on cold case mysteries and a whole lot more. WA Police Confidential, the official WA Police podcast every week, wherever you get your podcasts. Music Well, hello ladies and hello gentlemen. Welcome to Victor Davis Hansen and his own words. I'm Jack Fowler, the host, but you're here to learn, listen to the wisdom of the great Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buske Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College and a senior contributor to the Daily Signal, which is the happy home not only of this podcast, but of Victor's other gig, Victor Davis Hansen, in a few words, which he does four times a week. And Victor's website is the Blade of Perseus. You should subscribe and I'll tell you why later in this episode. We were recording on Saturday, May 23, 2026. This episode will be up on Tuesday, the 26th of May. We've got some scheduling things. So this is why we're doing this show and the next show a little early for folks. And as usual, anything can happen between now and Tuesday or now and Thursday. We would have thought something might have big might have happened after we last recorded Victor's things in Iran. Nothing, yeah, not yet. So maybe if you have any, well, you've talked with Sammy about that. So Bob Woodson has passed away the autopsy of the Democrat National Committee's Disasters 2024 election. Tulsi Gabbard has resigned her position. There's this slush fund, $1.8 billion to Trump, January 6 slush fund. We'll get your take on all these things, Victor. And more when we come back from these initial important messages. America is going through a higher education transformation where students are realizing that what they want and need is a place that doesn't stifle their intellectual freedom. Standing out among the few graduate programs that value viewpoint diversity is Pepperdine's University School of Public Policy, where I've taught the last two years. Their masters of public policy is both applied and practical, preparing the next generation of leaders to participate in government agencies, the business sector, and think tanks. Pursue your MPP at Pepperdine. Daily signal listeners qualify for an automatic 50 to 75 percent tuition scholarship and can learn more at go.pepperdine.edu slash daily signal. It's go.pepperdine.edu slash daily signal. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Victor Bob Woodson, a great conservative, an advocate for subsidiarity, neighborhood, family, the non-victimization of blacks, like you at Bradley Prize, honorary, awardee, and somebody you knew. Your thoughts about this? Yeah, I was on a lot of committees with him. He was very soft-spoken, very polite, very strong advocate for working people, and very lonely guy in the sense not that he wanted to be lonely, but he was attacked on all sides by the black elite leftists that run the black movement. So he was a lone voice in the wilderness, and he was always trying to argue that if blacks could restore the nuclear family, at least commiserate to other groups, fathers would be home, two-parent household, gainfully employed, adopt the pre-great society habits. He was channeling a lot, Tom Sowell, of the black community of self-help, independent, self-reliance, then all good things would happen. And when they don't do that, the majority don't, then it's not good. And he was very upset the last time, I think two years ago, I was on a committee with him about, oh, black gangs and the attitude after the George Floyd, and he thought that the BLM movement was injurious to black interest. He was also very critical, in a polite way, of white liberals that patronize black leftists and encourage them in that type of rap culture or counterculture that they adopt when they won't do it themselves. So you have this really weird situation where black, or I should say white, bi-coastal liberals said, don't judge people. One parent can be just as good as two. You don't need to have two parents. You have to lower grades. A lot of black people have historic disadvantages, and then when they go home, they close the door, they take their kids, say, you're going to study for four hours or you're not going to get lunch. And they have intact families, at least more so, than blacks do. So they live a particular lifestyle that results in economic success and stability, but when other people are failing or not achieving that level, then they patronize them and say, you don't have to be like us. We're not going to oppose our will, and they live segregated lives as well. He was one of the people who pointed that out again and again. Yeah, his emphasis on subsidiarity in neighborhood and family is a direct attack at the left, which as we've discussed before, destroyed black neighborhoods, wholesale, wipe out, and now you get to live in these whole projects, which then played its own role in destroying families. I'm only going to be able to live here if I am on welfare and then behooves me to be a single mom and not have two husband here. So it's just so deleterious. It is. It is. It has always turned out that the best friends of the black community and the white community are those who offer constructive criticism rather than appease and accommodate. Yeah, let's just get your take here on this quote unquote slush fund headline from the Daily Mail stunning sign, Trump losing party White House crisis summit scrapped as Republicans knife president over $1.8 billion fund for January 6 rioters last night. Just flipping through the channel saw something about Ron Johnson and any number of senators saying they're aghast it at this set aside. Victor, I have to admit, I'm not steeped in it, but what is your take on the actual fund or the political ramifications? Well, there's no doubt that the IRS broke the law and leaked on Trump's private tax records. And remember that the state of New York really passed a bill of attainer as they did in the case of Eugene Carroll. They said, we're going to pass a law that says that the federal government request a New York state tax return in the next year. I think it was. Then we're going to comply and allow them to publicize his state. So they got him on federal and state exposure. There was nothing bad. He took a lot of deductions. He didn't pay. He had losses. So he's very angry at that leak. But the problem is, as the senators pointed out, the IRS is in the Treasury Department. So when they make this decision to have a, I don't know if it's a slush fund, but a compensatory fund, are they under the influence of Donald Trump, who was a plaintiff in the suit? And that was one problem. The second is, he seems to be, according to his opponents, he's rewarding his friends or supporters, the J6 people. But there's a larger problem for him. He got a lot of pushback. And traditionally, that when a Republican president faces his midterms, and he's got a very slim majority, then he makes accommodations for people who vote 70% of the time with him, Mavericks. And that is on questions with Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, Susan Collins, and Rand Paul. Okay. He's come to that point where he acknowledges that doesn't do any good to criticize them when they give them 70% of the vote and Alaska is turning more and more, you know, it's getting more and more centrist. And Maine is the centrist place. And Tennessee, well, that's another case. But where he's very angry is, in his point of view, if you have a completely red state, and you have a slim Republican majority in the Senate, and you have people in that state, like Cornyn in Texas, or Cassidy in Louisiana, that are not as conservative as they could be, given their constituencies. And those people vote to impeach Trump, or they oppose him 30%. That's a different case is what he's saying. So then you primary them. And he did. And he was successful, maybe. Texas will see. But the point I'm making is, if you primary your own party, and your polls are at 40%, then you're going to get a backlash among other people too, because, A, they don't think you have the power anymore through public opinion to hurt them. And B, they're worried that you could primary them. And so they were pushing back on Thune, and others were pushing back on the fact that he primary two incumbents that they thought had a much better chance to win than the conservative replacement, hard mega replacements. And two, his popularity is at 40, so he really can't enforce that anymore. And it introduces a larger question. How do you get from inauguration day 50 to 40 or 38? Well, that happens to all presidents after the honeymoon wears. And it was just two things. The first dip was inflation. And he said, before the war started, I mean, gas was $1.88 in Iowa, it was less than $3 nationwide, maybe, and $2.50 or something in some places. But the point I'm making is that he had the low inflation, but he had promised that he was going to reduce the Biden prices. That's a whole different story. They had gone up 30% in staples. He had 9.1 or 9.2% in 2022. He never got, even though he got down to 0.4 or 3.2 at the last year. The aggregate inflation, especially when you apply it to a basket of the staples and essentials, was 30%. And Trump came in and said, I'm going to lower that. Well, he didn't lower it, but he'd kept the Biden inflation at about three point, and it got some months down before the war two. But that wasn't enough because people had suffered that for four years. So Trump kept saying, I inherited the Biden inflation, but they didn't use the word inflation. They used the word prices, and they didn't care what the annual inflation rate was. They just knew that the prices had soared, and they wanted them to go down. And if you talk to some people and you'd say, well, what do you want? We want the prices. So you want zero inflation? No, I don't want zero inflation. I want minus inflation. So it goes back down where it was. And that was kind of unrealistic to achieve. So he got stung there. And then the war, and we'll talk about the war, maybe, but he's at a crossroads right now because he's starting to bleed today in the Wall Street Journal. Mark Penn wrote an op-ed. Seth Cropsey wrote an op-ed. Well, he's getting a lot of people, independents, conservative Democrats, conservative maga, who say the pathway for you to get your economy rolling and the pathway to get back to popularity is not to pull out or negotiate with these people. They are never going to dismantle their nuclear reactor enriched uranium. They're never going to give it to you or a third party. They're never going to willingly open up that straight. It's just not going to happen. And they want 30 days. You've already negotiated more time than the actual war. That is going to lower, lower, lower. And it's going to lower it on the right because they want to finish the job. And they don't want to be told as soon as we go home after the negotiations that they break the negotiations, that they're cheating, that Trump is a taco, the left goes jubilant. Robert Kagan, whom we know, I knew his father very well, wonderful classicist Donald Kagan. He has a piece saying it's a complete defeat. I mean, he doesn't even talk about the attrition or the destruction of the Iranian military or the $500 are bleeding a day. But my point is, he's at a crossroads. I think New Guinea is just right. You've got to finish the war as quickly as possible. Take out dual use targets. Take out the ability to offload and unload oil at Card Island, clean out, bomb the corridor opposite the strait so there's no dockage for PT boats, forcibly open the strait and then let the Israelis go after command and control, let them go after the enrichment. That's their key issue anyway. They want to get rid of the enrichment. So let them go after it and get the command and control. And then take out dual use bridges and take out military industrial complex. I'm told they have better intelligence than they ever had and they know exactly what they missed and they've got more assets right now. But I'm getting at, if you do that, then all good things follow. You lower the price of gas, you take a hit at the first, but the price of gas will collapse because of all the speculation that it was going to go to 200 and all the oil coming in on the market and no war. And then when that goes down, psychologically people are going to feel good about the economy and prices will start to go down. And you will get credit and people will say, he took out Maduro, he neutered the Iranians and the Cubans are in trouble and we've only lost 13 soldiers doing this and he will get recognition. But if you wait and wait and let this narrative get entrenched and solidified, that he's a taco or he can't, that's bad. So I don't know who's advising him. I think a lot of the Maga people are saying this is a terrible thing. We got to stop. We got to just, that's not the way out of it. The way out of it is to cut the Gordian knot, not to try to untie it. Cut the Gordian knot. Just say, you know, this is so complex. Just cut it. And that means get rid of their ability to make war in four or five days and then just say, we're going to go home once the straight is open. Speaking of psychology, do you think the reason this is prolonging, because a week ago, Victor, it seemed like any day. And right now, actually, it seems like any day. This is Saturday because Trump called off a trip to New Jersey's in the White House. So these kind of things make people think, well, he's at the White House because something kinetic is going to happen in the next eight. But nothing kinetic happened last week. I guess my long-winded question here is, do you think this is part of his propensity for the art of the deal? I'm the negotiator. This is a, we're in the midst of negotiating. He succeeds at negotiating. Yeah, I think it is. He did that in the summer. He said, we want negotiations and right in the middle of me bomb them. So yeah, I do. I just hope, put it this way, he had all of these fundamentals that were starting to kick in in the economy. They're still there, tax cuts, deregulation, massive foreign investment, energy booming. Just take them out in four or five days and don't negotiate with them. Just say, if you can get the enriched uranium and you can get an international group to help and you got a carrier group, maybe two that can keep the thing open, then go home. And then concentrate on the economy, on the economy, on the economy, on the economy. And then you won't have this problem with Republican senators. They won't be apostates because you'll be increasingly popular. You remove two toxic enemies of the United States at little cost. Cuba's about ready to fall. There's a lot of good things there. And you won't have people mumbling, he took out two of our friends in the Senate who were in the party. They're going to say, you know what, you better stay with Trump because he's doing great things and the people like him. And that's what you have to concentrate on. They need, New Guinea-Hut had a good article, you sent it to me about kind of a contract for America. What are you going to do in the next two years, get gas prices down? The RFK, he's an unpopular figure, but his agenda is popular with independence. You can emphasize that and really, really emphasize the fraud and what the Democrats are doing. It gets a pass. They kept saying, Trump tried to distract from the Epstein fraud. There is no Epstein files. What he distracted from was the fraud, the Democratic inadvertently, but this record historic fraud by Democratic people, it's up to probably a half a trillion dollars nationwide. You know, on the economy, you and I, blessed, we can buy, say, a $30 can of paint or but I'm doing stuff for my son's house and I'm buying paint and I'm buying molding and I'm shocked. I can buy it, but I'm like, holy crap. I know. I know. And you're right. It doesn't matter about the inflation. It matters. These costs went up dramatically. There was sort of an expectation. They went up so dramatically and it had to do with what the logistics and all other things that would have settled down. Therefore, the prices would have come down. Well, they've not come down. And maybe it seems like they're never going to come down and that's going to be borne by Trump, even though it's Biden's doing. It is. I mean, they're already campaigning on it for the midterms, that Trump's inflation, Trump's inflation, Trump's inflation, Trump's slush fund. The slush fund, as I said, it, rationally, that was very wrong what they did and they owe him a apology and maybe some, whatever costs were incurred with legal fees or whatever. But the idea, you're going to take this from one hand of the government to the other when you're in $31 trillion debt, as we are now, and you're going to take a one-point-something billion dollars and you're going to hand it out, that's what Democrats do with the reparations. Remember the Pigford farm deal, $4 billion or whatever it is? You don't want to do that. It doesn't do us any good to say they're hypocritical because they do that all the time. We're different. And so he's got to be careful with that. The ball room is the same way. It was billed. I see the logic. It was billed on a $400 million, just bill the building. Then the government, GSA, Pentagon, got into it and said, well, if you're going to tear it down, we can make a huge vault down below and we can have security and offices and it all makes sense and special anti-terrorism protection. And that's another billion dollars, apparently, and he wants the government as it should to pay for it. But how that plays in the news is that Trump promises $400 million ballroom now wants a billion dollars to guild for guilders. That's what they say, stuff like that. So that's not the issue. The issue is the economy and winning the war. The ballroom and things like that, renaming places, they're distractions to all that. Yeah. So the true social too, he knows out the distractions. And you just got to say the economy, the economy, the economy, and we're going to win the war. Well, let me tell you something, Victor. You and our listeners and viewers, did you know that over 176 million Americans are drinking tap water with PFA's in it? 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And note that I had a little argument when Mrs. Vowler yesterday saw her filling ice cube trays from the tap. Like, what are you doing? Get the Cove Pure. Okay. What's next? Well, Victor, let's talk about, let's get you to talk about Tulsi Gabbard, who is resigning for her husband, has a rare form of bone cancer. Some people have been nasty. Let me read one of the nasty things. If I can find you, you'll forgive me. My notes are all jumbled. What's our favorite person in the world? The state, the senator from California. Yes, here's what, yes, here's what Adam Schiff had to say. I can't stand this guy. My thoughts go out to Tulsi Gabbard and her family and her husband battles a serious health problem. I hope and pray that he makes speedy. Where's the button? Yeah, a button coming. But let's be clear. Tulsi Gabbard's only positive contribution to our nation's national security is her resignation. She politicized intelligence. She dismantled, who is he to say that? She dismantled critical agencies keeping America safe. She weaponized the IC to pursue basis selection fraud claims and more. We must ensure that her tenure represents a terrible exception at DNI and not the new normal blah, blah, blah. Shut up, Adam. Adam, Adam, you were censored by the U.S. Congress. You were censored. And the reason you were censored is you lied under oath. You were in the, you were on the House Intelligence Committee. You knew that Eric Saral Marilla never heard one word of Donald Trump's phone call to Zelensky. Not one word. It was, I think I got to get this right because he corrected people, Lieutenant Colonel Venman, who was on the call. It was a classified confidential call. He had no business disclosing the contents outside the National Security Council secure room. He did. He called or met with Mr. Saral Marilla and said, I think we have a way to get Trump because I'm interpreting what he said about holding up weapons, holding up weapons deliveries based on the investigation of corruption that pertains to the Biden family. And then Mr. Saral Marilla says, okay, I will be the whistleblower to protect you. And both of us will go to Adam Schiff and we will coordinate how we can get this out in the public. And then they ask Adam Schiff, did you meet with it? And he said, no. And he cooked the whole thing up. And the irony was that that what they charged Donald Trump with in the first impeachment was exactly what Joe Biden did. The only difference is Donald Trump didn't say, well, I went over there to the Ukraine and I said, you fire the prosecutor for what he's doing, i.e. the prosecutor was looking into Hunter Biden and Burisma. Or you know, I'm looking at my watch and I'm going to leave here in about an hour and I'm not going to give you your 40 million or 400, whatever it was. And then he's bragging to the council in foreign relations in which this conversation took place. And he goes, Son of a blank, they paid. Haha, tough Joe. I shook them down so Hunter got protected and they wanted their congressional and what was the impeachment? Donald Trump suspended, congressional-improved aid. That's exactly what Joe Biden did. Exactly. Only Trump didn't brag about it and Trump released it and Trump was the first president to really give them offensive arms, which neither Biden nor Obama had approved. So he's a real scoundrel, Adam Schiff. Any thoughts about Tulsi, a Gavrige from the Central? Yeah, and Tulsi, she came from the originally from the Tucker Joe Kent Wing of MAGA. It was kind of, she was a democratic eccentric and that eccentricity on the democratic side, a radical libertarian, I suppose you'd call her, dovetailed with the Rand Paul School of MAGA. And she got along with Trump for that reason. But when she went into the office, she was very, she was very good. She released, I can remember last June, last July, she was releasing all the stuff about Clapper and Brennan, everything we know about what Obama did in the transition that he brought Clapper and Comey and Brennan in and said to all three of them, I want some connection and proof for this collusion narrative where we're going to spring to, this was after the election as well, that we're going to do to basically ruin Trump's transition in first year. And they said, what do you want us to do? Just ignore what your case officers say and give me what I want. She released all that. She released all that about Kevin Plainsmith and Judge Broseberg and all of that stuff. So she did a very good job. The problem that I think she's having is she doesn't believe in optional military engagements in the Middle East and she wasn't had in the service. And she's not Tucker or the others who were just screaming and yelling. She's not going to do what Joe Kent did, resign and then turn on Trump. I don't think she is. She's got a lot more character than that. And so I take her at face value that her husband's very ill and she needs a caregiver. I've been dealing with cancer. I know how you get, you get, what's the word, you get needy and if you're not, you need somebody to help you. If I go out and try to prune a limb that I could do a hundred of them before, all of a sudden I get dizzy. So things like that. And so she needs to get back and that's, that's, that's what she's talking about. At some point, there was going to be a collision had she stayed. That being said, because she did not believe in preemptive military engagements in the Middle East. And period. The other thing I've mentioned on our podcast before, she's a very nice person. I went to a, we were the co-speakers and it was in a little town in Texas, but a big, very big crowd and it was, I mean, they wanted their money's worth and they got it. They wanted, and understandably so, they wanted a meet and greet in the afternoon. They wanted pictures. They wanted a VIP reception. They wanted a regular reception. They wanted a dinner. They wanted one spot talk, two talks and then an after dinner greet. And a pint of blood, well, all of that. Yeah. And I, and book signings and I was with her on our feet for maybe five hours and she never, she never complained one bit. And when people came up and at dinner, she sat next to me, we're talking and people, could I have, can you sign this? Could you not one bit? And people say, well, why, why should she, she, that's your job, Victor. I said, I know it is my job. That's her job, but you would be surprised the people who think their eagles are so big that they snap at people that want an autograph or snap at people who want to talk. And she didn't. And she was smiling the entire time. So she's, I thought she was very authentic. Good. Well, Victor, we're going to get your take on the Democrat 2024 autopsy. Maybe we'll go back a few weeks or a week or so to that shooting in San Diego. I don't think you've oh, pined about that. We'll do that when we come back from these important messages. If you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, you might enjoy the Daily Signals flagship show, the Tony Kennett cast, the same common sense perspectives you love weekdays at 7pm Eastern. And unlike some of the other evening shows, we work up until showtime to bring you the latest breaking news, analysis and good old American star cast. Tom Tillis, I'm pretty sure might have been useful at one time as a doorstop. Find the Tony Kennett cast on YouTube, X, radio, TV, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back, ladies and gentlemen with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words today. We're talking on Saturday, May 23rd, it's Memorial Day weekend, two days from now or the day prior to when you're actually viewing this originally will be Memorial Day and I hope all have remembered those who made the ultimate sacrifice. Victor's website, the blade of Perseus, the VictorHansen.com, see address, please subscribe. Why would you subscribe? Well, that way you can read the two ultra articles Victor writes every week exclusively for the blade of Perseus. He also does an exclusive video 10 minutes or so video every week. This is a ton of free stuff also there, archives, the podcasts and all sorts of things. If you're a fan of Victor, you want to do it and I think it makes a great Father's Day present. So consider that the blade of Perseus, VictorHansen.com. Victor on the autopsy, I'm just reading a little something here from National Review, which is just like many initial reactions on the right. They put a link here's where you can find the autopsy if you want to read it, but why waste your time? The document is clearly unfinished. I would call it a first draft, but it doesn't even rise to the title. Key sections including the executive summary and conclusion are missing and what analysis exists is conclusory and scattershot. There's no unified thesis, etc. Anyway, Victor, your thoughts on this and I apologize for the barking dog in the background. We've reversed roles. My former pack of six is down to two decrepit dogs and you gained on me with a fresh, yeah, I think a new dog is entering the house right now. So, my apologies. But anyway, the autopsy, well, what you just said and I looked out the little bit, the subtext was this, A, these outside legal firms and pundits and they interviewed and they polled people, they all came the same conclusion. They could have won that election. They feel. I'm not sure that's true, but they did not win the election because they concentrated on boutique issues that are not everyday fair for most people. Most people are live and let live, let trans do what they want, but I do not want biological men and my daughter's volleyball team. They did. On deportations, close the border, stop the madness of 10, 12,000 people coming across the border. They couldn't do that. They didn't want to build the wall. Fracking, horizontal drilling, what's wrong with producing 14 million barrels of oil a day. They wouldn't do that. And they were on tape during that. Joe Biden and Camilla Harris opposing fracking. Foreign policy, nobody knew what it was. It was something between Joe Biden's radical withdrawal, maybe from Afghanistan and then the first month or two of his tenure when he was being yelled at for being by the Chinese in Anchorage, Alaska. So and then the other thing of course was DIDIDIDIDI and this idea of pronouns and communities and I'm here with the black community. I'm here with the LGBTQ plus community. I'm here with the Chicano Latino community. I'm here with the Asian community. People don't like that anymore. The majority. Yeah. The trans people at the White House one took the fake breast and then there was some other applaudings. Yeah, they did. And you know, they had all of the trans dance shows at libraries where children were there. They had them at military bases. They were just sick of that. So this thing was trying to politely explain that and saying, go back to basically lunch but box issues, Allah Bill Clinton. The problem is the people who control the party now, I don't know if they control the voters, but are the people who lost them the election and they're not going to go back. And the only thing I can think of that's going to make, if they try to nominate Camilla Harris and they will, you're going to see the biggest affection of big democratic donors. They're going to say, you know what, we gave her a ton of money. She blew through, she had a billion dollars more than Donald Trump during the whole and she blew through it. She leased jets. She had her cronies, you know, junk, junketing all the way to the United States and she's incompetent. You know, I watch Gut Field once in a while and it's a, it's a running joke that she's been drinking, but when they show those clips, it's very hard to think that she's not drinking. She seems completely incoherent. She's forgotten nothing and learned nothing about 2024. She has the word salad. As I said, anytime the word being, time, feelings, metaphysics comes up, she, she goes into the twilight zone. And I just, that's what the report was basically saying. And they thought it was racist and sexist and homophobic and transphobic and who wrote it and all that. And the guy that runs the party is at Ken Martin from Minnesota. He's, he's not a good spokesman for them. Yeah. Well, their bench is kind of pathetic. Although another piece today, I think was in the New York Post, again, about Rahm Emanuel looking to 2028 and he's not going to make it. He's not going to make it. They're going to come for him. They're going to, he's strongly identified with Israel. With Israel. Yeah. He's Jewish. And we should know what happened to Josh Shapiro who was less identified with Israel. Yeah. Unless he wants it just to say there's no anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party. He doesn't want to take them on. But the whole squad is anti-Semitic. They've got a guy with a Nazi tattoo running in Maine. What's, what's he going to do? I'm running for president in the Democratic Party and I want to condemn Graham Plattner for having a Totenkopf tattoo. That's not who we are. And then Rahm, there's a woman down in Texas. She wants to put Zionists in camps. And that's not who we are either. And that's going to be endless, endless. The heroes are Kaleel, Mamut Kaleel. That's who they honor and people who kill, people who kill like Luigi Mangione. That's the party. So what's he think he's going to do? The fact of the matter is, he's, I hate to say it in America today, but he's Jewish. And for the left, that is a disqualifying factor. Anybody with a right mind knew that Josh Shapiro, and I'm not a big fan of his, but he would have been a better vice president, she'll candidate the Camilla Harris. Initially when Biden picked her, but he had already promised a black woman. Then when she ran, does anybody think that Tim Walz got more votes than Josh Shapiro? He was a complete buffoon, but he was mediocre and he was hard left and he wasn't Jewish. So you're never going to see a Jewish person nominated in today's Democratic Party at the national level. You won't see a Senate campaign. You won't see anybody nominated. And when you see Adam Schiff attacking Tulsi Gabbard, does he really believe that the Mondami, the new people in that party are going to rally around somebody like an Adam Schiff? No, no, no, no. Or the mayor, you know, there's Ossoff, the Georgia Senator. This party doesn't like Jews. It just doesn't like them. It never did. And when you get thousands of Middle East students here and you get Middle East student populations and you've got a secular rise, a simulated Jewish population now, and Israel's strong and proud and capable. And you've got all this money pouring in from the Gulf. That's a perfect storm. And it brings the anti-Semites out of the woodwork. And they're mostly in the left. I mean, there's some on the right, but they're marginalized. You know, if you're running for office, as people say now with this truism, if you're Republican and you're running for office, you will comment on that you disagree with Tucker. If you're a Democrat running for Senate, Elizabeth Warren, or maybe Chuck Schumer, you will either say, I don't know what that's going on. I don't want to get into it. I have no idea what you're talking about. Or you're going to say you support it. Simple as that. Any Democrat who says Graham Platner's anti-Semitic post, his pornographic post, his anti-military post, his anti-white post, anybody who says that, well, is it going to be ostracized in that party? It's just the way it is. I do not recall the name of the congressman. The New York congressman, I should. He's in the New York Post all the time. He's the heir to the, I think, one of the genes, none of its Levi Strauss, et cetera. Goldman? Not Goldman. Yeah. But he is way behind in his primary. He's being primaried. The reason is, is because he does support Israel. Imagine that a Jewish Democrat supporting Israel now. You can't win in a Democratic primary. It might be the general election. Peterman will not be elected if he's still the nominee next time for the Senate. He's going to have to run as an independent. You will not win a Democrat primary. No. No. He might win a general election, but he will not win the primary. Those people are crazy, and it's kind of tragic. They always invoke the Nazis' situation because they think Trump is Nazis, but if they're going to go ad hit Lerim, they might as well go all the way and say, people in the 1930s were very worried that German culture was being so battered with anti-Semitic tropes that people would not speak out and they were going to be in danger. Well, the Democratic Party, its youthful base is so affixated on Israel. And all of these, I mean, you're seeing a young couple killed at the Holocaust Museum. You see a guy come in and ram a synagogue whose brother is in Hezbollah. It could go on and on, but the thing that's interesting is they're all contextualized by people. Well, New York, well, maybe the bombing of Hezbollah and Lebanon set him off, and that's what they do. I see a young Jewish kid in New York City because of wearing a yarmulke or clearly Hasidic. My thoughts now are, that guy's got stones because you're a target now. Maybe you were a target also five years ago. You're a target by everybody. Five years ago, if we had this conversation, we'd say there's a dangerous phenomenon taking place among identifiable Jews, like the Hasidic Jews, and that's called the knockout game, where black youth walk up on there and they see a Jewish person, they walk nonchalantly by him, and then right when they get near him, they hit him in the head and knock him out, and they laugh about that. And nobody did a thing about that. Then after that, the weird thing about October 7th, though, Jack, was you would think, given the gruesome details and the medievalism of these wretched people who killed 1200 Jews, that it would gain Israel's sympathy, but it didn't. It was like, well, this isn't the end. This is the beginning. You mean 6000 Hamas people got into Israel and butchered and raped and dismembered and decapitated, and now that wasn't even the whole ring of fire. The Hezbollah's got 200,000 rockets, the Houthis, the Iranians. This is great. We're going to see a bunch of, that's what they thought. And then they condemned Israel for being, they got empowered and hated Israel because it was weak. Ah, Israel's not strong. Look what these guys did. They plowed right over that. So it made it, it brought, it wasn't the going into Gaza. That didn't happen until October 27th. That was three weeks after the 7th. Two or three days after October 7th, the Harvard organizations had passed some resolution attacking Israel and praising Israel. Don't you remember that? They were, BLM was flying those hang glider banners at Stanford where I was teaching a black lecturer was telling Jews to get on one side of the classroom. I don't know. That happened, that happened in that 20 day period before the IDF went into Gaza. They were a jubilant. They were ecstatic, kill Jews and we're going to destroy Israel. Don't they get it? The democratic people? That's who they are now. I get so tired of these phrases that they all use when the left does stuff. Even knows that every campus president when a bunch of Middle Eastern students or somebody ransacked the office or they push a Jew or they corner the Cornell professor, remember, in his car and threaten. They always say the same thing. They either say, that's not who we are at Cornell or they say, there is no place for that. There's no place for that here. Well, there is a place and it's going to happen. They should say, we created a climate where they feel that there's every place is conducive for what they want to do because we're a propaganda machine and we, everybody on campus teaches that you hate Israel and then indoctrinate these kids. So it's logical that they're going to do that. That's what the truth. And it's been marinating for decades. It's not just like a quick reaction. The foundation for this has been taught for years and finally flourished in the sixth sense of flourishing. Well, Victor, I have a thing I wanted to raise with you about October 7th separately, but first, if you've studied enough history to our listeners and viewers, you start to see a pattern. Nations don't lose their way overnight. They drift through debt and division until one day you realize the foundations you thought were permanent were never permanent at all. Today, America is spending at levels once reserved for wartime, normalized deficits that would have stunned earlier generations and policymakers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention, more printing, more distortion. But here's the historical truth. Every society that pushed its currency beyond discipline eventually paid a price. The wise never waited for collapse. They prepared for the correction. And that's why so many thoughtful Americans, especially those nearing retirement or in retirement, are reallocating part of their wealth into something that has outlasted every paper experiment in human history, physical gold, not as speculation, but as insulation. Our reputation matters here, Dr. Davis Hansen, in his own words, which is why we're partnering with Allegiance Gold, a company distinguished by integrity, reliability, and an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau. For years they've guided Americans through transparent education and long-standing relationships built on trust. And right now they're extending a special liberty offer to our listeners to help you get started with real gold, whether your funds are in a retirement account or sitting in the bank. If you believe as we do, that the best time to reinforce your position is before the storm becomes obvious, call 844-790-9191, 844-790-9191, or visit protectwithvictor.com. That's 844-790-9191, 844-790-9191, or visit protectwithvictor.com. History rewards those who take the long view and we thank very much the good people from Allegiance Gold for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. We were just finishing up on that report that they ignored. They ordered an autopsy. They ignored and it basically said, you know, if you're going to run in the Democratic Party and you put pronouns in there and you spout all this nonsense, you're not going to win a general election, but you're not going to lose a primary. And that's just a fact. When they get into the general election, they're not going to run on their agenda. They're going to run on, we're going to get a bunch of money and maybe we can massage the early or mail-in balloting, especially here in California, and Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump. They cannot beat Donald Trump if he concentrates on the economy because he's got all this foreign investment coming in. He's got the deregulation. He's got the tax cuts. He's got good jobs report. He's made a lot of these countries trade more fairly with us. And he did brilliantly getting rid of Maduro. And he's at the cusp of ending the 50-year threat of this lunatic regime in Iran. He just has to finish the job and come back. He still has four and a half months. He can do that. He can do that. But he has to act. And that's where we are now. In the Democratic Party, the thing that everybody has to understand is thematic, it's characteristic. It cannot, cannot talk about its agenda. It has no agenda. It's a socialist agenda. People don't want it. They don't want drag shows at kids. If the Republicans use their money advantage and they run ads, and they like Spencer Pratt's ads, and they show what these people have said about trends and the border and illegal immigration and the violence toward ICE and Tesla, they can, they'll win them midterms if they have good economic news and they can finish the job in Iran. Well, it's interesting. You know, what you just said remind me of another topic about Democrat performance. Sorry, maybe we'll get to that in a second. But I did, I did want to say one reason. I, of many reasons, I love Israel. And here's a headline. Israel formed secret unit to kill or capture every October 7th attacker. I think this, I'm reading this from Breitbart. They've established a secret elite intelligence task force in the aftermath of the October 7th massacre to track down and kill or capture every terrorist involved in the attack from senior commanders who orchestrated the assault to individual gunmen who crossed into southern Israel during the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Victor, I believe they facial recognition, whatever, all kinds of technologies, they are going to carry this. I wonder what you would do. So they had 6,000 of these people that came across. And then they had another 500 to 800 that said, oh, I'm washing my car. I'm playing backgammon. I'm having coffee. Oh, what? The fence is down. They're looting and raping over, they're killing Jews and decap, I got to get in on this. And they ran across. And so now they're, they are recognized. And they're recognized by their own UBUS because they had these cameras on their helmets. And so they indicted themselves with the horrible things they did. So if you were a guy who walked over there and you went into a kaboots that was, you know, destroyed and you saw people raping a woman and you joined in or you stole things or you shot a boy, whatever they, you did. And now you're saying, well, they're not going to find me. They're going to find you. So what would you be thinking right now when you're in Gaza, when you're walking around? What would you do? You remember the chic that was in the wheelchair, the big home oscuy and he had been crippled in an earlier, and they, Israel said they were going to finish a job. Every time he came on CNN and they interviewed him, he was going like this. Yeah. And that's what they're doing right now. Yeah. And remember when Steven Spielberg made the movie Munich, did you see that? I didn't. Oh yeah, I did see that. Yeah. It was very unfair because it sort of implied that the effort to go after the people who were responsible was itself a bad thing to do because some people got killed and things and it was too vengeful. It wasn't. It wasn't. Let's say you wandered into the capital of the United States on January 6th. Police said this way and you know, you didn't destroy anything. You just were in the zone and you ended up two and a half, three years, four years in solitary. Yeah. That's what Trump's trying to do. Yeah. Yeah. That's fine, but are we going to hear because I participated in the abuse of kidnapped Israeli women? I'm supposed to get away with that. It was just a remark. You know, I wrote a column today and the United States, and I mentioned it in a video in my own, in a few words. The United States population is 34 times larger than Israel. Do the math. If we had something of the similar proportion or magnitude, it would be like this. There's a community near the Mexican border. 200,000 cartel members come across, 34 times times 6,000, and they rape and kill and murder Americans. And 1200, 1200 by 34 is 40,000 of them. They kill 40,000 Americans, graphically kill them, decapitate them, rape them. Then they go back to Sonola and they take with them 8,000 hostages. That would be the same number given the size of the United States. What would the United States do? What would the United States do? Because when they got back to Sonola, they would descend into a labyrinth of subterranean tunnels and the entry and exits would be under churches, schools, and mosque. And when we tried to deal with them for 21 days before we went in there, who would we talk to? Well, we could talk to the El Chapo, right? El Chapo. Please give back the 8,000 hostages and all the people that killed, of all of your 200,000, the people who killed the 40,000. We want them. We want them back. Well, maybe we can go to the UN. We'll talk to China and Russia. Please don't veto something in the Security Council. Or we could go to Geneva. Maybe we could ask our NATO partners, Mr. Sanchez in Spain or Macron or Sturmer. Can you help us? Can you have an international criminal court? That's what that... How would we do that? I can tell you what we would do. We would go in and bomb. We would try to bomb very carefully. We might even follow the Israeli example of phoning people to get out of Sonola. But and most of the people in Sonola, what if they were cheering this on and all the murders were among them? I don't think given our record, I don't think the greatest generation said they were killing 20,000 people a day in Asia in 1944 and 45. They started this war. I'm not going to... We're going to do something to the mainland because we're not going to send 2 million Americans into the homeland and lose a million collagen. We're just not going to do it. So that's what we would do. And what would people say? I can tell you a little bit what people would say. In 1917, Jack, Poncho Villa came across a border to a little town called Columbia, New Mexico. And he went in to get supplies and kill both federales that were former enemies of his, but he killed 17 Americans. He butchered them. And what did our left wing president Wilson do? He immediately rounded up 100,000 troops to guard the border. Then he told John Jay Pershing, with 14,000 Americans, go into Mexico and invade theirs. And he did. George Patton was there. They didn't find Villa. And the point is, that was a minor thing to what a magnitude of October 7th would be to us. And if a progressive president acted like that, you can imagine any president what he would do. And Netanyahu did, only 34 times more devastating as required. And what would the world say about us doing that if they came in and killed 40,000 Americans? I know what they would say. Yankee, go home. This is payback. This is part of the United States belonging to Mexico, Gadsden Purchase. Oh, Mexican war, Mexican war. You think I'm crazy? No. Amador, what's his name? The former president of Mexico. The guy, the former president, he in 24, he gave a lecture. And he said, they asked him about American-US relations. And somebody mentioned something. And he said, 106 years ago, Pancho Villa went into Columbia, New Mexico. And they were kind of aghast that he would mention it. And he said, that was a wonderful thing. That was a blow against imperialism. That was a former Mexican president, right out of office. So you can see what they would say. That's what they're saying about Israel. What I'm getting at is, if we put ourselves in the same position that Israel was put in on October 7th, and we reacted the same way, and we would be furious. The people would all condemn us and hate us for protecting ourselves, except for one big difference. If you win, then people being human nature, being what it is, you get respect. And that's just the way it is. That's why the golf partners are asking Israel, right now as we speak, can you send over more Arrow, David Sling, Patriot batteries, because we're afraid there's going to be another volley of Iranians. Please don't tell anybody you ever set foot on Arab soil. The other thing very quickly is, I am so sick of all of these terms that mean nothing. Ethnic cleansing, genocide. You heard the new one, Jack, settler colonialism. That you were ready as your settlers. I even heard it here on Turtle Island or wherever we live. You know who's a settler colonialist? Is Zoran Mondami. One percent of the Ugandan population are Indians, and I can guarantee you that Indian people from India do not have a 3500 year history of residing in Uganda, like the Jews in Israel, and they control 65% of the output of Uganda. Does anybody ever say to Mondami, you're a settler colonialist, imperialist. You were among the elite elite. That wasn't fair. You told us that you're going to go after white, richer neighborhoods, but your ethnic group is the wealthiest in the United States. Why don't you go back to Uganda and make sure that that money is spread around from the 1% that you came from? You could say that. You could talk about ethnic cleansing. I heard that not too long ago. These people are so ignorant. There was about Jack, seven or 800,000 Arabs when Israel was there, and they partitioned it. News came back to Israel that were in the West Bank, but anyway, that population fled. It's controversial where they were forced or they left, but there was 180 Jews left, 180,000 left. That population, 180,000, has increased 14 times now. There are 2.1 million Arabs, 21% of the population of Israel right now. And they say that Israel ethnically cleansed the Arabs out of there. How did it grow by 14 times? And why is it 21%? Oh, we better look at the opposite view. When Israel was formed, there was about 950,000 Jews in Jordan, in Egypt, in Iraq, in Syria, in Morocco, in Algeria, all of them. They had been there since the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Some of them had been there 800 years. And what happened after the 56, but especially the 60, they ethnically cleansed all of them. How many Jews are in Arab countries today? Almost none. There's 20-something thousand in places that are not Arab, that are Muslim in the Middle East, Turkey, and some in Iran, but they ethnically cleanse them. So it's so strange to see that Israel is ethnically cleansing people when the Arab population has increased 14 times, but the Arabs don't ethnically cleanse, but there's not a Jew left after nearly a million people fled for their lives. I don't know anybody. I know that Edward Said used to... Remember, he used to shake his keys, Jack, about his lost home in Palestine, his family? He'd go like this. And I thought, I haven't seen any Jewish guy from Egypt. This was my home in Old Cairo. This is my home in Damascus. This is my home in Baghdad. This is my home in Amman. They don't do that. And so settler colonialism, genocide. I was thinking the other day about genocide, because I saw Ilya and Omar mouthing off. And I thought, you know what? If I recall, there was a civil war in Somaliland. Somaliland was a new country that broke off from Somalia. And the Somali dictator was Sayyid Bahrie. And he was a Marxist, cutthroat, genocidal maniac. And he flipped and tried to get United States to support him against the commies in Ethiopia. They flipped both sides. And we did. And he engineered a genocide that killed 200,000 people. And who was one of the architects of the hit teams? I don't know if he was the main one or not, but he was one of the people. It was Colonel Omar, the father of Ilya and Omar. Okay. So when that satanic figure fell, we were obligated to his government. I don't know why, but we were. And most of the refugees, not all. Everybody knows the exact percentage. Most of the refugees that had ties with that horrific government and indirectly or directly were involved in that genocide fled to the West, either to Europe, mostly, or the United States. But I don't hear anybody walking up to Ilya and Omar on the street and saying, you are an ethnic cleanser. You are family was participating in genocide. And so what I'm getting at is all this anti-Semitism, everybody said, well, being against Israel is not being out. No, it's not, but it's the symmetry. It's the fixation. You talk about refugees and confiscated land you never, ever mention. You never mentioned the invasion of Cyprus by Turkey, the force removal of the whole northern most beautiful part of Cyprus. And then implanting Turkish nationals as settlers inside Cyprus to change the demography. You never talk about Azerbaijan going in. It's the same day as October 7th into the Armenian corridor at Nagorno and ethnically cleansing 120,000 Armenians and blowing up churches and having Erdogan say, we know how to take care of their grandparents. I didn't hear Mahmoud Khalil when he was at Columbia on October 7th say, well, in the interest of fairness, we're talking about displaced people and confiscated land. And I must say to my fellow Azerbaijani Muslims, that was very wrong that you ethnically cleanse 120,000 Armenians. I didn't hear anybody say that. So I'm so sick of all these terms they picked up in the university and they're so selective in their outrage. And that's a sign. How do you know an anti-Semite? It's very simple. When he starts on his harangue about the Jews, just say, take a deep breath and say, okay, you're against ethnic cleansing. How about ABCD? Oh, you're against settler, colonialist. How about ABCD? You're against genocide. How about the Armenian genocide? Do you ever talk about cutting off aid to Turkey? How about what they do to the Kurds? Do you ever talk about that? No. And when you see the asymmetry and they fix on this little country of 10.5 million, you know they're anti-Semites. That's the way you find out. I think on a separate show, Victor, we should talk about the Armenians because Armenians who are sent in America, I have friends up the gizoo who are and they're such lovely people. What is there? What is the problem that Turkey has had with them for at least 100 plus years now, probably much longer? So we should get into that. They were the oldest Christian nation. They were the first nation to adopt Christianity as the official religion and they were in a sea of Muslims by the 7th century and they were very capable people. Armenians in America, you've lived right? Aren't the pletiful? This is the third largest community is after Boston and Los Angeles, the Fresno County area. This is where William Sororion grew up. He had a home in Fresno and Fresno State along with UCLA had the two top Armenian studies program. IA's have a lot of Armenian friends and nobody talks about Turkey on the national stage. It's too powerful. So it's a losing cause. Let us focus on it sometime. Well, we're coming to the end here, Victor. We said we were going to be an hour or over but it's okay. We have to record another program today, our listeners and viewers. So you'll see us wearing the same clothes, I think, for the next show. But let me just read two comments to the many hundreds of thousands that people make on YouTube and other places. Here's one from Donnie D. 9432. You were talking about retiring. I fully expect to fall over dead with a tool of some kind in my hand doing some kind of work. It's been going for me even though I had half my lung removed and I'm on my third aortic pig valve. All right, Donnie D, keep it up. I like that. I like that. I was out helping my son do, hook up his vote today for Memorial Day and I can do stuff at just that. I had that AFib and so much blood loss. My heart just spikes and I don't mean I look at the watch, I can feel it and I get out of breath. But they tell me it's getting better and I'm hoping that. I'll find out my next Friday a week from now after all these scans and tests. I'm sure. But I like the idea that he lost that. That's a good attitude to have. One more. This little long gets from W. Keith Gilley, 9334. You were talking about being at that restaurant in Palo Alto with someone coming up to you. Yeah, that was a very strange thing. It was at a Pete's coffee, I shouldn't say that, but it was at Pete's coffee shop in Mineral Park. So here's what W. Keith has to say. I have a great deal of respect for Doc Hansen and I've been there when Doc was threatened or the potential of a threat. Someone might have received some United States Marine Corps corrective instruction. Never need to put hands on someone when they have a disagreement. That is the purpose of intelligent debate. If you put hands on someone as intelligent and intellectually accomplished as Doc Hansen, then you need an average intelligent Marine to instill some good old-fashioned Marine Corps discipline. My university was the School of Hard Knocks, aka Parasilon. Don't tread on Doc Hansen. You know, it was fun. It was a very weird paradox about the guy because on the one hand, he was much bigger than I was. I'm 6'1", but he was about 6'3", and he probably weighed 250, but he was older than I was, and he was in terrible physical shape. He was kind of leaning on the gallon. And the weirdest thing about it, he came up to praise me to get in on three. He goes, I just want to say, could I talk to you a second? I said, I'm kind of busy. Well, no, no, no, I love your part. And then I thought, wow. And then he says, but I can't stand you or what you say on Israel and the Jews. And you know what? You're doing it. And I thought, and then he kept getting in my face. I said, get away. And what do you do when somebody's, he must have been 75, and he looked like he was on his last legs because he was so, he was very obese, I think, as I remember. Senior abuse. That's what you do, Victor. Senior abuse. Yeah. Okay. Well, senior on senior abuse. He may have been watching this episode. Well, wait a minute. Maybe I get DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, exemption because now I'm a cancer survivor. You're cancer survivor. So I am in the 30% of the exploited. Yeah. You are a victim, Victor. I'm a victim. Yeah. Okay. Well, you've been terrific. I want to thank folks who subscribe to Civil Thoughts. That's what I do. One of the things I do for the center for civil society, go to civilthoughts.com, sign up. And when you do that every Friday, you'll get an email newsletter, 14, 15 recommended readings totally free. We're not selling your name. Civilthoughts.com. Again, Victor's website, thebladeapurseus, VictorHanson.com. Check out the daily signal and all its bounty, Rob, Bluey and company do a great job there. Thanks for all the wisdom you shared today, Victor. We'll be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Bye-bye.