Victor Davis Hanson: DHS Shutdown Is All About the Economy, Not ICE

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They looked at the fourth quarter shut down, longest in our history, last three months, September, October, November. And they said to themselves, we reduce GDP by two or three points and stall the economy. And Trump was going to have this great fourth quarter and then roar into 2026. So then they said, we're going to shut down the government unless you do the following to DHS. So here the Congress going into an administrative cabinet and telling them what they can and can't do, which is an executive branch. They're saying to them, we knew you were going to do this. So we've already funded it than the big beautiful bill. They're funded. It has nothing to do with DHS. And they said, okay, but we're going to hurt you in a different way. We're going to stop all the security at all the airports. We're going to not pay these people for over a month. And we're not going to pay anybody else in DHS does all this stuff. And then the Republicans said, well, why don't we just talk about ice? The Democrats can't talk about it because the half the party, Ilian Omar, you know, and AOC and all these, they don't want any ice. The new Ayatollah may, his sexual preference may be gay, which is no big deal in the West, but for Islam, that doesn't seem to comport. I was wondering whether they were going to hang him on a crane as they do or throw him off a building or stone him. Hello, and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. We're glad you could join us. This is the Friday news roundup, and we've got a lot on the docket about Iran and Cuba and what's going on on the Hill. So stay with us and we'll be right back with those stories. If you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, you might enjoy the Daily Signals flagship show, The Tony Kinnitcast, the same common sense perspectives you love weekdays at 7 p.m. Eastern. And unlike some of the other evening shows, we work up until showtime to bring you the latest breaking news, analysis and good old American sarcasm. Tom Tillis, I'm pretty sure might have been useful at one time as a doorstop. Find The Tony Kinnitcast on YouTube, X, radio, TV, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back, and we're happy to have everybody. Thank you for joining us. We are a subsidiary of the Daily Signals, so I hope everybody goes there and they are associated with the Heritage Foundation. So please go to their websites and have a look at what they do. Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky 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. Please come join us there. So Victor, lots going on. Still with Iran, I know that you and Jack discussed Iran on your Thursday show, but I had other questions to discuss with you on that. And so I'd like to start with a couple of things that have been floating around in the press either this week or last week. And one of them is, do you think that Iran will strike the U.S. homeland? That seems to be a concern with those drones. I was wondering your thoughts on that first. Oh, drones? No. But I mean, they have to, how would they be launched? Even if they had a range of four or 500 miles, they would be tracked by a U.S. Navy and destroyed. Any ship that got between Hawaii and the United States would be destroyed. But they've had an attack. We've had four attacks by naturalized citizens, and we have no idea to what degree they were influenced by Iranian people on the internet. And we had a Hezbollah guy, the person who ran the synagogue in Michigan's brother was in Hezbollah. They are directly controlled by Iran. No doubt he communicated with his Hezbollah relatives. And so, yeah, I mean, they have ways of, they almost killed the Saudi ambassador. They went after Trump, Bolton, Mike Pompeo. So, yeah, we should expect that. And then they were doing the same thing in Europe. Yeah. It also seems that Trump is preparing the much feared and awaited, perhaps, ground offensive. Do you think that that is going to happen? It seems that he's moving more troops over to the region. Now, that's a tripwire because so far he's said that the MAGA reluctance for a forever war, or endless war, did not include preemptive one-offs. So, kill Soleimani, one-off. Kill Baghdadi, one-off. Bomb, ISIS, one-off. Kill the Wagner group, one-off. Go into Venezuela, one-off. Take out the nuclear facilities at Fedor and other places in Iran last summer, one-off. But once you bring ground troops and they're not just in and out, it's going to be difficult. And why would he do that? I think Karg Eiglen is up to the north, but it's where 90% of their oil is pipeline to the island, and then it gives you the advantage that ships can come on all sides of the island. And so it's a massive export center. And he hasn't hit the oil on it. These hit them. It's got subterranean assembly plants of everything, weapons. So, I think the idea is that now that he's taken all the military installations out, and now that they're watching every second, every foot of that island, there must be a lot of Iranians ready for them. So it could be dicey, but I think the idea would be one of two goals. One would be to take Karg Eiglen and then start processing the oil when the Strait of Ruz was open and say you're going to put it in account for the Iranian people and starve the regime of its money. And then say to the Iranian people, this is going to get dicey, but the money will come to you if you get rid of these people. And the other is right across the Strait of Armuz, I think he's trying to create a sanitary corridor. They have ballistic missile silos along the coast aimed at the Gulf Petro nations. So the idea is that did they get them all by air power? Probably not. So you would put Marines along the edge of the coast and make an enclave, and then they would guard that shoulder of the Straits of Armuz. So that no missiles or troops or boats could come anywhere near, they would occupy the land and no Karg Island, they'd cut off the oil and that would require ground troops. But that's an escalatory step. It's going to be difficult. So it's a way, it's like a rock scissors paper game you played. They are hoping that we'll quit and they're ropy doping. They're just saying, yeah. You know, Monty Python, the guy that got all his limbs cut off and said he was ready to fight, or I remember in John Wayne's, the shootist, Richard Boone played a character where John Wayne, on the last day of his life, was going to kill three bad guys. And he had a little table in the saloon and he charged him. John Wayne relaxed his shot right through, right through, right through, right through. And the more that he shot and wound it, Richard Boone, he said, take that. Richard Boone said that. Kind of like an lonesome dove. Robert Duvall was running away from these awful Blue Duck people, the bandit Blue Ducks men. And they were screaming, they were Indians, so-called Native Americans with them. And one guy, he had shot about five of them, but he charged him and he's yelling, he just smiled and then just kind of relaxed and put his 45 right in his head. And the guy, and he blew him up. So that's what a rant is. They're feisty, they're angry, they're say they were winning, but they're being annihilated. And their hope is, very briefly, you can see what their hope is. The American left, the European left, the self-loathing, oikophobia of the Western nations and culture in general. To intimidate the Gulf monarchies, 20% of the world's oil goes to the straight of our moves, cut that off, and then just last. And Trump says, we've got to put so much punishment, and he's telling his generals, no doubt. Come on, come on, come on. One more week, one more week, and they say, okay, but we're running short of this and that, we've got this two carriers, they've been out there for months. Come on, come on, come on. So he's, something's gonna break. And the question is whether it's gonna be the willpower of the administration, given that for the midterm and MAGA pressure it's under, or the Iranians. The Iranian people can't really, these Iranians are doing something very unique. They're going after the people that kill the protesters. So they're going after checkpoints with drones. They know from their intelligence, they've got so many people that hate that regime, and there's so many cell phones, and there's so many Starlink stuff that people are able to contact them. There was a really bizarre story today where he called up a Republican guard officer, and they said, you're a dead man. He said, I'm a dead man walking, but I didn't do anything wrong. So they're contacting individual people and saying you're gonna die. This is a new dimension. So if there's a lot of that, and the Israelis just wait for a phone call, then the guy calls up and says, I'm on the sixth floor of my apartment, and there is a checkpoint right onto the street. Here's my address, and they know the GPS anyway from this phone. They can keep hitting those with drones. And that's what they're doing. But there's a lot of them. So the Israelis want to go through four more weeks to eliminate the command and control. They're doing the command and control mostly, and we're doing the infrastructure. We're trying to find the assembly. Apparently, they must have a lot more missiles, 3,000, 4,000 than we thought, because they're still sending these cluster bomb missiles, which are impossible to defend against, because when they break up or when they explode, these little bomblets go everywhere. Yeah, that looks really dangerous, too. Well, since you mentioned the Strait of Hormuz, it seems like the European countries, meaning Britain, France, Italy, Spain, and Germany have all said this is not NATO's mission to the Iraqi war. And so they're taking a step back. And there's been a lot of pushback from people in the United States. The one that I thought was most interesting is, the commentator wrote, don't they realize that the United States has lost 102,000 men since the end of World War II, helping to defend the European continent? The answer is- No thanks, right? No. I mean, Colin Powell said that during the Iraq war, that when they said, get out or we don't want you here. And he said, does that include the cemeteries of all the people who died saving you? I mean, in my own family, Holt Kather was my mom's first cousin. He was killed right after Normandy. And then my grandfather, Frank Hansen, was gassed in World War I. He was just on a farm in Kingsburg, money in his own business. He was 26 years old. And he didn't even know what was going on. They said France and England would have been- the German spring offensive would have crushed it. So they got there just in time. But yeah, their argument is we told Trump not to do this and he did it all alone. So he didn't want allies and he infended us in Greenland. And therefore we're just going to sit here and watch it. And the subtext is, we're going to be the beneficiaries of that because there'll be no more Iran with nuclear weapons, hopefully. We won't be in missile range and we won't have these terrorists. And if we want to get rid of some of these Muslim Islamic enclaves in Europe, there won't be a terrorist reaction because this Iranian pathological government funds everything. They're the only ones that have the money. The Gulf have stopped funding for the most part. Gutter's a different story, but most part. So Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis are getting money from Iran. So they want them to be removed. And they want Trump to keep doing it. But they don't want to be involved because they're scared of A, their own Muslim populations that are non-assimilated. B, they don't have many assets. I think Britain has maybe, if you call them combat ships, 35 major combat ships. And they've got like 45 admirals. So this is the Navy of Lord Nelson. It's just a joke. They can't even get to Cyprus with one ship after two weeks. So they won't have much to offer except credibility and we have allies in the world united, but they're not going to help. I think they should be very careful because the next time they get in a jam in a unilateral fashion, that's not a NATO mission, like the British going into the Falklands, you know, and then if they call up, if this is Margaret Thatcher in 1982, and she calls Reagan and say, we need your sophisticated intelligence. We need your sophisticated naval intelligence. We want to know where the Argentine submarines are. We want to know about your intelligence on the ground in Argentina. We need your fuel. We need your weapons. We need your Tomah. And we need an extra carrier if we lose one. Could you give that all to us? Yes. Yes. I think the answer is going to be no. That's pretty crazy. Because we were in the same position. We were like Margaret. Can we use Diego Garcia just to land some B2? Nope. Nope. You can't do it. Okay. That's the new rule. So I would be very careful, especially when we're the deterrent that protects them from Putin going further west from Ukraine, but they hate Trump and they know their populations do. Even the people that like us, the Poles, the Italians, they know that if they were to send a ship or two, their own populations would be furious. Yeah, that's certain. Well, Victor, let's talk a little bit more about the Israel Lebanon front and then also whether the Ayatollah is gay or not. But first, I would like to welcome back a sponsor, my Patriot supply. If a major disruption happened and you couldn't get to the store, how long do you think you would last with what's in your house right now? If it isn't any, oh, sorry, if it's anything less than a month, you need to check out our friends at my Patriot supply. They're America's number one preparedness company with over three million satisfied customers. And right now, when you go to preparewithvictor.com, they're best selling four week emergency food supply comes with an additional week of food free. This is the best long-term, storeable food you can find. You're getting at least 2000 calories a day, real meals with real ingredients, no artificial flavoring or colors, and shelf life measured in decades. Look, we all know we need to have some food stored for emergencies. Why not get it from the most trusted folks in the business and get a free week of food while you're at it? Go to preparewithvictor.com to get your free week of emergency food today. That's preparewithvictor.com. I'd like to thank my Patriot supply for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show. So Victor, I was just wondering your thoughts on this Israel Lebanon front. Do you think that the Lebanese government that is not part of Hezbollah will join and help the Israelis is kind of make you curious? No, they haven't done it in 50 years. They're not... I mean, if you put the Sunni population of Lebanon and the Christian population, which by the way is shrinking, people are fleeing to Europe and the United States from Lebanon, and you add it up, the Shia are only about a half as I recall. So they have the numbers, but the Christians don't get along with the Shia, they have more in common actually than the Shia and the Sunnis do. The Christians don't get along, I should say, with the Sunnis. I think surely you don't get along with the Shia, but the Sunnis and the Christians are not good partners and they have a rotating government. So they just don't have... And we gave them weapons and the Biden administration tried to beep them up, and they're not particularly fond of Israel either. So it doesn't seem to me that they're going to do anything, and that's why the Israelis are in there, and they've gone in there so often. The graveyard of the Israeli army, we were told, given their bad experiences in the 80s and going in there, but getting bogged down. But they're just trying to create a corridor along the border where there's no Hezbollah people and they can make sure that short-range drones and rockets don't hit them, and then they're trying to get their informants to tell people exactly where their rockets are. You know, I saw on the internet there were some leftists deploying what we're doing to Beirut, but they don't ever say that Hezbollah comes in and puts these missiles in the basements of all these apartment buildings, and everybody knows it. And then in the middle of the night, they take them out to a launching pad. So why don't they just, you know, if they're going to allow that to happen, and then I don't know what I would do if I was in an apartment and a bunch of thugs came in and said, we're going to use your apartment to put a missile, and you said, well, you're going to blow us all up and put a gun to my head. That's what you're talking about. Yeah, you sure are. Thug tactics. Well, there's been a lot of news in the very recent press, and we are recording on Wednesday, that the new Ayatollah may, his sexual preference may be gay, which is no big deal in the West, but for Islam, that doesn't seem to comport. But I was wondering, I mean, that's riff for misinformation. I was wondering whether they were going to hang him on a crane as they do, or throw him off a building, or stone him. It's very interesting, because the first reports came out that he was a hypocrite. Not only did the Khamenei family have a lot of investments put it that way in the United Kingdom, but he was going there for impotence treatment. But that wasn't the story. Apparently, the gay, the gay tola is impotent only when it comes to women, that his family had known that, that he wasn't able to procreate, and they passed it off as impotence among the rumor male of the elite. But he was not able to perform his marital duties, because he was married to a woman apparently, and he had no enjoyment of it. So I don't know how you treat somebody for that. But he may be okay if he's with men, but he might be dead if he's with men. So it doesn't matter. He's out of commission. That's the least of his problems right now. They're killing everyone. Lauren, Johnny, they're going down the list. Israel, the head of the intelligence, the head of the defense, the head of the Republican, the revolutionary guard, the head of the Bosch G's, Bosig, whatever he pronounced that, they're going down list person by person. And the Iranians say that we're a system. It doesn't matter who leads it. And the Israelis say, no, at some key point, everybody that has any responsibility at all knows they're going to be dead. And they would, they're not going to go to work. They're going to hide out. And that's going to cause the collapse. You know, the strange thing about that is that it doesn't seem for all the talk of hitting all the heads of various organizations, either in Iran or of the Hezbollah, they still seem to come back and come back and kind of stay alive in ways. But I mean, I hope they can get rid of them, but it doesn't. That's the tactical, tactically they can, but the question is not tactically. The question is, is there somebody in charge who says, this morning we have 89 landmines, we have 500 sea mines, we have this number of ballistic missiles stored up in the mountains, and we're going to distribute it to these locations that I don't think they have those people. So you have people, it's like they're dying on the vine, you have berries on the vine, but somebody's cut the cambium layer of the stump and they can't get nourishment. So it's just a matter of, the whole key is at what point, if you're an Iranian, do you feel safe enough and angry enough after they killed 30,000 of you to go back out and hope that people who killed you before are going to flip or leave you alone and have a mass protest, like 100,000 people in the streets. And what would happen if you did? Would you be killed with some of the people defect to your side? Would Israeli drones be monitoring it and kill the people that wanted to kill it? Nobody knows. Yeah, how the coup and overthrow and the assumption of a civilian government would happen, I know they have a parliament that under the Ayatollah obviously didn't do much, but how that will turn to a functioning civilian government seems to be the big question. All right, and then the last thing on last thing on Iran that I have, I've seen sort of some whisper of this in the media, but it seems like if you look at the entirety of Iranian, the history of Iran or that region, they have two large traditions, the Persian tradition, which is earlier and subverted in the 7th century by the and 8th century by the Islamic tradition. Wouldn't the Iranians or it seems to me that culturally you could say, well, the Islamic tradition has really turned this place into a disaster. Why don't we go back further to our roots as Persians and Persian society and a Persian society that I know was brutal. It was dictatorial, of course, back in those days, but it also had informed most of what was called the golden age of Islam, meaning that most of the scholars came out of a Persian tradition. So it has a very strong cultural intellectual tradition. I think that's the problem that the regime is having, that they have a Zoroastrian religious tradition and there were three peoples in most of Iran. There were the Persians and the Medes who were conquered as we learned from Herodotus and then there were the Parthians who came into prominence during the Roman period. But they were all Iranian, Turkic people, at least the Parthians were, and they had a mention all over classical literature as their main rivals to the Byzantine Empire was always the Parthian Empire and then later the so-called re-emergence of the Persian Empire and of course there were Darius I and Xerxes and Darius III that Alexander conquered. But that was hijacked, that tradition by these Islamic Shia radicals. And that's important because when you go to the Middle East, there is a prejudice that Arabs, in many cases, do not feel comfortable with Iranians and vice versa because there is a sophistication that exudes from the Iranians, that they have an older literature, they have an older corpus of religious studies, they predate Islam as a great civilization. And before the mullahs took over, technologically they were more advanced in the Arab countries. And I mean, the Shia envisioned for Iran by 1980 was pretty much what we see now in the Emirates or Dubai. He wanted a secular, sophisticated, highly technological society and he was getting there slowly. A new golden age maybe, huh? If only they could shake Islam, which doesn't seem friendly to intellectual progress. Well, Victor, let's turn to Cuba after we take a moment for some messages. Stay with us 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 to Victor Davis-Hanson in his own words. So Cuba has been in the news as well recently and I guess given, right, the power grid shut down. Some Latin American countries have expelled Cuban officials and we also see that Venezuela, they've lost their Venezuelan oil, which has parted the energy crisis for Cuba. And Trump thinks that Russia's kind of out of the game to be a supporter of Cuba since it's got its Ukraine war going on. And I was wondering, given all of those conditions, are we prime for real change in Cuba this time around? I think the problem with Cuba was that they were propped up by the Russians and by the Obama administration that opened up relations and allowed tourism and popped that Castroite government up. And the Maduro-Chavez-Maduro regime gave them subsidized fuel. So Trump, they'd never think he's a geo-strategic thinker, but he is. So you chase the Chinese or try to chase them out of Panama and Latin America, cut them off from Iranian oil and control Venezuelan oil, which they were getting a lot of. Then you get rid of the hardcore Stalinist and Venezuela. They're still probably socialist, but they're under control of the United States. And then Russia can't get in there because it's embargoed and they're tied down in Ukraine and you've got Cuba starving to death. No oil, their airlines are all parked, they can't fly, most of the cars can't run. And so they're falling apart. So the government, the surviving Castro brother, is it Raul Castro? I think he's 95. He's just irrelevant. They've got a technocrat running it or an old aporatic check. So just a question of how do you survive? And what they think is, well, Americans are going to come here, a bunch of Cuban right-wing Americans with a lot of money are going to come here and they're going to put beaches on the hotels and they're going to bring in, fix the airport. They'll have cruise ships. This will be all great, but we'll still be communists. And the Cubans think from America, no, you won't. We're going to come in over there and we're going to not just take over the tourist industry and you won't not just have Carno who's there, but we're going to insidiously undermine the government and turn it into constitutional system. It's kind of funny because the Leptis, if you ask a Leptis on campus, they love Castro, they love Cuba, but they never would want to live there. But if you said to them, we're going to free the Cuban people and there's going to be Spirit Airlines, charter flights and caravans and you've got mobs of Americans there and it's going to be like Key West on steroids. Oh no, why would you do that? So they don't want that obviously, but you know, McDonald's, Starbucks everywhere. If you read it about early Spanish literature in the 16th century, that's where Cortez was. He first came, most of the Spanish hill doggoes that came to the New World went to Cuba first. They didn't know anything about Mexico or the Mexican coast. So they went to the Caribbean and that's where Castro, I mean Cortez left Cuba to go land in what was the little shrine of Veracruz to conquer the Aztec Empire. He left because and they had, most of the indigenous people on Cuba, the native had been extinguished by the Spanish and they brought in a lot of African slaves. So today in Cuba, it's a little bit different ethnically than say Mexico or Bolivia or Peru. It's mostly direct descendants from the ruling Spanish and then Mestizos who intermarried with former slaves and black Africans, but you don't have a lot of indigenous people alive in, if any, in Cuba. So it's unique because that island was ethnically cleansed of indigenous people by the Spanish. There weren't very many of them and they were very violent and they had pretty much existential wars with the Spanish. All right, Victor, I'd like to 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. 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 war time. We've normalized deficits that would have stunned earlier generations. The policymakers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention, more printing, more distortion. 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Whether your funds are in retirement account or sitting in the bank, if you believe, as I do and we do, that the best time to reinforce your position is before the storm becomes obvious. Call 844-790-9191. That's 844-790-9191. Or visit Vector.com. That's 844-790-9191. Again, that's 844-790-9191. Or visit Vector.com. History rewards those who take the long view. And we'd like to thank Allegiance Gold for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show. So Victor, let's turn to the Hill and talk a little bit about the controversies going on up there this week. The first one is the SAVE Act, Save America actually act. And they're trying to get voter ID through Congress and they're in the Senate now with the bill and it's having a little bit of trouble. Some Republicans don't support it. And Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is one of those. And that was a strange vote that she voted against bringing it forward for debate. They have ranked voting in Alaska. And she didn't really win her nomination. She won as a write-in. As a general, I don't want to be too cynical, but Democrat or Republican, if you were elected with a sizable portion of mail-in ballots, those can't be verified as we know. So you're not going to... I mean, Rand Paul is a libertarian. He will vote against it. But she, her attitude would be, why would I want to do that? Because if you had to go to the polls and have ID and everything, I'd lose. She probably would have lost. And so a lot of Democrats would have lost too. That's the subtext behind it. It's not that they have any. I don't know how many times I go into my small town, well, it's 20,000 now. And I see people, so-called people of color, and they're showing me IDs to... Showing me. I was at the lab getting a blood draw the other day in this town. And people were showing their IDs when they showed their... They said, are you so-and-so? And there was all these rooms. They all had showed IDs. They even asked for my Medicare card. So it's not about that. And they know that even Mondami, when he wants snow shovelers, he asks for ID identification. It's just they have become so dependent on registering and having people to vote who have no known address or can't show up or don't exist, that they just won't do it. And Project Veritas, the former director, as you know, he was down in Los Angeles posing as a homeless person. And he saw people coming through with the Democratic affiliations registering voters among homeless telling them, you don't really need an address. And these were all going to be mail-in voters. So that's what it's aimed at. And in the 2024 election, they ran a poll. And usually the Democrats cite these polls and it runs something like this. If you had a voted, if you had been registered, that's everybody, not the people who were... They were just registered and didn't vote or just the people who were registered and did vote. Usually the Democrats get that margin. In this particular poll, and I think another one, Trump would have won more by a greater margin than he did, had all the people who supported him, who were eligible to vote, registered to vote and showed up at the polls. And so that shows you that the Democratic base is shrinking. And why wouldn't it be given their agenda on the border, the trend stuff, the crime? They don't... For all of the people angry that we watch on television or on the internet, that not one says, I disagree with Donald Trump. I have this plan for the border. I have this plan for crime. So we had these senators, they are in Congress people, they don't even know how silly they sound. You have a guy on TV and he'll say almost on spec. Iran was very dangerous. They had killed so many Americans. But there was no immediate threat. There was no immediate threat. And so you say, well, there was no immediate threat right before the Beyraid bombings. There was no immediate threat right through the Iranian hostage. That was a complete surprise. Did anybody say, I think they're going to blow up the embassy in Tanzania and Kenya? No. Anybody say, hmm, I think they're going to try to kill Trump? No, nobody said that. How about... Oh, there might be an immediate threat because they're going to put thousands of shape charges, IEDs in Afghanistan, but they're particularly Iraq and kill anywhere from 600 to 3000 Americans. So it's not that there's a... The point is twofold. There's been a lot of provocations over 47 years that have gone down the answer. And number two, they are... It's not that they're immediate threat. They are an immediate... They're immediate, a midterm threat. They're an existential threat. They're a long-term threat. They're just a threat. That's who they are. They can't help it. You know what I mean? That's who... That's what they are. I quoted that once, but in Dirty Harry, when they say, why does the kill... I forgot his name, Zodiac or something. Why does he does do it? In Dirty Harry, he says, because he likes it. And he can too. They like it. They like killing Americans. They hate the West unless their kids are in school here. Yeah. Well, let's turn then to the shutdown of the DHS. And while I... All I see out there is that the Republicans are blaming the Democrats and their constituencies believe that. And the Democrats are blaming the Republicans and their constituency believes that. But is this going to be a net benefit for either side, or is this just going to be a civil war divide between parties type thing? They looked at the fourth quarter shutdown, longest in our history, last three months, September, October, November, December, November, December, November, November, November, November, and they said to themselves, we reduce GDP by two or three points and stall the economy. And Trump was going to have this great fourth quarter and then roar into 2026. So then they said, we're going to shut down the government unless you do the following to DHS. So here the Congress going into an administrative cabinet and telling them what they can and can't do, which is an executive branch. And they're saying to them, we knew you were going to do this. So we've already funded it than the big, beautiful bill. They're funded. It has nothing to do with DHS. And they said, okay, but we're going to hurt you in a different way. We're going to stop all the security at all the airports. We're going to not pay these people for over a month. And we're not going to pay anybody else in DHS does all this stuff. And then the Republicans said, well, why don't we just talk about ICE? And they don't, the Democrats can't talk about it because the half the party, Iliana Omar, you know, and AOC and all these people, they don't want any ICE. AOCs, I think her father was a naturalized citizen. Her mother may have been naturalized. I think we know how Iliana Omar came here. I should say we don't know exactly given the details, but so many people now are invested in having no immigration system that the idea that anybody would be deported is Gestapo like to them. So, and then the real cause, the Greeks had a good word for it. It's in Thucydides. He, and he always says there was this. So he spoke, this was the pro-fascist, the pretext, the idea, the real cause. So they're talking about the pro-fascist is DHS. And that's a silly one because they can't come up with any reason why you would shut down the government to hurt DHS when DHS won't be hurt. So then the idea, the real cause, that they want to repeat what they did last year and hurt the economy by destroying the airline industry, making people wait, making people angry, slowing down a lot of stuff that the DHS does. And they want to or have Trump crawl back to them and said, please, please, you're interrupting air service. And they've counseled a lot of flights and they want to hurt the economy because they don't have an agenda. It's, I've never seen anything like it. I mean, that's sincerely, I've never seen a political party without an agenda. If you ask any Democrat on the street, okay, we know you hate Trump. We know you hate ICE. Would you please tell us your foreign policy, what's your policy on the border when you get in power? Let's say Gavin Newsom's present. Is he going to have the wall there? Is he going to tear it down? Not one inch, as Joe Biden said. Tell us. Are you going to, what are you going to do with the economy? You're going to have, you're going to cancel all these pipelines offshore. You're going to go back to green subsidies. Is that what you're going to do? Are you going to empty the petroleum reserve? Joe Biden almost did 60% of it. He emptied. Just tell it, but they won't because it's not because they don't want to. We know they don't want to, but they don't know what they want to do. They have no agenda. It's just, it's just, it's a bunch of congresswomen dressing up and kickboxing and then using the F word, the S word, and then it's this geriatric tumor and Pelosi hobbling around and screaming. And then there's these young people who, if anybody said, what is Jasmine Crockett known for, for legislation? She's known for one thing, saying that white people are satanic basically. That's all she yells out. And she's this prima donna from the suburbs who went to prep school and then fakes a inner city ghetto accent depending on the audience to which she's speaking. Now you mentioned the democratic agenda and I did notice besides hating Trump, they do have another thing that they're putting on the table. And that there was an interview of JB Pritzker and then Susan Rice was talking about prosecuting anybody who in this administration, they see as criminal and they'll prosecute them either criminally or civilly. JB Pritzker said that and Susan Rice came out warning corporations that if they comply with this administration, they too will be subject to... Yeah, she didn't say. She just said, you would leads out there in the media. So what do you mean, Susan? You mean that if there's an executive order that DEI must be eliminated because it doesn't follow the Supreme Court ruling on racial preferences, you're going to do what? You're going to call in Microsoft and say, we're going to cancel all your government contracts unless you do what? I don't... I mean, are they going to cancel them unless they reinstate DEI? So I don't know what she meant. I do know that she's very sensitive because in the Obama years she was revealed as a buffoon. In other words, when they wanted some ignorant ignoramus to go out on Sunday TV and lie to the American people that the Benghazi deaths had been caused by an accidental release of a filmmaker's video that an American, supposedly a right-wing, Coptic immigrant did a video, which he did, but he was an obscure person. That triggered the whole demonstrations that led to the death in Egypt, excuse me, the death in Libya and Egypt, all this mass across North Africa. No, she just did that because the Obama administration had ignored warnings that the security at the consulate was non-existent, basically. And then she, when they wanted somebody to lie that all the WND had been moved, we moved from Syria under Obama's red line, they wheeled her out. And then she still couldn't stop saying stilly things. And then she goes to a meeting where they're plotting to go after Trump. Obama's basically saying, I'm going to be out of office. And you guys in the CIA, Comer, Clapper, Colme, Brennan, I want you to do this and do this and find him in Russian collusion. Then she writes on her email to herself, there was a meeting in which the president and people were very concerned that everything be constitutionally correct. And so, I mean, she wrote it to herself and then mailed it and then showed people. See? I mean, how silly is that? And so she was kind of the fall girl for the Obama administration. And I was on the Harry Guggenheim board and I served with her mother, Lois, and she was from a very aristocratic family of Caribbean origins, very wealthy, sort of the Doyen of the black community in Washington. So she was an aristocrat. She married a multimillionaire, very privileged woman. So it's kind of ironic that she's on the barricades of some crusading civil rights leader and she's always haranguing people about the injustices in the country when she's a member of the ultra, ultra, ultra elite, both plutocratic and aristocratic. And so, I don't think, what I'm saying is she has no judgment. So if you really believe that, that you're going to punish people, then you keep quiet about it because Trump has two and a half years left. So then you think, somebody called her up today and said, you idiot, he runs the DOJ. We've got a lot of people in Minnesota that are crooks. We've got a whole scandal in California that are crooks. Newsom and Wallace maybe have known about it. We don't even know if Comey and Brennan and Clapper are out of the woods yet. We don't know if Fannie Willis and Latita James are out of the woods yet or Alvin Bragg. What are you doing? If when they hear that, they'll just go after us. It was so stupid. All right, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about Cesar Chavez and then California as well. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Welcome back to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. You can find Victor on X. His handle is at VD Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup. So if those are Arab social media outlets, please follow Victor on those venues. So first, I wanted, there's been recent news that came out that Cesar Chavez has during his time had abused young girls while he was the icon of the American immigrant labor movement. But there was an interesting thing in left news outlets and this I'm using the Atlantic that had a story that Cesar Chavez and it's not, I guess it's somewhat complementary, but it's also got an edge to it. They said Cesar Chavez oscillated between a Christ-like asceticism and a Chicago political tactics, like informing on illegal aliens taking the place of orders. He wasn't that he was informing. He said the Teamsters were hiring illegal aliens and he called them wetbacks and he sent people down to the border with clubs and they worked with the Border Patrol and ratted people out when people, all these ICE people should say to themselves, hmm, we're on the front lines trying to stop ICE just like Cesar Chavez pause, tried to help ICE. So in other words, left-wing crowds are now trying to stop ICE, but the Locust Classicas was the same thing with Cesar Chavez, but he was organizing with mobs down at the border where they were trying to go after illegal aliens and then help ICE and the board, what the precursors of ICE. And I grew up here on a farm at the very center of this, Delano, where he started is about 45 miles from here and in the park in town, I remember going and listening to him. In fact, when I was a senior, there was a big strike at Table Grape and all of the guys wanted to watch it because we had all worked on packing houses and everybody said that Cesar Chavez threw nails at the UFW through nails all over the driveways. They cut down little trees with chainsaws. They sabotaged trains that had refrigerated cargo on them going eastward and it was mostly Chavez's brother who was in charge of the shock troops. So a bunch of guys, I think there were two Mexican American guys and two of us, let's go watch a big strike in Delano. So we drove down and there were maybe a thousand people protesting and there were people picking early table grapes and they were trying to get the people to come out. And I was kind of naive and I said, well, he's nonviolent. There's not going to be anything happening. And everybody said, oh, yeah. So a prearranged signal, they just went into the fields, the Chavistas and pulled everybody out. And it was one of the most violent things I'd ever, excuse me, that I'd ever seen. And the weird thing was we were there watching it sitting on the car and the Tulare County Sheriff's came over and wanted to arrest us. And they said, you guys are from Berkeley and we all had like short hair and San Joaquin Valley accent. No, we're not. We're just watching. Oh, you're an outside agitator. The problem with Chavez was he was never an angelic. He gets credit because I grew up in those days and I were in summers, I either worked on my grandfather's farm or I worked for local packing houses and I picked peaches and grapes and it was pretty rugged. I mean, there weren't beautiful bathrooms and water break, all that. So he got all that in mostly by fear. And then the big company, they weren't even big companies. They were family owned companies. And he started with the table grape because the others were so dispersed. In other words, peaches, plums, nectarines were 40, mostly small growers. They became greater, bigger, but in those days, and the raisin farmers, we were raisins and plum. But they were all members of the community and their kids all worked in the fields. And you might have like 20 workers for one week a year picking grapes on your place. So it wasn't anything he could organize and the people were local. So the kids got out of school, we all got out of school early. So my grandfather and my uncle who were farming at the place would say, okay, you're going to get, well, one through you four boys are going to get well, one for, and I want you to pick 200 trays a day so that the workers see you. And I don't want, he's horsing around and when you roll, I want you to roll 2000 or 2500 trays when it was time to roll. So everybody could see you because that was, you know, you didn't want a bunch of snotty white kids with Filipino workers or people from Oklahoma or Mexican America. So he didn't target that. He targeted shipping. And most people when they go in the stores don't go rush to the Sun Maid Raisin counter. And they don't rush to get some nectarine. They love those big, beautiful green and red grapes. So he knew that. The problem he had was these were not vast, tinico type farmers. They were the best farmers. They were the most savvy farmers and they were hard knuckle farmers and they were from immigrant families. So you had Derigo from Sicily, the Derigos, you had the Jamarra family from Italy, I think. And then you had the Zaninovic family from Croatia, the Pando family from the Balkans, I think Croatia, the Zulun, all of these people. They were hardcore people that had nothing and they built up this stuff. So when you saw them on TV or you talked to them, these were guys that were tan, leathery faces, cigar in their mouth. They'd worked their whole life. They were not the type of, you know, like a suit, you know, a guy with an MBA or something. Hey, Mr. Chavez, well, no, no, these guys were tough as nails and they had done all the work themselves when they were young. And they had built these kind of, they were large acreages, but compared today, I mean, they might have been a thousand or acres, but not like these 20, 30, 50,000, 100,000. But so it was very hard to, took him about five or six years and you had to get, he thought he had to get violent. So what he did was he, he wasn't a very good speaker, but he had a very expressive face. I remember listening to him, well, the growers, the growers, you know, the growers, they, this is more than just grapes. These people don't want people to live. They don't want them to drink water. They're killing us with pesticides. And that was very effective. And these guys were kind of like, you know, I went out, I did it. Oh, it's so bad about it. That kind of, so they won that optics war. And then they got Robert Kennedy and he came out and he blessed the program and all the people boycotted grapes and they did a secondary boycott, which was illegal. In other words, if Safeway had non-union grapes, then you, nobody would go to Safeway. They bought, they wouldn't boycott. You couldn't go to Safeway and not buy grapes. You couldn't go to Safeway at all. So even at the local Safeway where I was growing up, they had pickets all the time. Don't go into Safeway. And it's very funny. I was in this period in 71. I was 17. I went to University of California, San Diego, the most radical campus, probably in the nation. It had just opened three years ago. And I had grapes, but they weren't table grapes. They were the same species, Thompson seedless, but we dried them into great. They were the little yellow ones. They're not the big fat green that you girdle and use jabrella and you artificially make big. Same plant, same vine, but you cultivate it differently. So I had them in my room and everybody would come in and eat them. And then one day, some, a very, I won't mention her name. She's very famous. Her parents owned a huge cosmetic company. And another guy whose father was a pretty well-known producer came in and they said, these are grapes. We boycott grapes. I said, these are, I picked them myself. You're non-union. I said, they're not even table grapes. They looked like grapes. I said, we dried them into raisins. Well, they should know all these are grapes. So they put all these stickers on my door, my dorm boycott. And then I walked out and everybody said, you hate chavez. So that's how he won. He had all of these wealthy white kids that felt so guilty they wouldn't eat grapes. Most of them didn't eat the grapes anyway, but in the cafeteria, if you had grapes, they had big signs, union, pick, you know, all of this. And it was very effective. The problem with him was that beneath that angelic face, he was ruthless. So he drove almost all the people that he worked with out of the movement. His closest confidant was Dolores Huerta. And even on camera, he would scream at her. They were supposed to be, and they became intimate. Nobody knew that, but now we're going to celebrate every town in the valley has Caesar Chavez Boulevard. He's a folk hero, but no pe... There's almost nobody who is Mexican-American, second, third works in agriculture. I mean, in a sense of picking thing. That's mostly immigrant labor, first generation. But the point is, everybody reveres it reveres him. And I don't know what's this going to do because they've all, yesterday and today, canceled their Caesar Chavez. And why did they cancel it? Because these revelations are coming out and it coincides with two things, the Me Too movement and the Epstein files. And the accusation is that according... And it's not some white, maga nut on a talk radio who's screaming and yelling that they can easily character. It's Dolores Huerta, 95-year-old Dolores Huerta, who knows everything about the... And whom Caesar Chavez treated very shabbily and drove out of the movement, especially with his little flirtation... A big flirtation with Synanon, that weird cult where they played the game, where they got everybody in and they just said F-U and that really turned off the Catholic, Communite, Mexican-American hierarchy in the union. And he was very vindictive. So he turned over the apparatus of the whole UFW to Synanon. And by 1975, 80, he was zero. Everybody just imploded. But the weird thing is, the accusations are, I shouldn't say weird, tragic, is that Dolores Huerta, the most radical Mexican-American political figure in California, is now saying that she was taken to a vineyard and raped by Caesar Chavez. And then other situations was forced to have intercourse with him. And she mothered two children that were his. She was so bothered by it. I think she had eight of her own that... And I think, excuse me, Chavez's wife had eight children. Dolores Huerta might have had 10 or 15. And she was very feral. And she had them raised by somebody else, as I read the accusations today. And they did a DNA test. They are his children. But that's not the worst, that he raped his most trusted advisor, then kept quiet, that he was having other affairs with women. He also... There's an allegation that he had groomed young girls as very, very young. I won't get into the ages, but they were considerably younger than 15, 14. And he had sexual intercourse with them. So he was a rapist and a pedophile. Well, you don't know how that this is going to do. I mean, nobody wants to cover it, but the New York Times is going to run... And you know what they're going to do. So... The New York Times already ran a story with that. Yeah. But I mean, they're doing a deep investigation because it's... Apparently, it's the tip of the iceberg. He had affairs with a lot of different women. And many of them were underage, allegedly. And so it kind of... He always played the idea that there wouldn't be any women in the UFW that were vocal and high profile, except Dolores Huerta. And he would always tell her what to do. And his wife's never... You never saw his wife. She stayed home. He... Good mother, good Catholic woman. He always said he was a good Catholic. And so that whole facade and down south of Bakersfield where they have the compound, I debated somebody there once. It was very strange. It was kind of a synonym. Has no formal relation with synonym, but it had a cult like many of the people who worked there and operated it were second, third generation Chavez family members. But it was kind of a hero cult. And mind me, of a hero cult, archaeologists finding Greece, the hero cult of Ajax. And then there's all these little buildings and relatives and stuff that were worshiping Ajax. Well, they worship him. And we don't know what it's going to happen now. If the left is consistent in their protocols and policies and iconoclasm, I suppose what they're going to do is we'll see Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer and AOC, Jasmine Crockett, introducing motions to do what? Tear down Caesar Chavez's statues, rename all of these boulevards to someone else. They've already canceled all of the... They've already canceled all of these commemorations. So it's quite stunning if these allegations are true. And what's weird is the UFW and the Caesar Chavez Foundation have not denied them. In fact, they've said, if true, we are going to have compensation with the victims. So what that tells me is that everybody who was an intimate, who are now in their 80s and 90s knew about this, and they knew about it for years. And they felt it was not... These girls, if it was true, that had coerced sexual relations with the great icon who were under 18, they were sacrificial ponds or collateral damage. And you could not reveal that because it would hurt a lot of resistance, la casa. And that's why it kept quiet. And now Dolores worked as 95 and she's going to meet her Lord and she wants to get this off her chest and tell the truth. So it's coming from one of the most, I shouldn't say one of the most, the most authentic United Farm Workers organizer administrator who's still alive. So it's going to be very hard to refute. Yeah. And she has the DNA tests, she says, of these two daughters are now in their 60s and they're alive. And if their mother in their 90s says this, then they're going to collaborate that. I think what else is interesting is that the New York Times and the Atlantic are running the stories about that. That's because they want to get it out first and they want to package it. And so you've already said that they had a duality that he was charismatic and sort of reflected. Yeah, Christ-like and yes, yes, and political tiger, right? I had no strong feelings, but I had grew up with people. I worked at packing houses when I was in the summer and they despised him. These packing houses meant you were pretty wealthy and you had your own land. And they'd always say, ah, you know, he never worked a day, went out one day and he got sunstroke. He didn't have a long, he always said he had back problems, but I don't think he was a farm worker for very long. He was a very adroit. He got all of, gosh, he got the UFW, the AFL, CIO, Walter Ruther and the auto work, everybody. The UFW was under his control, but also you had all these people traipsing down to Delano. Then he had something called, let me remember, the Robert F. Kennedy Medical Plan. And he got a lot of money from private foundations to fund what was necessary was healthcare for farm workers. Good idea. And it was so poorly run and replete with efficiency that it kind of was broke very quickly. And some of the workers never got covered. Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show and we have a few comments of those who send in their comments. Here is from Russell Doe. There are a few conservatives that maintain a gentle humble and empathetic nature as you do. If Trump could harness just a small percent of what you have, his approval ratings would go through the roof as his policies are transforming this country and the entire pecking order of this world. He is a great president, but the teeniest bit of your humility would make him lovable. I like that. That was sweet. Thank you, Russell Doe. And this is from Matt Thrasher, frustrated in California. He titles it, our family recently moved to the foothills of California from Flagstaff, Arizona. My wife's brother, who has special needs, also moved with us as his mother can no longer take care of him. I knew when we moved to California that everything would be more expensive. But what I didn't realize was that my brother-in-law would get so little given all the taxes we are paying. You would think high taxes and being in a blue state would mean they take care of their most vulnerable. Not even sure how we will pay for everything. Arizona was much lower taxes and they took care of those with special needs. I'm disappointed in the state of California. Well, we have all of these disclosures that there's a multi-million, if not billion dollar fraud and hospices in the LA greater area where these people just went to hotels and said they were hospice and they were getting $6,000 a month in some cases for people supposedly dying and they had nothing. It was just a multi-fraud. And the Newsom, the Newsom or Walt's attitude to these disclosures is never okay. Let's find the people who did it. Let's indict them and jail them as a deterrent. Let's cancel this program until we need more money. Because they believe Walt's and Newsom believe the money is there, so they would say to, well, Victor, these people are needy. These are victims. They're the oppressed. So what does it matter the delivery systems? They can go in and get food stamps or they can go get it, pail grounds or we can just say we want to give you the money and try to help out the dead. But if they don't do it, it's okay because the money is coming from the wealthy to the poor. They're really socialist, communist. And then the very last thing I'd like to do is just show a picture sent to us from down under Judy James and I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this for those who are, it's not going to focus in very well. It's an absolutely beautiful picture from down under. Yeah, it is beautiful. Oh my gosh. So Judy James, thank you for the picture and the nice note as well. Thank you, Victor, for everything today. Great and informative session. We'd love it. Thank you. And thanks everybody for joining the Friday News Roundup on Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Please come back to join us. 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.