Victor Davis Hanson: California Election Theft Happens With Mail‑In Ballots, Not Election Day

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It's only going to cement the reputation of California that it's a third world dysfunctional state. Well hello ladies and hello gentlemen and welcome to Victor Davis-Hanson in his own words. I'm Jack Fowler, Lucky Man. I get to ask Victor questions. Questions, I'm pretty sure you would want him to address. We are recording on Sunday, June 7th, 2026. This particular episode will be up on Tuesday, June 9th. And in this episode, we're going to look back on D-Day. I'm going to ask Victor some questions from the perspective of a few days. D-Day plus three, D-Day plus four. How did things stand that day? But more timely, and again, this episode's up in two days. In two days, will Spencer Pratt still be a candidate? One of the top two vote-getters for the Los Angeles mayoral race. We have John Bolton seeming like he's going to plead guilty for that infamous case. We have Carmelo Anthony case where he is convicted, not convicted. He's being prosecuted for a murder attempt of Austin Metcalf in Texas. America 250s a month away. Gosh, doesn't feel like there's anything being celebrated, Victor. And a little more on Scott Pelley, the fired 60-minutes host. So we'll get to all these topics when we return from these important messages. What would you say if you found out that some of America's biggest companies, ones you use and support, are paying for gender transition drugs and surgeries for kids? This is really happening. So our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom are doing something about it. Companies like American Express and Home Depot appear to cover irreversible, experimental gender transition procedures for minors in their employee health care plans. That means kids can get puberty block, cross-sex hormones, and life-altering surgeries. And the companies you support foot the bill. This has to stop. And you can do something about it. Sign Alliance Defending Freedom's petition telling corporate America to stop covering these procedures. Your voice will be heard by leaders at these major companies whose decision to end coverage for these procedures could impact other companies across the country. Visit joinadf.com slash Hansen to sign the petition today. We're back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. By the way, that is a show, one of two shows that Victor does for The Daily Signal. Victor is a senior contributor to The Daily Signal. He's also 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 man with the website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHansen.com is the address. You can subscribe. You should subscribe. You're a fan of Victor's. You'd got to subscribe. It's $65 a year. That's discounted from the monthly cost of $6.50 a month. You could do the math. You'll see you'll save $13. But you want to stick your toe in the water? Do it. $6.50 a month. And when you go there, you'll be able to read the exclusive articles Victor writes every week for The Blade of Perseus and he also does an exclusive video. So Victor, let's start out local. California election. This thing, there's no state in America and in fact, I've read there's no country, non-first world country that counts votes like California does. And we saw the other day, there was a dump of votes that came in in one tranche, 10,000 votes exactly for the mayoral race and not a single one of those 10,000 votes. When suspends are Pratt, they were divided amongst the two Democrats, Karen Bass and the lady who's probably going to prevail. And then as the votes keep getting counted, Pratt's second place status keeps diminishing. We're watching Thievery live. Victor, your thoughts? Well, the betting platforms have all said that Rom-Rom is going to win not because they had any insight from polling. They just assumed that left-wing Los Angeles would not allow him to win. The theft or the alleged theft or the irregularities are not actually in the counting. They're in the mail-in ballots. And in California, almost anytime you come in contact with a state agency, you're going to, and all you have to do is say yes, and you will get an automatic mail-in ballot. And there is no ID. There's no way to determine whether you can use different names, and that happens all the time. So when you start to see things that these ballots are coming in and not just he's getting less than half than she is or a quarter than she is, but what's even more interesting is Bass was way ahead of her, of course. She was in third. And yet in some of these tranches that come in, she's ahead of Bass. And that, I know they say they're younger voters, but what it suggests to me is if people thought that they needed ballots for her, because Bass had already clinched it, then maybe people were voting in Mass for her, voting in quotes. But the other thing about it is it's only going to cement the reputation of California, that it's a third world dysfunctional state, even if it was not crooked, that you take this long, and here in the Central Valley, I can think of three races, and it's kind of so cynical of Republicans in purple districts, and they have one on election day clearly. And then they've even had victory celebrations, and then it starts just like this. You start to see the mail-in ballots, and then trickle, trickle, trickle, trickle, trickle, trickle, and the portions to have nothing to do with the proportions that were counted before. So for Republican, it's 58, 52, 48 across mail and early that have all been counted on election day. It doesn't matter. The asymmetries will grow, and the suspicion is always with Democratic candidates, wait till the California Teacher Association and the SEIU votes come in, and all of the dubious votes from people who may not be legal residents, but got mail ballots at their residencies. And the Democratic Party then calls it racism if you want a voter ID or anything like that. So no one in Europe does this, no one in the United States does this, allows the mail-in ballots to come in way after election day. And what can you say? It's designed for fraud. It's designed for the Democratic Party. It's designed for mass registration dash voting by people who otherwise would have no intention of voting and may not exist. Because as I said before, when my son was living here, when he was finishing his college, at local college, then he moved out and, you know, he bought a home. But for three years, I kept getting his ballot. Maybe it was four years, even though he was registered, and he didn't know it. I didn't know it. It just kept coming, and I just stood away every year. And I left a message that the registrars once I phoned in, it was like, put you on hold, I just left them at, they don't care. But it would have been very evil for me to sign his name, and maybe say, instead of William Hansen say something like his middle name, Frank Hansen, W. Frank Hansen or something. So it's really discouraging and just says that in addition to the wildfires, in addition to the high speed rail, which by the way, now they're talking another 81 billion, just to get the front, the first phase down. And in addition to- Excuse me, an additional 81 billion? Well, that's the cost of it to get the whole thing up and running. That's with the cars and the tracks. And I don't even know if that includes the Merced over to Palo Alto. I don't think it does. That's going to be a horrendous cost going through the Pacheco Pass. It's not going to happen. But anyway, in addition to the water that- I mean, here we had a pretty good water year, and the reservoirs are not full. Because Newsom released water out to the Gulf. We've talked about the indigenous takeover of water supplies up in Northern California and the wine country. We've talked about Newsom blowing up four dams on the Klamath River while using money from a fund that was earmarked by the voters to create them and build them, which we never did. We never built three great reservoirs that the voters voted for. Temperance Flat, Los Manos, Grandes, and the Sykes Reservoir. And then you have, in addition to that, we have the worst infrastructure. Reason Magazine Jack has a great survey that's out of all the transportation systems, but mostly highways in the United States by state. And they rank them according to not just fatalities, but miles driven accidents, polls of what people think, maintenance, whether they have guard- and guess what state is 49th? California. 49th. And that's where the highest gas taxes, the highest income taxes, and among the highest property because of our assessed evaluation, actual taxes, and again sales tax because of the add-ons on the counties. And so you get almost nothing with 21% below the poverty line. And then all this legislation that's coming down the line about billionaire tax, which will morph very quickly into a millionaire's tax, I think. So it's a dysfunctional state. And then you hear about the election. And everybody said, everybody you talked to said Pratt and Hilton can't win. And you'd say, why? Why? Why? Why? Everybody's sick of what's going on. Yes, but they won't let it happen. The balloting is just so corrupt. And they're not going to fix it. There's a proposition coming up on November, I think, to have a valid ID. And I think it'll pass. But it will be thrown out by federal, California federal judge, I bet you five bucks it will, just like the gay marriage, rejecting gay marriage. And two days later, a gay judge, federal judge, ruled that unconstitutional. And so it just depresses people. And that's already, what I don't understand about the exodus is that after you've drained the state of 12 million middle class and professional classes, you would think that the yearly exodus would go down. But it's not. It's going up. It's up to three to 400,000 expected this year, 50 to 60,000 from LA city itself. That's going to really balloon. I don't know. So many, I just had a friend that called me. He's, he's, I do business with him. He's been a long California native. And he said, I'm leaving. I said, what do you mean you're leaving? He said, I'm leaving. I said, well, where are you going to buy a house? I bought a house. I've already bought. It's just a matter of selling my house. And believe me, my house has much more than my California house. And it's cheaper. And the taxes are in gas and everything is just incredible where the state that he's going to. And so it's, it's sad because this state was not only, is not only with its thousand mile coastline and Sierra Nevada and Mojave, everything is here. And it's the most naturally abundant state, number fifth with gas and oil reserves. It's got precious rare earth minerals in the desert. It's got, it was the third largest timber state. It has a huge timber potential. Of course, we shut that down and then we let 60 million trees burn in the last three fires, 60 million trees that could have been harvested. We had a big mining, as I said, mining industry, the UC state college, community college tripartite system was designed by Californians. And the UC system was the, the premier wasn't just Berkeley. It was Berkeley, but also UCLA, UC Irvine, UC Davis, UC center, they were all good school. And the state colleges were training the state's vocational people. They were training nurses, educators, they were good school. When I started in 1984 at Cal State Fresno, I had really good students. When I finished 20 years later, I couldn't even offer a class with the same, I tried with the same syllabus that people couldn't do it. Yeah. I remember you telling the story of a student, it took him 10 minutes to read. Yeah. He said, I can't do your, I said, well, I'm dropping your class. I said, why? And he said, I can't read. I said, well, sit down and let's see. So here's sing God's of the wrath of Achilles, first line. And he said, what was wrath? And then he said, God's, what are God's, he didn't know what God's plural meant. So, and then I said, can you go on? And he, and I said, well, we've now spent 15 minutes on page one, and you had 100 pages to read this week. So you're right. You can't do it. You got to draw. But he should have never been admitted. And he was admitted under DEI circumstances. I had a lot of students who could not speak or read English that were admitted to the CSU system. I mean that. I don't mean, I'm just not being hyperbole. And I'm not being nativist or something. I was really, it was tragic because I tried to tutor them. At one point I had like, I think 13 independent studies, just for students in my basic GE classes that wanted to come in and read. And I was, I felt like I was a kindergarten teacher, which is a noble profession. And that's what I was. But that's, that's, that's where the problem is, not necessarily kindergarten teaching. You know, I talked to, and who doesn't in conservatism focus on the university as the problem. But as you're pointing out, and others, your friend Dan Mahoney, after a while, like, they're kids are coming into college unprepared. So what does this say about third grade education? I don't know. I mean, they, they're not, they're not teaching what we used to teach. They're teaching therapeutic courses and they're teaching ideology. And that's only going to make people arrogant and ignorant. And that's what these students are. They're arrogant and they're ignorant. So when somebody interviews students and they'll say that they hate Trump or they hate the United States or that they want socialism, then you please explain, why do you do, why do you feel that way? They can't explain. They cannot explain at all. And if you, you know, if you went to students today and said, Graham Plattner has a Nazi tattoo, they would, they don't know what Nazi is. They have no idea what it is. They just think it's bad, but they don't know what, how bad it is in comparison to what or what it was about. They've just told that it's bad or that Trump is a Nazi or that George W. Bush was a Nazi. But, you know, societies and civilizations don't collapse suddenly. It's insidious. It's very slowly. It's that often quote, remark from, I think it was from the sun also rises by Hemingway about a friend who went bankrupt. He said it, you know, it, it was slowly then suddenly. And that's what happens. We think it's sudden, California's collapse, but it's been going on for 20, 25 years or more. And what the sad thing about it was in the fifties and sixties under Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, Pete Wilson, George Dick Masian, Pete Wilson, and even the first term of Arnold Schwarzenegger, it was a, except the little hiatus of Gray Davis, it was a, and he looks competent. And the first, first eight years of Jerry Brown started the left wing, but they were more libertarian than they were left wing. And he didn't spend a lot of money. He didn't. But my point about it, he made some bad appointments. One of them, one good one was my mother, I think, as a superior and appellate court judge. But what I'm trying to say is it's now sudden. And the California has no more reason. We're running a, I think it's going to be $20 billion deficit. And Gavin Newsom is giving iPads for people on death row. So, and we still have a reparations committee. We still have a high speed rail project. Nobody believed it's going to be done. So, you know, we started here about this statistical, not even anomalies or just evidence, again, the 10,000 votes come in, not a single one for this candidate, or all of a sudden, these new tranches lopsided for the, the third person, the councilwoman in third place, who will be in second place. Democrats used to care about statistics if it worked for them, like particularly in justice issues. I wrote the first article I wrote for national review way, way back was about death row. And Ted Kennedy and others trying to pass legislation that you could not put lax on death row if the proportion of the population, that sort of thing. So, I think they're pushing, I think the left is pushing it though. They're pushing it to the point where in the UK, there's an enormous anger at what happened to Henry Nowak. And, and that's going to have ramifications. I know that Sturmer doesn't have to have an election for a long time. But the conservative side in, in Germany, the same thing. They're all talking about repatriation. And when you saw our senator from Missouri just eviscerate the Democrats that when he talked about repri, the repatriate, repatriating bill that's before Senator, before the Senate right now. And I think people have soured not just on illegal immigration, they're just, they're just overwhelmed with the Somali fraud case, the FBI photos of all the people that have been recently immigrating to California that are up there on the most wanted. And the stories of all of this could be 250 billion. And then you add in the driver license capers and the people who've been slaughtered on the freeway are injured by people who were here illegally did not speak English and should never been allowed to drive. And then you see the Kamar Lowe, Anthony, Stabbing and people are just, and then the YouTube fair is, you know, it's almost every day. If you have smart news or one of those things that you, I don't read it very much, but it comes with your phone apparently. And all of a sudden, it's either some swarming of a jewelry store, a sneaker store or throwing somebody off the subway or attacking somebody. And it doesn't do any good to say crime is at an all time low or something. It's just people feel that the center is not holding. Yeah. There's this infamous video now going around about some Uber driver in New York, trying to throw someone out of the car. I don't know if you've seen it. This is our city now. It's obviously a guy. The guy is kind of trying to be logical and plead and say get out or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I don't know where it all ends, but the country is, the youth of the country and the leaders are stupider. They're more ignorant and they're more arrogant and they're more dangerous. They really are. When I looked at the way Rubio came in, all they had, he was a fellow congressperson, a senator. And they started attacking his shoes. They said he went to anything other than policy. And that's what's even stranger was with all this hatred of Donald Trump, you never really hear of any democratic agenda that's an alternative to what Trump offered. It's either one of two things. It's Trump hatred, hatred, hatred, hate, we're going to impeach him, we're going to do, or it's, we're going to change the demolition system. No more Philip Buster, no more doctoral college, no more Supreme Court of nine justices, no more 50 union state. But never, well, we want 3,000 illegal aliens a day or we're going to dismantle the wall when we're in. They never tell you what they're going to do or we have a big new spending program. Nothing, nothing. And I don't know where it all ends, but a lot of the problem is that I blame the universities, our N and K through 12, because we are turning out all these students who've been sold this bill of goods to, you know, to go to college. And I'm putting a carport right next to where I'm speaking and the people are making about $40 an hour, you know, legal license contractor, they're very good workers, I'm watching them, they're just, they almost run when they're working, but I just watched them. They put up a six by eight frame with six by eight rafters and this huge 12, one foot by 10 foot beams. And they did the whole thing in seven hours. But my point is, would you whether it be paid 30 or 40 or $50 an hour, and I'm having an electrician come out, it's $50 an hour and that's considered cheap. And that's only because I know him. And $50 an hour and I'm going to have, if I can, I'm going to try to help, you know, do help run errands and stuff from him for him. But my point is, why would you if you were 18 or 19 and you were not well educated and you were ambivalent about a professional career, why would you go to a community college and then to a state college or a four year college and go into debt for $200,000? And why would you ever major in psych or sociology or any of the study is courses, gender studies, you know, race studies, black studies, Asian studies, leisure studies, environmental studies, rack up all that debt and then maybe just maybe get a desk job in a state agency for $40,000 when you could make $80,000, $90,000 working, you know, and put it in a four when you'd be so far better off. You know, you'd be around normal people, you'd be around normal people, you wouldn't be around an aberrant and these people that are, I'm speaking as a faculty member, these people are aberrant. They're not like the rest of the country professors. They really aren't. Yeah. Well, let's keep on. Well, a little more on this. Victor refers to our listeners and our viewers. Did you know that over 176 million Americans are drinking tap water with PFA's in it? What are PFA's? They're manmade chemicals used in food packaging, non stick cookware, firefighting foam and so on. 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It is really good. Okay. My wife was reading paper to me, Sharon, my great wife. Some survey of, as we approach America to 50, Victor, of affection for America. And of course, the Democrat, your typical Democrat has just sub-basement of love of America. I don't know, in the teens or the 20s. Surprisingly, not all that much higher were independence at 32%. And Republicans, I found this a little surprising too. I think it was 68, 69, something like that. But where are the other 30? 30 to 2%. Anyway, across the board, and this gets to your, after years of indoctrination from K through master's degree, we really have a country of people that really don't care about this country. And hence this celebration less than a month away should be a celebration of our 250th after life was. Yeah, I think it's some three, two or three causes. One, again, ignorance. They don't know anything about this country. They don't know what the Declaration of Independence and how wonderful it was compared to the other documents of liberation at that time. They have no idea about the Constitution. They don't know any of Lincoln's great addresses. They don't know anything about the Civil War. They don't know anything. Slavery, they're told is only white people putting people of color in slaves. And the United States was the archetype. They know nothing about the Muslim world. They know nothing about Brazil. They don't know anything about African slaves, slaves, slaves. They've been just drummed into this drum, drum, drum, drum, drum. So ignorance is a great part. The other part is social acceptance. They understand when they're in a university campus, at a community college with their friends in high school, to the degree that you utter something that you don't know anything about, but you say you don't like the United States or we're racist, genocidal. And you can hear those people. Jesse Waters is Johnny on the street. I don't know to what degree they're edited, but when he asked these people and they expressed disdain for the United States and he asked them to give an example, they never can give an example. And the third is, they're very, I mean, this sounds snobbish, but they're very parochial. And I mean by that, compared to what have they ever been to any country in, I don't know, North Africa, deep Africa, Asia, for that matter, Europe, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, South America, the Caribbean, Asia, no, they don't. They don't know the different. And if they have gone and they're left wing, they go as elite tourists. Even the people who were chanting, chanting Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea. When they go to the Middle East, they do not go to Gaza. They do not go to the West Bank. They don't even go to Lebanon. They stay at the King David hotel in Jerusalem. And so it's just ignorance. And the only thing, we'll talk about D-Day in a second, but when you see those pictures, those newsreels of the ramp coming down on the landing craft and all these young 18 year olds looking at you. And then you go up, I've been to D-Day a lot, and you go up in the hills above Omaha Beach in Utah, and you look at the firing patterns that those people had. And then you look at the aerial pictures of planes that went over D-Day. And it just looks like there were 2200, over 2000 people slaughtered on that beach. And they're just body after body. And you think that they would all huddle in the landing craft the second way that they didn't. And they were dumped at six feet deep of water, some of them, when they're packed. And they kept coming and coming and coming. And they weren't against, I mean, there may have been Soviet prisoners and everything, but very quickly they ran into the Dossreich division, the Panzer II. These people were, they weren't 18 year olds, they were 26, 27, 28. They've been fighting since 1939. They were the survivors of the Eastern front. They were the most deadly, you know, general Guderians looked at one of the Panzer divisions said, with this one division, I can expel all the cowboys who land here. He was wrong, but so confident. And then you think about us today. And they gave everything for their country. And what do we do with the inheritance? Well, the greatest generation is dying off of it. It's mostly gone. And they did, but, and they transmitted those values to my generation. But the sixties, the hippie movement, the counter, all those things meant that the great chain of continuance, each link was getting weaker and weaker and weaker. And this generation, I think, I mean, I'm quoting Horace, and he was looking at the, the Republican, he said, oh my gosh, oh, be of a bad generation are about to give the country over to a worse generation who will produce a generation worse than themselves. And unless we have some kind of counter revolution about education and patriotism, and we're going to be in bad trouble. And I can tell you that no nation, we have now 53 million people who weren't born in the United States, 20 million or wonderful people. They came legally, they're very productive. They were the creme de creme of their countries. But the 30 million are very suspect. And some of the people who came illegally, if they can get a green card are very good people, even though they broke the law, and they have to be punished for that. But we're getting a lot of people who are legal immigrants, who have no, they are the fodder of the new democratic Socialist Islamist Party, and they have no gratitude. Mondami cannot say anything about the United States that's positive. I haven't heard Ilya and Omar say a positive word. I haven't seen Rashida Tlaib say a positive word. I haven't seen Jasmine Crockett say a positive word. And the fourth thing why we have this is, it's not just the cultural acceptance by being anti-American, because it went up a little bit with Obama. When Obama was president, they did these polls. Republicans were the same, but Democrats started to creep up because they felt that Obama was a revolutionary figure that had apologized all over the world, and that meant that we were seeking atonement, and we might still be salvageable. But the fourth thing, it pays. If you're a sharp critic of the United States, and you pay, and you identify as a non-white victim, then there's a whole array of goodies for you. You're on the right side of the DEI, oppressor, oppressor, victim, victimizer ledger. And I can tell you, I'm not just spouting off. I had over 20 years, I must have had, I don't know, I taught four and five classes a year. They had to average 25, so maybe two semesters, two to 300. So over, I probably had six or 7,000 students. And I can tell you the great majority of them were what we would call minorities, and the great majority were wonderful people. But I was always shocked that I will bump into one of those people who was very close to me, and I too, and I tutored and tutored and tutored, and they took class after class, and they graduated, and I would say they were non-political, but they were very, very traditional. And they all now have used their identification as a pathway to careers. And part of that identification entails being very critical of this country. And I have no tolerance. I'm a pretty tolerant guy. I never get too angry at people, but when one of these people calls me or I bump into them, I just say, I'm done. I'm done. Sorry, I'm done. No more, no more. And gratitude is something I think rightly anger. I mean, if those watching this behind me, again, my left shoulder, there's a poster behind me of Bill Buckley, it was Mayoral Race 1965, but one of the books that was Bill wrote, he wrote many books, but most important to him was gratitude. He just thought this is natural. We are so blessed to be in America. And of course, he was advocating for some kind of national service as repayment for just being in this land of great opportunity. Of course, the other great act of ingratitude, Victor, is Moses comes down and worshiping a golden calf. So, it doesn't, ingratitude does not sit well with God nor with the founder of the conservative movement. These people have no idea. I had a torn ureter where you have a staghorn calculus that gets caught in the ureter and it tears it. It will never pass. And I was in Greece in 1979. And I went to the public hospital and I didn't have enough money at that point to go to a private clinic. My mom mailed me $500 and that allowed me to get out of there after a week or two. But I can tell you, at that time, they were using reusable needles that I, you know, and I had in my, and I kept saying, are they okay? And so my point is all these people who get weight shots and they get all these wonderful things, why would they go to a place and just get a reusable metal syringe? I wish they could see the medical care when I had a ruptured appendix that was offered in Libya, free medical care, by the way, except for foreigners. But it was strange. I mean, how would you like to be prepared for surgery? And they say you have to void and defecate and you go in and there's a Turkish toilet with no toilet seat and there's three inches of feces water around your feet and you're going to be operated. And then you're told there's no sodium pentathlon, nothing except an ether mask by somebody who was operating in the next room smoking, which is very flammable gas. And that's what a lot of people have to endure in the non-western world. And they were very nice people. I really were. The surgeon was a wonderful person. He saved my life. But what he had to go through, you know, he had no gloves to operate, no gloves. You know, all those cruises we did over the years and a couple of them, we ended up, I was responsible for the folks taking sick people to hospitals. One was in Portugal in Porto, another in St. Martin and particularly in Porto, which is not a tiny city. And then one hospital, I thought it was, I was in a minekey muffler shop. It was just chaos, slop, dirtiness, flies, St. Martin. Down with somebody, it's just flies galore in the hospital. Yeah, we have, Germany was okay. I have to admit, the German hospital is pretty up down. I was in the clinic in Luxor and that was supposed to be in 1974 with what I thought was dysentery, but turned out to be malaria. And I was there for eight days because I didn't take the hydroxychlorine, quina hydroxychlorine. And I could not believe the conditions under which no sheet changing, nothing. And then finally I said, my sheets have been this way for five days, I got to get out of here. And they said, well, you didn't pay for them. You can pay if you want. I will go get, I think it was an Egyptian pound at that time. And I, this is funny, when I flew back to Greece, I literally put my knees on the tarmac and prayed. I did. I was back in a western country after being in old Cairo. I was in old Cairo for a week and then in the hospital for a week. And then I was in Alexandria for a week. And I never seen anything like it. And I went, I met four or five of our students from our school in Greece and they, we were all there. There were three boys and two girls. And the girls heard that we, three guys were there and they asked if they could meet us because they were, so we went on a bus and they just shouted and shouted and shouted. And when we got back home to, we had joining hotel rooms and they pulled up their blouses and pulled, not in a risque way, just up to their navel. And they were just full of bruises, bruises. And I said, we said, what happened? They said, we were just pinched and grabbed the entire time. Every time we got on a bus and nobody did anything. At that time, our buses and subways were normal. We can't judge anybody given the, the travesties they've become, but what we're getting at is, I mean, this is a very unique country or it was. And our generation has to say that we're not, we're not going to turn it over to these mad, insane people, given the legacy of D-Day and those people who came out of those landing craft, were blown apart or those people that were in B-17s over Germany that were blown apart, or those people that were on aircraft carriers off Guadalcanal that were blown apart. We're not going to do it. It's just not going to happen. And the left doesn't, and thinks it is, but they never, and if they say, well, that's unfair, you're not talking about our page, they never talk about it. They never talk about it. And things I think are going to get rough at some point Victor, but No, they're going to get very rough. And it's not going to be pretty. And I hope the left, if I can, if the left doesn't win the midterms, and I'm not sure they're going to, I think they're going to go completely insane because they had all the historical odds on their side. They had an unpopular war on their side. They had a high gasoline problem on theirs. But what they didn't have was a sober and judicious agenda. And they were completely unhinged by Donald Trump. And people are tired of that. Well, let's, we're going to talk more. I have a couple of D-Day related questions for you. But then we also have the breaking news about John Bolton. So let's talk about that and we'll, about Bolton, and then we'll close out the show on D-Day, and we'll do all that when we come back from these important messages. And so, the latest breaking news, analysis, and good old American star cast, Tom Tillis. I'm pretty sure it might have been useful at one time as a doorstop, find the Tony Kinnit cast on YouTube, X, radio, TV, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, folks, we're back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. You know, also on the Daily Signal, Victor has another show, Victor Davis Hansen, in a few words. That's four times a week also, just like the podcast. And they're about seven, eight, nine minute clips of Victor's wisdom. So you should check, check that out. So Victor, John Bolton, we talked about him before, you and I both know him. John, I served on a board with him. But here's the headline from the New York Post. Bolton set to plead guilty and classified. Document case. He's 77. He was indicted in October 2025 on 18 counts of illegally hoarding or sending sensitive information. The charges largely revolved around his bestselling 2020 tell all quote, the room where it happened, end quote, that's the name of his book, which Bolton gave readers a behind the scenes look at his time. In the White House, prosecutors accused Bolton of sending more than a thousand pages of sensitive material from his personal email to two individuals without the necessary clearance widely believed to be his wife and daughter. I believe Victor, it's sometime later this month towards the end of June, there's going to be this hearing where he pleads and he could go to jail. It's possible. I have a lot of mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, they usually do not indict, they don't, I mean, they indict you on it, but they don't really, the DA's don't ask for if you're found guilty for prison time. And I'm just saying Sandy Berber, the National Security Bites for the Clinton administration deliberately, I think on the Clinton's orders, went in there to the archives and tried to get incriminating evidence that would have shown the Clinton administration was derelict about Ben Lawden's threat. And then of course, we had Hillary Clinton, who James Cormie of all people said she transmitted, I don't know, 20 or 30 classified documents over an unsecured, which is illegal. And then in addition to that, we had Joe Biden's ghostwriter, is that the right word for it? And I forgot his name, Zittwitzer or something like that. He was found according to Robert Hoer, he was given classified documents by Joe Biden and discussed openly with them. And then he destroyed that information. And he said he did it to prevent, and that was subpoenaed information. All of those people did not serve. Hillary, he was never even charged. And I think her was just terrified to charge him, given the left wing climate. Hillary was never charged. And Sandy Berber had no prison time. So given the elite always take care of the elite, by that standard, John Bolton should not at his age go to prison. But they sure didn't extend that exemption to people in January 6th. Some of people who were charged with illegal parading and put in isolated confinement and solitary confinement. So I have mixed feelings. The other thing about it is John Bolton, I think I told Sammy that he was warned by a federal judge when in 2020, everybody knew he was writing a book and they knew that he was going to, he was rushing to finish it. So the question arises, why would somebody daily, daily transmit over an unsecured email to his daughter and wife, the digest of the day's events, many of them classified meetings? And the answer is he was preparing a book to cash in right at the 2020 campaign, given his hatred of Donald Trump. So what he was doing was not so much just transmitting classified information. He was using government time in real time, writing a book. So these things went to his wife and his daughter. And then when he was fired and he went back into public service, he had the book written. He had the digest every day and he just come, I looked at the book, they're just compendia of what he saw and heard. And then when they sued to stop that, the judge essentially said, it's already out. But he looked at Bolton and he said, this is not good for your country, what you've done. And at some point, somebody's going to call you on, I want to warn you. But he just laughed that off. He was a best seller. He made probably a couple of million, maybe more than that on the best selling book. And it was all forgotten. Now people think that Trump administration is indicative going after them. They're not. They're trying to restore an equilibrium. I don't think I wouldn't want to see John Bolton at 77 in prison. But what he did, he did knowingly. The final observation is people should take a deep breath that hate Donald Trump because it becomes an all consuming 360 degree malady. And the case of John Bolton, he went from a conservative, controversial, neo-conservative hawk that got widespread spread recognition when he was an ambassador with a recess appointment to the UN from Bush. People had on the right supported him because they said that the left was so paranoid about him that they would never confirm him. So poor John Bolton forever. Many people thought he should run for president. Yes. And he explored it. And he had his own pack. And I think he made the rounds of the Washington, Florida, New York donors, and he was raising $7 or $8 million a year in a pack. And he was giving it to preferred candidates and building coalitions. He was in demand as a speaker. He was making millions of dollars. And then he made a critical decision that he, and he should have said, I don't like Donald Trump. I can understand if that's how he felt. But, but no one would ever appoint me to any job that required senatorial approval because they would have filibustered me. They hated me so much the left did. And no one would probably appoint me as a recess appointment like Bush did because it would only be a year. And no one so far in my seventies has ever appointed me without Senate confirmation. In other words, George W. Bush didn't come back and say, well, you know, John, you can serve as assistant national security, but he didn't. He didn't. And other people earlier in their career that were Republicans did not. Reagan didn't, George H. W. Bush, they could have appointed him to appointments that required confirmation. And if they did, they were minor. It was Donald Trump of all people gave him one of the highest jobs possible in the nation as national security advisor and one of the few that did not require Senate confirmation. Suddenly he got his life's dream. And what did he do? Very quickly, he decided that he, John Bolton, was so much smarter and so much more experienced in the buffoonish, dangerous, crazy Donald Trump, you know, who had not gone to war, but had done some great things by taking out Soleimani, Baghdadi, the Wagner group, destroyed ISIS. He gave him no credit for that. And he started to write a book by sending classified information and emails to his family and disguise that. And so what I'm getting at, Jack, is he destroyed himself through the hatred and the obsessed fixation on Donald Trump. And we know somebody's people who have done that. If we had this conversation 15 years ago on a Sunday, Bill Crystal would have been on all the news shows. And he would be widely quoted by the Republican president in the White House. He would be a fixture there. And all he had to do was say, I disagree. He could have done what Brett Stevens did. And Brett Stevens was a never-trumper. He was obsessed. He saw that Donald Trump was doing some good things. He saw that he was destroying his career. And he came out and said, I'm done with never-trump. Doesn't mean he said he liked them, but he said he would at least not be fixated by him anymore. But he couldn't do that. He could and he destroyed his career. And we know a lot of people that used to write for National Review, they did the same thing. They destroyed their careers. And anybody who gets fixated like that destroys themselves. And so I absolutely agree. Regardless of it's just Trump, when you fixate, you obsess, you just lose perspective on my life. How could a person with his experience, Yale Law School, he was in the DOJ for a time. He had served in government. He was on numerous corporate boards, numerous government boards. He was the old Washington hand. How could someone believe that you could send classified information, hide it by emails to your own family, as if they would never check that. And they probably wouldn't have. I think it was hacked by Iranian-related hackers that released it, his emails. Otherwise, they wouldn't have found out about it. But the only answer is that he was so full of hatred that he wanted to tell the nation. That I, John Bolton, am going to be the informer of how dangerous Donald Trump, and I'm going to make sure he's not going to be reelected in 2020. That book did, along with the Hunter Biden lie, did affect the election somehow. It really did. And it's tragic what happened to him. And I don't wish him ill, and I don't think he should be gone at 77 into a jail cell. But he really injured his country. He really did. Well, Victor, I have another thought to get from you on that. And then we'll round off with D-Day ear analyses. But to our listeners and viewers, 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 wartime. We've 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, though 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 goal, not a speculation, but as insulation. Now, our reputation matters, had Victor 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 from the Better Business Bureau. For years, they've guided Americans through transparent education and longstanding relationships built on trust. And right now, they're offering and extending a special liberty offer to our listeners and viewers to help you get started with real gold, whether your funds are in a retirement account or sitting in the bank. Well, 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. One more time, 844-790-9191, or visit protectwithvictor.com. History rewards those who take the long view, and we are very appreciative of the good people of Allegiance, Gold, for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Victor, one last thing about John Bolton. I just find the idea, the premise of somebody taking a job, writing a book. There's nothing on writing a book, right? You've written many of them, but do you take a job with, this is going to be one of my intentions, is to write a book, or even in, let's say, the famous Jim Bouton writing about, you know, ball four for baseball. I'm going to write about you. I'm not going to let you know I'm writing about you, and I'm going to sell you down the river for a few bucks later on. I just think going into that job, I can't help but think he very much had an intention, I'm going to do this in part so I could write a book about it. And I think there's an insatiability for money also as part of the, I want to kneecap Trump. I think the first term, there were three types of Trump appointees. The second term we know what there are, their primary qualification was that they had to be confirmable, and they had to be completely loyal to the MAGA movement and Trump. And there were problems, Matt Gaetz was a problem, that nomination. But otherwise, people like Sean Duffy and Pete Hexeth, for all the criticism they do, they've been doing it. Pete Hexeth, everybody caricatures him, but the military has performed wonderfully in Iran. It's both times last year and this year, and Venezuela it has. And recruitment is up, nobody thought that would be possible. It was a miracle. They were down 45,000, they're exceeding their recruitment, the morale is up, and Sean Duffy's done a great job, Doug Bergen's come Chris Wright, they're very good. And I think maybe the stellar star, there's two stars are Marco Rubio and Scott Basson. Brooke Rawlins too. Brooke Rawlins, yes, I don't want to mention, ignore her. She's been professional, competent, treats her, I mean, she treats the audience with dignity when I've watched her. She's just graceful, you know what I mean? She has all the assets to be a great cabinet secretary. So, but the first term Donald Trump, as I said before, had admitted he did not know the Washington culture. So he came in and he was swarmed with applications under the premise that this guy is a fool, and he needs us. And there were three types of people who asked to be confirmed, or be nominated. There was the people who were genuine public servants, none of them were MAGA people, for the most part, but there were genuine public servants, and they thought Donald Trump's MAGA movement has to be translated into bureaucratese to be implemented, and they need people that know it. And I can tell you that even if HR McMaster did not like Donald Trump, I don't know whether he did or not. But he knew enough about the military that when Trump told him to do something, he did it. And he tried to do it using the framework what he knew. There were other secretaries, the second group, who said, Donald Trump is a fool, and he's given me another foolish effort. And I'm going to say I'm going to do it, but I'm going to use all my effort to stymie him. And that was Rex Tillers, and I'll give that example. Then there was the third group. They said, I am going to operate independently according to the law, regardless of what Trump, when Trump calls me, and he wants a initiative, if I myself find it wrong, I'm going to stop it. If I find it right, I will implement it. But I am his equal. And I think that was sort of Bill Barr. You know what I mean? He sort of said, I'm a professional. I've been here before. And if Trump issues an order or he wants something done, I'm going to respect the barrier between DOJ and the White House, and I will carry it out. However, if I feel that it's contrary to the my perfect, I'm going to oppose him. And by that, I mean, I'll give you the classic case. Andrew McCabe lied on four occasions. I think three of them were under oath to federal investigators. That's not Victor's opinion or your opinion. That's the opinion of the Inspector General. And that should have been, and he was acting as the second in command of the FBI. And then he would be the interim director. And Donald Trump fired him. He should have been subject to perjury charges. And Bill Barr did not indict him. He wouldn't do it. And he said, I think essentially he said, these are not the type of lies that would constitute a winnable case or that we usually prosecute. Why not? There'd be more responsibility on an FBI person to show integrity. And I don't know how Peter Struck got out of it either. But Andrew McCabe should have been, and when he wasn't indicted, then he sued for his pension and he won and da da da da da. He became a fixture, a big critic. But Bill Barr was acting as an independent entity in direct violation of, and I think that decision was made in part that he had no respect for the person who had appointed him. And that's taken a consideration that he was a consummate professional. I'm not saying he wasn't. But that was a third case. So you had people who said, I'm going to use my knowledge to help the MAGA agenda. That's what the people wanted. He got the most elected. And then there were people that said, he's just an idiot. He is an idiot. I'm Rex Tillerson and he's an idiot. And I'm going to use my expertise such as it is to stop him. And there were others I won't mention. And then the third was, if he gives me an order and it is in tune with the professional boundaries of my cabinet post, I will enact it. But if I feel that it's not, I will oppose it. And that assumed that Donald Trump would be wrong a lot of time. But he wasn't wrong when he voiced, I mean, he wasn't telling Bill Barr to indict Andrew McCabe. He was saying that Andrew McCabe was a nave, which I think he was. But so there were choices for people, what I'm saying with Bolton. And he took the Rex Tillerson move. He really did. He just tried. Yes, big lead. He didn't have to do that. And all of the Never Trumpers ended up so fixated on Donald Trump and so angry of their impotence that for all the anger they did, they couldn't stop it. They may have had some small role in the 2020 defeat. I doubt it, but they claim they did. But they were so obsessed that they renounced all of their political beliefs and ideology of the last 50 years of their life. And they basically said to all of you listening and to me and Jack and others, if you ever heard me say that I was for legal only immigration, if you ever heard me say I would have never been for no cash bail, if you ever heard me say that I wanted fracking and horizontal drilling, if you ever heard me say that I wanted a strong military, a deterrent military, well, that was all a lie. I just said it because I was doing very well. And when I wasn't doing very well, I just become a left wing Democrat. That's what they did. And that's not hyperbole. Bill Crystal, didn't he endorse Mondami? Yes. And he actually, I think we talked about it. He's actually become a Democrat himself, formally and officially. So. And didn't Lynn Cheney stay on the same stage, try to help Camilla Harris? Yes. She had the second, I want to get this right. She either had the second, according to studies, the second most left wing record of the entire 100 person Senate or she was right behind Bernie Sanders, right? I think she was ahead of him voting left wing. And here you have Liz Cheney, the number third Republican at one time, and groomed to be the speaker within five or six years, no doubt, on the stage with the most left wing candidate we've seen in our lifetime endorsing her. And so what was she saying to us? She was saying basically, I don't want fracking, I don't want the horizontal. I love BLM. I think DEI is wonderful. I think we need to get another 10th. She may not have said that, but she knew the agenda and she was endorsing it because of her hatred of Donald Trump. I got to dig up that list of, you know, we had the 53 or the 51, but there were 100 Republican minor grandees who endorsed Harris. They took out some ad. And it's one thing to say, I don't like Trump and I'm not going to vote for Trump, but I'm going to endorse this leftist Marxist agent of chaos. It's how about people who ruin their reputations for a lie? I mean, John Brennan and James Clapper, they didn't have any reputation by the time they signed that letter about the laptop, but Leon Panetta did. Leon Pérez never apologized. He basically knew that the FBI had a laptop that was Hunter's laptop and had authenticated and were keeping it under wraps while the administration was threatening Facebook and Twitter to not print stories that it was authentic, such as the New York Post's, and that that would arm Joe Biden. That was the purpose of the letter, so that he could deny the truth in the last debate and win the election. And they never apologized and that had an effect on the election. Because Leon, I remember him laughing about it. Hey, Victor, we've got to get to the end here, wrap up. So we promised you have some thoughts about D-Day and I thought I'd pose it to you this way since today is, when the show is airing is June 9th. So let's say it's the anniversary of D-Day plus three. And from your perspective as a historian, as the author of the Second World Wars, on that day, how confident do you think the Allied commanders were that they were pulling this off? Or was there some thought that this was still an extremely tenuous position? And on the other side of the line, the German military, you just talked before about, we'll push these cowboys back into the sea. But were the Germans confident that they could somehow in that first week prevail and and push the Allies back into the channel? What's going on on June 9th, 1944? There are two things to remember that to land on a 50 mile, they needed a 50 mile beach because they had to have the first day roughly 150,000 and by, I think it was within 20 days, they needed 850,000 because the Germans had over a million people, a million people under arms and that and they were going to seal that enclave. And so that's a massive amphibious task. No one had ever even tried to land 150,000 a day. And given that the Koten and Peninsula and the ports, all of them were sherbet, they were all mined and outfitted with really tough troops. So it was going to be impossible to find a port. So they needed an order, they had to tow over a Mulberry, two of them, concrete ports, one was damaged. And then they had to have, they had no gasoline. So they had to have an underground pipeline all the way to Britain to send gasoline to the beach. And they were confident in that at this point in the war, they had not air supremacy over superior, they had air supremacy. They had devastated the Luftwaffe and they had planes, typhoons, late model Spitfires, Thunderbolts, Mustangs that were qualitatively either equal to the best German planes or better and pilots that were better because they had whittled down most of the veteran pilots from the Eastern Front. So, and they had overwhelming naval superiority. By this time, the American fleet, which wasn't really the dominant fleet, it had Pacific obligation, but it was bigger than all the fleets put together. But the British fleet was huge. And the Canadians had the fifth largest fleet in the world. So they had more battleships, destroyers, cruisers, and they said to themselves, nothing can stop this. And then they took a deep breath. And they said, other than the easy against the Vichy's in North Africa, November 42, we had a tough time on Sicily. Everything went wrong on that landing. And we only recovered because we had a genius called George Patton. And that was not good. And we have tried an experiment landing on the coast of France. It was called the Dieppe raid in August 1942. 10,000 troops were landed in Dieppe, mostly Canadians. And 5,000 of them, 5,000 were either killed, captured, or wounded. And it was a complete and utter disaster. It may have been to get ultimate machines. Nobody knows why or to find out if it was possible. So they were saying to themselves, we don't have a good record necessarily. And then they said to themselves, we need to ask the Pacific people, because by June 44, they have landed at Tarawa and other places. And they came back and said, you need to do this and this and this. And it's not going to be easy. And we are slowly mastering it. But they didn't master it because Iwo Jima was in 7,000 dead, 20,000 wounded in February 45, landing in Okinawa, the last amphibious with the veteran first army division, army division, infantry, and then the new supposedly college graduates, 6th Marine division, they were completely rendered combat ineffective. We lost 12,000 dead in the Okinawa campaign and 50,000 wounded. So it was never easy. And this was the biggest in history. And then the weather was very bad. They had to cancel it for 24 hours. And after that, the moon, the tides, it wouldn't be possible for another 30 days. The Germans were going to find out about it. And so that was another problem. And then the Germans had a huge fight over two great issues. There were those who said all of the radio traffic says they're going to Kalei, which is only 26 miles away from Dover. But it's too fake. It's too much. And everybody knows that we have well defended it. And the only place down 800 miles around the French coast all the way to Spain, the only place that they could land that many men necessary is Normandy. And so they began belatedly to put what they call asparagus, traps, mines, more artillery, machine gunning and the Normandy beaches. But it was too late. And Hitler kept saying it's Kalei. The second thing they made a terrible mistake. And if they had thought rationally about it, and really bulked up on Normandy much easier, I don't think we would have been able to do it. The second thing is there were Panzer divisions of about 50,000, you know, 16,000. Some of them were under man, but there were four or five Panzer divisions that were top notch and had been transferred from the Eastern Front. And there was a big fight about how to use them and who could control them and where they should be. And Rommel said, you've got to stop them on the beach because they have air superiority. You can't hide from them. If you don't, typhoons and thunderbolts will be flying at 400 miles an hour at treetop with rockets and they're going to destroy our Panzer divisions. So we release all 50,000 and it's going to come toward Normandy. And so we can make a semi circle around these beaches and then pound them and they will be pushed into the sea. And Hitler said, no, only I can release the Panzer divisions and it's coming at Calais and this is a faint. And so he waited. And he waited and he waited and he waited. And when he finally released them, and this is the proof of the pudding, they couldn't take King Khan. It took them until July, the British, and they had to destroy it. The only way they took Khan was to level it. If you go to Khan today, it's mostly all new buildings after 1944. They had to bomb it into extinction. And the only way that the Americans broke out was two things. They unleashed the eighth Air Force, which never ever really flew tactical missions with four engine bombers and they blasted a whole Operation Cobra, about six miles right through German lines. And they obliterated everything at about a quarter to a half mile. But to do that, they bombed not parallel to Americans, but perpendicular and they killed hundreds, including the highest ranking officer to die in the European theater, Leslie McNair, three star general, they blew him up and then they hid the funeral. And they did that twice after the saying, you cannot bomb perpendicularly. And they and everybody said, if you're in a four engine bomber and you're going 300 miles, 240 miles an hour, and you're at low level, and you don't know where the battle lines are, it's impossible. And yet they did it twice. They took a probably about 1000 casualties of our own shoulders and they blasted a hole. And then they unleashed George Patton and George Patton for all of his crudity and for all of his character flaws was an authentic military genius. And on end of July, first of August, Third Army became operational and the rest is history. I mean, he had a million men under his control by the time he got into inside Germany, he ran wild and had had they listened to him at the filet's gap when he said, close it and had they listened to him at the Battle of the Bulge when he said, cut it off at the base and not the point, the war probably would have been over in March or April, not May. Well, you can read about your thoughts on Patton. What book? Save? Two books, but mostly the Soul of Battle. Okay. I talked about, but I mentioned him in the Second World Wars as well. He's a very tragic figure, but he was, he's like Curtis LeMay, people who their personalities were uncouth, grading. They said things that were injurious to their reputation, but they were authentic military geniuses and they saved thousands of lives. But we should keep that in mind. They were a tragic hero is some person who uses methodologies that save lives for good purposes. And then when the peril is over and the existential crisis has been solved by them, then the people have the laxity and the margin of error to say, you know what, I can't believe you were ever part of us. You're so uncouth, get the blank out. And so they relieved, they relieved Patton of command for some of the crazy things he said. And Curtis LeMay ended up as the character for Dr. Strangelove. Yeah. Well, you've written about this applied to politics and Donald Trump as the John Wayne character from, you know, the searcher. Ethan Edwards. Yeah. Well, Victor, we're a little over where we thought we'd be today, but that's okay because the more you as the more wisdom people get to hear and absorb. So thanks all that. We have a couple of comments. I'm just going to read one comment today. Thanks for thousands of people who take the time to, particularly on YouTube to leave comments. But one is from Dr. Yes, 1963, who writes, I love Victor's commentary, even the rare slips like calling president 22 slash 24, you call them Grover Cleveland Alexander, baseball star played by Ronald Reagan in the movies. So I remember that slip. I only really think anybody would catch it, but somebody surely people catch everything Victor, but I only raise it to say that the never vote, never vote against your audience. They're always collectively smarter than you were always watching, always watching. But the expert on Grover Cleveland, yes, is our friend Troy Seneck. Troy Seneck. I read his book. I blurb the book. It was a wonderful book. He wrote part of that in my office in Milford. He lived in Milford. He was actually in pain. He had a lot of health problems, Cleveland, with his middle, as I remember. Oh, Cleveland, not Troy. Okay. No, Troy's indestructible. Yeah, Troy's a great guy. And folks, Kite and Key is a place where he is. Now, they make terrific videos. So anyway, thanks, Dr. Yes, for that. Thanks. This for me, I just want to say, Jack Fowler, I write Sibyl Thoughts. If you go to SibylThoughts.com, sign up, and every Friday you'll get my newsletter emailed, 14 recommended readings. I know you're going to like it. I get a lot of thank you notes and appreciative notes. And thanks for those folks who do that. Okay, Victor, you've been terrific. Again, people go to Victor's website, the blade of Perseus, victorhanson.com, by the way. And you can buy the counterrevolution online. Yes, yes. Coming out in September, but get it now. Yes, September 8. Thanks, Victor, for all the wisdom you shared. Thanks, folks, for watching. Thanks for listening. We'll be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Bye-bye. Thank you, everyone, for watching and listening. At VictorHanson.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.