Regime Change Is a Bonus—Not the Goal—in Iran | Victor Davis Hanson

Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, and audit dread. It's time for Vantor. Vantor automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place, and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clearer visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance or call it calm compliance. Get it? Join the 15,000 companies using Vantor to prove trust. Get started at vantor.com slash calm. Hello and welcome to Victor Davis-Hanson in his own words. This is our Friday news roundup in which we look at the news stories from the week and we're going to start with Iran. It's just so pressing in the news. It's inevitable. And then also, Iran is, Ritzka is back in the news. So we'll take a look at that. Stay with us and we'll be back for both of those stories. Hey, I'm Bradley Devlin and just like you, I'm a huge fan of Victor Davis-Hanson. Whether it's his long form podcast, Victor Davis-Hanson in his own words, or his short form content for the Daily Signal, Victor Davis-Hanson in a few words, I always leave an episode learning something new. I think they forgot the 1982 Falklands war. And in the age of clickbait and ragebait, that's a really good feeling, right? The media, thank you. You can leave now. Well, if you agree, you might like my show, the Daily Signals long form interview podcast called The Signal Sitdown. Every week, we take you behind the scenes of the biggest battles in Washington, DC, as they happen with some of the biggest names in politics. We explore big ideas and we analyze the policymaking process from an unabashedly and unapologetically conservative perspective. And that's important now more than ever with the Trump administration back in office because in 2024, you sent Washington a message it couldn't ignore. It's your government. And together, we're taking it back. So check us out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you enjoy Victor Davis-Hanson, or there too. And drop me a follow on X at Bradley Devlin to stay updated with what's happening on The Signal Sitdown. Welcome back. This is Victor Davis-Hanson in his own words. Victor is the Martin and Neil Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buske Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. Come join him at his website, victorhanson.com. The name of the website is the Blade of Perseus. We'd love to have everybody there. So Victor, I know that we often start this Friday news roundup with Iran, but it's hard to avoid that. This week, lots of news about Iran. I have, I quote, the Iranian parliamentary president and the head or one of the generals of the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, are in conflict over whether they're negotiating or ought to negotiate with Donald Trump. And this is what the conversation that was picked up on an intercepted phone call between the two. The president, Peskezikian, I hope I said that right. Peskezikian. Peskezikian. Peskezikian. Peskezikian. Okay. Said to Vahidi, who is one of the chiefs of the IRGC, he said, I want to be involved in the negotiations with the U.S. Without a quick deal, our entire economy will collapse in three weeks. To which Vahidi replied, that's exactly why you can't be involved. You'll give up everything for a deal. And I thought that intercepted phone call was very revealing about how negotiations are going to go on. So we can start with that. And then Shelly Kittleson has been kidnapped. She is a independent journalist who was in Baghdad and she was simply carjacked in broad daylight off the street in the middle of a busy street. I don't know why anybody would be in Baghdad right now, myself, but that's tragic. I hope we can get her back without giving up leverage, little endangered lives. But Marco Rubu gave a talk, I'm speaking on Wednesday, last night, I follow him on Hannity. And he outlined exactly what we were doing in Iran. And he made a very subtle point. He said, we're going to destroy their air force. We're going to destroy their navy, their ballistic missile capability, both fabrication and the existing stocks of them. He implied that we're going to stop them from killing Americans and disrupting the Middle East by attracting their military infrastructure. What he didn't say explicitly was we were going to ensure they didn't have a bomb, but it was implicit because he said, you know, we don't know where it is, but we've been bombing and bombing and the Israelis have said that. The Americans have been trying to seal that suspected cosh of enough in vituridium to make 11 bombs. So they said, they can never get it. So what was left on said that everybody's asking about, well, the first is regime change. It was never an explicit, I went back and looked, Trump never said we're going in there to change the government. What he did was very unique. He had these other objectives, but then by extension, he said, we're here to help us on the way. So the idea is that he's going to so devastate the military architecture of Iran, which he's almost done, but not destroy the power, the water, the communication, so the people won't starve to death. And therefore, the revolutionary guard corps will be weakened and the dissidents and protesters will be empowered. And that process can go on and on and on after we leave because they're in a dilemma. If they want to reestablish credibility, they're going to have to get their hands on oil revenue. They're going to have to open the straight to everybody. And then if they do get their hands on oil revenue, the people are not going to sit there while they spend another half trillion dollars to buy missiles from North Korea and give $100 billion a year to terrorist proxies or something. They're not going to do that. Well, they're starving. So they're going to really a terrible place. So then he has come up with the Venezuela situation. Rather than have a revolution or rather than arm it and have a big mess, i.e. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, he's basically saying we're going to only talk with strong men or who have credibility that we're elected in some primitive fashion and that will ostracize the theocracy and the revolutionary guard. But that's only half of the equation. The Israelis are killing them anytime a person identifies himself as a chief leader of either of those two groups, they get killed. So what Trump is saying, we've had an almost internal regime change, kind of like Venezuela. Instead of kidnapping Maduro, the Israelis are killing them. And then the people who are left, we tell the Israelis, these people want to cut a deal. And if we can cut a deal with them and they can remain in power, they will not rebuild the arsenals and the bomb. They just want to be prosperous. They're just autocratic thugs. But it's better than nation building and it's better than not doing anything at all. So that was interesting about the regime change. The other two things that everybody's asking about, straight or more moves, straight or more moves, straight or more moves. Well, Trump and Rubio basically said, we'd get no oil out of there and it's international water, so Iran is breaking it. And the Europeans say, well, they weren't breaking it till you came in. Yeah, they weren't breaking it till you came in, till we came in because you were appeasing them. And they were building a bomb and they were building ballistic missiles to get hit every one of your capitals, you fools. So Trump is saying, you, all they have to do is say, I'm France, one frigate, I'm Britain, one frigate. I am Italy, one frigate, I'm Germany, one, that would be all just 10, 12 ships as a show. But they won't even do that because their restive populations are 15 to 16 percent Muslim. And by the way, the Muslims in Europe are more radical than the Muslims in Iran. I don't mean the government, but the average Iranian on the street is more pro-western than the average Muslim in Europe. No doubt about it. So they are shackled in the streets. There's two or three solutions. The most severe and dangerous is taking Carg Island, cutting off their oil revenues, way in the north, and then making a sanitary corridor along the northern shore. But why do that? The best way would be to get an international coalition of people who use the straight and have them go by and say to the Iranians, these are your customers. If you want to fire on them, we're going to destroy you and then have a sky full of Apaches and Warthogs going up and down the coast to get tactical weapons and drones. I think that's very doable. The other long-term solution is Saudi Arabia could easily build two pipelines, one to near a lot, right on the Red Sea, that little eddy, that little bay on the Red Sea, and they could ship all of their oil either out the Suez Canal or across out the Suez Canal, or they could go out to Indian Ocean, to India, I mean to India and China, or, and not exclusively, but in complimentary, they could build a shorter line right across from the oil fields through Jordan, the West Bank to Israel, right around Haifa or somewhere. And they could, the Israelis could protect it for them and they could charge them like a modest fee or they could be paid in oil. And the Saudis then would have two alternatives to the straight or move. So that would be the best, the best solution. And then they could have other Gulf states tap into it and just make the straight of or moves irrelevant in 10 years. And that would hurt Iran unless they wanted to reform. The final thing is the NATO countries, Rubio mentioned that. The Wall Street Journal is very disappointing. They have a story today by two Europeans, basically saying, people don't know all the good things that we're doing. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we know all the bad things that you were doing. The Spanish not only denied us the use of of a NATO base, but we can't even go into their airspace. Then the Italians, or ally, Malone, wouldn't even insistly let us land bombers to refuel on their way. The French won't let us use their airspace. The British hemmed and hawed, well, today I don't think you could use Diego, so of course, tomorrow you might. Maybe not. Oh, no. Our Muslim populations are angry at us. You can't. So then they're saying to us, this is what they said, you did not consult your NATO partners and you staged a unilateral NATO mission, not NATO, American mission, now that when you're in trouble, you want us for cover. No way. Well, first of all, we're not in trouble. And second of all, this is a pattern by the Europeans. So in 1984 to 88, and then for the next 20 years, the French came to us and said, it's in the world's interest to make sure Gaddafi doesn't export his revolution to sub-Saharan Africa. So our post-colonial presence in Chad is endangered. We don't have the lift capacity. We don't have the refueling capacity. We don't have the satellite technology. We need resupply. So we're going to go there unilaterally. Would you help us? And the United States finally in 2007 said, well, Gaddafi gave up his nuclear arms after we went into Iraq. And he's reforming. He's turning over power. So I don't know. But if you're an ally, we'll help you. And then in 1991, they came and said, there's genocide in Europe. Milosevic is killing all of the Muslims in Kosovo. There could be a theater-wide war. We need to bomb. And we said, well, it's a European problem. And none of these countries are NATO countries. So you want to use NATO for your own particular mission, quote unquote for the world? Yes. When we want you to lead it, you talk to pilots and I have that flew there. They will tell you that the Americans flew 90%. And they were the people who flew in the dense fog and the terrible weather and the most dangerous anti-aircraft corridors. So we went over there for them. And in less than three months, we got rid of Milosevic. And they were happy. And we kind of destroyed any type of detente with the Yeltsin government and the Russians. Because it was 1999, or Putin, I should say. And they were in transition. And there was still hope that Russia might liberalize. But after that, they said, you attacked or Orthodox allies, Serbia, I think Wesley Kark rushed to the airport and one of the British general, what do you want? I'm not going to obey your order and start World War III and all that. So it wasn't an art necessarily. It was our humanitarian interest because of the genocide, but not our political. So that was 1999. And then they decided that it would be wise to go into Libya. Gaddafi, as I said, had reformed. But in 2011, the French and the British said, we're going to go in there. We got a UN resolution that he's committing genocide. He wasn't. He was just a thug who was giving up his nuclear weapons. He was terrified of the United States. I was there in 2007. I stayed 10 days there. I talked to everybody. I left my appendix there. So I talked to members of his government. I had two Libyan minders. All they did is tell us how much they liked America and they were going to reform. And Gaddafi was demented and old and his kids who had soccer interests and were Western educated. OK. So we went along with it. Remember that's Samantha, the big triad. Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton went to Obama. We've got to bomb them into some of that. They bombed for seven months. Not one month, seven. The left wing media said nothing. Nobody said. The Europeans said nothing. And all they did was destroy that country. The last day in office, over a year later, Obama bombed some Lib people in the desert. So we went along with it. That was not our idea. We didn't want to do it. And then we remember the 1982 Falklands. So the British came to us and said, they took the Falkland, the Argentine dictator, and Hague, who was Secretary of State, didn't want to get involved. Said, well, we're trying to build bridges in the Western Hemisphere with our Spanish-speaking neighbors. Now, Gallitieri is a dictator. We understand that. But we're working on them. And we have good relations with them. And we've got 5% or 6% at that time of the population that's Spanish-speaking here in the United States. So it's a little tricky. Maybe you should just kind of do it your own. And then they went around his back and went to Reagan. Thatcher did. And they said, we can't do this alone. We only have one aircraft carrier or two. And we've got to go all the way across the world. We have no satellite reconnaissance. We don't have enough Tomahawk missiles for a long campaign. And we don't have any gasoline. So Reagan said, we'll give you 2 million gallons of gas. We'll give you all the Tomahawk missiles you want. You have complete access to our reconnaissance, satellite, technology. And we'll even have a marine carrier. We'll put it right on ice. And if anything happens to your carrier and your carrier, you can have it. We did everything. And now, so my point is that when we're doing a unilateral attack on Iran, and it's for the Western benefit, because the missiles can't hit us. They can hit every European capital in the West. And yet, they won't do anything. Instead, they are two-faced. They talk to their domestic constituency and damn the United States. I'm not using that as a pejority, by the way. United States is a warlock. And then they come around to us and say, we understand that we're helpful. We just don't want to be involved. Well, you're involved, but they're not. So then the question I'm leading to is Ukraine. Ukraine is not a NATO ally. So Russia attacks Ukraine. And Trump had tried to revive detente with Putin and turn Putin against China, not detente that we like Putin for all what the left said he was Putin's poodle. He wasn't. He was trying to triangulate in the Kissinger model. OK, so then they said, they're going to overrun Ukraine. And we're disarmed. And we should have listened to you about the 2%. But we're not able to. So we need a couple hundred billion dollars. And we need some Abrams tanks. And we need Tomahawk missiles. And we need reconnaissance. So we did. Heimar, a whole thing. And so what Trump and Rubio were saying is the Balkans are a long way from the United States. And there are some issues there with Russia. We're trying to stop a nuclear war with Russia. We had a Cold War to taunt with them. And not that we want Milosevic to win. OK, we'll stop him. The Balkans were a long way, but Ukraine is a long way. And maybe we could get along with Putin and flip him. But not now, if we're an active participant. And he invaded because of a liberal American president in a weak Europe and your stupid Nordstrom pipeline. So we got involved. We got involved with the French at Chad. We got involved with the French in English and Libya. We got involved with the British in the Falklands. At some point, people are going to say, is there any reciprocity? No, there's not. We should not expect them. Some of them came into Iraq and Afghanistan. But most didn't go into Iraq. The Aussies did. The British did. But not too many others in full force. So the point I'm making is, at some point, way after the birth of NATO, whose motto was, Russia out, Germany down, the United States in. Well, Russia's pretty down now. And Germany is up. And we're halfway between in and out after this. And a lot of Americans are saying to themselves, if they won't let us use our airspace, and we help pay for these bases, and they won't let us use the bases, and they want us to go halfway around the world and defend them from the Russians, because they won't arm, even though their population is 100 million people larger than our own. And their GDP aggregate of the NATO European members is 10 times out of Russia. If they won't do that, well, then what's the purpose? What good are they? And that's where we are. And that's what Rubio actually said in his talk on Sean Hannity. What good is it? Yeah, I have a question on that. But first, let's welcome back a sponsor, my patriot supply. Everyone's focused on how conflict in the Middle East is raising oil prices. But there's another grim reality to this contention. Oil isn't the only resource being constrained. About one third of global fertilizer trade happens through this region. And with spring planting season on top of us, American farmers are sounding the alarm. With some saying, they can't afford to plant their fields. When one piece of the supply chain gets hit this hard, you know what comes next? High food prices, reduced availability, and maybe even panic buying. That's why having an emergency food supply at home makes so much sense. And that's where our friends at my patriot supply come in. Right now, at preparewithvdh.com, that's preparewithvdh.com, when you get a three month emergency food supply, they'll include a free mega protein upgrade. An incredible $200 bonus you don't want to miss. It's a simple way to protect your family from whatever comes next. Go to preparewithvdh.com to get your emergency food supply to date. That's preparewithvdh.com, preparewithvdh.com. We would like to thank my patriot supply for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show. So Victor, you and then Rubio was making that point in his talk that this is an untenable relationship with our NATO allies. But my question is this, who is more at risk by cutting the other one loose? Meaning the United States, and let's just cut all those Western allies loose then and not have an agreement. Or is it in the European interest? Well, they're gonna be. But they say, let's just cut the United States. Well, they never say that, do they? Every time they wanna, it's not just that when they feel that NATO was threatened by Ukrainian invasion, but when they wanna have an expeditionary force, a preemptive one to secure French interest or British interest, or they think that the Libyan oil is in danger and it's right across the Mediterranean from them, then who do they call? They call the United States. So Thatcher would not have been able to do that expedition if she didn't know in advance she was going to get secure gasoline, resupply and reconnaissance. The French wouldn't have been, they couldn't even refuel their planes on the way to Chad. We had to help them do that. They would have never been able to take out Milosevic on their own. These were European projects. And we went along with it. That's besides paying the majority and depending on how you calibrate the expenses of the NATO budget. But much preferable, we would have, we would do this. We would say, we're done with NATO. We're done with you, Spain. Come back when you get a conservative government. France, we're not gonna deal with you anymore. We can't trust you. You were out of NATO yourself. So then we would say to the countries, we want bilateral relationship. Germany, do you wanna be a partner of the United States? We'll keep our base there and we will protect you. Poland, I think all of Eastern Europe would be happy. And we would just say, you know what, Britain, you've got so many intrinsic problems right now that your liability and we like our bases. Unless you wanna make a bilateral peace treaty with us of mutual defense, we're willing to do that. But we're not going to have this, everybody hides behind the cloak of NATO thing anymore. And I think a lot of them would fall into line. But we would have express conditions. That it's reciprocal. And it's not now. And what gets a lot of people angry are, they have all of these soapbox sanctimonious lectures. This was not authorized. The Germans said that. This was not authorized. The French said this was illegitimate. It wasn't authorized. Okay, nobody authorized you to go and chat either. Nobody authorized the British to go into the Falklands. Nobody said, you've got a UN mandate. Maybe in the Balkans they did. But my point is, they pick and choose when they hide behind UN approval and when they don't. But when it's in their interest, they act. And when they act, they want us to help them. And it's logical. We have 11 fleet carriers and each, our Marine carriers are more numerous and bigger than all of the carriers of Europe put together. Forget the 11 fleet groups. So, and then when you look at what they have, Israel has over 300 jets. That's more than Germany's, France or Britain's. The other thing that came up very quickly was the Israel thing. Israel is pulling the string. But you know who's pulling the strings? Not Israel. It's the golf monarchies. Because they wanted us to do this and they took the European stance a little bit. They said, you've got to do this with Iran. You got to do, they're threatening us. They're threatening us. They got three or 4,000. They can destroy the whole oil fields for Europe. And we thought, well, why don't you talk to the Europeans? They get your oil. We're the biggest oil producer in history. We don't need your oil. No, no, no, no. We're allies and we need to protect us. So then we said, okay, well, we'll negotiate it and into the missiles and then they said, you can't negotiate with them. You got to hit them. But don't tell them that we said that. So we hit them and they did nothing. And then we said, you know what? We've destroyed their air force and their Navy and probably their ballistic missile force pretty soon. A couple of weeks, we're gonna go. And they said, you can't. They'll turn on us. Well, yeah, but you, all of your golf coalition of those countries with all that money, they have bought F-15s, F-35s, F-16. They have a whole, they have 600 fighters. They have double all those countries together, double the number that Israel. Why didn't they say to us, if you keep going until they're completely flattened, they're military, we will take in a whole area of responsibility and promise that our jets with your reconnaissance will, Israel will have one section in Tehran. You guys will get the outlying problem. You go after the infrastructure, Israel go after the command and control and we'll go after Republican Guard in the south or something. They could have easily done that, but they're not. So then I'm wondering why all of these podcasters don't say, well, did we go in? They used to say no blood for oil. So were the golf monarchies pulling the strings and saying, you gotta protect us and we have investments in there? And no, they didn't say that, but there was a better case to be made. You pick up the Jerusalem times with the Israeli, the Jerusalem post or the Israel times. You know what all the op-eds are about? How little influence they have on Donald Trump. And it's, United States is distant and powerful and we're proximate and vulnerable. And if they stop now in five to eight years, they're gonna come back. So we've got to finish the job but the United States can't for political reasons. And so we feel that we were all alone. And yet when you get back to the United States from left and right, you hear about Netanyahu is running, he's not, they're not listening to Netanyahu. They're listening to the golf states and the golf states have some shared objectives now with Israel and the United States, but not all. I think that intercepted phone call between the IRGC chief and the president of the parliament shows us the problem though, because we're now at the point where everybody's thinking, okay, Trump is saying he's negotiating with somebody. We need a negotiating platform to get this war finished. But it doesn't look to me like they are going to have a sane negotiating platform or person inside of Iraq because the parliament has no power and the IRCG is crazy. So what they have to do is they've got to eliminate the people, they just got to keep going and eliminate the Republican guard, I mean the revolutionary guard, kingpins, the theocracies and just say, we're not going to talk to you people. We're only going to talk to the elected president and members of parliament and we're not going to allow them to be hurt. And they're going to negotiate a deal with us and we're going to make them legitimate. We're not talking to any of you people. And you know what, you better hide because as soon as we find out who you are, you're gone. And that's what we're doing. And I think it's going to work. Remember that the hysteria that the war went is bad. It's lost. It's coming from one, the left, who is not very confident about the midterm seven months ago. There's only going to be about 15 to 25 seats in play. The Democratic party is really pulling badly. And if Trump can get out of this in a week or two without ground troops, the Wall Street had a record, almost record day yesterday. Stock market will recover. The oil prices will drop dramatically, especially when people speculated and wanted to buy it at a high price so they had volume and now they're stuck with it and they'll dump it. And the tax cuts, the deregulation, the foreign investment likely lower, that'll all by July, he'll be in great shape. And the Democrats know that. So in their way of thinking, they said, Tesla vandalism didn't work. Anti-ice protests kind of worked, kind of didn't work. Anti-dose didn't really have much effect. No kings, it was a circus. So we need, shutting down the government three times. It hurt Trump's GDP a little bit, but we've got to come up with, we got to make sure this war is a disaster of Vietnam proportions and we'll hang it around his neck. On the part of the right, I think it's, some of it's very sincere. They say Trump said he ran on no forever wars, but I don't think by any definition, four weeks with no ground troops is a forever war. When you were negotiating during the whole period prior to the war and you'd be, you're negotiating during the war and you'll be negotiating after the war. So it's more like the Sole Manny, Baghdadi, Wagner Group, Maduro taking out the last summer of the nuclear facilities. And I think a lot of them know that, but I feel that maybe they feel they're losing influence with the White House, because Trump has been critical of the Maga Wright, vocal Maga Wright and the polls show that probably 90%, 93% of Republicans support what Trump's doing and the people who identify themselves as strongly maggots in the 70s and 80s. So I don't think there's a constituency. If there's not a constituency, the louder and louder and louder they become. And then they end up saying things that are not, there's no military reality to it. So when they say the war is lost or it's gonna cause World War III, you look for the evidence. And the only way you can adjudicate that is look at history, the 42 days of the first Gulf War, 20 people were killed in the Air Force, maybe 50 depending on how you categorize them, 50 to 60 aircraft, it was much more injurious. If you look at the Balkan War, we went 72 days. If you look at the Libyan War, Obama, they had 26,000 sorties over seven months. So in comparison to those prior incursions, it's nothing. And it's the first time we've ever really suffered such, I mean, it's tragic that 13 people were killed, but Biden lost that in one day in Afghanistan, one hour. So it's, and the difference is that Iran is a much more formidable enemy than Milosovic Serbia, or Chad, or Argentina dictatorship, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. It was considered the terror of the Middle East. And yet in a mere four weeks, they reduced it to a pathetic shell, a husk. And you just think people would be empirical on the right. They'd say, well, here's how much it costs, maybe $40 billion. Here's how many people were lost. Here is what we did to Iran, and they were not going to have a nuclear weapon for a long, long time. If ever they have no ballistic missiles, if we keep at it in a couple more weeks, they have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no air defenses, and the country's in an economic basket case, and they've got factions. They've got strong men autocrats, they've got revolutionary guard theocrats, and they've got the people. And they're all gonna fight it out. But whatever happens is it's not going to be conducive to a powerful Iran. And we did that at little cost. And I think everybody, it's a convincing realistic appraisal of what's going on. What's not realistic is the war is lost, or it's hopeless, or it's stupid. Doesn't make any sense. Yeah, the media doesn't seem to deal with reality. Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the mural of Irina Zarutsk in Providence, Rhode Island. Stay with us and we'll be right back. If you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, you might enjoy the Daily Signals flagship show, The Tony Kinnit Cast. The same common sense perspectives you love weekdays at seven p.m. Eastern. And unlike some of the other evening shows, we work up until show time to bring you the latest breaking news, analysis, and good old American sarcasm. Tom Tillis, I'm pretty sure might've been useful at one time as a doorstop. Find The Tony Kinnit Cast on YouTube, X, radio, TV, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. And you can find Victor on X. His handle is at VD Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup. And come join the Blade of Perseus. You can subscribe for $65 a year or give it a try at 650 a month. And all of Victor's writings are there. These podcasts are there. And you can find links to buying his books as well. So we'd love to have everybody. So Victor, there was a mural being painted of just her face. Yorina Zaritska and our audience remembers she was the one that was murdered on the light rail train in, I think it was North Carolina, South Carolina. Yes. And the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, this mural was private. It was on a outside of a bar that wanted to paint a mural of her. And he said that it needed to be removed because it was too divisive and it was misguided in intent. Isolating people. Yes. So I guess what he's saying is because they have canonized George Floyd, if she'd only been black, if she only had been in the process of passing counterfeit money, if she only had a link the prison and criminal record, including a home invasion where he threatened a pregnant woman with a knife, if he only, if she only had been on fentanyl at the time, if she had only resisted police arrest and been killed, then she would be a hero. But because she was white, because she was an immigrant, because she was mining her own business, and this 12-time, 11-time, 12-time fellow, slid her throat and killed her, she doesn't qualify for a private commemoration. Nobody's asking a free zone in Seattle or Washington like George Floyd did. And then, I mean, what happened after George Floyd was, it wasn't just they canonized a criminal. And I don't know what exactly happened because that trial of Derek Chauvin was so politicized, I think the problem was his face, facial expression. He looked really angry and lack of empathy when George Floyd said he couldn't breathe. That was, even though he was using an authorized element to protocol to stop a guy who was clearly resisting arrest, but there was culpability maybe, not what they charged him with, murder. But that led to four months of rioting, that led to $2 billion in damage, that led to 1,500 injured police officers, that led to 35, 36 people dead, that led to burning a police precinct, the iconic St. John's Church in Washington, and a federal courthouse. And it led, Camilla Harris to say, this isn't gonna stop, this is gonna continue, this is not gonna stop. And the long-term, it ruined the universities, it really did, because all the problems they're having started right after his death when they all tried to outvert you, Sigl and performance are at each other, and they eliminated the SAT, and they didn't go to quota admissions, which they were doing, 11%, 12% black, 10% Hispanic, was discriminated against Asians and whites, but they did repertoids. So suddenly Stanford University, where I work, was admitting 9% white males, even though they make up almost 35% of the population. And the result was that in 2001, two, three, four, they let in people who, in their defense, were not prepared for the curriculum that these universities had advertised was necessary for their world rankings, and the type of level of students that they expected. They all bragged on themselves, we have a higher SAT score entering class, we reject more straight A, you know what I mean? And suddenly they threw that all the way out, and then you talk to these left-wing faculty members, and they all whisper, well, it's very problematic. I can't assign the same number of authors. Yes, don't tell anybody we're giving 85 to 90% A's. Yes, the Silicon Valley employers say that a Stanford graduate is not what he was 10 years ago. That's what happened. And then they said, we don't dare give people C's, because it might be racist. They might have a pattern, you know, they look at our synopsis, and we have to have key words in there, and to be hired, you have to have a diversity statement, just like the McCarthy period, I can't believe it. And then if I give BB, BB, BB, BB, and I give A, A, A, and there's a racial difference, I'm gonna be in big trouble. So what I'm gonna do is just water down the curriculum, and give everybody A's, and let Stanford worry about their diminishing reputation, or Harvard, or Yale. And that's what they did. That all came from George Floyd. It did. And the action took, no, I haven't even got it. They didn't even mention the Black Lives Matter, the three women who organized it, who scummed with what, I don't know, $100 million was missing, and they all ended up with nice, beautiful homes, and luxury appurtences. And the whole thing about Black Lives Matter was, it started out by three lesbians, whose purpose was feminism in the Black community. They were saying that being a gay Black woman was against the grain with the macho, rap, Black image, and they were not treated well, and they were gonna have a equity. And then as soon as this thing, they just switched, and said, we represent all Black people. And the money poured in from corporations, and said, don't boycott us, don't call us racist, how much you need, 10, 20, 30 million? And then they took the money in, and it's never been found. It was spent. Well, the Providence Mayor, Brett Smiley, said something that was a little bit rich when he was advising against this mural. He said, I continue to encourage our community to support artists whose work brings us closer together rather than divides us. That's a little rich coming from a left-wing person. I don't know, I can go, I won't mention, I don't wanna be too nihilistic, but I can drive into Fresno, and I can see murals and pictures of Cesar Chavez. And I think you can make the argument that what Dolores Huerta is saying at 95, she was whispering at 45 to various members of the Cesar Chavez highest echelon. This is when he had gone into Sinanon and was playing the, quote unquote, game, and using the Sinanon thugs to go after dissidents while he was going down the border and using force to beat up illegal aliens. But so he was a hero with a feat of clay, and they all knew that he had engaged an imposter, I shouldn't even say impoverished, illegal and perverted, pedophilic sexual relations with small girls, and they said nothing, nothing. And nobody's saying, nobody at the time said, well, before you put that mural out, it might be a little divisive because we've gotta investigate these rumors that have been coming out for years that Cesar Chavez was a serial adulter and may have been a pedophile, and that's at odds with his Catholic peasant face. You know, he had this long suffering person. And so the mayor's words are, I get so sick of those sanctimonious people that are such hypocrites. He should go join NATO. Yeah, he should. Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break, our last break, and then come back and talk about the No Kings rally, speaking of things that are detached from reality. 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. This is Victor Davis-Hanson in his own words. So Victor, the No Kings rallies this weekend got a lot of press, but I thought there was one thing that was interesting. I know that our audience probably says no kings that these people that are protesting were pro-Obama, pro-Biden, pro-COVID restrictions, all of whom had worse egregious assaults on democracy than Donald Trump ever has had. So it doesn't make any sense- I have a phone and a pen, that's what Obama said. That's what he said. But so it doesn't make sense. And plus, on top of it, the lot of the people out there are aged white women that we use the K word on, but there was an independent journalist, Nate Friedman, he went out there to ask these people and one of these white women replied to him, why is it that there's no diversity out here that it's all white people? And this is what she said, that it was too dangerous for blacks and Hispanics to come out to protest because they might be arrested. So the white people had to do this for them. So patronizing. Let me ask her seriously. In a great part of LA, let's say at four o'clock in the afternoon when many of these things were, being a single white woman or a black male would be safer. She was saying that what? White men would go and beat up black people or that the police would. Does she have any idea of the ethnic makeup of the LAPD now? It's a minority white. Does she have any idea who the mayor is? The mayor is a black woman communist who cut sugar for Cuba as a student. The whole city council is people of color and many are racists. We remember that little remark about black children, about the city council by Villa Rosa. So that's just absurd, but it is important because it reveals the mindset of what I would call the bicoastal affluent white septigenarian woman liberal. They feel that they're so committed, so spiritually and ethically and morally superior to everybody that they're out on the barricades taking the fire so that poor black people who are helpless and have no ability to take care of themselves and look to people like her to protect them. Tell that to Tom Saul or Shopee Steele. Oh, we need you to protect us, this ignoramus white woman. It's very embarrassing because these protests, whether it's the Tesla or the No Kings or the Ices are predominantly white women between 40 and 70. And they're out during the day. So they're either husbands are working or they're on retirement or they're independently wealthy, but you don't see a lot of minority people out there because our poor white males, because they're working. And it's just, I don't know, as somebody who spent 50 years, unfortunately, in academia, I have met that type again and again and again. Can I relate an anecdote? I was at a foreign language meeting. I don't wanna mention anybody. And I was listening to a person who fit this profile, a colleague, and they were talking about travel funds. And they were all fighting. You thought it was like the Iranian war over who was gonna get $150 of travel money to go to Europe. And they started arguing. And I said, do you really wanna spend an hour arguing over which people get to go to Paris and charge the university? It wasn't that much, you know what I mean? And then this woman said, why don't you shut the F up? But she muttered it. Everybody was startled. And I was new there. So I said, I wanna talk to you afterwards. And I said, so you go in a meeting and you threaten me. And she said that once you get the F out too. And I just said to her, would you like me to talk to you? I went, shut the F up and get the F out. And she goes, you know what she said? You just did. I'm gonna report you. That was so mean of you. I said, I just said what you did. Yes, I know. But you know, you're a man. I thought, well, you just hide behind this little veneer of feminism and then use these foul words. And you don't even have the courage to say it out loud. You just mutter it so all the people can hear that you're a virtue signaling and that poor farmer from Salma is a crude guy and you're gonna put him down. And then he just repeats what you exactly verbatim what you said. She had tears in her eyes. She started crying. And then she said, I'm gonna report you. I said, promises, promises. But that type is what I'm getting at is passive aggressive. And you see that every time I've independent journalists goes up and ask one of them, they get angry. You know what I'm saying? They get really angry. They're face clenches. So that's not, what I'm trying to say is no Kings is not the problem. They know that Trump was elected. They know that he was impeached three times. They know that they waged lawfare against him. No one has had his authority and power more constitutionally and unconstitutionally contested than Trump. She didn't mention that Biden was the result of a complete hoax where people put a waxin effigy up there as a spokesman and then engineered a veritable coup to clean the primary in 2020. And then to use him to bring in the Obama people to run the most radical agenda that people didn't want. That's what they did. But my point is again, that what they project politically is that they're very unhappy people. And I don't know quite why they're unhappy. I think a lot of it is they see that in America, you have to be a victim to gain empathy or money or success and they don't fit that category. They're well educated, they're wealthy, they're well off, they're white. So they either have to play up their femininity that they're women victims or they have to be crusader women. They're helping, they're out on the front lines as a victim, they may be shot, they may be killed. That's what she was implying. I got to, I'm gonna be out there, but I'm doing it for the helpless. And it's just so far from reality. The people they really hate, in my experience of talking to hundreds of these people that fit that profile or white male working class, the kind of people they call and say, my toilet is stuffed up and there's a bad smell from a dead rat under my foundation or the roof leaks. Will you get over here right now, that kind of person? And politics, is this the manifestation of their deeper neuroses? It really is, they have a lot of psychological problem. I think that the Democratic Party has a lot of chaos, or dissonance going on inside of it. And I have a new example of that. Everybody was using that metaphor, the Star Wars bar scene. Sure looks like that if you go to those, or look at the videos of the No Kings rally. But the Democrats have published, the DNC has published a strategy document. And it has a lot on how they're gonna try to get more voters on their side, et cetera, like you would expect. But nothing at all about changing policies, just merely tactics and getting voters. But they did also in this document, survey their various constituencies, Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and the working class, for their complaints about the, and here a lot of you are not gonna be too surprised at some of these, but I thought it does show the dissonance. Blacks said they're weary of people campaigning, using their story, I've seen that before. Latinos say that we're interested in affordability and healthcare and not immigration. Native Americans are angry because the Democrats consider them a monolithic unit. And the working class says that we're worried about economic hopelessness, we distrust politicians, and there is a gender divide, meaning that women are more likely to be democratic and men are more likely to be Republican. I think women make more now than, Black women make much more than Black men. I think it's true of professional women in the workplace that are make more than men. But all of those groups express things that are self-evident. I think I've said for years that the Hispanic community, if that's the right term, Latino, whatever they wanna use, they're very troubled about open borders because their communities are swarmed by people. And when you have salvo, and they're not all, another thing that people don't realize is that traditionally illegal immigration across the border was from Mexico. So 90% until recent years were Mexican nationals and Mexican-American naturalized citizens. Okay, that's not true now, it's 50%. When you get Salvadorians and Guatemalans and Hondurans, and you get Chinese, and they don't feel that that is they cause celebrity more. Number one, number two, there's a subtle racism. I don't know what you call it, but the earlier diasporas from Mexico were from Northern Mexico, and they tended to be high school educated. They claim they had more Spanish ancestry. The more recent were more impoverished people that were indigenous from Chiapas, Michoacan, and especially Oaxaca. Every little San Joaquin Valley town, if you drive through it, it'll say Oaxaca Market. And they look different, they're more indigenous. So there was a prejudice against that too, or they felt that these people who came later and all illegally, many of them came with green cards, were dangerous to their communities. They had gang in 13, Nortaniel, Serrano, Trent, whatever. And then they swarmed social services. They swarmed the dialysis, they swarmed clinics, they swarmed the ER. I think I've been to the ER in the last two years, three years for B. anaphylaxis, and then for pneumonia two times. And you go in there, it's just completely swamped. And the people there are not legal, if you can tell. They don't speak any English whatsoever. And so the Mexican-American community feels that they inordinately bear that burden and the crime as well. So they wanna have affordability. If you live in California, then you're paying now $6 a gallon for gas, and you can't buy a Tesla. And if you do buy a Tesla, the electricity almost, it makes it as much, you know, 40 kilowatt an hour sometime. So that's obvious. And blacks, they don't want their story. I know a black person story. No, they mean that they have slavery and Jim Crow, and then therefore their victims, however many generations they are from that. But everybody else is assuming the victim status in various and asundry ways, off of that initial. That was a sense of tension with the Jewish community. They kept getting angry at all these Jewish Holocaust survivors and 6 million, whatever you can say about slavery, they didn't put 6 million of them in a gas chamber. And they were so-called white. I mean, so they were very angry that they had hijacked the sympathy. Yeah, and the more that you had the intersectional, and the irony is that Jesse Jackson started all with a rainbow coalition. He said he was gonna get together every victimized group, Latinos, Asians, da-da-da-da-da-da. But come on, we're six generations away from slavery. And we've had $25 trillion in great society programs. And the greatest killer of black men in the United States is not racism, it's other black criminals. People who are killing blacks in Chicago on a Saturday night are black. And if you think that's an unfair statistic, if you look at interracial crime, it's a little bit rare, but to the extent that it exists, I think it's 7% or 8% of violent crime. It's about six to one. In other words, the perpetrator or black and the victim is white in almost six out of, six times more likely to happen. So it's very, you know, I understand that. And then when you look at this wave of, we've had it in Wisconsin, we've had it in Chicago where black teens mass at these stores and then swarm them. And it really disrupts urban life, it makes people, and usually the victims are ethnic people, immigrants from India, Pakistan, the Middle East, Korea, and they're much more explicit about the problem because they feel that they're part of the intersectional community as well. Brings up a larger issue here in California, we're facing revelations of hospice, COVID money. It looks like it's gonna be much more than $10 billion in fraud. And when you start to look at this, it's as clear as it was in Minnesota that California authorities knew about it. They knew about two and a half million registrations that were doublets. In other words, they knew that there's somebody named Joe Smith was registered twice. And with that mail-in ballots, that was an exposure that you should have rectified. The point I'm making is many of the people that are in these federal and state subsidy and entitle programs would qualify, or they would self-describe as DEI. So what's happened is the diversity, equity, inclusion industry has sent the message out that you're a victim. And when you combine repertory ideology with it, you think, well, you treated my grandfather terribly, or my great-great-grandfather was a slave, or you had Chinese exclusionary law laws in the 19th century. Therefore, if I do something wrong, it's sort of a reparation. You should give me exemption because your existing programs do not sufficiently level the playing field. So if I commit a crime and embezzle federal money, it's just a form of needed and necessary and overdue reparations. And that's the whole ideology behind the Somali community. They were baffled when those independent journalists started knocking on their doors, these white men, and it was like, who are you? Why do we not tell, we're gonna threaten you. They chased them and everything and said, don't you understand that we're Somalis? Who were never ever slaves. A whole Somali group that came in and immigrants and refugees. That area of Somali that's trying to break away Somaliland has wanted to extradite Ilyan Omar because her family was involved in the genocide in Somalia. This is the greatest irony of all, that we allowed in a family that was the elite of the elite that was part of that corrupt elite in Somalia. And her father was in the military conducting, I guess you would call it extermination raids. And then we let them come in and we didn't audit them. And then once they were naturalized, she wanted her brother to come in and be a naturalize. And one of the quickest ways I guess she thought was to marry him. And again, all that came up again this week and it could be easily resolved. All she has to do is hold a press conference and say in Emile Zola fashion, Jai accused, I accuse all of you of libel and slander. And I'm gonna show you how you're wrong. This is my brother. Does he look like the pictures of the people that I married? This is his DNA. And here's my DNA. They're the same. Okay, now look at the pictures when we were married. And you might have had to take a blood test. And can any of you prove that he was my brother by DNA and if somebody, she won't do that because people see him and they know that he's a, there's a photographic record of him. There's probably a fingerprint too when you get married. And all they have to do is look at his DNA. So she's now trying to say that that person that she married was not her brother. That makes no sense because we've seen him. He's on record. But all she has to do is take that person and we know where he is. He's in England. All he has to do is say, would you please send your DNA and I'll shake my DNA and I'll show you that we weren't brothers. That we're not brothers in sister. But she's claimed him as her brother, but she has pictures of him as her marriage partner as well. Oh, okay, so the pictures seem to be consistent. He'd live with her. Yeah, but she's that person that lived with her. Isn't she claiming was not her brother? Yes. But everybody knew who he was. They knew who he was. The Somali community knew who he was. He's had some name changes, but there is evidence that you can tie that person with her during the marriage. I mean, he signed his name to a marriage certificate. And so I don't know if you still have to take a blood test when you get married, we had to. And I was, but my point is there's mechanisms that she can call out her accusers. She can say to JD Vance, you have slandered and smeared me, I'm gonna sue you. And I'm gonna sue you because I am going to produce the person that I was married to. A good friend of mine still. And I will show you that this person fits all of the photographs when we were married and all the evidence and here he is. And we do not have identical, any identical DNA, but she won't do that. No, she's never gonna do that. Because she always says the same thing. I'm not gonna participate in this racist conspiracy against me. Well, Victor, let's turn then to another, the last topic that's hot in the news. And that is of course the DC shutdown. Right now they are on vacation for two weeks or they are on relief from being in DC to go back to their constituencies. John Thune, the majority leader from the Senate made a deal with the Democrats and he agreed to defund ICE and their border security, defund both of those and send it down to the House for this bill to get signed. So at least the DHS can be funded again. And Mike Johnson said he'd have none of it. He too, both of them are Republicans. So we got a fight going on between the Senate. Yeah, I think John Thune represents the Romney wing and the Republican Party and he feels that you have to get the government back and make, and Johnson represents the Trump wing and thinks these people are completely crazy. ICE has nothing to apologize for. They have the overwhelming support of the United States voter. The polls show that people still think that they want people deported that are here illegally and there's no reason to compromise with them. And ICE has already been funded in the big, beautiful bill. So they're talking about future funding or something like that, but it can continue to operate. And they're talking about future funding and getting it out, the Democrats. And so Thune is saying, well, we'll just let them do whatever they want, but it doesn't really matter because they can't stop the ICE people in the field. And Johnson is saying, no, they're trying to codify rules and regulations on their conditions that in the future will really impede it. So we're not gonna do it. And Thune is saying, let's just get the government going and then deal with it. So... Does this show more dissonance on the side, the Republican Party side? I mean, given Joe Kent coming out with his leak and Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly criticisms of the right and the CPAC in fact, was not all that well attended. No, it speaks well of Republicans because the Democratic Party has no dissident faction. It's completely crazy. It's run by the old guard, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and then they have convinced the old dinosaurs like Pelosi and Claymore and Chuck Schumer that they have to act like they're radical socialists. Maybe they are now, I don't know. And then the Mondami people, that Mondani is the face of the party and Gavin Newsom knows that. I mean, he's now he's trashing Israel and he's praising all these socialists, Karen Bass. And then you've got even the squad, they kind of seem passe, you know, compared to the people, these Democratic attended functions. I mean, they were out and out anti-Semitic. They're river to the sea and push the Jews off. And then you've got the Communist flags in New York, Philadelphia, you've got a rally where people are talking about glial with a gun. None of them are ever condemned by Democrats. That's who they are. But at least in the Republican Party, you have disagreements and people, you know, go back and forth and argue. And everybody said Trump was, what did Joe Biden call him, ultra-maga? But he's at war with, he's disparaged Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens. First term he wrote off C. Bannon. He's said, well, I don't know, I don't know if he's ever been in a war with Trump, but he's not with Bannon. He's said Megyn Kelly was wrong. He's at war with that element of the mega movement. He said, they're not mega. They're podcasters looking for, basically he said they're looking for, I don't know, I'm not gonna get into it. I think for the Republican Party myself, it would be much better if they didn't get into the ad hominem. I'm not trying to say I'm elevated above it, but I don't have any energy right now because of my predicament. But I just think that it doesn't do anybody any good to call names and all of the stuff they're doing. And they're not like, I mean, all of them, I knew Tucker, I like Megyn Kelly. I don't think that's really, I think they're in a mode right now and they're feuding that it doesn't do anybody any good. And it hurts them. Yeah, absolutely. Because I've defended them, people will say to me, why were you on Tucker? And I said, Tucker was perfectly rational when I was on that show. And don't go on this show, don't go on that. I don't think that's healthy either. I think, if you believe, politics is 51-49, it's better than the alternative. That's what Buckley said, I'm gonna vote for the person who's the most conservative on the ticket. That's what he said. And he said he would vote, he'd rather have the first 2000 people in the telephone book than a Harvard professor. So what I'm trying to say is, take all of these differences and then say there's certain parameters we can't go on. We can't be anti-Semitic. We can't blame the Jews. That's a taboo. You can't be racist. You can't own anything like that. But within that, you can disagree about how to deal with abortion or NATO, any of that. As long as you have certain commonalities and then you present that to the people because this is a 50-50 country. And three to five to 8% can hurt. But the other thing is, on the right, I don't think people have a long-term view of what's gonna happen. The war is gonna be over in two weeks, two to three weeks. And when people go into Iran and they see the damage that's done and the state of the Iranian military and the state of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis talk really big, but they don't seem to wanna get into it or they don't have enough missiles or they haven't been supplied recently. Or the Israel United States says, if you send another missile volley, we're gonna blow up your power plant. So they'll see that there was a lot of efficacy and good that came out of this and people are gonna be happy and the economy's gonna get stronger and Trump's gonna go into the midterms against a lunatic party. And he could very easily hold onto the House and Senate. I think he will. And I don't think they see that. They think that they can divide the party or that he's gonna lose, I don't think that's gonna happen. Yeah, well, let's hope not. Well, Victor, we're at the end of our podcast. I'd like to thank you for all your words of wisdom and thanks to our audience for choosing to join us. We have another episode on Saturday with a weekend episode and we'd like to invite you all to come and finish up with the news. And then we will talk a little bit about, we're on ancient Greek gods. I was thinking Aphrodite on Saturday. And we did Zousa. Yeah, we did Zousa. We did Zousa here. Yes, I'll do. Aphrodite isn't Artemis the God of War? She's the Roman Diana. She's the God of War. She's Artemis. Hunt. Yeah, hunting and the masculine. There are two goddesses that are sort of masculine, but especially Athena, she's asexual in some sense. And then there's the martial god Poseidon and Aries, et cetera. Aries is kind of full, you know. He's Mars. Yeah. So Aphrodite and Aries, how about that? They're brother and sister. All right. So join us on the Saturday edition. And once again, thank you. This is Victor Davis Hansen and Sammy Wink and we're signing off. Thank you everybody for listening and watching. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. 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