From Trump Ally to Critic, Joe Kent’s Changing Path | Victor Davis Hanson

Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there, integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time, from startups to scale-ups online, in-person and on-the-go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com. It's a tragic figure because he was 11 deployments into combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. His wife was a CIA operative and tragically killed. He served honorably. He owed a lot to the Trump administration because he had been a defeated congressional candidate twice and it was very likely that he did not have a political future. And Trump allows Tulsi to bring him in and he's like the number two, number three people and the director of national intelligence. And then he knows that she's vulnerable because people have suggested that her lectures about forever wars put her at odds with this. So you would think to be sober and judicious. He would try to follow the directives of the elected president. And if he could not do that, he would write a very nice letter and say, I'm in opposition and leave, but he didn't do that. Hello ladies. Hello gentlemen. Welcome to Victor Davis Hansen and his own words. No words right now because Victor's finishing breakfast. So he needs that strength. I'm a total wreck. That's all right, Victor. Victor is a wreck is better than most men in the tuxedos and limousines. We're recording on the 21st, Saturday the 21st, this episode is up on the 24th. Victor Davis Hansen in his own words is brought to you by the good people, Rob Bluey, the great Rob Bluey from the Daily Signal. Victor is the Martin and Eli Anderson senior fellow at the Hoover institution, the Wayne and Marsha Buske distinguished fellow in history at Hillsdale College, man with a website, the blade of Perseus. Victorhansen.com. Go there, tons of free stuff, but Victor also has exclusive material. You need to subscribe, $6.50 a month, $65 discounted a year and you get to read two articles every week, one video every week that Victor does exclusively for that site. So I think I got it all in there, Victor. By the way, I saw Rob, I was in DC on Thursday for the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast and Rob was there. He's just the greatest soul, but so many people there have to meet. We love Victor. How's he doing? How's he doing? Like I have some special insight information about you, but you're beloved wherever I go, Victor, beloved. That was very nice. You know, I had a just off topic, I had a kind of a bad week because I'm trying to develop my lung, redevelop it, losing the lobe and then I had all that lost half my blood volume and all that, the second surgery to find the bleed and all that. And you know, you don't want to press your heart, but I had been walking about 10,000 steps for three days at heart rate about 75 to 80. And then all of a sudden out of the blue, whatever I did, I mean, I'm get up to get a drink of water, 100, get dizzy, really, I'm dizzy, but more dizzy. And then like anytime I walk, 95 immediately. And so I wrote this, I wrote my doctor and he said two things that I kind of sloughed off. He said, well, you were on this beta blocker and then you got off and you've been on a long time. So your heart is overcompensating. I said, well, I will come back and said, well, the first three days I felt great. He said it's called the rebound effect. So if you suppress a heart rate and sometimes, you know, you would get in the 60s when you were walking with it, but it felt very artificial. And then he said something very astute. He said, once the good, ecstatic part, you know, your ecstatic getting off it and three or four days, then the rebound, that'll last either a week to three weeks even. And that'll mean your heart will be at 10 to 15 to 20 beats higher. And then he said, you lost half your blood volume. It's been hot. I bet you're dehydrated and I've never been dehydrated in my life. So I went to get a blood draw for a test and the woman said, you have no veins. I said, I have the best veins. I have vampire veins. And she said, she said, no, I have, I can't even get blood out with a pediatric needle. So you've got to drink some water. I said, why? She said, because you're severely dehydrated and I started drinking 16 ounces and then it kind of oozed out. So four days ago, I thought, wow, it's now been seven or eight days since I was off the drug. Maybe he was right and the rebound effect will fade. And maybe I've been chugging water, right? And the last three days I've walked 80, 500 steps and the heart rate's steady 73 to 80. So I'm just very, that's a wonderful doctor to be able to remind me of that. Well, your post-op has sort of been that phrase, two steps forward and one back. It has been. Some days I get up and I feel, you know what the worst thing about it is? It's very humiliating. I was always very physical. I don't mean necessarily particular, but I always did things. I fixed sprinklers. I'd climb up in the barn and fix a rafter or I'd spray weeds. I did it all the time and I'm like an invalid because these weeks whenever I kind of forget, oh, there's a sprinkler broken, water shooting out. I get on my knees and next thing I know, and I look at my watch and it was 105, you know? And then I wouldn't sleep. I hadn't slept more than two or three hours and then it's very, I can't drive. I tried to drive around the yard and all of a sudden I thought, ooh, I don't want to be one of those people you read about that elderly gentleman 72 ran over a pedestrian. So it is very humiliating, but I'm trying to do all the rehab, you know, the spirometer and walk and all of this is a side show because the real question is, is this thing going to come back or not? So I'm also now scheduled for my next blood biopsy and CT. So got to stay upbeat. People have been very nice, right? Yeah. All these wonderful stories and letters. I just, yeah, I was at Mass before the prayer breakfast the day before a couple of people stopped me there. I mean, they were praying for you right then and there. So it's a beautiful thing for people to, not all about you. I think this has other impact on influencing people's religiosity and the belief that prayer is meaningful. It does, it does, it does matter. It is. Yeah. So Victor, I think we'll get started today by getting your thoughts on an important essay that's come out in the spectator by Chris Caldwell. It's titled The End of Trumpism and we'll get to that when we come back from these important messages. Hey, I'm Bradley Devlin and just like you, I'm a huge fan of Victor Davis Hansen. Whether it's his long form podcast, Victor Davis Hansen in his own words or his short form content for the Daily Signal, Victor Davis Hansen in a few words, I always leave an episode learning something new. I think they forgot the 1982 Falklands war and in the age of clickbait and ragebait, that's a really good feeling, right? The media, thank you. You can leave now. Well, if you agree, you might like my show, The Daily Signals Long Form Interview Podcast called The Signal Sit-Down. Every week, we take you behind the scenes of the biggest battles in Washington, DC, as they happen with some of the biggest names in politics. We explore big ideas and we analyze the 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 Hansen or there too. And drop me a follow on X at Bradley Devlin to stay updated with what's happening on The Signal Sit-Down. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. I should have also mentioned at The Daily Signal, Victor also does four times a week Victor Davis Hansen in a few words. Do check that out. It's about seven, eight. I just started again after my hiatus of three months, I think. So yeah, you're doing about four a week and about seven, eight minutes each and really spoon-sized, bite-sized Victor Wisdom. So here's what Chris Caldwell, who's, so Chris is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. He used to be one of the most essayists for the weekly standard back in its heydays, terrific guy, but he's written a somewhat controversial essay and it's titled The End of Trumpism. And for the guy who has written the case for Trump and the forthcoming book, the subtitle, I think, The Fall and Rise of Trump, Who Better Than You to Reflect on This. But here's what Chris wrote and bear with me folks. Trump has, and he started about Iran off the bat, Trump has escaped other predicaments of his own making, but there is something different about this one. The attack in Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base, so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project. Those with claims to speak for Trumpism, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, have reacted to the invasion with incredulity. Trump may entertain himself with the presidency for the next three years barring impeachment, but the mutual respect between him and his movement has been ruptured and his revolution is essentially over. He goes on at great length to say, to be increasingly critical. It matters, Chris Colwell says in the Public Square, Victor, what are your thoughts on this? Well, as somebody who, you know, have written for about 50 years, it is very, very hazardous to offer a prognosis in what we say in Latin, in medias rebus, right in the middle of things. So what do I mean by that? Let's just say that the regime in Iran really is exhausted and they have scattered around certain emergency silos, three missiles here, 10 drones there, it would be impossible to get them all and they're letting them off to show everybody that they can take this blow. But I don't know why they did it. They have convinced the NATO partners of two things. That they are trying to shut down the straight-home moves that our allies need. They've convinced them that if you let this regime do this, they'll do it again and they will control it. And they've sent an inner range, intermediate ballistic missile to Diego Garcia, which is beyond the range of which they said their missiles were capable of, 20 to 600 miles. They said, oh, we don't have anything over. You take a map of Europe and you put concentric circles and you'll see that most of the European capitals are now in range of those. So that kind of shocked them. So what I'm getting at is, I think Christopher doesn't see that we're in a very fluid, volatile point where I asked myself abroad, strategically, I said, and then I'll get to the domestic very quickly, but I'll say, are the Gulf monarchies that beg this not to do it, that triangulate with us, that pay around off so they will be safe, pay them the dangled, and then they secretly fund Hamas or some of them fund Houthis and Hezbollah? Okay. Are they now angry? No. They're more on board than ever because basically they said, if Trump leaves this regime intact and he leaves, we are going to be vassal states of Iran. We already were in a sense, but now it's over. They have the ability to ruin our tourist industry, our oil industry, and they're crazy. So what I'm getting at is the world at large has not abandoned the United States like the left has and part of the right piece. And we don't know where we are right now because the command and control has been wiped out. There's other people that will step up. We don't know if they're capable. We don't know. We don't know what the Iranian people are going to do. We don't know to what degree the Israelis are going to direct all their attention to attacking the revolutionary guard. And they've been doing that with drones. When you send in tactical aircraft like Apaches and Warthogs, then you have to have not air superiority. You have to have air supremacy because those are low flying targets. And some guy can take pot shots and get a lucky shot and shoot somebody in the windshield. That can still happen. But it shows you that if they're flying freely over the Gulf and along the coast, then they're pretty secure that there's not going to be a great deal of danger because there's not a lot of resistance left. So these things can be, nobody predicted the Berlin Wall would fall. They said it would not happen for years. Other people predicted Tenemann Square would lead almost immediately to the end of the Soviet Union. It didn't happen. So we don't know what's going to happen. But it's very volatile. But let's just say if it did happen, Cuba, the Cuban government would probably, and I'm not going to prognosticate after warning about it, but there'd be a good chance it would lose control gradually if they see what happened in Iran. And Venezuela would not want to rebel or go revert back to the Chavez Maduro regime. So everything is in play right now. But if it should happen that Iran has regime change, then you look at a president, you say, what were the three biggest worries outside of China, and I shouldn't say outside, that the United States presidents have had? One was a nuclear Iran and a trouble-making, subsidizing terrorist Iran, which we don't want to touch because we thought they were invincible. Two, the slow, leftist takeover of South and Latin American with these left-wing governments that the Chinese, as they had been doing with the Radians and North Korea, they're propping up. And the use of Cuban mercenaries, bodyguards, and ideological missionaries all over the Western Hemisphere. And who is the beneficiary of that? China. And for us to take out the Chinese pipeline, I'm being metaphorically, but the access to Venezuela and maybe Iran, you could see, as one scenario, in three weeks, a collapsed Iran, a revolution in Cuba, six weeks, who knows. And Donald Trump would not have failed, he would be the greatest president in the last, I don't know, 50 years, 80 years. I think Chris knows that, should be aware of that. Domestically, for what he said to be true, if you were going to be completely analytical, you wouldn't cite Joe Rogan, Megan Kelly, Tucker Carlson, or Candace Owens, even though they have a lot of clicks, you would look at polls and you would say, what does an anti-Trump poll say on CNN? What does an anti-Harvard and you look at them and the mega base is much higher than people who poll that they're just straight Republicans. Straight Republicans that say, I'm not a big Trump supporter, about 60 to 70 percent. The mega people's one poll had them 100 percent, 100 to 90 percent. So for his article to be convincing, you would have to have demonstrable truth that there is a widespread, not just unease, everybody has unease, but I'm saying it translates into actual defection. And I haven't seen that and the polls don't indicate it. And the other practical question, so you're a Trump person and you didn't want to have forever wars and you see that Joe Kent resigned, then you say, well, who are the other people that are avatars of no forever wars and the mega bill JD Vance? He just came out and said Trump had no choice. He had to do it. Tulsi Gabbard, she just asked for a vote of confidence from Trump and she got one. Bobby Kennedy, he's been mom. So there's no wise, Joe, nobody followed Joe Kent out the door. So even a good example is right in the, the crucible of January 6th, Betty DeVos, remember that resigned and Elaine Chao resigned. And what did the people say? Oh, there's going to be a mass accident of all of his cabinet officials so they don't go down with a ship. He's, that was it. And then I'm just quoting from this manuscript that's now in galley proof. I thought when I looked at the evidence that Donald Trump his fall would have lasted a lot longer. It only lasted about a year. Yes, all of his rivals were out polling him in early 2021. But once the indictments came and the mug shots, he was rebounding very quickly. And there's nobody that had a better record of governance at Ron DeSantis. He was the perfect MAGA, he was the MAGA agenda without the hysterics and the fireworks that Trump can often display. And he pulled out after the first primary. So what I'm getting out is all of these epitaphs and post mortems for Trump have always been wrong. And he's taken a really, really, really big gamble before the midterms. But the midterms are April, May, June, July, August, September, October. They're over seven, seven and a half months from now. If you get the straights open, you'll have a flood of oil and the price will collapse just like it has done before after embargo. So I'm not saying this is going to happen. I don't know, but I'm just suggesting it's very perilous to predict the end of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. Let me, I want to follow up. But first, if a major disruption happened and you couldn't get to the store, fair viewer and listener, how long do you think you would last with what's in your house right now? If it's anything less than a month, you need to check out our friends at my patriot supply, their America's number one preparedness company with over 3 million satisfied customers. And right now, when you go to prepare with vdh.com, their best selling four week emergency food supply comes with an additional week of free food. This is the best long term, storable food you can find. You're getting at least 2000 calories a day, real meals made with real ingredients, no artificial flavors or colors, and shelf life measured in decades. Look, we all know we need to have some food stored for emergencies. Why not get it from the most trusted folks in the business and get a free week of food while you're at it. Go to preparewithvdh.com to get your free week of emergency food today. That's preparewithvdh.com. And we thank the good people from my patriot supply for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Victor, my follow up is about that word Trumpism. And I don't know what it means. It gets us pretty variable. But I think one thing that we've seen in the last week of people have corralled these old Trump video clips that go back even 40 years. One thing Donald Trump has always been consistent on is the need to address the threat to Iran. So if Trumpism does not have Donald Trump of all people being responsive to an immediate threat from Iran, or looming threat, I don't know what Trumpism means. He even said he would take Carg Island when no one knew what Carg Island was. And the thing is, there's a lot of things that Trump can do. If you take Carg Island and whether that means you put a protective airspace around it, or a blockade, so you don't have to actually put Marines, because the whole island is probably now by now booby trapped and subterranean tunnels and you'd be in a Gaza-like situation maybe, who knows. But if you just blockade it by air and sea and you say you're not going to get any oil out, and that might spike the world, but they wouldn't have any income and they're already freezing their assets. So if you're an Iranian and you're, how do you get paid? How do you have any money? Look at Cuba. So this is 93 million people and they can be easily boycotted and barcode, etc. And we haven't really done all of that yet. And at some point we'll see it. As I said before, there's a rock and a hard place and I don't know where the greater laxity is, but they think they can wait Trump out with Ropadote. And that because when they cause havoc, they are going to get pressure from the Gulf monarchies on Trump, from NATO on Trump, from his base on Trump and the U.S. economy on Trump and he'll cry, uncle, and then they will be free. The Chinese and North Koreans and the Russians will come in, rearm them, and in two or three years, they will, the first thing they will do is try to get a nuclear weapon with the fish and the material they probably still have hidden. And now we know they can hit Europe with it and they will threaten Europe and they will threaten Israel, etc, etc. And the next time you have to go in, it will be very different, much more difficult. So why you have air supremacy, you should finish the job. Will you support the original incursion or not? I mean, it's not, everybody said this is R, this is, God, I heard one of the stupidest things. Somebody was, I was watching it was CNN or something they said. Yeah, but they said this is Putin's, this is Donald Trump's Ukraine. I said, my God, man, there's two million casualties, probably a million point three dead on both sides. We've lost tragically 13 soldiers. Come on. Russia's lost a million people. It's lost a city the size of, you know, Greater San Francisco, out, gone, kaput. And Donald Trump, we haven't, we've never done this before, tried to fight an entire war. We did in the Balkans. But even there, I mean, people were calling, I think after week two for Clinton to quit. And they said, you can't do this, you can't remove, you can't do this, you can't do this. And they did. And when you try to go on a little bit and off a little bit, you get eight months of bombing Libya and Qaddafi. And remember, Qaddafi was in a reform mood after 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was opening the country up. I went there. Right. And I can tell you, they had cell phones for the first time and people were ecstatic that the kids were taking over. They were open the Italian archaeological sites. I spoke there at them. Sabratha, for example, Leptis Magna. It was a very exciting time. And then we go in a few years later and bomb them. And we had no strategy. And we just, that was Hillary, Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, and the loquacious Susan Rice is now telling, warning everybody that she's going to take retaliation when the Democrats come back. Pritzker did that too, yesterday. He is a reprehensible character. He really is. Well, let's talk about Joe Kent. First, though, I do want to get into something. We talked about the last time. This is not a, this is a non-secretary. The devil, what color is the devil? You race it. Yes, did you find out? Yeah, well, I love our listeners and viewers. I'm just to say Jim B sent me a near treat a email on the colors of the devil from... That's what I like about our listeners. It's like having an instant encyclopedia of your favorite tips. Oh yeah, that was true. The devil is all colors. I remembered correctly, he was... He's a multi-colored devil. He's multi-colored. Blue, mostly black, red, some green, some blue. And the green I remembered from shot... He's chameleon-like or that... Isn't there a... Is there a reason like, why is he... When he's green, what does that signify? When he's blue, what does that signify? There's a word in ancient Greece, poikilos, that means multi-colored. Well... I don't know how certain fabrics can radiate colors. He's not green though, huh? He was green. Yeah, no, my point is I do remember him being green at Chatro. There was just the most beautiful stained glass in the west. I've been there, yeah. Yeah, and indeed he is green there. I thought maybe it was I remembering right, but he was... I thought he looked like a groiper with horns. You know, like the green frog, peppy the frog. Well, maybe he'll be on Tucker's show then, sometimes. So anyway, Joe Kent, Joe Kent. So he was on... Speaking of Tucker, he was on the show and let me trouble our readers just to give some indication of... I don't know, is this a conspiracy or what? I'm reading this from M.A. Rothman who posts this on X. Joe Kent goes on Tucker Carlson, within minutes, not hours, minutes, the same clip, same caption, same outrage, floods hundreds of accounts simultaneously. Labs tracked every amplification event in real time and the data is damning. So there was a trigger quote, the Israelis drove the decision. This is Joe Kent saying this. That was clipped and posted across hundreds of accounts almost simultaneously, not after it trended during the broadcast. Real breaking news takes time to spread organically. This had a running start. Who amplified it? Look at the coalition, Russian TV, Iranian state media, Hamas-aligned CUD's news network, Turkish state broadcasters, Sputnik, Brazil, and simultaneously Candacellan's Marjorie Taylor, Green Others. So anyway, Victor, this stuff doesn't happen naturally, kind of coordinated. I don't know who coordinated it or not, but Joe Kent is increasingly seeming like a troubling figure. But yeah, it's a tragic figure because he was what, 11 deployments into combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think. His wife was a CIA operative and tragically killed his first wife. He served honorably. I remember his campaign, I think he was running for a Washington representative congressional seat in the state of Washington. I might have misspoke last time in said Oregon, but he was very close. I mean, my gosh, it was a very, the first time he ran, he lost by I think less than a percentage. All of the MAGA people endorsed him. Trump endorsed him and he got very close, but the second one was not as quiet as I remember as the first, I know these encyclopedic listeners will correct me, but my point is this, that he owed a lot to the Trump administration because he had been a defeated congressional candidate twice and it was very likely that he did not have a political future. And Trump allows Tulsi to bring him in and he's like the number two, number three people and the director of national intelligence. And then he knows that she's vulnerable because people have suggested that her lectures about forever wars put her at odds with this. So you would think to be sober and judicious, he would just go to the meetings and he would try to follow the directives of the elected president. And if he could not do that, he would write a very nice letter and say, I'm in opposition and leave, but he didn't do that. He wrote and said, not only did he feel that the MAGA movement or the Trump movement was not being followed, but it was following Israel at the dictates of Israel. So he bought right into the Jews, the Jews did it. And at that moment, then the whole new world opened up for him and he thinks that's quite a big world on the right. It isn't, as I suggested with the earlier polls that show Trump has overwhelming support for Iraq. But then magically he goes on, as you said, all of these shows and what he says about Israel becomes the main topic. In other words, had he not said that about Israel, he may or may not have been on Candice and Tucker and all the rest. But once he said that, he was ensured to be on there. Then there's a second troubling aspect, Jack, and that is, I don't know if this is narratives put out by the administration that have not been verified. So I don't want to suggest that they're actually verified, accurate, proven. But there are narratives now in the meeting that he was a source of leaking and that there was pressure on upon him and that he was probably going to resign. And he preempted that resignation by making a statement of conscious against Trump and Israel. And that opened up another avenue. Had he not done that, in other words, had he done what I said earlier and just resigned and thank Trump for all of the support. They probably would not have leaked that story that he was an object of an investigation for leaking. But you get the impression that at least some people believe that he got when that he was out going out the door. So he preempted by resigning with this sensational charge that Israel was controlling the Trump administration and Trump had betrayed the mega movement. And that opened an escape hatch into a very lucrative pot. I think he's going to start a podcast too. Podcasting, hard right. And you know, this is very familiar World War II. I mean, when we after Pearl Harbor, there was a great, for three days, there was a great debate and that was whether we were going to declare war on Germany. I think the historical evidence suggests we were not. We were going to beat Japan first. And there was a big argument, do not get drawn in as Churchill tried to, we've already given him Lin Lee's, he's trying to draw us in. Let's just concentrate on the people who attacked us. And then of course, three days later, Germany declared war on us for a lot of reasons that don't make sense to this day. But it was the same idea that Roosevelt and the United States were being controlled by the British. And they didn't realize that it was in the US interest to destroy Imperial Japan, but especially Nazi Germany. It was in our interest, despite what Daryl Cooper and some of the people that have been on Tucker's show say. Donald Trump is not being controlled by Netanyahu. And if you think he is, then ask yourself who blew up all these Americans over the last 47 years. They use this term apparent. I was listening to this guy, Jeremy Raskin, Adam Schiff. There was no apparent threat. There was no apparent threat, but there was no apparent threat. They had all these D&C talking appoint. Can they tell me when there was an apparent threat of anything they've killed, anything they've done to us? Oh, they blew up the American, the 241 Marine Peacekeeper, but there was no apparent threat. Oh, they blew up the embassy in Beirut. Oh, but there was no apparent threat. Oh, they helped blow up the embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Oh, but there was no apparent threat. Oh, some of the operatives may have had help from around that tried to blow up the USS Colt, but there was no apparent threat. Oh, they tried to kill Trump, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Ambassador Hook, but there was no apparent threat. When has there ever been an apparent threat with these people? Every time they do it, they're a little bit different. They always use sir, oh, they've killed 600, maybe 2000, some of the military Americans with shape charges, but there was no apparent threat. They were doing that. So how can we respond? And that's what they, they always had deniability of culpability. They knew exactly what was going on on October 7th. They green-lighted it. They knew that was part of their Ring of Fire strategy, and they thought it was going to work. And no apparent threat. What if a US Navy plane had spotted the Japanese fleet on December 4th? Yes. Oh, could the same thing could apply? Well, they're just floating out there. This is not an errand threat. They had radio silence. Yeah, what if they had just flown over and somebody said, yeah, I think you should take them out. They're on their way to Pearl Harbor. There's no reason. But there was no apparent threat. And so that's how they operate. And now we know that they have a strategic plan. Should they be in extremis or if they want to stop the West? And one of them is to take control over the Strait of Hormuz. The second one is to destroy the oil or intimidate the Petro kingdoms who supply 45% of the world's oil into submission. And the third is to launch test rockets that can reach now we know all of the European, Western European, major capital. And that's what they've shown us. So if you weren't, if you, if you wanted them to get out now, then you're going to try, you're going to have to say to them yourself, well, there's no apparent threat. Even though I didn't know that they could reach Diego Garcia and there before most of Europeans greatest cities. Oh, there was no apparent threat. But I guess they kind of had a plan all along to control the Strait of Hormuz. Oh, there was no apparent threat. But I guess they went and rearmed Hezbollah and have been working to reestablish its command and control. But there was no apparent threat. So it's the regime. It's who they are. It's they walk like a duck, they talk like a duck, they are a duck. And that's who they are. They get up every morning thinking I want to destroy Israel, then the United States and then Western Europe, and they go to bed every night thinking I didn't do enough today to do that. That's how they think. Yeah. Because if they die in the process, they think they get 71 virgins. So they say, they say that that they hate the West and then they, you know, they go for impotence treatment to the West. They say that they hate the West. And then one of their daughters is a professor at Emory University for a while. They hate the West and the Khamenei family has condos everywhere or apartments in London. So they say, they say, they say, but they hate the West like a moth hates a light bulb. You know what I mean? Yeah. Right. Well, we're going to talk about Ian Muskin a second, but first, Victor, this year marks a critical moment for our country as the opposition grows more aggressive and unapologetic. The fight now reaches into the everyday decisions we make. Patriot Mobile has been standing on the front lines fighting for freedom for more than 12 years. They don't just deliver top tier wireless service. They're activists like us who truly care about our country. Patriot Mobile offers prioritized premium access on all three major U.S. networks, giving you the same or better coverage than the main carriers. That means fast speeds and dependable nationwide coverage backed by 100% U.S. based customer support. They also offer unlimited data plans, mobile hot spots, international roaming and more with simple seamless activation. You can switch in minutes, keep your number, keep your phone or upgrade. And here's the difference. When you switch to Patriot Mobile, you'll be part of a powerful stream of giving that directly funds the Christian conservative movement. Take a stand today. Go to www.patriotmobile.com.vdh or call 972 Patriot and use the promo code VDH for a free month of service. Don't wait. That's www.patriotmobile.com.vdh or call 972 Patriot. And we thank the good people from Patriot Mobile for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. I apologize if you hear my dog in the background, but part of the allure Victor of our show is that we have seven dogs, but they've all fallen to cancer. Spotty had, they were all Queensland's. One of them had something wrong and she got frightened and ran out on the road and got killed. But yeah, greasy. But sport diet of cancer, spike, is still alive. Spotty died of cancer. I'm sorry. And I don't know if it's kind of worried about that because we live in this farm and we were bathing chemicals as kids and told that they were perfectly safe, organic, organophosphides and organochlorides. Man, what your liver has processed over the years, my friend. And I'm not talking about alcohol. Well, I'm speaking. Yeah, you are. Somebody said for the first time the other day, remember, you're a cancer survivor. I never heard that term applied to me of all people. I said, no, I'm not. I know from some of the many of the comments actually that people feel a broader, a deeper brotherhood with you over that. So it's like a sort of damocle that just hangs over you because yeah, it's what the Romans called cancara, the crab. The crab is always crawling inside eating you. It's depressing me, Victor. It's okay. That's where we get the term cancer. I get it. It's just Latin for crab. Okay, more depressing things. I wonder how, when Chuck Schumer goes to the airport, is he waiting in a three hour line? No, he's ushered by a VP. They all are. They all are. And you know they all are because the socialist par excellence, Bernie Sanders had that, and AOC had those rallies last summer and they were flown in by private jets. He's got three homes and look at Aileen Omar. She's communist par excellence and she's bore $30 million. How she got that, I don't know. And her sister runs one of these Somali charity entitlements that's no comment needed what it is. Well, while America waits for hours to get through TSA, and now there's a threat that smaller airports are going to be shut down. And some of them are not so small. Where I travel out of, I saw Bradley, which is out of Hartford and Springfield, is on a potential shutdown. His headline, Musk offers to pay TSA workers as DHS, Homeland Security Funding, LAPS hits airports. He posted on X this morning. We're talking on Saturday the 21st. I would like to offer to pay the salaries of TSA personnel during this funding impasse that is negatively affecting the lives of so many Americans at airports throughout the country. This dude is truly unique. I don't know how many there are. There must be at least 10,000, don't you think? That are out? No, yeah. Well, if you paid them $500 a day, wouldn't it be, I mean, he's talking about $5 million a day. I don't know when you're worth half a trillion or more. Maybe it's a rounding error for him, or maybe it's a loan. But still, it's a great gesture. It's an amazing gesture. Yeah. And it comes at a time when we were told that you've got to take all the billionaires' money and drive them out of your state or tax them to death. Oh, my gosh. You were a former New Yorker. You're Governor Kathy. Yeah, let's talk about that, if you don't mind. Two related things on the tax front. One is, you're a current governor. Gavin Newsom told a SW conference, this is the last week in Austin, Texas. He said, oh, we, California, have the most progressive tax rates in America. Texas taxes poor folks more than we tax our richest. The question for you is, who's the higher tax state, California or Texas? Who are you for? Are you just for the 1%? Are you for the 99%? So he's calling California a low tax state. Because he's not very bright. What he does is he takes the income tax alone. And he's right about that because of the black market, which is huge in California. And because of the tax entitlements, 50% of almost 50% of Californians do not pay the state income tax. About 1% pay about 40% of all of the income tax revenue, maybe and fit in probably 5%. I put it this way, 5% pay 40% of the income tax and 1% pays the rest, 50. So what I'm getting at is, yes, he's right that you, in California, because they don't, it's socialism and they just, it's redistribution confiscatory socialism. Half the people don't even pay income tax, but that's not the whole story. There's been study after study after study and they do the following. What is the price of electricity and what is, it's a state-run public utility and it's controlled and it's the highest in the continental United States. What is the gas tax? It's higher now in Pennsylvania. What is the sales tax? It's like in theory, seven and a half state, but if you look at all of the county and local add-ons, it's about 11 to 12%. And yes, we have a lid, it can range from one to two and a half percent on property taxes, but our assessed evaluation is really the highest in the United States, continental United States. So when you look at all of these taxes that hit the poor, because they have to pay, if they buy something, they have to pay sales tax, they have to pay property tax, they have to pay gas tax, and their controlled utilities are sky high, then they are the most taxed. And he knows that. I think he knows that. But the thing about him is, when he gets, just think of what he said the last few days, last few weeks, he said that he told the European leaders that they basically need to take their knee pads off. In other words, they crouched down before Trump and perform a foul sex act upon him. That's what he said. And then his team, when the brave young kid who was trying to expose all of the fraud and help the taxpayer comes to California, he tweets out that he's a, with pictures as if he's a sexual predator. All the boy, kids are going to like that. And he's tweeted out that he'd like to hit Trump in the mouth. He's gone to a group of accomplished black people and said that he's, they're no smarter than he is, he's no smarter than they are. I mean, every time he opens his mouth, he says something either foul, vile, mean, stupid, self-incriminating. And then he has these, and then he wows these, you know, these magazine editors and they always say, how good looking, he does this with, and he does this strange kind of a Tim Waltz body contortion. California version of Tim Waltz. So that's what he does. And then what does he not do? He has no plan to, we have a 25 billion dollar debacle called high speed rail. It was supposed to be pretty much that cost for the whole thing. It's going to be 300 billion. It's not even going to be close. It's never going to be built. Even when they, not one foot of track has been laid, when from Bakersfield to Merced, if they get that 170 mile link in five years, it'll lose money every day. Unless people like you, Jack, as tourists to California, say, oh my gosh, I got to get to Merced and Bakersfield. Skip Yosemite, skip Carmel, skip Malibu beach. Not knocking Merced, not knocking Bakersfield. I'm not making it, I live here, but people in my experience are not flocking to Salma either. And so, and then he's got no new dams. We're short now, water, we have a whole bond that has been already funded that has misused. He blows up dams. He doesn't build them. He's got the highest, as I say, taxes in the country. The schools are shambles are in the bottom 10%. One out of every three people who checks into a hospital has diabetes in California. 27% of the population was not born in the state and there's no, there's no means to acculturate and great, assimilate them. And then we've got these 70,000 licenses that were issued to people who did not qualify. So we've got a bunch of IED truck drivers everywhere that are moving explosive devices that could kill people in a second. And he doesn't talk and we have the Pacific Palisades fires. We've had all of these fires from his, I don't know what you call it, green forest program or green fire prevention, where you just let them burn out and you know people to yes, you try to clean the hillsides of Malibu or Palisades. It's against the law. You go into the Aspen fire, you want to clear out brush against the law. He shut down the trucking, the mineral industries. Got sitting on vast deposits of oil and gas and we're not developing them. Why he imports gasoline from Japan and oil from Saudi Arabia. And that, believe me, as sure as the sun gets up, gas is now over $5 here. And every time I go to Palo Alto, where I drive through there, it's seven. I saw, I saw a picture of eight 50 something. Yes. And that's because of our special Gavin Newsom green blend and the highest gas taxes. And he's driven out two more refineries that are left. And so now he has to import that very hard to produce special strain of gas for the summer from the Caribbean or from Japan. And now it's going to be very, very expensive. As sure as the sun gets up, he's going to say, oh, Trump raise your gas prices as if going from $7, $8 to $10 or nine, and it's going to get there. And when it gets there, I think people are going to explode that voted for him. Right now on the polls, we have two Republicans that are ahead of the pack. And this is very ironic because they, they pushed, as you know, Jack, these jungle primaries. And they wanted to put everybody in, in these blue states, so that basically they thought they could get rid of the Republicans and then run two Democrats in the final and there would be no choice. And that's happened here, but it looks there might be no choice for Democrats. Well, speaking of Democrats, we're going to take a break. But before we do do that, mentioned by the governor of the, say, where I used to live, I haven't lived there for 40 years, but the accent still is you can't get away from that. Governor Kathy Hockel is begging wealthy New Yorkers who fled the city to encourage their rich pals to come back and continue padding the Empire State's lavish public handouts. This is from the New York Post article. So in 2022, Kathy Hockel, running for governor said, jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong because you don't represent our values. You are not New Yorkers. She was kind of echoing something that Andrew Cuomo had said a couple of years earlier. Conservatives are not true New Yorkers. Well, the other day Hockel is begging, maybe the first wealthy people who have moved to Florida, maybe the first step should be to go down to Palm Beach and see who we can bring back home because our tax base has been eroded. Poor baby. Yeah. What she said was insult her retraction was more insulting than the offense because she said, we need our progressive to help people on entitlements and you got to come back here and let us rob you for more monies to pay for entitlements for people that are programs that are fraud ridden. That's not going to win, Kathy. I'm sorry. They left. They're gone. They could put gone, vanished, smoke back into story. They're not going to beg you to come back so that you can insult them by stealing their money and then running one of these fraudulent welfare problems we've seen in California and in Minnesota. I remember when she said, she was running against Lee's old, get out of here. Get out of here. You don't have our values. Well, they did get out and you should get out and we'll see what's happened. Then poor Manda, while she's doing this and there's Mondami with Khalil Mahmoud in the governor's mansion, the pro-Hamas person right after the IED attacks. Then his wife, it's very funny, she's a daughter of Syrian immigrants. One of these naturalized citizens, I just wrote something called the ungracious immigrant. All these people, whether they're illegal or whether they came in on a student visa or whether they got naturalized, they are ungracious. She comes here. We're in a war in the Middle East. Now we get this whole trove of stuff that she liked. Social media postings that said that basically October 7 was a hoax, that Jewish girls didn't get raped. She thinks Tel Aviv shouldn't exist. Then he comes in with his little fake smile and says, this is unfair. She's just a private person. Then the next thing you know, she's got to lay out for some fashion magazine dressed up as a postmodern European in the know. I don't know what. Woke person. She's commenting on everything. She's illustrated this book that's utterly anti-Semitic. My point of all this is you have Kathy Huckle begging who's Jewish, who's begging for everybody to come in. No, she's Catholic. She's Catholic? Excuse me. I thought she was Jewish, but she's not because I saw her in a synagogue, but maybe she was visiting. She was visiting. She's doing all of this. Then she's begging these wealthy people and then her mayor who's is powerful in some sense more powerful than the governor, not maybe by statute, but by publicity and everything else, power. Then he's sending a message via his wife and via his own past statements that he doesn't want people, especially Jewish people. He doesn't like them. You better get your narrative straight. Why don't you just say we want all the Jewish American financiers and wealthy and successful people that we drove out with our anti-Semitic attacks on the one hand and our confiscatory taxation on the other. We want you now to crawl back and give us the money because we have all sorts of socialist dreams that are not realized and we want your money. It may be fraudulent, but don't dare object. By the way, Victor, please ignore the mass prayers now happening in the streets of New York, like we've seen in European cities. I don't want to say anything untoward to our Muslim prayerful friends, but there are hundreds of people assembling in parks to do the prayer call. I saw somebody comment. He says, I've looked in United Arab Emirates for 10 years. I never once saw people in the streets responding to the prayer. How come it's happening here in New York City now? Come back to this. It's funny about phenomenon. You get a custom or culture aid to something. I think a lot of the radical Islamic population, whether they're tearing apart Columbia University or they're chanting, as we're in war with Iran, that they want Iran to win or we've got all of these naturalized citizens who are yelling, Allah Akbar, as they kill Americans and they think they're exempt. It's kind of reminding and I think a lot of people do that because of laxity. When I was a little kid, I was in a school and there was a market across the street and we were told it was first to third grade. So obviously they didn't want six, seven, and eight year olds walking across, even though there was a crosswalk to this market, skipping the lunch and buying candy because of the traffic and everything. I think his name was Mr. Evans. He said, I don't want. In those days, you had Mike. You know how there was no taboo about having a Mike coming into your room like big brother? Yes. So they had the Monday. Every morning we had the principal's message. Young men and women, I want to remind you, you are not, not, not to cross the street. You were to eat your lunch. We didn't even have a cafeteria. We had to eat outside or in our classrooms. But he said, you're not to go over to the market and everybody was doing it. And they thought because everybody was doing it, nobody would do and finally some people got fed up. Parents got fed up. It was dangerous. Drivers got fed up. The teachers got fed up. He got, and then they just said, if you're going off campus, then they locked the gate and you couldn't get back in. And they called everybody's parents. It was like I went once to a BB King concert in the cell in Irino when I was 17. And they had like, that was in Fresno, three, and everybody said, oh, you know, you're gonna, you're gonna go to prison if you have marijuana. But if you go in there, there's 5,000 of us, 10,000 of us, they can't do anything. I'm sitting there listening. Everybody was lighting up. Everybody and no, that's the marijuana. And then the next so then Elton John was playing about a month later. And I went to Elton John and wow, same thing. And then Jimmy Buffett was playing. I think it was Jimmy Buffett. And all of a sudden, I swear, he started, the lights went on, police came in and they went down. Yeah. And they just started arresting everybody. What I'm getting at is if you push it and you push it and you start humiliating an authority and the law, there's going to be respond. And so I would remind our radical Islamic friends, if they're our friends and they're not the radical ones that are committing violence, you keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it. And you think that Islamophobia is going to help you when you say, how dare you? And you think another person like George Casey is going to pop up out of this military and say, well, you just shot 13 soldiers and killed them and wounded 32. And I would be just as tragic if we lose our D. It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. People have reached the breaking point. And I wouldn't keep doing it. There's not going to be a lot of illegal immigration, at least until the Democrats come back. And they're going to be looking very carefully at legal immigration. And I think they're going to be able to denaturalize some of these people who have been committing crime. And so I wouldn't push it. I really wouldn't. Totally agree, my friend. We have a hard stop in a few minutes and I haven't taken a break yet. So we're going to take a break and we'll come back with one final question for Victor. And that's about the late Paul Erlich. We'll do that when we come right back from these messages. 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. We're back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words, recording on Saturday the 21st, this episode is up on the 24th. Victor, I do have to ask you though, if the little Victor crossed the street to the market, what candy was he getting in 1962 or whenever it was? You remember that? Is it called bazooka bubble gum? Yeah, Joe. Yeah. And it had a little cut so you could break it off easily and give it to your friends. Yeah, you could split it down. Because yeah, I would get that. And then, but what we did was... Did you save the cut? Did you save them to try to send in to get one of them? No, I never did. But what we did is, I won't mention his name because he became a police officer. But he was a great guy and he would come to us and he'd say, all the little farming kids, it was mostly Mexican American group. This guy was not Mexican American, but there was about 20 farm kids. And they were like, you know, you go up on a farm and you don't cross the street without asking everybody permission. You know what I mean? So we... But this guy would come around and say, hey, I need 10 cents. I need five cents. And I'm going down my market run. And then he would go and come back with this big paper bag and give it to us. The supplier. But in those days, there was something called accessory. So then Mr. Evans said, and I want to reiterate that if anybody gives money and how someone do the buying for them, and then are my eyes there just as guilty. And then I remember all of us said, oh, man. And Mrs. Radner, it was Mrs. Wilson said, that's called accessory. And that is equivalent to the crime itself. You imagine a sister. That's like American graffiti. Remember asking the kid, hoping the guy will go into liquor store and buy him booze. It's a far cry from buying Victor a bubblegum. But so be it. I know. And I was guilty of giving money. Simpler times, happier times. So, hey, Victor, we were supposed to have unhappy times if Paul Ehrlich was going to be right. He died a few... Stanford, yeah. ...two weeks ago. Jason Riley at the Wall Street Journal wrote a very interesting piece about him. And here's what the summation of Jason writes, making spectacularly wrong predictions of imminent catastrophe became something of a habit. For Ehrlich over the decades, his dire forecast about global warming, cooling and warming, were wide of the mark. A twofer, he speculated that the U.S. and Europe would be forced to ration food, encourage couples to limit themselves to one or two children. In 1971, he said that by the year 2000, the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands inhabited by 70 million hungry people. Three years later, he predicted America's economic joyride is coming to an end that will be no more cheap food, there'll be no more cheap abundant energy, no more cheap and abundant food. He was also very famous for the population bomb. But Victor, I ask you this only because he is one of the... His famous vet, remember his big wager? Oh, with Julian Simon, yeah. Yeah, he lost that. One of the famous experts of all, and yet he's... I feel bad, yeah. I think it's supposed to be a perfect... Half of me follows the Roman reminder. Right. Neheldekele, Nisi Bonum, De Mortuiz, don't say anything except a good thing about the recently departed. However, he was very provocative and he did a lot of damage. He was the one that told us, as I remember in the popular, you can have one child, but you have to adopt another one. And he convinced, and you saw that with AOC who says she's not having children because she doesn't want to bring them into a boiling planet. And he was the first wave population and then they said, well, it's more than population, Paul. It's also environment, the green movement. He predated the green movement. He lived up in San Francisco. He was kind of a cult figure, as I remember. And population bomb was, gosh, when I was in school in 1971 at UC Santa, everybody had it. Everybody had it. It was just signed in a couple of mandatory courses I had. And it was all... He said that by 2000, Britain would be completely starving and it would have no food or fuel and scattered items. He was a Johnny Carson all the time. He was a popular figure. He was a very photogenic. He was very well-spoken. He was very... He was sort of a public intellectual. He really was. And he was wrong. Yeah, he was a Carl Sagan prototype. And he did a lot of damage. And just that... I mentioned UC Santa Cruz. That was a crazy university. It had just opened. It was a very good university, but the people were completely insane in the early 70s where I went. And I can remember because the lake... We're speaking about people who just perished, died. Cesar Chavez did. And I talked about a mouse where we can talk about him if you wish. But I can remember the first day I went to my dorm room at UC Santa Cruz Cal College. And it was in September. And we had picked the raisins. And when you pick 90% of the crop, people miss some. And then they get very sweet, the remaining bunch or two. So we kids would always go through and get... And these were not table grapes for sale. The big green ones, they were the little yellow ones. Now they're very sweet. Same species, but they have not been girdled or had gibber like acid put on them to pump them up. People forget that, that those green grapes you buy in the store are not natural. But yeah, the little yellow ones are. And they make... And girdled. Okay. Yes. And we made raisins. So I bought some that I picked myself. And I brought in the next day, my parents stayed. We bought a... I don't know what it was, Motel 6. We moved all my stuff in. My twin brother moved in. He was in another college. And then I was straightened out. And then the next day you could come. So my dad, I think I told you, we went with me, went in the shower and two people were fornicating in the nude. And he said, oh my gosh. And then he lent back against the picture of Jimi Hendrix. He almost fell through the wall where they'd had a party and they kicked holes in all the sheet rock and then they put posters over them. But I went in there and then he left and I was all alone. And I had my door open going and then I had a table you could see. And it had grapes. And I swear, everybody that came by would stick their head in. Are those grapes? I said, yes, they're grapes. You're not allowed to have them here. I said, they're mine. Who picked them? Are they Union? And I said, they're Union because I picked them. And I own them and I picked them. Well, you're part of the problem then. You're one of the grower, the grower insects that are just doing this to Caesar and all the people. I said, no, no, that's in Delano. That's the table grape. This is a family small farm raising production. Not very different. And even the people in Delano, the Jamera family, the Zulums, you name it, all of them were small. They came from the Depression with nothing. They came from Italy. They came from Serbia. They came, a lot of them, Zanovich, Pandol. They came from Serbia, Croatia. And they were hardworking families. And, you know, Chavez basically said, I'm a nonviolent Christ like Gandhi figure. You're all evil. And that spread to the Kennedys coming out there. But all these students, and they were all, most of them for Los Angeles, they were very wealthy. And I said, have you ever picked grapes in your life? No. Have you ever been to a vineyard? No. Do you think that Caesar Chavez is nonviolent? Yes. I said, he's not. They sabotage driveways with nails. They have sabotaged shipments. And when they swarm a field, they use force. They send people down to the border to stop the illegal aliens with force. It's high stakes unionization. And it's an utterly corrupt union. And it will not, you know, and then this is before he went to Synanon and you played the game where he was using profanity and force and using the Synanon thugs to enforce his own union. I should have said, and everybody was, everybody in these small farming communities would talk to workers that work, that were not in the union. And they'd always say, he's a communist. Not that he was. I don't know whether he was or not. He's socialist. But they said, there's things going on in that union you wouldn't believe. And every once in a while, he'd fire. They had a bunch of Anglo or whatever you want to call them, white college graduate socialists that were, and then he would get rid of them all as disloyal. Then he'd go down to to hatch up in his compound, where he's buried today. But my point is that nobody was quite aware of it, but it had permeated that he was doing things that you shouldn't be doing. And there were rumors. And then it comes out. 95 year old Dolores Huerta says that she fathered two children. I think she was married to his brother too by Chavez DNA proved it. And there in their 60s and didn't even know until recently. And then she says she was raped forcibly, violently by him. In a grapefield and then coerced in a hotel room. And then we find out he groomed two daughters of some of his advisors, supporters, and sexually groomed them there now. Quite, you know, in their 70s, I suppose, and he was having inappropriate sexual abuse. I don't know what I don't want to know what happened. And they were pre teens, eight, 12. And there are others. And he was a serial adult or so he had this kind of angelic face. I heard him in the park in Salma, he came in the 60s or 70s, I went and listened to him first year in high school, I think. And he was a saint. Everybody said he was saintly. But he was doing things that if anybody else had done them. And it was known, they people around him knew what he was doing. And they didn't say a word because they felt that it was Dolores Welter. They said to him, why didn't you tell people he was a rapist? You could have helped. Well, I had to save LaCausa, I had to help the union. So what happens with the left now? The leftist established that we don't judge people by the bad and good. You know, unless you're left, I mean, Martin Luther King was a serial adult. David Carroll said he had over 40 leisons. And there was that Ralph Abernathy memoir where he said that King watched a rape take place in a hotel room and might have egged on the rapist. And we said, America said, well, that was the evil part of him. But he did a lot of good and he did a lot of good. So therefore, the plus and minus is that's how we, what we don't do that with somebody like Robert E. Lee, we don't do it with somebody like Woodrow Wilson, I'm not a big fan of him. How about Earl Warren, they took his name off, they erased it from Bold Hall. He was a good man. He was a good in his private life. I disagreed with him, but he was, he thought he was doing right, but he was completely Trotsky-ized. So the left has this propensity and it's going to be very interesting because when they get, when they get into situations where you can't character somebody as an old white guy, but one of the DEI brethren, then you have a real problem. And all of a sudden, Jack, I walked for 20 years and there was a Cesar Chavez statue. There's a memorial garden at Cal State Fresno and there's Gandhi and Martin Luther King. And they have a big black tarp over immediately. And the reason is, is that he should have had Martin Luther King exemption, but he's in the intersectionality. And one of the intersectionalities are women. And when they see coming out of the Epstein files and the Me Too years, people are saying, we don't really care if you do this to women. And so I think they're going to cancel Cesar Chavez day. It's a state holiday in California. And they're going to call it Farm Workers Day. They're going to change. They have almost every single town over 30, 40,000 people has a Cesar Chavez building or street. Yeah, highway. I remember from my childhood as a Catholic that he came out of a hunger strike and the first thing he did was he had communion. That was the first and the Kennedys were involved in it. And so yeah, he had this whole. I grew up on what was the Catholic Bishop from Fresno? He was from Los Angeles. He from Fresno, he went to Los Angeles and he was Mahon. Mahon. Mahon. Yes. He got in trouble himself, remember later? Yeah, he's still alive. He's a bad egg. Yeah. Well, he would give lectures about the piety of Cesar Chavez. He was the Bishop here, or not the Bishop, I guess, the less important in the Fresno diocese. Then he went to Los Angeles, but he was a big advocate also of open borders, which Chavez, you know, Chavez Club had people big club. And everything about it, it was so strange because when he, when there were rumors that he was not nonviolent and his brother was in charge of the strong arm, you know, using violence, or when they were intimidate other workers, or when he would say things like, I hate growers. And then he got this synonym, weird cult, and they were violent, violent people, and they played these awful pornographic, not pornographic, but they get together and then they scream in people and call, use profanity and try to insult them and humiliate them. When he was doing all of this stuff, and then the other dark side of the sexual perversion, you couldn't say anything. He was, he was sank, he was sane. And well, me too has come for him. Harder they fall, feet of clay. And just a reminder that nobody is exempt. Nobody, nobody, nobody. Well, yeah. I said, me too comes to us all, but God comes to us all too. So, yes. Hey, Victor, we got to end this in a minute or two, but I have a couple of comments to read from so many folks. Thank you for taking the time to comment. This one is from R Bridges, you 9M, you write, I'm so glad that people have been praying for you. When I heard you were sick, I was so scared. I kept telling God, please don't let anything happen to him. We need him right now. You are loved, Victor Davis Hansen. You are loved by God and you are loved by all of us. Thank you. There's a lot of people say things just like that. Raymond Laefield, 2785 writes, it's wonderful to have you back. I grew up on the Central Coast. You are common sense, your common sense approach to the issues is a breath of fresh air. And finally, one from CSBN4UN. I don't know what it stands for, but Victor, I've encouraged my grown children and a number of teens to listen to your broadcasts and consider your books as a Christmas gift, sent one of your books to a history loving and plans to be a history teacher, high school senior. You are among a very few who give such a good historical foundation for everything unfolding now. Fits well into our homeschool years, decades ago, where I attempted with good materials on the Bible to lay such a foundation, which I had your publications in those years. Appreciate all of your YouTube videos, but y'all are a great broadcast duo. He's talking about you and the great Sammy Wink. Also, love your family history stories, which weave into today's events in your life. So, all to those and all else who take the time to comment. Very nice. Appreciate it. I'll just remind before we leave, don't jump to conclusions. We're witnessing a rare moment in history. Haven't seen anything like this since the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe from 89 to 91. There are geostrategic political historical forces at play, whether it's in Venezuela or Cuba or Iran, which involve the entire Middle East, which involve all of Latin America's future. And they have a direct bearing, whether by intent as I suspect, but by collateral effects on China. And we don't know how it's going to end up, but there is a potential to remake the world as we knew it, at least in the United States, as we look out at our neighbors in South America and the Caribbean and we look at the Middle East. It's a new world order I can get Yes. And don't jump to conclusions that it's over or we don't know what's going to happen. We are in the middle of a radical transformation if all of these things play out. Well, Victor, as ever, tons of wisdom here. Thanks for sharing. Thanks, folks, for watching and listening. Do check out Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus. Do go to www.CivilThoughts.com and sign up for the free weekly email newsletter. I write for the Center for Civil Society. God bless all. We'll be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Bye-bye. Thank you, everybody, for listening and watching. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at VictorHansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, an audit dread. It's time for 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.