Victor Davis Hanson: Eugene Semyon Vindman’s Predictable Fall From Grace

Why would anybody vote for a person tied in with Gavin Newsom who have taken control of the state? Devastating wildfires to highest electricity rates in the continental United States, the highest gasoline. Everybody is leaving who would vote for a conservative and everybody is coming who compares the welfare state of California much better than the conditions that they had in India and China and Mexico. Hello and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. This is our Friday News Roundup, so we've got lots on the agenda, of course. I think it's the last of the midterms took place on Tuesday and we need a little update on the around a fair since the ceasefire ended on Monday of this week. So stay with us for that and we'll be right back from these messages. Female athletes are being forced to compete against biological males, sometimes without their consent or even their knowledge. 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Victor Davis Hansen 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 Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. Please come join him at his website. Victor Hansen.com is the URL and the name of the website is the Blade of Perseus. So we'd love to have everybody there. So Victor, the midterms Florida was the big attention, I think, and it looks like Oliver Larkin lost out to Jared Moskowitz, who for a representative, a democratic representative candidate in Oliver Larkin was the DSA, so the DSA did not do well in that case. And then the second thing is the Senate race Angie Dickinson against it will face off with Ashley Moody and Angie Dickinson was the DSA candidate and it was only had thoughts. Well, he was running against Oliver Larkin, who was Jewish like Moskowitz, but he was, he had a whole record of endorsing at various time the entire agenda of the Democratic Socialist America. So when they were asking about deep on the police and Pentagon, he would say, yeah, so it was way too liberal left for even the Democrats in Florida. And those districts had, there's about 700,000 Jewish American voters in Florida and they tend to be people who have left New York and the East Coast, just for the weather or for political conditions or for tax reasons. And they're very, I can tell you, as someone who's spoken to a number of Jewish groups in Palm Beach, they're very politely aware and they were not going to support somebody who had trashed Israel as Larkin had done. So that was, I think that was a given that he was going to lose and the same thing Nixon was running against Vennman and Vennman was notorious for being the quasi whistleblower when he was on the National Security Council. He claimed that he heard Donald Trump issuing ultimatum to Zelensky. The problem with that is in the years since that and that led to the first impeachment, we have now got the whole story and even the electorate knows a lot about it. Number one, Vennman violated protocol by disclosing a classified phone call to someone who was not on the call. He wouldn't answer questions about whom he talked to, but he did lie and say that he had not met with Adam Schiff. He did call Eric Karamawa, who was not on the call, who volunteered to be the official conduit or whistleblower. So when the hearings came out, we weren't really sure of that. He just said, "No, I can't speak about that." But in the time since then, we've got the whole story that he called his friend Eric up and said, "Look, I just listened to Trump and I can interpret that he was leveraging weapons for political harassment of the Biden's." Because Trump said something to the, "You should look at the Biden's. I'm giving you a, but you're an interfering in U.S. politics." That's what he claimed. And a lot of people since then have seen that Vennman is culpable and that he did violate the law and that he did lie and that Adam Schiff cooked up the entire impeachment writ. And Adam Schiff lied about it, said that he had not met with Vennman. Then the other thing that came out with Vennman was he was a Ukrainian dual citizen and he had been bragging that he had been offered the defense minister slot in Ukraine, why he was involved so heavily in the United States government. So it doesn't look good when you're on the National Security Council of the United States and under testimony you brag that the Ukrainians wanted you to be their defense minister as a dual citizen. And then you add to that that the Ukrainian minister, prime ambassador, excuse me, in 2016 had written an op-ed that was really a taboo and interfered in U.S. politics aside from the steel dossier basically endorsing Hillary Clinton at all of that up. And he didn't age very well and then he he got involved as a middleman so he was constantly lobbying for Ukraine war not which is fine but he wanted more and more weapons and then we found out that he had some kind of what he called a nonprofit or some kind of private company but it wasn't nonprofit. And he was refurbishing our transferring vehicles into Ukraine. So you can't be an advocate a U.S. citizen advocating advocating for your former homeland and then be involved with your former homeland in various mechanisms whether supplying them weapons with your private capacity or launching impeachment against the President of the United States. So he came off what I'm trying to say is arrogant and shady and duplicitous. Just a quick question. Everything you say right now seems to me that he would be a shoe in for the Democrats. Why did he lose out to this to Nixon? Well, he came across as a he wasn't in a congressional district. That's what you got to remember. He was statewide and usually that hurts the socialist because they get all but in this particular case he didn't have a constituency like Moscow. He didn't have a moderate and wealthy base to work within and a large Jewish vote within that congressional district and he didn't have what Debbie Wasserman Schultz had she had been redistricted also out of her job and she went into the 20th district. There were five African Americans there. Elijah Manley says I'm sure I've been chastised by a couple of leaders for getting the names wrong. But in his case he was leading and he made a statement that she had no business coming out of her district that no longer existed to pray on what she said were black candidates. So then he got the idea that the leader would consolidate the black boat and they would have more than Debbie Wasserman Schultz who outspent everybody because she had a lot of very wealthy donors and she had a monopoly on the Jewish vote within the 20th district like Moscow. And lo and behold she won handily but when you when you sum up all of the black candidates had they united and they voted along racial lines which they see. to have done, then she would have lost. So what I'm getting at is there's a lot of dissension in that. This was a microcosm of what's going on. You have Debbie Wasserman-Shell, who was a hard left, big DEI person, and then she loses her district in the redistricting wars between the states. And she jumps into, it wasn't a majority black district, but I think it was 48 or something in plurality. And she jumps in there in a district that wasn't her own, but she was the one that was telling us that we need to racially gerrymand her and point. Then she takes a seat, a way that would have won by a black candidate. And then we have these nicks in as a crazy socialist. That vote, she was outspent by Vennman, but I think that vote was unique statewide among the Democrats, because people did not like Vennman. He comes across as arrogant. I mentioned the history that he had, and he's not a likable person. There was a personal animosity to him. Everybody who meets that guy is turned off. Well, can I ask you what I saw Ashley Moody. So this is a senatorial race that Nixon is running for, Angie Nixon, and then she's against Ashley Moody. And I have to confess that Ashley Moody didn't seem terribly impressive, so for the Republicans. So how do you think that race is going to come out, do you think it's something to watch or do? Yeah, she's going to win. She's the incumbent. She took over Marco Rubio's seat. She has the advantage of an accomplancy, she's got DeSantis's endorsement, and there's been a revolution that we forget in Florida since the days of the hanging chaff in 2000. The Republicans have taken over the state, and they have about a million and a half more registered Republicans. If you total up in these races, all the Democrats that voted and all the Republicans, the Republicans have like 400,000 more votes than the Democrats. So they're going to turn out the vote, and they voted in much higher ratios than they had before. That was kind of a surprise to everybody. They thought, you know, they were all on, I'll do Republicans are mad at Trump, it's a midterm, but they got out and voted. So she'll win, and Byron Donalds, the governor, now the Republican nominee, I think he'll win too easily. So they're not, I mean, Florida is a red state now. What do you make of the John Osoff in Georgia, who just recently said sailors are fighting, the sailors out, our military out there, are fighting Trump's war number one. So he's accusing them of sort of harkens back to Vietnam and blaming soldiers. But the other thing he said was that he's getting a lot of flack for is that Trump, all he wants to do is build his ballroom and go on flights with Natalie Harp, which was crazy, but it's getting a lot of press out there. Well, it's getting a lot of press because nobody knows who he is. So he was getting worried. He had no name recognition. Georgia is a purple state now because Atlanta has got a lot of yuppies there. It's got a huge black population. So it's a 50/50 state now. And you can see it. It's highly weaponized. We saw that with Fulton County and Fanny Willis' law fair that was waged against Donald Trump. So he wants to be known, but he's kind of like mayor Frye, remember him of Minneapolis. He was kind of doing a little dance the other day with a rap. It was just embarrassing. He was a nerd. Also Fulton is the same. He's a privileged guy. He's in this. He knows he would never have won that race. Had it not been for January 6th, excuse me, the day before January 6th, but it had not been for that climate because after Donald Trump won after his first term, he thought he was headed for an easy re-election. He would have been if it hadn't been for COVID. But as we know, the state legislatures in about 25 states changed the rules under the guise of COVID. This was in March, April, May of 2020. So same day voting, no ID, same day registration and voting. You can register on the day of the election and you can cure a ballot. You can harvest ballots. The Republicans just weren't ready for that. So 30% of the people who had done mail-in or non-voting day ballot-in turned into 70% and Trump was arrayed, so he went crazy. That got a lot of anger. So then we had those two special elections in Georgia and Donald Trump did not go down there and support the two republics. It was a strange long explanation, but there were two candidates running for two Senate seats at the same time. The problem was with the Republicans, member Lin Wood, the attorney had said he was actually a Democrat, but he was agitating that the election had been stolen and the computers were fraudulent. In any way, make a long story short, the voters of Georgia were told that their vote wouldn't count. It would be stolen like the January six protesters had alleged later. The result is that when you look at the number of Republicans who turned out in November to vote for Trump and he barely lost that state, I think, by 10,000 votes, he shouldn't have lost it. The number who turned out with the Senate races, it was about a 600,000 drop, and even then also didn't win by that much. He was very careful about what he said because he understood he was the result of a fluke. But now with this democratic social stuff in the air, it's gone to his head. He's trying to get out there and talk a little bit more abrasively. But as soon as he did, as you said, he made a fool of himself, Natalie Harp. She's known to almost every conservative columnist and writer because her job is to disseminate. She has a rolodex, I don't know how many hundred or thousand on her email and she'll send like the Democrats to tidbits, and she does it very professionally. She is a devout Christian and she's a cancer survivor. She happens to be attractive and blonde. He was trying to assinuate because she was young and blonde and attractive that Donald Trump is having some relationship that's extraordinary or taboo or have some, I don't know what it would be, "trist" with her. But she's not the type that fits that, so that was just character assassination. Then he just cemented the idea that the Democrats either are ambiguous about who wins the war or when they say Trump war and they hate Trump. They want him to lose it. Is that what they do? They have thousands of Americans out there fighting, that was stupid, and Trump called him Peewee Herman and he does kind of like Peewee Herman. I mean, the problem with Trump's epithets are not that he says them and they're crude, but they fit and people laugh and so, you know, I like Marco, we'll be alone, he said a little Marco. I didn't have any idea how tall he was. Then I started noticing it. And when he said that about various people, you don't, after the initial shock that the President of the United States or a presidential candidate is engaging in that personal victory all passes, then it fits and it sticks. So, you know, Jeb Bush, he did that to the Jeb Bush too. Yeah. What do you think Ozoff's chances are, given all of that, do you think he'll be reelected? No, I don't. I think he's going to lose. It's going to be a very close race and he's going to lose because Trump and the Republican PACs, not individual Senate racers, they will make up what lead he has and I just don't think you're going to get a lot of black voters that are enthused by him and the Democratic side to come out. Yeah. And he won the first time the other candidate was African-American, remember him and he was a preacher and he had a long, he had a lot of residents. in the black community. And they all came out because there were two elections. But I don't see that happening. Yeah. Yeah. And I think he's going to lose. Yeah. And then finally, the Alaska ranking system is being put to the test by two candidates with exactly the same names. First and last, I believe it's Sullivan. Yeah, they did that on purpose. The Democrats did it, right? 16 candidates. You put one in with the same name. And then people get confused in these. But the vote. I'm very confident about the Senate. I think Said is going to lose. I think Telleriko is going to lose. I think Susan Collins is going to win. Jackson's going to lose. I think they're going to keep Lindsey Graham seat. I think they're going to knock off Oscar Oscar golf. So I'm cautiously optimistic. They'll hold the Senate and they have a 40 to 50% chance of holding out these candidates are these socialist candidates are stupid. And the Democrats are not reacting well to them. And well, I shouldn't say they're not reacting. They don't have a choice. If they attack them, they'll stay home in the general election. If they cater to them, then they're going to be hit by their Republican colleagues were endorsing these crazy positions. But you take Debbie, Debbie, just take two races. El Saeed, who won and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, she'll probably win, but I have a sneaking suspicion. A lot of black voters on the Democratic side will say home and not vote for her. I have a sneaking suspicion. There's going to be a lot of independence, but especially Democrats that will not vote for El Saeed. There's some in Maine that will not vote for Jackson. I have a sneaking suspicion that Telleriko for all of that high visibility, a lot of black voters in Texas. Remember, they want a Jasmine Crockett and they won't come out. So the Democratic Party either comes out with endorsements of these people and then they lose moderates that don't want them or they stay silent. And if they do win, a lot of Democrats will not come out. If they lose, then they get bitter and don't think the Democratic socialists won't stay at home. If they have lost a primary race, which they have in some cases, and I don't think they're going to. They're going to be very eager to get out and vote. Just to add to your sneaking suspicions and we have a sneaking suspicion that the polls are going to be all wrong in favor of the Democrats. Yeah, for El Saeed was wrong, 20 for hung was wrong. Some of them were made up admittedly so. Yeah. All right, Victor. Let's welcome back a sponsor. My Patriot Supply. Food security should never depend on perfect weather, flawless supply chains, or fully stocked grocery shelves. 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Well, Victor, just one thing on those races before actually the elections this year midterms. And we know that in California, Xavier, I think his name is Becerra, is going to win, but he is the most unimpressive of governors I've ever seen. Even Kamala Harris said he was not up to snuff. And she is, of course, one of the most unimpressive of mediocrity. He didn't come out and talk about the Biden immigration policies, which he was involved in when there were all of these unattended youth, 350,000. They can't account for it. That had been Trump. He'd be in jail. So he's not very, I followed his career in California. He's not very adept. He's not a good speaker. But again, Steve Hilton has all the answers. He really does. And he would be wonderful for the state. He's running about 18%. Let's just say that the polls being all slanted and they're designed to raise democratic money and create democratic momentum are exaggerators. We know they have been in these other races. So let's say there are eight points off. So he's ahead of Steve Hilton by eight to nine points. Now, my question is this, why would anybody vote for a person tied in with Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi and that whole tradition of Bay Area politicians who've taken control of the state from the LA center of power of the 1970s and 80s, when they gave us a huge government fraud program, devastating wildfires due to their policies about not cleaning up the forest. The highest electricity rates in the Continental United States, the highest gasoline rates in the Continental United States, the highest income tax, state income tax, 13.3, the highest gas taxes, the highest number of homeless people, the highest almost the same as Appalachia 21% below the poverty line, one out of every three welfare recipients, 50% of the burst on medical welfare type of thing, 40% of everybody uses that healthcare system. And we've got a high speed rail, not far from where I'm speaking, that we've spent 20 billion dollars and it hasn't laid in 10 year, 12 years, one foot of track. And this group of people have overseen that and I have an answer for you. The answer is this, a knife set up before 28% of the state was not born in the United States. Another 7 to 8 million of our 40 Californians are the children of people and that can mean they were just born here one day when their parents arrived, right? But anyway, they have not been fully integrated, cultivated and assimilated. You add those two groups of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants and you get about 45 to 46% of the population. And when you look at where those immigrants came from, three large groups, South of the border, Mexico and Central America, India and China, those are all impoverished groups. So in their way of thinking, and I talked to a lot of them, when they come to California and they see how far it is declined and what it was like in the 1960s as a can do state that was at the cutting edge of aqueducts and water projects in the Tripartite UC, CSU, JC system. And I think it was number 9 in test scores. And it was well governed, it was not corrupt. And they had one of the most sophisticated highway systems. When they see all that, they don't know, they just say, I don't know, I just know, I listen, I grew up in Venezuela, I grew up in a walk, I grew up, this is a, I've never seen a place like this, it's wealthy, it's and you know what, the moment I set across, I put a toe across the US border, these crazy people think I've been oppressed. And not only have I been oppressed, I've been oppressed by them. So I come over from India or China or Mexico and all of a sudden my kids get preference getting into school, I get preference in civil service hiring. I, if somebody said, well Victor, you've said yourself that DEI was on the way, I said it is the way out, but there was just a statistic that mission high school in San Francisco 94% are not proficient in math and like 70% are not proficient in English and it's sending a huge amount of its graduates to UC Berkeley. And then there was example of another school district where 95% are in proficient and instead of getting 45% of the applicants accepted like mission, they got 8% in other words they were penalized for getting for turning out students that were superbly trained in math in English and only 8% got in. That's California and it hasn't changed. So they look at that. So I think those voters, I mean they're the majority, they're 45% I'm not talking about other ethnic, I'm not talking about third generation of people from those same areas. I'm talking about just first or second. So it takes three generations to become conservative when you're an athlete from a poor country. It does. In my experience it does. Yeah and to add to your statistics on California just glancing at the California post that's also the New York post today Kentucky fried chickens closing down 44 stores and you all is reporting that more and more people are exiting the state as well. I see them every day. It's one of those weird stories where you see the national story that 11 million people have left and you think oh my gosh, they're going to Reagan voters, they're going to Pete Wilson voters, they're going to George Ducmazian voters, right? They're going to the Arnold Schwarzenegger voters and then you start to see, I have a group of people I hadn't seen and a wonderful group of people since I graduated from high school, you know, 55 years ago and one of them lives by here is a fourth generation. He just left to South Carolina and I talked to another person. I won't mention him but I had just talked to him and he was talking about a nice home near his in Fresno that I should look at and I was considering that he's in Arizona now and I don't blame him one bit so it's everybody is leaving who would vote for a conservative and everybody is coming who compares the welfare state of California and the DEI complex as superbly convenient to them and much better than the conditions that they had in India and China and Mexico. So when somebody says to them, you don't know what California was like before these people took over. You should have seen what California was like under Reagan and Wilson and it worked. The universities worked, the highways were sufficient for the population at the time. We built nuclear plants, we were at the cutting edge of airports, LAX was not like it is now, it was not and the California water project was going to have more reservoirs and they said, "Well, go down to Chiapas, go down to Michal Khan, go into a big city in India and tell me that this is not better and that's their frame of reference." And so there's nobody and then you start meeting people from India in the third generation or from Mexico that have been here and they don't know the home country, then they look at it and see this as a dysfunctional society because they can see on the news and they traveled other states. So that's a long windy explanation of why I want Steve Hilton to win but I'm not as optimistic as I should be because he's got an English accent too. This era has a slight Hispanic accent. I saw him on Fox News, he said that polls are closing from the 25 point gap earlier and now it's below 10 he said, "I believe that, I believe that but he's also warring against another thing. California I feel is the most LAX state as far as registration. We saw that in the mayor's race where, is it Ramon or whatever her name was, she had conceded and then all these mail-in ballots came and then people in the homeless communities were saying they were getting money to register the same day and vote and I know that having children at my house I was years after they went out on their own, I still get their ballots here. Five years and I would write, I'd send them back and it didn't do any good. They just kept sending. Any time you come in contact with a California agency they send out a registration. That's intentional. They want that edge, a democratic party. The army is that right during COVID, I read a Stanford law article in the Stanford law review and it was talking about, they didn't say so, but it was talking about the effort that going on to get mail-in and early ballots in the 2020 election. Okay. So remember everybody, Molly Ball, I keep saying, wrote that article in Time Magazine explaining how that was a cabal, that was her words, not mine, conspiracy, her words, not mine, to change ballot law so you would have 70% of people not voting on election day who could not be audited. But the Stanford review was talking about the insipient, just the beginning of that. And this left-wing neo-socialist review was criticizing it because they said this is full of so many holes and can't be verified that the right will use it. See what I mean, they, and I thought when I read it, I said, no, you're right about, it can't be verified, but it's your guys who did it and your guys know how to cheat a lot better than our guys do. That was what was so weird about it. Yeah. Well, I did LA City Council just voted that it was okay to have encampments in city parks once again. So there you go. I mean, they tried it with Nitya Rahman putting that just one homeless person outside her house. That was a fake homeless person. She went, she got on the phone, didn't she, called 911? My children saw a homeless person, they're not supposed to see a homeless person. I know. That was the worst thing. She was, I can't believe they did it to my children. We had several hundred, two hundred, three cases of medieval typhus in Los Angeles, and it was 2,000 percent higher than the year before, typhus in a modern American city. That's something you read about. When you read about the Athenian plague, I wrote about it in a war like no other, it was just amazing. All the articles that are arguing it's typhoid, no, it's typhus, no, it's smallpox. But the whole point was, if you read Thucydides' description of the plague, it's because they brought into a city of 80 to 100,000, another 50 or 60,000 people. And it was in May and June hot, and there wasn't sufficient clean water nor sewage, and they got an epidemic that killed a quarter of the population, probably lost them in the war. They never quite recovered from it. You think, when you would read this in graduate school, when I was writing the book, I think I wrote that in 2003 or four, you'd always think smugly, "Well, that's ancient history. We wouldn't do that in Los Angeles or New York." So we are regressing, and we're just too arrogant to see it, that we're going backwards. The left, every time I say something like this, I feel bad because I know so many people on the left that I like, but it is a nihilistic movement, a religion. And everything it touches, if it has power to change, if it touches it, it destroys. It wants to destroy it. They look at those pictures of Los Angeles, you know, in the 50s or 60s or San Francisco, and they'll think, "Well, how about the people who were poor? How about the people who were black?" So yes, they may have been better off than they are now, but I doubt that. I mean, I'm doubt that they were bad off as they say then, and I doubt that there's good off as they say now. I think it was among the black communities of Los Angeles in the 1960s and 50s, it was safer than it is now, much safer. And I don't think a small Korean or Hispanic market owner had to worry about his auto-zone being looted twice in one day, and I still market the other day, did you see that? The funny thing about all this is, they always talk about teens, teens, but they never say Inordinately black teens, black teenagers make up. There's about 11% of the population is black, roughly 5.5% are male, and probably half of that five or below the ages of 20 or, say, 25, you're talking about 2% of the population of the United States seems to turn up at the state fair in Wisconsin or a market yesterday in Los Angeles or an auto zone two days earlier, where they just swarm a store and they beat people up randomly, they steal, and then the news media says teens. And yet if it's some, if that had been a group of white thugs, they would have said, you know, Aryan supremacist or white privilege people. So it's a specific group that they need to address, and they need to say, you know what, Kamala Harris talks about race non-stop, and so does representative Clyburn, and so does Jasmine Crockett. If you want to talk about race non-stop, and you make yourself the collective spokesman for a collective, and you don't believe in individuals, then you better talk about a collective problem, because you will like to stereotype people by saying white privilege, white rage, all of these terms, and you apply it in mass, but nobody's allowed that to do that when you see these, and I'm not saying that this is typical of black teenagers between the ages of 12 and 25, most of them don't participate, but they're inordinately disproportionately represented as 2.5% of the population. And I would guess every time we see a store swarmed, nationwide, or an intersection taken over, or people twerking, it's, I would say, 60 to 70% of them are African-American. And that group is again 2.5% of the population. So we know that if policies change, like the Mississippi school districts, for six or seven years, they've gone back to strict attendance and math, science, analytics, languages, and they're making superb progress. Their test scores are higher, I think, now, than California is easily so. And we know schools in New York that where people have uniforms, and teachers wear uniforms, and they insist on a longer school day, their minority populations can exceed white public schools. It's not a racial thing, it's a cultural thing, and yet the left doesn't want to discuss it at all. No, they sure don't. And I think, I used to think it was because they were racist. They are racist, but it's because they don't want to stop. The vast river of entitlements that come to their constituency. Because once you say, "Here's a system that will save money and make African-American youth as well-educated on average as white or Asian youth, and empower them and preclude the need for all these special DEI affirmative action head start programs," they'll say, "Well, why would we want to give up that?" That's how we trap people in dependency and vote for us as constituents. Yes, and on that note. Somebody says, "Well, Victor, you can't blame, are you suggesting that Democrats sometimes are not, they don't have the interest of their own country first?" Yeah, we just heard Senator Ossovolve talk about Trump's war. Trump's war. All right, so let's talk about. I'll have to somebody flying an F-16 and do it. You're a flying Trump's war. Yeah, especially all the soldiers take an oath to the United States, they don't take an oath to. Yeah, can you imagine that somebody's wounded and attack on a Jordanian insulation, you're supposed to say, "I have morphine and abandonment, but I got to know right now, are you a Trump voter or not? Because this is your war and you deserve it if you're a Trump voter." Oh my gosh. Well, Victor, let's go ahead and turn to that war that we have. This week, lots of news came out that I think the biggest one I mentioned in the beginning that the ceasefire deal ended on Monday and we seem to still have the status quo, which is the Iranians are still saying they're going to get nukes and there's no new government really. They're starting to hurt us, it's the hardliner and there's last two things, though, before you go. Trump threatened to bomb Oman if it interferes with the blockade on the streets and then, but it's on the good side, they're trying to enter into a defense agreement with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, the major players, so. That's bad news. That's. Is that bad news? Very bad news. Wow. Well, anyways, all of those things, let us have it. Before the last first Saudi Arabia was a strong ally of the United States, we've armed it. They were ready to go into the Abrams Accords and they were actually begging us to. When Tucker Carlson says the Israelis got us in on this war, the ones that were hammering us to hit Iran were the Gulf States. The reason that they have backed off and now are stealthily trying to contact the Iran and cut out financial deals, except for the UAE, is because they didn't think we finished the job, so they think, "We're really for you if you finish the job," and Trump is saying to them, "We've hit over 20,000 targets. You've got 600 combat aircraft. We know they're state-of-the-art. We sold them to you." So why don't you join in and hit them? You never do that. You sit on the sidelines. Occasionally you do that, but very rarely. So, Saudi is now flirting with an unstable nuclear Pakistan and a Turkey that hates Israel, hates Greece, hates Cyprus and hates us, to be honest. And they're going to have a defense pact. And so what would that mean? Well, that would mean that if there is some type of meeting, like, you remember when Gutter had a lot of Hamas and all the people who were responsible for October 7th, meeting there in Israel since a missile, if you were to do that to Saudi Arabia, they would have a nuclear patron, and they would say, "Pakistan," I don't think Pakistan would hit Israel because of the chances that Israel would knock down a Pakistani missile or much larger than Pakistan's chances of hitting an Israeli. Under Trump, he starts always with a clean slate. He has no prejudice if he's talking with North Korea. But that said, we have to be very wary of Turkey and Pakistan. They're both Islamic countries, they're both anti-American. They despise Israel, they despise our allies like Greece, as I said, Cyprus, and they don't like the United States, it's just a fact. And we have to be very careful of them. Now, Oman, I mean, if Trump said, "We'll bomb on them," they said that they wouldn't want us to have a blockade of Iran because they're afraid that Iran is said, "If you don't call the United States off, we're hurting, we're going to send more missiles." But we're not going to bomb Oman because there's nothing to bomb an Oman. I mean, they pose zero threat to us, and they're not going to do anything to us. Their biggest worry is that we're going to leave the area, and then they're going to have to shell out billions of dollars. That's what Iran wants. They want to send these missiles occasionally, and then they want to say the midterms are coming up, so the United States should leave, and then when they leave, they don't have income right away because they're still going to be sanctioned and blockaded by us, and we'll have enough ships to blockade them, and their bank accounts are frozen. So they'll just go over the golf and say, "I need 20 billion this month from you." They're like a mafia organization. If you don't give it to me, I'm going to hit your distillation plan. They should say, "If you hit our distillation, we're going to send 600 bombers, but they are afraid to do that." Maybe they're too vulnerable, but the long and the short of it then is what's the plan? They are hurting really badly. As a general rule, the more that the Iranians say crazy, nutty things are winning, they're going to do this, and that means they're just about ready to fall apart. Those sanctions and blockades and freezes on their bank account are hurting them, and they're losing money rapidly, and Russia and China have not been able to fully rearm them like they say they are. They say, "We're being rearmed by China," and the Wall Street Journal picked that up, but I don't see how they can--we've bombed some of the rail links, and the mess they're just flying at night, transports into Tehran, and we're not we're afraid to hit them. I have a feeling that they're going to push it, push it, push it, push it right before the midterms. because they'll do something like send. I don't they won't send it in Israel. Maybe they'll send something at a US frigate or American stationed in Jordan or something a missile bar barrage or a missile barrage at Kuwait or something Just something to remind the American people before they vote that the war is on and then whatever happens whether Trump wins or loses everything changes after the midterm. The only thing is see if he was convinced he was going to lose the midterms as 39 out of the last 41 occupants of our White House have then he would be liberated but he doesn't think he's going to lose because this is a weird year where there has been redistricting in favor of red states the end of racial districting or gerrymandering due to supreme court and he's not sure what the price of oil he thinks it might go down if he holds off if he got down to 350 a gallon it would help him but most importantly he got a gift with these crazy democratic socialist communist and they won't shut up and they the more you meet them the crazier they look just the other day there was a democratic socialist I don't want to make fun of people but she what's the word she was she was overweight in a way that she accentuated with a halter top and she was tattooed and she was screaming about she's a New York socialist legislator about stealing soap and toothbrushes and toothpaste and deodorant and all and basic food is okay and everybody was there nodding yeah yeah yeah her crowd well when they play that stuff and you say I'm a socialist too that's the breakdown of civilization if you have civilization that's how San Francisco broke down when a person walked into Walgreens and San Francisco and just started picking things up and they didn't arrest them then civilization doesn't exist it can't and so these people are nealist and Trump didn't think that was going to happen but it has so all of a sudden if he puts his half million half billion dollar treasure chest which he's raised and he's willing to blow the whole thing on these races he could save the house that's what he thinks and then ironically that has put a break or a deterrent on him from finishing the war he should have just gone medieval and finished it and got home but he couldn't because he thought he was going to he now actually unlike 99 percent of the in-house governments during the midterm election he has a chance of saving the house however asterisk footnote after the midterms that would tell you Iranians after the midterms if he wins are loses it doesn't matter there's no constraints on him and they're piling up their missiles and you think you eat all these left-wing media don't buy it he's going to unload on you people because you know you don't say what you're going to do and you're still going to try to get a bomb and and you've got a lot of angry Iranians that don't have any money and they can't and by September or October or even the revolutionary Islamic revolutionary guards not going to be paid they don't pay them monthly they pay them quarterly I think and their next quarterly payment they don't have the money to do it we'll see how zealous and eager they are to go into virgin heaven when they have no money all right dr let's take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about minnesota stay with us and we'll be back every state is home to significant historic sites that tell the american story but not every site is telling that story honestly and fairly that's why the heritage foundation created the heritage guide historic sites this interactive guide equips american citizens with the tools they need to enjoy the sites that depict some of the greatest moments in our nation's history analyzing them for historical accuracy and provides resources for families or educators planning a visit for mountain Vernon to independence hall to get Eastburg and more americans deserve transparency and sites that steward our history faithfully deserve our gratitude the heritage guide to historic sites invites every american to rediscover the places and stories that define our nation whether it's across the country or in your backyard visit historic sites dot heritage dot org to start your adventure today welcome back this is victor davis hamson in his own words and you can find him on social media at on x his handle is at vd hamson and on facebook he has a page called hamson's morning cup so victor minnesota speaking of civilizational breakdown and people orchestrating it has just named their immigrant of the year that was or he was named by walls and they've just arrested i should say they're immigrant of the year for medicare fraud in the millions and sex trafficking and i was wondering thoughts on that and then we'll turn to keith elisena always weird when they always ask for restitution i think they ask him for a million or two dollars and rest it where's the money going to come from it's in somali you know it's in somalia so it's the left is so embarrassed because this was there they all went to minnesota and the left said oh my gosh we got a hundred thousand new voters and they're black and it's d i and they're going to vote lockstep for us which they did and we're just going to turn the other way if they bring their somali habits over here of graft and corruption which destroyed their own country when you add into the equation that which they don't want to talk about but they came because saeed baray was a genocidal dictator ship when a portion near the golf somali land wanted to break off from his government you see he was a genocidal monster as well as from a different tribe he started slaughtering them but then he lost so they said all our enemies are going to get after us so then these settler colonialists came to the united states and they fit every description of what mandami and hasun piker call the Israelis falsely but they are genocide they have a history of genocide and they are settler colonialists coming to the united states they're not refugees they left they left because people were after them that had reason to be after them saeed baray's son is here the dictator he came i think he came with his i'm talking about he beings ilian Omar's dad who was a colonel and saeed baray's army he came he had he was a he ran a group of a contingent that was active in going after civilians and soldiers in the war so all those people have connections and i don't know whatever happened to saeed baray's dead i think he was he went to another african country for sanctuary but most of these people flock to the united states and they're very mumble about they don't talk about what did your dad do what did you do in the baray government ilian Omar never talks about it except to say that this country was trashy when she got here she said that and uh but the point is they gave him a blank check and then they knew what they were doing they thought you can imagine the conversations they had with the Somali quote unquote community we've got some rumors that you guys have storefronts that don't serve meals we have some rumors that you have a senior assisted living that's at somebody's house with 500 people we and they said do you want us to vote for you do you want us to vote or you want us to vote for don trump and his people we vote as a block and so that's what why did Tim Walls not run for his third term because it's all come Keith Ellison and he were knee deep in it speaking of Keith Ellison he's having it out with Texas governor Greg Abbott he's demanding that an ice agent by the name of Christian Castro who he has four counts of assault when Christian this ice agent Castro was in Minnesota under on an operation metro surge so he was doing the government's bidding and they want to charge him with assault and they're telling the governor Abbott that they need to extradite the man you can see how that is that's going to work you can see how ignorant what an ignoramus Ellison is so you have camp pennilton a federal light and all of a sudden one of the soldiers says I was hit by another soldier and I'm going to go to LAPD L.A. County Sheriff and so the L.A. County. You were hit. Well, you're a resident of L.A. County or something, you know, whatever county it is. And then the local sheriff goes into the military checkpoint and says, "I have jurors." No, you don't. Get the blank out of here. Keith, they're federal officers. They're under rigid oversight and guidance and subject to federal law. If you have a complaint, you go as Attorney General Minnesota, you go to the relevant federal attorney of Minnesota and you lodge a complaint and ask for an investigation. Then the federal attorney makes that decision, whether there's evidence or not to look at this particular ICE agent, but he doesn't extradite them to you under state. That's just not going to happen. Because if it did happen, we would have utter chaos in this country. It would be something like 1861 in March between the Union and what would soon be the Confederacy. Do you want to go back to that? You don't have any. It's like, "Mondomi, I'm going to arrest Netanyahu." No, the UN Charter says that people who are legitimate members of the UN have a right to come to New York. If they get a visa from the federal government, not you, you can't. That would be really interesting because if Netanyahu comes with Israeli security and US FBI assisting because they always coordinate, and then, "Mondomi," says, "My trusted loyal, friendly NYPD that I love so much is going to go arrest you." They probably say, "We're going to arrest anybody." It's you for breaking federal law. All right, since we're in Texas, I just have a curiosity about the Taloriko candidate for Senator. He has hired the deputy policy director, Jacob Smith, who once was a Republican policy director or policy adviser. He worked for Kornin, I think. Yeah, Kornin. I was wondering, what do you make of that? That sounds really strange. He's just hired a Republican on to help his deputy. Yeah, but he was. Kornin was kind of a rhino, and Kornin said something they got, "Wow, your former staffers working with Taloriko." He said, "I don't. In the United States, we don't monitor whom people work for." It's true about that, but Paxton is a very controversial. He was a Kornin would have won this race easily, because the MAGA right had nowhere to go. I don't think they would have sat home in Texas. But Paxton, he's much more Trumpian, but he has a checkered personal life, and all sorts of accusations we don't need to get into. But the problem with it is, Taloriko makes Beto look like a conservative. I mean, he believes what God is multi-gender, and there's six different genders, and he hates meat until he was a vegetarian in Texas. There's that one commercial where they show him, and he drives up in a ram truck with a cowboy hat, and then he goes in, comes out with a Texas t-shirt, and then right after he made reality confirm myth, because he cut a commercial where he is out there welding or something, and he has a pickup, and he's been seen in cowboy hats. He's a very, I mean, he's a left-wing liberationist Christian who lived with his mother for a long time, never married. There's a good chance he may not be heterosexual, which is just, I have no problem with that. He says he met his girlfriend in a gay bar. Most women don't go to gay bars to meet men. I tell you that. And he's got a squeaky little voice. He looks like he's about 13 years old, and he's a socialist in Texas, and he thinks he's going to win. Just like Beto said, he was going to win. Every time they get a raptured, and they throw money into these candidates, and they lose. And so far, that Texas Republicans like this, because they suck national, we're going to flip Texas. But Texas is, they think that they're going to flip Texas because all these Californians have fled there. The Californians go to about four places, Nevada, Idaho and Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. But everyone that I've met that has left California, maybe a hundred of them in the last ten years, I would call them culturally liberal. In the sense, they like to have red wine, if you ask them about the best nap of vintage, they can tell you they like bike paths, but they're conservative. They vote conservative, and they don't like high taxes. So the idea that Texas is going to flip because a bunch of California, I don't see that. Maybe I don't know, Austin, maybe a lot of people from the country who are left we can go to Austin, but Texas is not going to flip in the near future, even the Hispanic voters become 50-50. Well, Victor, we are up against a hard stop, but I just want to a couple of comments from our listeners. Mr. Hanson, my husband and I saw you on Mark Levin's show Sunday, July 26, and you were fantastic. Thank you so much for your edification, and I may add that you looked dapper in your suit jacket. All that you do, and may God continue to bless you with good health. Linda, in this. Also, let me see, oh, I wanted to just note, somebody wrote about the Prometheus statue that Elon Musk is putting in front of his star base, and I went to look at it. It's really awesome. I didn't always tell that people that had Renaissance skills like that, they could still do realistic sculpture, but we've had some with the World War I project. Yeah, and the craftsmen are specialists in titanium. It's going to be a 50-foot statue, by the way. I want to put that cause out of titanium. Why did he choose Prometheus, Victor? Because Prometheus is the God who brought fire to mankind and allowed them to cook and keep warm, and the God punished him because he was empowering men. If you're interested in it, there was a trilogy. I'm doing this by memory, but it's not by memory. I spent my life called Prometheus Bound, how he's bound by the gods on a rock, and he has his liver eaten out, and then it regrows. Then there was Prometheus Unbound, which is lost, and the Keats or Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound, but in any case, he's the good God, the beneficial God, the humanist God, who wanted to help man. He gave them a great gift. It was in a fennelstock, a little bit of fire, and after that man said, "I can forge weapons, I can make steel iron, I can eat, I can keep warm, I can live like a God." That's where the God punished him in a way. Escalus has a great play. I think it is the shortest Greek tragedy. It's about a thousand lines. It's a dubious authenticity. People have sometimes attributed it not to Escalus. It's the first Escalian tragedy I ever read in Greek. It's very easy to read in Greek. It's a great play. All right, so then a last statement that she wants to correct things about Steve Bannon. This is from Judith Snyder. Yes, I used to Bannon a little. She says she likes everything you do, and then she says, "You lump Steve Bannon in with Tucker Candace, Marjorie Taylor Green, and Nick Fuentes. Not so. He's a populist nationalist. Yes, he dislikes Israel for getting us to fight their "forever wars," but he is still majorly loyal to Trump and continues to advise him and supports him for a third term. Okay. He is anti-Islam and continues to work towards preventing their takeover in Texas, Minnesota, Maine, Michigan, and Massachusetts. Bannon is a loyal patriot, both to Trump and to our country. Please correct your thinking on him, and that's again to you. I met Steve Bannon 20 years ago, 25 years ago. He called me up and he was interested in absorbing my website, and I went down to Santa Monica and met him. He had his own studio, and we had lunch at the needle at the LAX, and then on at least three occasion, he came to the Hooper institution, and I was a good friend of his. They called. Security called me and said, "There's three guys with long hair and boots in motorcycle jackets, and they parked in the director's area, and they say they know you, and they want to come up." I said, "Bring them up. And it was Steve, I like Steve Bannon. In fact, I think he was responsible in some part of winning Donald Trump the 2016 election, especially that brilliant thing when the first when right after access Hollywood that our colleagues at Nash and with you were calling on Donald Trump to resign and all of a sudden Paula Jones and Paula Jones, there's three of them and I know them very Kathleen Willie and the one that owned the rest home. She was really good to all three and the young girl who had been raped at Hillary defended the rapers and chuckled about. Yeah. They all showed up. Jennifer Flowers. No Jennifer Flowers. She didn't go in. The girl friend of Bill Clinton. But anyways, he brought me in. I need a Broadway. Yeah, all three of them did there. You should saw Hillary's face. It just dropped. And she was rattled. Steve thought of that. I think he did. And what I I agree, but I do think that he is flirting with those guys. That she mentioned Tucker and all skies and you and I don't know what he I don't know he didn't before. He was a big. I don't know where he is now, but I don't I'd never suggested that he was exactly the same as Fuentes or Tucker Carlson. And I do believe that she's correct that on on occasions he talks at Trump. And I've said more than any time he was treated very badly by Jaylene him, especially when we see that felt you just don't want. What's the difference in just going to the committee and saying I'm not going to say a word and just say, well, I'm not going to say a word. So why go? And so that's they put him in jail for months and Peter Navarro and in the new book counter revolution that the fallen rise of Donald Trump and the Megan Movement. I mentioned him very favorably as a person who was dealt an injustice by the left. Yeah. So I stand modify if I came across that he was synonymous with can he's not. I didn't mean to suggest that, but I do think that he's strayed from his earlier positions in some cases. Yeah. Well, thank you, Victor. We're coming to the end. Thanks to the audience for joining us. And we'll be back on Saturday for our weekend edition and lots more news and Victor's going to be talking about Tyler and John Tyler and Richard Nixon. So join us on the weekend episode. Thank you everybody for watching and listening. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson and we're signing off. 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