Victor Davis Hanson: Why Charlie Kirk’s Death Sparked Conspiracy Theories

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Age and location restrictions apply. Product availability varies by market. See fanduel.com for eligibility. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. How did we get to this place after 9-11? I thought we were going to remember it forever. Mondami handed that honorific pin through Jessica Tish. And she's the police commissioner, the NYPD overseer. Would you hand that over to my chief legal counsel? Who, by the way, defended the brother-in-law of one of the 9-11 killers. No, in the left-wing mind. There, it's on hinge. There's something wrong with it. You have to be filled with a lot of hate of Jews, Israel, to come up with such an elaborate conspiracy. Well, hello, ladies. And hello, gentlemen. And welcome to Victor Davis Hanson, in his own words. Excuse me while I punch my table. I'm Jack Fowler. The host, Victor, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, owner of the great website, The Blade of Perseus, which you'll find at victorhansen.com, to which you should subscribe. Only $65 a year, folks. $6.50 a month if you want to go that route. And you'll be able to read exclusive articles two every week, exclusive videos one every week, that Victor does. Or The Blade. He is also the New York Times number one bestselling author of The Counter-Revolution, The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump, and The MAGA Movement. Number one hardcover nonfiction. Came out on September 8th, which is, whatever, ten days ago. Also is number one on Amazon. Congratulations again, Victor. And I hope sales continue strongly. Or strong. I don't know if I should have added the Lee. We are talking. We are talking a late night here in Milford, Connecticut. It's Sunday, September 20th. This episode will be up on Thursday, September 24th. In the year 2026. I thank Victor for accommodating schedule. He's got strange schedules coming up. I do also. So this is why we're doing it when we're doing it, folks. Who knows what will happen between Thursday and today when we're recording on Sunday. But Victor's wisdom is timeless. We're going to talk about Canada, Greenland, Iran. And Nicole Hannah-Jones and Douglas Murray has a very interesting piece in the Free Press on 9-11. 25 years later, why are we still waiting for jurisprudence, waiting for justice for these terrorist murderers? So we'll get to. Let's start off with Iran. And we'll get to that when we come back from these initial important messages. Victor is a close friend of Dennis Prager and has had the privilege of working with his. and I have six of them anyway, and the war on all fronts, explicitly including Lebanon, release of frozen Iranian funds, which amount to billions of U.S. dollars, and the U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports, and U.S. interference in Iran's internal affairs, whatever that might mean, and U.S. cooperation with groups opposed to the Iranian government. I assume that's the Kurds, so I'm sure you'll tell what they might be. And finally, end to all U.S. attacks on Iranian territory. Victor, one other thing is that Donald Trump's stories today, he is saying things like, do I blow these people to kingdom come? Do I destroy this nation? Do I impoverish it, or do I make a deal with them? Do they have the sense to come to a deal? Those are the three options. Anyway, Victor, so we have this new wrinkle in the Iranian war, what is your take on all this? My take is they're hurting, hurting, hurting, and they're getting close to, as we've said, for several weeks, I don't know if they're going to implode before the election, but they're getting very, very close. I could interpret fairly, I think, all of their demands. So end to the war on all fronts. Notice all fronts. So we want you to stop. We want you to stop allowing Israel to respond to Hezbollah. We want you to not respond to the Houthis, and there's no way enforcing this. So after you agree to all this, from time to time, the Houthis, we can't control them, but they will hit you or the Red Sea. Release of frozen Iranian funds. We need more weapons. And we don't care about the people's food or fuel, but we need those frozen funds to rebuild our air defenses, to rebuild our missile fleet, to get more drones, and to resume work at Pickaxe Mountain. End to the U.S. naval blockade. The naval blockade is bankrupting us, and we want all U.S. ships out because they're the only ones who will stop us from periodically shutting down the Straits of Hormuz, which is our right. End to U.S. interference in Iran's internal affairs. That means we have the right to murder 45,000 dissidents in our own streets and maybe thousands after that, and we want to continue to do it from time to time. So don't ever interfere in what is our prerogative to kill our own citizens in the thousands. End to U.S. From time to time, we go in and try to slaughter Kurds, and so we don't want you to do it. We understand that the son of the deposed Shah is very popular, so we don't want you to have anything to do with him. End to all U.S. We want to be able to intimidate the Gulf and send missiles, but we can't do that if from time to time you target our platforms. There's no way to enforce any of those demands. And notice they don't say in their demands, if these are met, then we promise to do the following. Cease all work on nuclear acquisition. Cease all attacks on third parties in the Gulf and Israel. Stop all aggression against Israel. Stop all terrorist attacks in Europe and North America that are funded by our government against Western governments. And stop killing all internal dissidents and Kurds and hold periodic and fair, transparent elections. So I wouldn't give it the time of day. They think Donald Trump is so eager, and he may be, he's eager to make a deal and get, gas prices down and the non-popular war over with, that, um. And they are emboldened by the polls that show 65% of the American people don't approve and the Democratic Party, I'll be frank, I'm not trying to be malicious, but they are rooting for the Iranians. And, you know, Hassan Parker said that essentially. He said that they should have the right to get a nuclear weapon. And the left has been saying that more or less. They want to go back to the Obama policy of empowering Iran. Victor, if Iran folded up its military tent, let's say just overnight became a peacenik nation, what other nations have their eyes on Iran? How would it be threatened? I mean, if Israel, yeah, so none of its neighbors have any desires for it. The only reason the Shah armed Iran to the teeth was we were in the middle of the Cold War. And the Russians had outposts in Yemen and with Nasser's Egypt and later with Sadat. And they were trying to reassure the Americans that if you will sell us weapons, we will guard the entrance of the Strait of Hormuz and stop Soviet domination of the Persian Gulf. Otherwise, there would have been no need. If they had a consensual government that was pro-Western, there wouldn't be very many troops. In the Middle East, it would go back to about 1975 when we didn't have a lot of troops in the Middle East. But everybody knows that. So it's all about the midterms and they're gaming it. And I think a lot of parties, Trump is gaming the midterms. He's trying to figure out whether one decisive October surprise hit will topple them in time to make a difference in the midterms. The Iranian theocracy is trying to hold out in a hope that. Is on popularity translates into impeachment and cut off of war funds. The Democrats want gas prices to stay high. They don't really want a deal and the internal opposition and the Kurds are probably thinking if he should lose the midterms and the polls are right about the house, then we're not going to have a chance to overthrow this government. So we might as well take a risk before the midterms. All of those things are probabilities. But they're they have a good chance of being likely and we'll see what I think between October 10th and November 3rd, we're going to see some crazy things. Yeah. Hopefully not on our soil, which is the point of all this. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah. Well, Victor, let's talk about Greenland and Canada. But first to our viewers and listeners. If you've studied enough history. You start to see a pattern. Nations don't lose their way overnight. They drift through debt and division until one day you realize the foundations you thought were permanent were never permanent at all. Today, America is spending at levels once reserved for wartime. We've normalized deficits that would have stunned earlier generations and policymakers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention, more printing, more distortion. But here's the historical truth. Every society that pushed its. Currency beyond issue discipline eventually paid a price. The wise, though they never waited for collapse. They prepared for the correction. And that's why so many thoughtful Americans, especially those nearing retirement or in retirement, are reallocating part of their wealth into something that has outlasted every paper experiment in human history. 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Well, Victor, let's get an update. You want to give an update about Canada. And I think we need to get some more fulsome thoughts from you about the deal over Greenland. The deal with Denmark to give America rights and access, increased access to Greenland. But let's talk first about Canada. What do you want to say about that, Victor? Well, there's been some changes and changes. Carnie now is doubling down. And he feels that he is, I mean, he had three passports, Canadian, Irish, and United Kingdom before he became prime minister. So he believes he's a globalist. And now he's reached out to the Europeans and advertised the rich natural resources of Canada. Potash, rare earth minerals, timber, and especially oil. And he said, this is a natural Western alliance. And we would like to be a member, and if not a member, an associate member. And so think of the logic, everyone. Europe at the millennium had about the same GDP as we did, even though it had about 100 million more people as it does today. It only has about. It only has about 65% of our GDP today. We have $31 trillion in GDP. They have $21 trillion. China has four times our population. They have 65% of our GDP. So Mr. Carnie, in his infinite wisdom, is saying to us in the world, I would rather make special trade agreements, cultural agreements, the whole panoply of agreements with the Europeans who have an ossified stagnant economy, are highly protectionist, have a disastrous green mandated energy policy, have open borders, and are getting up to between 15% and 30% of their population Muslim with a fertility rate of about 1.3. Because we're just. We're just like them. We have the same fertility rate, only lower. We have the same open borders and illegal and legal immigrants percentage, only more. We have the same stagnant ossified economy, only more so. We have the same disarmament, only more so. Then he turns to China and he says, we want to have a whole array of agreements. We're going to let you come in with a measly little 6% for 48 terabytes. We're going to let you come in with a measly little 6% for 48,000 EVs. We're going to let you dump aluminum and steel below the cost of production so we can reassemble it and use it in vehicle exports to the United States that are competitive. So my point is this. He's got the largest economy in the world with no transportation right across the border. He speaks English. Trump speaks English. We speak English. Canadians speak English. We're right next to each other. And he's trying to circumvent a partner with this robust, dynamic economy where there's 1 million Canadians living under the most liberal immigration laws that in the United States accorded no other nation six months visa-free. And in addition to that, they have the best. tariff deal of any nation. And he wants to, in his spite, give up that entire 75% of his trade with no transportation, with oil refineries that fit his tar sands in Alberta, billions of dollars of investment in the United States, for A, a communist dictatorship that is the worst abuser of trade in history, China, , , , which takes care of the Arctic Circle, which it has extravagant claims upon, and the Northwest Passage, which it has extravagant claims upon, and its airspace. So I don't understand it, why he would do that when he would, even if those trade agreements were to go through, does he think that Xi is going to be more transparent than Donald Trump's trading team? Does he think the EU are less protectionist than the United States? And does he think it's cheaper to send goods to Europe or China than, I don't know, 100 miles across the border? So he is guided primarily by anger and spite, and that's why he will not have a press conference with his whole cabinet at his side and say, here is the transcript on the screen of exactly what transpired. Here are the exchanges between the trade representatives, and now you're a free North American press to question any of us at the table why I decided at the 11th hour to break off the negotiation. That's simple. Yeah, simple. Central to his politics is hatred of Donald Trump and hatred of the United States. Minus that, he might not have won election, right? So that prioritizes the needs of his nations. By the way, it reminds me, Victor, Canada with its poor economy, joining Europe with its poor economy. Long time ago, National Review, which never made money. It was a money-losing proposition. It was really a cause. There was an effort. Someone wanted us to buy another money-losing publication, as if joining two money-losing things was somehow going to magically. I did my part, Jack. I did my part. For 10 years, I wrote columns for $50 each. And you went on cruises for free. I did. I did. And you had to take Rome again back home. So that was a big deal. I liked Roman Glenn a lot. Oh, he's the best. Yeah, he's funny. I liked him a lot. I still like him. Yeah. Well, let's talk about Greenland. So here's a headline. Trump strikes a permanent Greenland deal barring China and Russia. This is from Fox News. President Donald Trump struck a sweeping agreement with Denmark and Greenland this week, granting the United States permanent military rights on the strategically placed Arctic Island. The U.S. will now have permanent access, basing the overflight rights in Greenland and the ability to establish additional military installations as needed, according to senior U.S. officials who outlined the deal exclusively to Fox News Digital. The deal bars China, Russia, and other non-NATO countries from establishing military bases or maintaining troops in Greenland. It also restricts adversaries, from investing in sensitive sectors that could pose a threat to U.S. national security. Victor, is this a great victory for Donald Trump? What's your take on this? It is a great victory because all he said in the beginning is that China and Russia, given the Northwest Passage, is starting to be navigated or will be. And when you look at the map and you look at missile trajectories, strategic air flights, bombing, it's all connected. I mean, you look at us and Russia and China in the Arctic and they're very close to each other as opposed to the lower latitudes. But here's my query. Let's say that Donald Trump, instead of saying, we need this, we're going to take it if they don't sell it, da-da-da-da-da-da-da, what if he just said, could I, this is before Denmark decided to invest a billion dollars and put Greenland's coat of arms on its own coat of arms and say that this was outrageous. But let's just say that Donald Trump said, you know, I really love Denmark and we kept that continent free of the Nazis when they were overrun in three days. We put a base on it. It was very valuable in ensuring the supply lines to Great Britain because of our air bases and destroyers and things that could dock there and patrol the Atlantic channels of trade. And then we gave it back. And now we feel that all we're asking for is a renewed defense presence to protect tiny Denmark and underpopulated Greenland from the encroachment, which is ongoing. So would you please give us unlimited basing so we can invest for NATO, the West, for your benefit? So, Jack, I was thinking, what if Donald Trump had not rambled on and frightened NATO and Denmark by saying he wanted to buy it and he deserved to have it and Germany had not sent its eight or ten troops there and just said from the very beginning, the Chinese and the Russians, Russians are replaying what the Nazis did in World War II by trying to take Greenland or use it or thought they would. And little Denmark, who had been under, you know, overrun, was not able to protect it. So I want to play that same role as FDR and come in and have periodic leasing renewals and exclusivity and we will protect NATO's northern flank. Would you please do that for us? Would they do that? I don't think they would. I think only the idea, and that's what bothers, it's the same situation with Panama, because I know what happened. During the Biden administration, they said, I don't think it's wise to lease the entry and exit foci of the Panama Canal to Chinese communist affiliated companies when we built the canal and it connects our West and East Coast. Would you please get them out? Oh. And then Trump said, we built it. We can take it back anytime. And you're not going to do that. So what I'm getting at is, yes, I understand when Trump gets his way that there's ill feelings left, but I don't think anybody else got their way because for the last four years prior to his second term, all you read in the news was that, oh, we built it. We built it. We built it. We built it. of Chinese and Russian overflights and shipping close to Greenland and worry about NATO's northern flank. And Denmark did not put Greenland on its coat of arms. It did not spend a billion dollars. It was indifferent. And that's a commentary on human nature that only that approach seems to get things that were necessary for Europe, for Denmark, for Greenland, and for us. And I guess I could add, and for Canada, especially. Greenland is in North America, by the way. It's not a European continental island. It's in our northern hemisphere. It's closer to New York than it is to Copenhagen. Right. I guess the essential question is, is the world a better place, safer place because of this deal, because of what we've done with Panama, or would it be a worse place without it? And I think that's a good question. I think the answer is a better place. Yeah, better place. And it would never happen under any other president, Republican or Democrat. And it's kind of funny, Canada can say all it wants, but Canada is a lot safer with a huge US base there protecting it, its Atlantic northern coast, than to have Russians and Chinese there, despite their new romance with China. Yeah. Well, Victor, before, earlier in the show, I should say, you mentioned Hassan Piker, and I just want to raise him now, as we have elections coming up. And I think some places have actually, I saw some headline, voting has begun in some midterm, for the midterm elections in some places. It sounds nutty. It probably is nutty. But here's a headline from the Daily Signal. Democrats criticize Hassan Piker's support for Iran-Al Qaeda. And it says, Piker, and I guess my question here, at the end of this is, Hassan Piker, the enemy, the political enemy conservatives have needed or need, that Piker is under scrutiny from some Democrat officials after he defended the Iranian regime's nuclear ambitions and other Islamic terrorist organizations during an interview with Axios representatives, Richie Torres of New York, Democrat of New York, he's from the Bronx, and Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, were among those who dismissed the streamer's comments. And offered condemnation of Piker. Gottheimer describes the comments as intentional adding that the streamer has built a brand on anti-American hate. Well, Victor, is he going to pay dividends for Republicans politically? I think if they can get, as I said before, the midterms are a question of time. In the 1968 race, Hubert Humphrey was way behind. And he He closed Richard Nixon's lead, and people had predicted. He needed two or three more weeks. He only lost by about 100,000 votes. I'm not getting into the politics of I think Nixon was better for the country. But that said, you could see that. And when you look at the races that are tightening up in Minnesota, and Flanagan is neck and neck now with Tofoya. When you look at the race in Maine, where Susan Collins is very close. When you look at Mike Rogers is within the margin of error of Saeed. And I think that's a phony poll because we saw that he was overpolled by eight or nine points in the primaries. And Tallarico is slipping a little bit. So if they have enough time to get the message out, who these people are, and they do it effectively, I think they have a much better chance. Well, he said that he was on the—basically, he said that he wanted Iran to get a bomb so they could deter democracies from meddling in their affairs. So he is pro-Iranian. And, you know, he's another person that came under what we would call birthright citizenship. His parents came. They had him here. They went back to Turkey. He was raised in Turkey. When he came of age, he came over here. He was a professor for college. And his mother's a professor. His father's a big transatlantic professor with ties in the United States and Turkey. And all he can say is terrible things about the United States in the fashion that Mondami says the same thing, in the fashion that Ilyan Omar. And what we're not allowed to say is, hold it. Whoa, Nelly. Hey, Omar. Omar, your father was a colonel in the Saeed-Berry genocidal regime that killed over 200,000 people. You fled to this country from a god-awful genocidal nation. And before you call anybody genocidal, you should explain exactly what your father was doing and what members of your Somali community were doing as high-ranking officials in that, I guess I would call it, illegitimate dictatorship. That was murderous. Hey, Mondami, before you arrest Netanyahu in New York when he comes for next week's U.N., ask yourself, are you going to arrest the Iranian delegation? They murdered 45,000 of their own citizens. Are you going to stop them when they come into New York? Or because they're Muslims and Iranian and not Jewish, they get a pass? And by the way, we don't really approve of 1%. We don't really approve of 1% of the Indian community controlling 65% of the wealth of Uganda and then coming over here and giving us lectures on egalitarianism. And oh, by the way, Hasan Parker, when you went back to Turkey and you start giving us lecture on genocide and the Israelis and the horrible things about America, you should take a deep breath and look at the history of Turkish genocide against the Armenians. I've never heard you say one thing about it. They butchered almost a million Armenians and destroyed Armenia as we know it and caused a huge Armenian diaspora to come here. And by the way, Hagia Sophia was a U.N.-protected legacy site. It had been for years. And your Turkish government did what? It desecrated the greatest church in Christendom for 1,000 years until 1453 and then took away its U.N.-protected status. And recalibrated it as a mosque. And so don't give us any lectures on genocide or anything or about religious tolerance. You come from one of the most intolerant countries. And by the way, when you talk about Hasan Parker, when you talk about occupied territory, why don't you go tell that to the Cypriots? You invaded a country and occupied about 40%. And then you as settler colonials. You sent Turkish civilians to repopulate and change the demography. And nobody in the world, nobody in the world recognizes northern Cyprus except you, Turkey. So I'm getting so tired of these first and second generation immigrants that come here and they open their mouth with a complete damnation of our traditions, our history, our culture. And then they come here and they open their mouth with a complete damnation of our traditions, our history, our culture. And then we're supposed to think that they've reached nirvana and we examine their families, their countries, and they have no moral ground to lecture us. We are morally and intellectually and spiritually and politically superior to their homelands. And yet all they do is criticize us. And then it begs the question, why don't you go back and enjoy Ankara? And why don't you go back and enjoy? And why don't you go back and enjoy your family estate in Uganda? But if that message gets out, and I'm really upset that the Republican National Committee does not have commercials that really go after this new Islamist socialist party. And maybe they have October surprises. I don't know. Well, here's a story that you would like to see more of, this pushback against these things. A headline is, Dearborn sued over Ramadan displays while ignoring Easter and Passover. And this is a Fox News story. This is a federal lawsuit filed Thursday, and that would be a week ago from when this program airs. Alleges the city of Dearborn spent thousands of taxpayer dollars on public displays celebrating Muslim holidays while ignoring a Christian resident's repeated requests for Easter and Passover recognition. Margo Cleveland. I think it's Margo Cleveland. I think you may know Margo. Yeah. A journalist with The Federalist filed a civil rights lawsuit with the American Freedom Law Center against the city of Dearborn and Democratic Mayor Abdullah Hamoud, alleging the city violated her First and Fourteenth Amendment rights, including protections involving religious establishment, free speech, and equal protection. The article goes on. I won't read any more of it. Let's just put it this way. If at the millennium, right after 9-11, some right-wing, quote-unquote, I'm worried about Islamic—we only had about a million Muslims at that time. I think we have five or six now. If he said, if we open the door to Islamic immigration from the Middle East, I'm very worried because they're going to target cities, say, in Texas or Michigan, and they are going to try to take them over politically, and they don't have Western ideas of religious tolerance. So, they're going to have prayer servers blasting out disturbing people who are not Muslims. And when they get control of the local government, they will have one set of rules for Muslims and another for Christians, and they'll be very intolerant of other religious expression. If you had said that, they'd say, well, what do you expect? He's a white supremacist. He's a right-wing nut. Or was he correct? Look at Europe. Look at what Sweden is doing. 30% of the Swedish population. Now are Muslim immigrants and their rape, murder, assault rates have just skyrocketed. Does that mean that Muslims do that? No. But that means if you come into a country either illegally or with false pretenses and you don't have any intention of integrating or assimilating, but to create ethnic enclaves to carve out a little outpost of your culture, but taking advantage without contributing to it of Western ideas. But that means if you come into a country either illegally or with false pretenses and you don't have any intention of integrating or assimilating, but taking advantage of Eastern freedom, security, and prosperity, then we have a right to suggest and tell people what exactly you're doing. Well, Victor, before we take a break, well, I want to ask you a little more about Sweden since you just raised it, but I want our listeners and viewers to know that you are a close friend of Dennis Prager, and you've had the privilege of working with his remarkable team at PragerU. Victor appears in several five-minute videos. That have reached millions of people worldwide. Remarkably, more than 60% of PragerU's audience is under 35, the very generation which most needs our enduring American principles. At a time when education and media too often erode confidence in our country, PragerU stands firm in defending truth, reason, and the ideas of Western civilization. We're proud to be part of the PragerU family. Please support PragerU. With a tax-deductible donation today. Go to PragerU.com slash VDH. Let me spell Prager for you. P-R-A-G-E-R. PragerU.com slash VDH. And give generously today. And we thank the good people from PragerU for sponsoring Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. And we continue prayers. Many people here, very prayerful people, praying for that Dennis Prager. Hangs in there and finds some. He's very courageous after that tragic accident. Yeah. He's shocked people about how. He's been able to continue talking and things after being paralyzed. Well, Victor, we're going to take a break in a sec, but you brought up Sweden. And we sense in various European countries a pushback and a mounting outrage and political gains. The AFD in Germany just made remarkable gains in their elections. But Sweden, I think it was 10 days ago, had their elections, and the left won. I think a mix of the left, the Green-Red Alliance, some form of that, provided a narrow victory for the forces of, I don't know, national destruction. National suicide. It's very hard to offend Europeans. If you're immigrants. But if you're able to, by the conduct and the intolerance and the violence of Middle East immigrants in Europe, offend socialists who want to be pro-Islamicists, who are basically anti-Semitic, and you're going to help ensure that Macron is going to be out and Schultz is going to be out, Schultz, and the Germans will, the alternative for Deutschland will take over eventually. And same thing in Holland. And Swedes, I don't think that close election is going to stop them from deporting or denaturalizing students. To get that type of reaction from that liberal, progressive, socialist continent is very hard to do. And you took this magnanimous, very tolerant continent, and you deliberately came in and you insulted them, you were violent, you did not assimilate, and you welched off their generous welfare, you being the majority of these immigrants, and you created a backlash. And I would advise here in the United States, given the massive fraud of the Somali community in Minnesota, and given what Mondami is doing, and given what Mondami is saying, he's going to go after richer, whiter neighborhoods or confiscate property he thinks is not well managed. Or people like Ilhan Omar saying this is a trashy country, or it's a Benjamin's baby, or somebody did something or something happened on 9-11. Or Hassan Piker saying that he is happy about 9-11. And he's warning people, if you're Jewish, you're not going to have any influence and you're not going to, the candidate will never be Jewish. If you're Jewish from the Democratic Party, you're really pushing the envelope. And that reaction you see in Europe will happen here, but it will happen much quicker because the United States is not a socialist country. Right. And we have guns. So if I was in the Muslim community, I would have leaders that come out to the public. And we saw this, and Sammy and I talked about it. It's very hard in the intersectionality tree to offend each other. But somehow. The Muslim community of Detroit has got the black community at odds. I mean, they are picketing and going into gas stations and stop-and-go stores and furious because a black woman was handled roughly and her purse was stolen. And that was an insult to the black community. But that's hard because they are part of the intersectionality that the left lectures is about. It's also a reminder, as I said earlier, that the tribal model doesn't work. When you identify as black or white or Arab or Muslim, then you are cutting yourself off from other groups and you're privileging your pre-civilizational tribal nature. And tribalism was the foe of civilization in history, and it's the foe of civilization today. Yeah. Well, I sense that in the black community, part of the angst at the Muslim community, and we've seen low-grade animus, Victor, over the last couple of years is, say, the infusion of illegal immigrants into America, and they're being housed in, you know, black communities or inner-city communities. And wait a minute, they're getting free housing, free food, et cetera. So there's this kind of. There's this welfare resentment, which is not the most altruistic reason for being angry, but how come they're getting some and we're not getting. If you're going to give it away, why don't we get a piece of the action? Well, I think Americans have mixed emotions because in the inner city, and I'm speaking now when I go up to East Palo Alto or I go through West Fresno or I go through Stockton, cities that have large African-Americans. African-American population, when you look at who is running the stop-and-go's, who's running the 7-Elevens, who is running the gas stations, they're either from the Middle East or from India. And the question then arises, why hasn't the black community in their own community have black enterprises? We know they can be very entrepreneurial because they were so in the 50s and 40s in these communities. They resent people who come in, and Americans are conflicted about it because on the one hand, many of these immigrants are very hardworking, and they work under enormously difficult conditions of high crime, high maintenance, high insurance costs, high violence. And I think it's just a reminder when these DEI groups under the umbrella of DEI start fighting with each other, or black women are fighting. They're fighting now with white women, or they're fighting over the jury in the Lindsey Clancy, the black holdout. It's a reminder it doesn't work. And I always go back to the first book of Thucydides when he says, before the city-state, people were nomadic and tribal, and they just wandered around. Civilization is not tribal. Read Caesar's Gallic Wars. As tragic as it is with the horrific violence in it, it does show you that there is a tribal mindset, and it's not healthy. And I don't know why we revert to this tribalism, but it's like nuclear proliferation. Once one country goes nuclear in your vicinity, then for deterrence, other countries. And what they don't understand is the black community. It's very funny. There's a lot of black online commentary. There's a lot of white commentators who are very astute, and they are warning their community. If you keep saying day after day after day, white, white, white, white, white, white supremacy, white supremacy, white rage, white rage, and that is coincidentally or happening at the same time or core terminus with three white girls at York College in an off-campus housing being dragged down and beaten to a pulp, that is coincidentally or happening at the same time or core terminus with three white girls at York College in an off-campus housing being dragged down and beaten to a pulp, are part of an internet meme that almost every single second, there is an interracial violence where a black person is walking and hitting people randomly, and those images, whether they represent actual percentages or not. But when you have all of that and all of this DEI, and you're telling everybody that everybody has to identify by their tribe, then eventually the white community. then eventually the white community is going to do that. And that's not going to be good because it's the majority, still a majority community. And if you don't, and if you say, well, Victor, that's very racist. It is. And that's why, but as I said before, if I go to certain food markets at 6.30 in the morning in my region, when it is 95% Hispanic and I see a white person that I don't know who it is. Hi, how are you? Good to see you. I said, do I know you? No, no, I just wanted to say hi. And that's a reaction to La Raza, La Raza, La Raza, La Raza, La Raza, La Raza, La Raza, Hispanic, Hispanic, Hispanic. So it's not a wise thing to say that for any group, any group. But we have this idea. That's the worst thing about DEI. It's like telling somebody you're a victim and you get blanket exemption. So things you say that are illiterate, illiberal things you do that are illiberal, you're not going to be held fully responsible. It's kind of like what was accorded white people in the South, at least white middle-class people in the Jim Crow era. Why would you want to go back and emulate the politics of Jim Crow and take a particular group and say it's not going to be held responsible in the way that other groups are? Right. Yeah. Well, Victor, we have some time left. I don't know if we have two topics. Well, at least one, and that one will be your reflection on a Douglas Murray essay for the free press on 2014. five years after 9-11, where's the jurisprudence? And we'll get to that after these final important messages. Many Americans are going to have a big wake-up call. We have never seen net migration as high as it has been in the last few years. This year, there have been more people coming to the UK in small boats than ever before. You did an extreme thing to the country. Britain is facing a migrant crime epidemic. We don't actually know where they're coming from, who they are, how old they are. Why would you let in millions of people who are unvetted if not to change the country from within? There is no other word for it. Demographic replacement. England's a blueprint for America. It's coming. It's just a blueprint. Thousands of daily migrant crossings. A political earthquake threatens to reshape America. We are showing there is a new path for politics in our country. Not all cultures are the same. You cannot ban Sharia. America is a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of immigrants. We are immigrants. The Immigration Crisis. Watch now on the Heritage Foundation's YouTube channel. Hey, folks. We're back with Victor Davis Hanson. In his own words, we are talking on Sunday, September 20th, 2026. This episode is up on Thursday, September 24th. I mentioned before Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus. If you're on X, Victor's handle is at VD Hanson. On Facebook, book BDH's Morning Cup. Do check out our friendly friends at the Victor Davis Hanson Fan Club, which is also on Facebook. So speaking of friends, Douglas Murray's a friend, a great writer. He's written this essay for the free press, The 9-11 Failure That Still Haunts America. And here's one paragraph from it, Victor. Like many people, I used to spend considerable amounts of time following the progress of the dozens of Al-Qaeda detainees originally held in an American military prison in Guantanamo Bay. The first of them was brought into what was then called Camp X-Ray in 2002. The first images released of the prisoners shackled and in orange jumpsuits caused a significant backlash in public opinion as audiences recoiled at their sometimes harsh treatment. But the U.S. could have quickly overcome any unease about the situation. these detentions if the terrorists had swiftly faced the full force of American justice. The families of their victims were promised that they would live to see that resolution. But after 25 years and five presidential administrations in Washington, most of the accused are still unbelievably in the pre-trial phase. I don't see what there is to argue with that disappointment. Disappointment is a weak word, but what are your thoughts, Victor? Well, we know in the left-wing mind, it's unhinged. So the same mental tendencies that make you want to identify with Lindsay, um, the, um, the same, yeah, the same, the same sympathies you have for Lindsay Clancy, and when you say things like, she's already suffered enough because she's not going to have the comfort of her children anymore. Think of that statement. That same tendency applies to the American legal system. So no, no matter how horrific, and we're talking about Luigi Mangione, people, Tyler Robinson, who blew the neck off of Charlie Kirk, the people who tried to kill Donald Trump, that same attitude of the left is deeply ingrained. And so when they see people who murdered 3000 people, their little brains go victim, check, non-white, check, Middle East Muslims, check. They are victims, check. I will get notoriety. I will get virtue signaling. I will square my moral circle and feel good about myself. I'm going to use the full weight of the American legal system to subvert it and delay justice and wait, wait until a whole generation comes of age. It don't, didn't, wasn't even alive when 9-11, they have no memory of it. They don't know the feelings, the passions, the trauma, and I'm going to be famous and get him off. And I'm going to feel so good about myself that I'm morally superior. And that's what you have. They don't ever think about what they, and remember Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wanted to do, but a lot of airlines, was it 11 in the Philip, blow them up. He wanted to kill a lot more people and they had a big Pacific, right? They had a big argument over the Capitol or the White House, and they were very angry. They didn't have five planes. And they finally, I think bin Laden said the Capitol dome would do more damage than the White House. And that, that had not been stopped over Pennsylvania. They could have killed a lot more people than 3000. And, um, so I, I don't, that, that, that tendency to feel so good about yourself when you, when you defend, like it's, uh, uh, when Mondami handed that honorific pin through Jessica, uh, Tish, and she's the police commissioner, the NYPD overseer, and she's Jewish. And he said, would you hand this? Okay. Little servant, ha ha ha little NYPD representative, ha ha, which I said was basically a criminal organization years ago and should be defunded. And which I said, I'm going to arrest the president, the prime minister, president of Israel when he comes, ha ha. Would you hand that over to my chief legal counsel who, by the way, defended the brother-in-law of one of the nine 11 killers. And that's what Douglas Murray is talking about. How did we get to this place after nine 11? I thought we were going to, to remember it forever. And I don't understand that. There are been some shocking in a related development. I don't know if you saw these clips that the, some filmmakers have left out, have started to publish some of the nine 11 incidents, excuse me, the October 7th, and they are horrific, um, with people shot, kicked, beheaded, et cetera. And we forget all of that October 7th, that you take away October 7th, 12,000 people, brutally murdered, raped, decapitated, mutilated, children destroyed, tortured 240 something hostages taken 40 Americans. Most of them killed. You take that away and there wouldn't be Gaza would be fine today. There wasn't any Jews in Gaza. There will never be any Jews in Gaza. They didn't want to go in there. They didn't have anything to do with Gaza. They put, they supplied the fuel and the power and the water and the sewage for Gaza, but they didn't want it. They begged the Egyptians to take it. They begged the Jordanians to take, nobody wanted it. And we wouldn't have had any of this problem. Had they not decided to go kill Jews and they would have killed a lot more if it had not been from about two or 300, uh, very heroic people within the kibbutz and within the idea. That came there and fought them off. Right. And they don't get that well, you know, and by the way, when they say genocide, genocide, genocide, they don't really talk about October 8th, three weeks before the Israelis went in and they did not want to go in there three weeks before that they were talking about, uh, how wonderful October 7th was. And when Israel, and I asked somebody at Stanford once when I was there, I said, you know, I don't want to go in there. When I was walking by this, I said, what would you have done if somebody had done this and gone in and killed 12,000 and butchered in a time of peace? And I said, would you ask for the perpetrators? Yes. I said, Israel did. Would you ask for extraditions? Yes. Turn over the perpetrators. Would you, uh, ask for trials of these people? Yes. Would you go to the UN? Yes. Well, they did all of that. And the Gazans had were so celebratory in their blood loss. They were so happy. And by the way, when they talk about the poor collateral damage, nobody wants civilians, but they never break down how many people were in Hamas or were supporters or were aiding and abetting Hamas or cheering them on or were used as human shields. And they never asked two questions. What would you do if that happened to your community? And I said, well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And you had to go, uh, deal with the perpetrators who refused to give back hostages and refused to turn over the culpable people. Well, I know what we would do. I remember World War II. I can remember tell you what we did over Japan and what we did over Germany. I can tell you what we did in Fallujah. I flew right over Fallujah in a helicopter. I went to Taji. I went to a lot of those cities in Iraq, in Iraq twice. And we went into those cities. And I don't think that the U.S. Marines, heroic as they are and as humane as they are, ever even thought in their wildest imagination they were going to be killed. They were going to get the phones of all of the al-Qaeda and Sons of Saddam terrorists in those buildings who had a booby trap waiting for them and text them a message and said, we're coming. Would you please get out in 10 minutes? And that's what the IDF did on so many occasions. So it really gets numbing that the majority of the country, and you mentioned that poll, Jack, where Israel has almost no supporters. It's got like 35% of the population. Well, Victor, these videos you mentioned are so powerful and disgusting, but to the made-up mind of the ideologue, I just don't know that there's anything you can show them, any hard evidence. No hard evidence that they will say is a lie. And you and I were talking yesterday about a conspiracy theory related to Charlie Kirk's murder. Here he is. He's murdered right in front of you. You see it. You know, he's shot, and people have these. I investigated. I investigated. I went online when a person told me this, explained this conspiracy theory, and I didn't know there's a lot of podcasts. I don't know if Tucker's one of them, but they do believe that his security detail were Mossad agents, and Tyler Robinson either had nothing to do with it, even though we have him on tape, even though he admitted to his trans lover that he had killed Charlie Kirk, and even though his parents had admitted it, and even though we know the gun he used came from his grandfather's arsenal. We know all of that. But they still believe that Mossad packed, I guess the one I saw the most, they packed a microphone with explosives, and then they had someone shoot it, and the fragment's carotid artery of Charlie's was hit by shrapnel, and then this other guy was a dupe. They either hired or they just shot in the air or something. That is. To take. The. Mental effort to craft that entire conspiracy is such that you have to be filled with a lot of hate of Jews, Israel, to come up with such an elaborate conspiracy when all of the facts say otherwise, and they're out there in the public domain. As Pontius Pilate once said, what is truth? And a lot of people don't care what the truth is because it disrupts the narrative. Yeah, quid veritas est. Yeah. Well, Victor, let's do, if you can just compress this in maybe just a few minutes, one final topic. The queen of 1619, Nicole Hannah-Jones, she's in the news today. Actually, she wrote an article for the New York Times. The New York Post writes about this headline. New York Times writer Nicole Hannah-Jones sent daughter to troubled schools as a sacrifice, and it backfires. The writer behind the 1619 Project deliberately sent her daughter to. Or Big Apple Schools as a sacrifice to try to boost the education system, and no one is angrier than the kid. I'll cut through this. By her own account, Hannah-Jones' daughter, Nadia, knows she was cheated by her parents. Quote, so you had the money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to. The girl yelled in one fight, according to the essay. And that essay is written by Nicole Hannah-Jones. Because other kids are disadvantaged. You didn't want to put me in a great school. Hannah-Jones wrote of her decision. Quote, we thought by sending Nadia to a mostly low-income and black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. End quote. By the way, Victor, I just said that. That's an abject. That is such a preposterous, abject lie. Even if Hannah-Jones walked on water and her daughter did, too, the idea that one child is going to improve a district. Hannah-Jones is so famous and powerful that she steps into a PTA meeting, and everybody bows down and says, we're going to have uniforms, we're going to have math required. That is blank, blank. I can tell you what happened. She knew, and she's 16 or 17 now, and I will bet you that she is going to go to an Ivy League school. No doubt about it. No matter what, especially ones that don't require SAT or anything. Hannah-Jones. Hannah-Jones was worried that her daughter would be inauthentic because people had said that about her, that she wasn't really. And remember, she got a very prestigious offer from North Carolina, but she deliberately chose to go to Howard. And what she's basically saying is, I want my daughter to have street cred and be able to say that she grew up in the inner city so that when she has her career as a black activist, people do not suggest from the inside. And what she's saying is, I want my daughter to have street cred and be able to say that she grew up in the inner city so that when she has her career as a black activist, people do not suggest from the inside. She's inauthentic. She will name drop the schools where she went, but it won't matter because I will call up my friends at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and she will be admitted as DEI. That's what she's saying. I kind of laughed about it because I am in a school district right from where I speak that is a rural school district, and it has a very good school. It did have an excellent school. All my neighbors when I was five years old that were further away from that school than our family went to that school because the district, we were well within the district. And when it came time to go, my mother deliberately chose to put all three of us in what I would call an inner city school in the so-called west side of my community that was 99.9% Hispanic. There were black students, and there were a few poor whites. I'd say 5% of the population of that school as it is today, if it's that much, is non-Hispanic. And I could have gone to a school that had an active social life. I would have been with other farmers, not all just white, but all farmers, Armenian farmers, Japanese farmers, Sikh farmer, but I never had that experience. I had an experience. I had an experience only with Hispanics, and I grew up with them. And I learned that if somebody trips you in the hallway and says, I'm going to get you after school's over, you better be careful. Or if I had said, if somebody when I was in third grade jumped me and put me in a headlock and I almost passed out and the teacher saved me by taking a stick and hitting the guy. over the head. She would be fired today. And she said, you got to go to the nurse. You're bright blue. And I can remember my brother walking down the corridor in, I think it was sixth grade, and somebody tackled him and threw him against. I could go on and on. But the idea was you had to be with, I don't think my parents thought that they were virtue signaling. They just said, we want you to see what the other world is like two miles away and not being an insular. And I can remember being sort of, you know, I don't think they were, I had good teachers in those schools. Don't get me wrong. Those minority schools actually had very good teachers. So I don't think I was robbed at all, but it was a little bit difficult and I would have had a much easier time at the rural school. And by the way, when my children from the same house came of age, they all went to that rural school and they all had a great time. And so I don't know why my mother did it, but I can tell you one thing. She didn't argue that my presence at that school was going to improve it. She had no such arrogance. Victor needed some street cred in order to be able to get into California College. I just remember on father and son night, when we went, we were about the only white people there, so-called white. And I never thought of it. The weird thing is I never, the whole time I was there, I don't think I ever heard the word white. I heard cracker, oaky. I was called cracker, oaky, and gringo a lot. Gringo, especially. Especially oaky because we were ground zero of the diaspora, but never white. And I never heard a derogatory uh, Hispanic epithet like wetback or worse because everybody was Hispanic. I did hear, we had about 10 African-American students and I did hear some of the worst N-words you've ever seen. And that came not from the minuscule white farmer population. There was about three or four other children of farmers that were in the district, not like us that were not in it. Um, but that came from the Hispanic group, not from the white kids. Yeah. So, I had mixed feelings, but one thing I do know, and I'm just relating that incident, her preposterous explanation of why she did it, uh, to improve the school district is, no one's going to believe that. She did it because she knew, that her daughter would be tutored. Her daughter would probably have special consideration. Her daughter would go to the Ivy League, and she will go to the Ivy League if she wants to. And this will be something of a cultural experience for her. Maybe my mom thought the same thing of being culturally wise. I will say one thing, that the people I met at Eric White School have been lifelong friends. I see them all the time. Yeah, well, that's mean streets of Selma, Victor. I just went to Quest and had blood taken not long ago, and a guy looked at me really carefully, and he said, Victor Hanson, you remember we won the softball championship in room four? And I said, I sure do, Asario. I really do. Glory days. All right, Victor, we've come to the end, almost the end. I have two comments from YouTube. One's a little long, and this is from Wayne Cudney Solchamp, who writes, I do enjoy Victor Davis Hanson's calm, cool, concise, fact-based insights. As a 56-year-old, third, fifth-generation Canadian, I guess that's both sides of his family, I always said, I am not so Canadian. I am more North American, eh? I can attest that Canada has been hijacked by the NWO. We are not a free nation. We are slaves of the state, and it's, bad word, Canada. That's what he's calling it. Can't believe we became a commie NWO woke, broke, hulk. Can't stand this nasty, disgusting, blank, dreaming every minute of every day to relocate to the best country on the planet, the amazing USA. This colony is fried, as in destroyed beyond repair, not just the government, but deeper in the woven fabric of this mosaic dump. Are too many citizens that love to be commie clowns? God bless North America. We need a leader who had some skill, power, a working brain that is not corrupt, but all we have is crooks, compliant bad actors, or weak wankers in every corner. Well, I can say that I've met probably in my 73 years, four or 500 Canadians, and I've never disliked one of them, but I do. Yeah, me neither. They're wonderful people. I feel that they're under occupation, though, by a globalist left-wing government. If Stephen Harper was prime minister, I think there would be a different story. One thing I think Trump should do, though, he should have, instead of talking about 51 states, he should say this. Anyone who's living in Alberta, Saskatchewan, or Mantoba has one year, and we will give them immediate residency with a pathway to citizenship in the United States, only from those three places. And I think we would have a million people come. Sure. If for no other reason, they wouldn't be on the euthanasia list when they couldn't get a kidney transplant or something, or couldn't get a chemotherapy. All right. Let me read one last comment, also on Canada, from Rosemary Whiteley, who writes, Thank you, Victor. Thank you, Jack. I especially appreciate your talk about current Canada. My family came from Canada, my father being one of 17 good Catholics. I have gazillions of cousins up there. Very few complain. I think they'll wake up when the tanks start running over the few protesters. Well, there are many more Canadian comments like that, but for everyone who sends a comment, whichever top. Thank you very much. I had a good exchange, and just finishing, then I'll let you finish, between our mutual friend, Conrad Black. And he wrote a nice note to me. He's been writing some very astute letters, as he always does, about Canada. And he's taken a lot of flack from Canadians, but they were very on. He and I disagree just on a couple of issues, but mostly about the oil issue. But that's minor. And he. He's been very eloquent, like he always is, and outspoken. He's one of the most beautiful writers, English language, and. Speaker. He wrote his. Speakers, too. Speaker, too. Yeah. Just. I'm very fond of him. Well, Victor, one final thing. I want to thank folks who subscribe to Civil Thoughts. That's one of the things I do for the Center for Civil Society. It's a newsletter. It comes out every Friday, has 14 recommended readings, a link, a selection from the article, not charging. Totally free, not selling your name. I think you'll like it. I know you'll like it. So go to civilthoughts.com and sign up. Simple as that. And go to Victor's website, thebladeofperseusvictorhansen.com is the address. Victor, thanks for making. Accommodating your schedule for me. Thanks for all the wisdom you shared. And we will be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hanson 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.