Transcript of Victor Davis Hanson: Trump Takes a Victory Lap As Europe Begrudgingly Smiles After Gaza Peace Deal

It's not sure to what degree Hamas is completely destroyed. Why would you ever even suggest that there would be a two-state solution in Gaza when they've killed 1,200 Jews in a time of peace? Number two, they are monitoring very carefully the so-called Palestinian Authority, and it's not clear if they're going to extend their rule into Gaza. They don't know whether they're going to renounce terrorism. They have river to the sea as mantra as well. So why in the world would you have a two-state solution if it was river to the sea?

Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen show. We are returning, and we have actually a new name to our show, the Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. So that's the name of the show now, and we are partnered with the Daily Signal. Victor is still the Martin and Nilly Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshall Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhanson. Com, the name of the website, The Blade of Perseus. We do have a new partnership, so I hope, Victor, you're excited about the new partnership. I sure How do you- I am.

I just feel bad that I got bombarded with text messages and emails that we had abandoned our audience because they couldn't find where we were. But I had a lot of tests to do, and then we were transitioning from one platform to another, and it went a little bit more rocky than we anticipated. So that was part of the problem, part of the problem. And Now we're back. Yes, I'm still at Hoover. I mentioned that because I was doing my angry reader column today, and I'm going to have one from a professor, Pennington, at the Catholic University. Yeah, and he said that I was a third-rate scholar, fifth-rate commentator, and never been affiliated with a prestigious university. Then he said, That's the only thing that made him happy. Well, I think Stanford University is not necessarily… It's not in the League of Fresno State, but it tries. And Pepperdine, I teach. I'm going there next week. It's a good school. And so it was the US naval Academy. So I was a visiting professor at Stanford. I have my criticisms of it. But what got me angry was he said, I'm glad that you're at the end of your road.

I hope he didn't mean that. I don't know why The guy was retired, but I'm not at the end of my road yet.

Not yet. No, you're not. Not yet. And in fact, you're speaking of- I'm just bringing that because you said you were, I'm still at the Martin.

Yes, I'm still there. Martin Anderson was a wonderful guy. He was one of my favorite people, and so was his wife, and so was his daughter, Christie.

Yeah. Well, you mentioned that people said things about you being off, but I've been reading comments, and there are a boatload of comments Just cheering that you're back. Hooray.

Yeah, I only miss two- Complimenting you as a national treasure.

So you should be good.

Yes, I did. I've never missed an ultra column for our ultra subscribers, so I I did those two a week, plus the videos. We did our Daily Signal, five a week. I didn't miss any of those, and I did my two columns. So in four years, I've never missed a column. So I was busy, but I had to go a lot. It seems like I was going all over Palo Alto to pomologist, ENT, just all these different things and trying to find... They were trying to find out what was the problem, but it was... I just remember my grandfather. He just stayed home the whole time when he said, Go to bed early, get up early, eat sparsely, work hard, take an afternoon, none of which I've ever followed. But he lived to be 86 and died in sleep. And my Swedish grandfather, who had been gassed at the Moussa Argonne, never went to a doctor. And then finally, we would go down every weekend to see his menagerie of animals. He was He was not self-sufficient. He raised all of his own food on 40 acres and broke horses. And we looked at once and he had this big, like a marble in his mouth.

And so my dad said, What is that? He goes, Yeah, I got the cancer. My dad said, I bet you do. We're taking you right now and we're going to get that. Oh, no, I'm 79 years old. I got gassed. It was the gas. It was all the scar. It was. That turned out to be true. So then each time we go down, it would get bigger, and he wouldn't move. He was big and strong. And he said, I'm not leaving this farm. So then my father said, It's going to stink. It's going to fester and stink, and no one will want Yeah? Stink? Well, let's go. So we took him up and they cut it out. And then they called my dad and said, Oh, my gosh, it's in his lungs. My dad said, I don't think so. He's never caused. So we drove up there and they showed us the X-ray and his lungs were only one-third the size and they had been gassed. And he was in a Belgium hospital till 1920 from phosphine and mustard gas. But they didn't So my dad said, No, no, that's old. That's not new. He never had any lungs.

They were destroyed when he was 27 years old in the 91st Infantry Division. So it was funny, but he never went to a doctor.

It's amazing. He made it to almost 80. Was he 80 by the time?

Almost. And he was working in a shop, and it was really dim, this little run-down barn. It was just really primitive with a dirt floor. And he called up my father, and he said, I cut my finger off. Can you come help me find it? Can they put it back on? So we drove down there and he was talking. He had a little thing around. He goes, Where's my finger? My dad said, I think it's too late, dad. So we found it. And then he took up and he started laughing. He goes, Look, I don't have a finger.

You should have put it in ice and taken it up to the doctor with you.

I think in those days, that was in the mid '60s. I don't think they knew how to do that, but it was pretty mangled. It wasn't cut clean. It was in a grinder. It was ground off. It looked like hamburger.

Well, Victor, we have to take a break and then come back, and we're going to start in on the news of the week. What an amazing Week, Donald Trump and his peace deal in Gaza. So stay with us, and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. So, Victor, Trump's peace deal has gone through. So I guess the big question is, what are the hopes for a long term peace? And also, what are your thoughts? He gave a speech at the Israel's Knesset and really praised his team, Rubio and Whitkoff and Steve Whitkoff and Rubio were the big ones that I remember. Then really gave a speech that you get peace through strength. I think that was the whole tenor of the speech.

But your thoughts? Very quickly. By the way, before I start, why does Macron show up everywhere? Everywhere Trump is, he gets caught in traffic in New York and he calls Trump, Can you get me out of traffic? Then he's always trying to weasel in and sit next to Trump. Yeah, he's like a political mole. I know. He needs to read Shakespeare again, Julius Caesar, and remember that line about his wide walks? And he thus strode like a colossus over us, petty men. And that's who he is. But I feel bad about He just had the Notre Dame Cathedral thing right when Trump was inaugurated. He was like a little magnet. He just went to glum on to him. That peace deal happened for eight or nine reasons, and it didn't happen for eight or nine reasons. Number one, Trump never insulted any of the major players. Biden and Obama did. Biden Biden said that the Saudi royal family was parias, and Obama linked that Netanyahu was a chicken SH. His team deliberately leaked that, and they both tried to remove Sisi in the Prime Minister of Egypt because they liked Mohamed Morsi when Biden was vice President.

Those people didn't like Biden or Obama, and they were not going to participate. And Trump developed relations with all of them. He even said about Sisi, Where's my favorite dictator? So that was number one. Number two, they wouldn't have happened if they had this nuclear sword of Damocles over Israel's head. Trump knew that. He just said, I'm not going to go preemptively take it out, but if they don't stop, I will react to them. And he took it out. And then he let Netanyahu deal with them for 12 days, and they destroyed their air defenses. They destroyed Hezbollah, they destroyed most of Hamas. So the so-called circle of fire, Ring of fire around Israel, the Houthis, the Hezbelah, the Hamas. We were told the Hamas were like the Waffen SS. You don't mess around with them. Israel neutered all of them, and we took out, and that made it much better. Then we didn't say, Don't do this, Netanyahu, don't do this. And Gaza, they had no choice, Hamas. Look at the choice. That was one thing. That was very important to get rid of the nuclear. Then the other thing is these were not John Kerry diplomats, Hillary Clinton diplomats, Jake Sullivan diplomat.

They were three businessmen, Trump, Weiskopf, and Jared Kushner. And they looked at it as a quid pro quo business deal. You guys and the Arab, there were three parts of this puzzle. There were the moderate Arabs, there was the US, and there was the Hamas people that had the hostages. And they basically said, These are the carrots and these are the sticks. You take your pick. And they did not treat this as a sober judicious Camp David, Russian peace plan, UN peace plan. None of that. It was just strictly business. It was very important in retrospect that Israel sent a shot across the bow of gutter, the perennial double dealer. They're the ones that print Al Jazeera. They're the ones that host Hamas. They're the ones that host us. They do it both ways. And Israel, when they found out there was a Hamas hierarchy there, they sent a bomb over there, rocket. And it didn't kill them, but it warned them. So then Then Trump made Netanyahu apologize. And then Gutter said, Basically, what's going to stop him in the future? Trump said, I don't know. Maybe they might be uncontrollable again. So then Gutter said, Well, will you protect us and make us a protector of the United States?

And he said, Maybe. And so Trump said, Yes. And they went for it. But Trump also obviously said to them, If you want our protection from Israel or Iran, then you've got to give up the Hamas people and Turkey the same thing. So that helped. Hamas had nowhere to go because the moderate Arab countries did that. That was very important. Then there was the other issue of American reliability. Donald Trump, when he said he was going to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities, he did it. And he He said the same thing about Soleimani bombing the blank out of ISIS, with the Wagner Group in Syria-Araq area. And he said the same thing about El Bagdaddi, And he did it. When Biden said, What are you going to do if Putin might go into Ukraine? He said, Don't. Remember that? Don't. And Obama, he said, I would think that was in 2013 when they said, President Obama, there's WMD there. And that was when John Kerry invited in the Russians for the first time in 45 years. How smart was that? And then Obama said, Hey, I took a while. They start moving around. That's a red line.

That's a red line. Well, nobody believed that. Then they did that. And then Susan Rice lied and said they stopped it. So they had no credibility. And And Trump did. So people trusted him, and he didn't insult the Arabs the Arabs, and he didn't try to have light between him and Netanyahu and the Israelis. And he allowed the Israelis to diminish the capacity to wage war of all their enemies, which were our enemies. And there were no more nuclear threats from Iran. And he got Egypt back into the picture. He didn't insult Sisi, and they were businessmen. All that stuff was so different.

Can I ask ask you a question right there? How important do you think the Operation Midnight... What was it called? Midnight Thunder or something? Operation Midnight Hammer. How important? Taking out the nuclear.

I just mentioned it. It was absolutely critical because-What's that central? Because whenever Obama and Biden negotiated, they'd always say, We're going to have an independent Palestine, and then the Israeli say, How about the nuclear problem? And then they would do the Sysnyx or whatever the virus take it out with the centrifuges, and the Americans would just say, It's your problem, basically. And they said, We can't make peace with these people when you don't embargo their oil, and the oil is arming Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas. Trump comes in and says, I'm going to cut off all their money, and they're not going to have the wherewithal pretty soon. And if you want to get rid of them, go ahead, fine with me, and we'll try to negotiate with Iran. They can do it the hard way, the safe way. But if they keep going, we're going to take it out. And he did all of that. And then all of a sudden, Iran has no military defenses. It has no air defenses. It has no nuclear plan. They kill a lot of the generals, the physicists. They don't have the money to rearm Hezbollah or Hamas or the Houthis.

So he did everything opposite the way that Obama and Biden did. There's no UN plan. The UN didn't have any role. The Europeans had no role. The Russians are out after the fall of Syria and the Hassad dynasty. The Chinese bet on the wrong horse, the Iranians. So what basically happened is, like a colossus, he strode were petty men. And he said, get the blank out, UN, Russia, butt out, China, butt out, State Department, butt out. And then he got Jared Kushner himself, and he had two great generals. We don't appreciate them. Raising Cain, General Cain, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he was involved. He had a really great Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. And he had another general that doesn't get any credit, but he should get a lot of credit, Eric Carillo. He just retired. He was the head of SENTCOM. And then that critical year of 2024, he was over there and coordinated the American response to Iran and to who helped Israel beef up their defenses and coordinated American anti-missile defenses with the Israelis, and pretty much helped drop the blueprint if we wanted to take out the nuclear So Trump did not have Mark Millie, and he did not have Lloyd Austin, and he did not have Jake Sullivan, and he did not have Anthony Blinken.

He had people completely different, and that made all the difference in the world. So kudos to Marco Rubio, General Cain, General Carrillo, Special Invoy, and Jared Kushner, and Trump himself. And to The Egyptians and the Turks and the Emiratis and the Qataris, and then the Saudis, and Mr. Netanyahu that everybody demonizes. And yet, I don't think any other, no other Israeli leader would have gone into a ram like he did. None, zero. End of story. And that was key. Now, the main question remaining is, Will it last? We're what in six days and everybody says it can't last. And we just saw yesterday Hamas executing a tribal members, rival tribal groups. And they put them right on the street and shot them. And then we see that they didn't turn back all of the dead as promised. And they even tried to pass off a Palestinian person dead corpse as one of the hostages. So they are utterly untrustworthy. So you have three entities in this piece, the US, the Arab regimes, the Gulf Sheiks, Turkey, not Arab, but Turkey, the Muslim regimes, and also Egypt. And Then you have Hamas, Israel, Hamas, the Arabs.

So somebody has to take care of Hamas because those 1,700 terrorists are the nucleus of the next generation of killers, and they're planning to come back. And so either Israel has to take care of them, and they can if we let them, or we have to take care of them. And I don't think that politically that's possible to send US troops into on the ground in Gaza, but we can aid them and help them with weaponry and intelligence. Or the Arabs have to have a peacekeeping force. They will not have a peacekeeping force until Hamas is abolished because they're terrified that Hamas will spread insurrectionary fervor among their own people, and they're afraid of terrorism. And the Europeans will be of no help. Every time somebody sneezes in the Middle East, they get scared because they have 15, 16% of their population are unassimilated Middle Easterners. So they have to disarm Hamas. And Trump says, They better do it. Well, what I think he means is, I'm going to unleash the Israeli and I'm going to give air support or whatever. But they've got to destroy the entire... I mean, what better place to when they clear the rubble of all these destroyed buildings, just dump them and destroy the tunnels and dump them in and get a good foundation.

But they've got to destroy the labyrinth of tunnels. They also have to have a complete... They've got to get the Europeans on board and say that we are having a travel boycott of all Hamas people. They cannot go to Europe. They cannot go to the United States. Trump has to tell the universities that these Hamas killers, they just executed their own people on the streets are like the Waffen SS. They are killers and terrorists. We are not letting any of them come in. To the extent that we have their names, we're going to debank them and sanction the individuals. You universities are not going to have protest on campus where you have Hamas flags, headbands, and so. That would be exactly like some white supremacist with a Nazi swastika. Would they let that happen? No. And so they need to do that. And they have to completely discredit these terrorists. They're not Palestinian liberation. They're stone cold killers. And they have to make it completely socially unacceptable to support Hamas and financially cost to those who try it. And if the Europeans want to get in on the deal, they just have to say, We're going to not recognize any Palestinian state, any of that, until Hamas is destroyed.

And then there has to be an Arab peacekeeping group that runs it, technocrats, and rebuilds it. But they won't rebuild it. They won't lift a finger until there is no more Hamas. And how do you do that? There's one other alternative. You can take these clans, there's six or seven of them, and you can arm them to the teeth, and you can say you're going to be the joint police force working with the Arabs to rebuild your country. But you can't let Hamas do it.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit more more about the Knesset speech and then also the left and Trump's impact on the left in the United States. So stay with us, and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. You can find these podcasts on Spotify, either audio or video. You can find him at Apple Podcasts as well for the audio. And then we have a YouTube channel and Rumbble for the video. So this podcast comes out in all those formats.

You can find all those links on our victorhanson. Com website.

Yes, you can find it on our website at victorhanson. Com. On X, too. Yeah. Our social media person will be posting on his X account and on Facebook and other social media outlets. So find us there. I hope everybody gets resituated to the new Victor Davis Hansen. And so, Victor, I wanted to talk a little bit more about the speech. It was very true to Trump's usual style. But there was one thing that they were bantering about in the newspapers, And that was that he never mentioned a two-state solution, and that was absent from that and from the actual text of the peace deal. And I was wondering that some people think that's a very significant omission. And why do they?

There's two good reasons. One, it's not sure to what degree Hamas is completely destroyed. So why would you ever even suggest that there would be a two-state solution in Gaza when they've killed 1,200 Jews in a time of peace? Number two, they are monitoring very carefully the so-called Palestinian Authority, and it's not clear if they're going to extend their rule into Gaza. They don't know whether they're going to renounce terrorism. They have river to the sea as their mantra as well. So why in the world would you have a two-state solution if it was river to the sea? If it was the Jordanian government right now said, Well, we'll take over Gaza and we'll take over the West Bank as it used to, then there would be a peace tomorrow. But there's no responsible Egypt or Jordan or Gulf government there. And the ones that say they are responsible have a history of killing people. So they're going to watch this. And if the Palestinian Authority was right, they would get rid of Abbas, he's a fossilized dinosaur, and get a new group leaders, and they would emulate the behavior of 2 million Arabs inside Israel that are prospereing, free, have constitutional rights, and are far better off than almost anybody outside the Gulf and the Arab world.

And that would be a model. But the problem we're having is that we don't really assume that the people in Europe and the United States who left the Middle East are more radical than the people in the Middle East, and that's a big problem. So when you have people in the squad, and Mamdani's wife was lamenting the death of that ubiquitous guy who appeared in every propaganda film, and one of the tribal people eliminated him, and she's all upset. So there are more radical Palestinians in the United States, I think, than in Gaza. Of course, it's much easier to be radical when you're in an affluent free United States than it is in Gaza. And they never quite... Rachid Taleb never quite asked the question to herself, gets in the mirror and said, Why did my family come over to the United States? Why did they leave my beloved Palestine? And if they did leave my beloved Palestine, and because it was too violent because of the Jews, well, why didn't we go to Egypt? Or why didn't we go to Jordan, where we at least have this wonderful religion and our own language, but why did we come to this awful United States, this Zionist support?

They never asked that question. We know the answer because she's safer and wealthier and freer here than she would be in any other Arab country. If you don't believe that, listeners, after the first Gulf War, when the Palestinians, about 350,000 of them in Kuwait started cheering on Saddam Hussein when he took over the entire country, when he was expelled, what did the royal family of the Kuwaitis do? He ethnically cleansed and expelled every single Palestinian from Kuwait in the aftermath and sent them out. And so the United States doesn't do things like that. And yet we never get any credit from so many people from the Middle East to come here.

That always seems so strange. It is strange.

It's crazy. Same thing with people in Los Angeles. People are so sick of that. People in Los Angeles waving a Mexican flag and then burning the American flag. I've said that so many times. I'm burning the American flag of the country I don't dare set foot out of, and I'm waving the beloved Mexican flag that please don't send me back to. I mean, who would ever do something so juvenile?

So dense. But I I was thinking it was very strange, too, that the Arab States don't even want to take the Palestinians. That's even stranger.

The word Palestinian was created in the '60s. There was no such word except in the Roman vocabulary. Palestine is a Latinate word, and it referred to the whole Middle East area on both sides of the Jordan River. But under the British mandate, everything to the east of the Jordan River was trans-Jordan, trans-Jordan. And that became Jordan. And that area between the Jordan River and the current border of Jordan, which we call the West Bank, it was Jordanian. And then Black September and all that happened. And finally, the Jordanian King Hussein, the elder, said, I don't want these people in too much trouble. Let them be in the West bank, and they can deal with the West bank of the River Jordan. And we, the West bank of the Jordan River, and they can deal with the Israelis.

Yeah, isn't it funny? They see them as a headache. I think that's more why they don't want them in their own countries than anything else.

Well, I just got, I just think everybody's tired of. I got tired of walking across the campus where I work and having some wealthy, wealthy the foreign student from one of the Gulf States start screaming and yelling, River to the Sea. Do not come over to this country on a student visa and then call for the genocide of an entire people, which is river to the sea, and then break all the rules of the university that says, One night, you can camp out and be here for four months and think that everybody's going to support you, just because a bunch of wealthy kids in right of passage years think it's cool to be left wing for three years before they go into Goldman Sachs or Facebook. It's just, it's really irritating.

I thought it was interesting that Federman called out the squad. I mean, he called out Rachida Taleb in particular. And then also the crickets from the left when they were all talking about a ceasefire, the so-called modern-he has that Cheshire cat smile.

So every time he does that, then some idiot on CNN or MSNBC says, John Federman is very worried about his democratic base. It's down to about 45% approval. Yes. And his approval among Republicans independents, about 60% added up. And so the biggest thing, and he's going to, the biggest problem in his two years from now will be the Republican Party. And they're going to have to get somebody who says, I am preferable to Federman. And then the voters were going to say, well, tell me exactly how Federman voted against a conservative. You know what I'm saying? He did on the shutdown and all that stuff. But he's pretty smart. Widely.

Can I talk about more left people, especially the former presidents? Oh, my gosh. A little bit different. Obama seemed to commend the peace agreement deal, but not Trump himself. And Biden actually commended Trump a little bit.

A little bit is your good qualifier. Biden basically said because they use the word 20-point plan. Biden's idea is that I have this plan that we've hooked up, and it's common sense from phase one to 2-3, and there's some points. And because Trump did it, he used some of them. It's my plan. But Joe, you would have never got to the plan in the first place because As I said earlier, you would have never dealt with Iran or Hezbollah, or Hamas or the Russians or the Chinese or anybody. All you did was you called the Saudi royal family parias, and then you crawled on all fours over there before the 2022 midterms, and like a little puppy begging for a bone, you said, Would you please pump oil and lower the price of gas? Because I'm emptying the strategic petroleum reserve. And they said, Why would we lower the price of oil? You called us parias. We're going to increase them. So that would have never happened. Obama, he's so strange. It's like he's an incredible shrinking ex-president. He was in this chair with his leg crossed in his arms, and they asked him simple questions, and it was like, Yeah, there's that.

And he couldn't answer. He had a Biden fog. You know what I mean? He lost ability to communicate. And then when he did, he was so petty about Trump and this and that. And then he got on to Hispanic men. I thought, Oh, no, don't go there. It's not going to be one of your false Marxist consciousness, is it? You already did that, Barack, during the campaign, you told all of these hard-working African-American young males, you saw them and you said, I don't want you voting again. I'm not going to get fooled by that. That doesn't work when you tell a constituency, you're basically stupid, and you will vote against your interests. But Barack Obama, in his infinite wisdom, will set you straight. So then he says, Well, a lot of Hispanic men, inflation. So you're a Hispanic man, if that's the term you use, Barack, and you vote for Donald Trump because you want the ER in your local community not overrun with people from Venezuela, that you want your mom to be able to get dialysis without somebody from Guatemala cutting in front of the line because your son does not want to be insulted by an M13 or Trent gang member because you're worried about inflation and gasoline and insurance prices.

Because you're worried about all this, but you're not worried about trans and why men with genitalia should be able to compete in girls' sports, or you're not in favor of 10,000 people crossing the border without any audit per day, or you're not worried about the flight from Afghanistan, or you're not worried about the crime in all the major cities and homelessness. Because you're not worried about... You're supposed to be unenlightened. And then Obama says to him, You should be worried not about inflation or gas prices or insurance prices or the economy. You should be worried. But basically, DEI is threatened, and very wealthy African-Americans like me or Claudine Gay or Eric Holder will not have special preference. And that's what you need to be worried about. And they'll say, You know what? I think I'll pass. And so that's why 55% of Hispanic males voted for Trump, because they're sick and tired of washed up politicians on the left telling them they can't think for themselves and that they're a permanent dependent constituency of the Democratic Party.

Yeah, and Obama is a perfect example.

You know what the next thing is going to happen? Because it's not working. The next time he comes out, he's going to say, You know what? We open the border and We let you all in illegally, which was not true because most Hispanics came legally, but we let in everybody illegally. You owe us. He's almost at that point. I think if he keeps talking, he's going to lose 50% of the black male vote in the next election. I think it was just so sad because he was in this little chair curled up like he's five five or something with his legs crossed and his voice week. And then juxtaposed, there were all these stories about the Obama Monolith presidential library, and they're going to have tours now because they're worried that press is all bad. And you look at this once beautiful park, and it looks like a out Hiroshima that they destroyed for him. And then you look at this window. You know what it looked like? It looked like Sauramun's Orthnack in the two towers. We remember when Sauron was up there and the ants couldn't destroy it because it had no windows and it was solid black marble.

Well, that's what he's built. He's built an Orphanack for himself. And then some of you are going to say, Victor, if you're going to mention the Lord of the Rings, get the right metaphor. It's not the Orphanack, it's the dark tower of Sauron, which was much more impenetrable and ugly and had a much more sinister character at the top of it. But those little horns with a red eye in them. That was the other tower of the two towers.

Yeah. And Donald Trump seems to continue to send them into disarray like he has done on the world stage with his other enemies. And Kamala is being eaten by the radical left now as she continues her book tour. They just recently were yelling at her that her legacy was genocide. And then she yelled back at him, I'm not the President right now, and started to whine about not letting her talk. But I was wondering if you saw any of that.

The subtext of that is, I'm left wing. I was the first Asian candidate for Asian vice president, presidential. I'm half black. You can't talk to me like that. And They're saying, We're ingrates. We don't care. We can say whatever we want. So Trump has no filter. So when he was on the plane talking and when he was at the Middle East Celebratory Summit, so to speak, he just says things, and then everybody's confused or gets angry. But then you start to think about it. Like, George Stephanopoulos cut off JD Vans because JD Vans reminded him that most of the things he had just said were And so an ABC reporter asked Trump a question. He says, I'm not going to talk to you because you cut off our vice president of the United States. Your network did. And by the way, I got $16 million from you, and that's worth your lies. So then everybody says, Well, he's petty, he's childish, he's calling names. Maybe, but the point you're left with is he's absolutely right. Same thing about Time magazine, where they took that picture ground up of his jowels on the cover, and they showed that his hair combed over.

It was deliberately made to make him look unattractive. So then everybody said, Oh, look at Donald Trump. He stoops over and just gets mad about a picture. And what is the result of it? He shows everybody how petty these sophisticated time, New York, Washington Corridor, left wing journalism, da da da da da. And so what he's basically saying is you people think you have a higher bar than I do because you're not crude like I am. But the fact is, I'm ahead of you because I'm not hypocritical. You are. And I'm going to point out that for all your degrees and all your smugness, that you are raunchy and you are childish. And if I have to be raunchy and childish to point that out, I will. But I'm going to strip off this veneer that fool's people because I know you, you're a one-eye Jack, and I flipped you over and seen the other side. That's this message.

They're a whole herd of ankle biters, and he really makes it obvious.

Again, Shakespeare, he strove like a colossus for us. Petty man.

Did you see onto a subject, just to bring it out, Blinken said that Trump had only built on what Biden had already set up. That Blinken, Shrinken Blinken.

The first The first time we ever encountered you, the first time we ever encountered you in the news, you were completely obscure as Biden's National Security Advisor when he was Vice President. We never heard of you. We heard of you one time, and that was during the 2020 campaign when your name came up as the guy who called Mike Morrell, the ex-interm CIA Director, and said, Can you round up 51 liars so they can say right before the debate in three or four days that Hunter Laptop was cooked up in Moscow because it's really lured and it's got all the stuff about the big guy and Mr. 10%, and it's accurate. So we want to have a disinformation campaign, and that's what he did, and it was successful, and he was rewarded to be Secretary of State. The second time we ever heard of the guy, he and Jake Sullivan flew to Anchorage, Alaska, to meet the Chinese diplomite dramatic team, their corresponding counterparts in red China. And they basically said, You're a piece of blank, blank, blank. And then they were like, Oh, interesting. I hadn't heard of that before. That's not polite. You don't really mean that.

And they just humiliated them and packed them on their way and said, Get on our soil. On our soil, on our soil, I've never seen anything like that. And then he's saying that he had a plan. You had four years, Blinken, and you know what you caused? You caused the biggest military humiliation in American history in Afghanistan, and $50 billion of weapons are still floating around the terrorist world because of your team. And then you said, Can I top that off? Well, maybe we'll let Vladimir hack things and tell him if you're going to hack things, at least don't hack our hospital. And then you said, your team, your boss, well, I'll react depending on whether it's a minor invasion or not in Ukraine. And then you withheld offensive weapons. And so you basically sent Putin a message that we weren't going to do anything, and he went in. And then you said, That's two great achievements. I'll try a third. So I'll put distance between us and Israel and brag that my Middle East portfolio, I'm quoting Jake Sullivan, is the most quiet there is. And then October seventh came. So that was a trifecta.

So why would anybody listen to him?

I don't know, but I think Shrinken Blinken has just shrunk a little bit more.

Shrinken Obama, too. I don't know how you rhyme that one.

Shrinken the Left as well. So one more on that. Well, actually, you went on, and I wanted to ask a question, just last thing on Trump's response to the question about Hamas not disarming, and he said, Well, we'll have to use violence if it's necessary. What do you think the odds are that the US will end up having to do something violent in cause it.

Somebody will.

I think it's going to be Israel.

But the United States will have a role to play by saying to that somebody, You can, and here's some weapons to do it. But it's going to be very hard to put... We have 200 troops there already. But the thing is, Trump's not naive. You can't deal with Hamas because they lie and cheat and kill. They can't even bring back the bodies. They don't want to return the bodies because they either desecrated them or tortured the people, or they didn't take care of the body, and they're not there, or they're in such a state that it would bring shame to the extent they have any global attention to the monsters that they are. When they brought the hostages back and when they went in earlier, there were a lot of civilians that looted and tagged along, and there were a lot of civilians that had Hamas, the killers, not protected their hostages for their value, they would killed them. And there were a lot of people that cheered when they just executed people on the street. So all these people at Columbia and Stanford and Yale that support all that, it's really hard to take because that's what they're supporting.

Well, let's hope that I have a feeling that the Israelis will take care of the Hamas. And you were talking, just one more quick thing before we get a break, about the bodies that came back. Why Why do you think it is that they have only sent four bodies back? One of them is actually a Palestinian body. Do you think that they have destroyed the other bodies?

Some of them they destroyed. Some of them tortured them to such an extent. They don't want a forensic analysis of what they did, and some of them are dismembered. Some of them they outsourced to different families that were in charge, and the families just killed them and did something with them. So The only irony about this whole tragedy for the Israelis is that we've had these hostages say that when they heard Trump was elected, they were all almost dying of starvation. Then suddenly, they tried to fatten them up and give them some sunlight because they wanted to suggest that... They thought there were going to be a lot of useful idiots in the West that would react, and there was. There was Christian Amunpour, and she said they treated the hostages, I'm paraphrasing loosely, they treated the hostages better or they were in better condition than the people in Gaza. She tried to qualify that and emphasize later, she said, for their own interest. Maybe so, but they were not in better shape. The one thing that's strange is that people have remarked on it. When you have pictures now of all the Gaussons coming out for a genocide and mass starvation, it's like you thought that from what the left said here in the United States, it was like Hitler's hunger plan for Ukraine in 1941.

It wasn't. They looked very well-fed. In fact, some of them looked overweight. If they're going to do it, they need to get the props right. They need to get it. And that's why Greta Thunberg took a picture of a starving hostage and then said it was a Gazan civilian.

Are you talking about the average Gazan or the Gazan prisoners that came out from Israel, the ones that were in Israel?

They came out looking pretty healthy, right? Yeah, she should have asked herself. I would like to ask everybody at Columbia just a simple question. If you have to be a hostage and they don't know anything about you, would you rather be a hostage of the Gazans or the Israelis? If you don't know anything about the political situation, would you rather If you had to be a horrible blasphemer, would you say, God is dead in Israel or in Gaza? If all you students, would you rather wear a dress above your knee in Israel or Gaza? All you gay people, would you rather hold your partner's hand in Israel or Gaza? It's not hard to figure out.

Yeah, it's not hard to figure out. So Victor Rubio actually made the statement that I thought was the most interesting, that the EU states that the ones that were going to recognize a Palestinian state actually made the peace deal a lot more difficult to complete.

They did. They added months to it because people in Hamas were convinced that this was a tidal wave that every European country would demand a Palestinian state, and then the United States would be forced to consider that momentum. And of course, Donald Trump didn't care. And the only reason that the Europeans did it, the British or the French or the German, the only one reason is that they have, depending, say, in Wales, the Wales and British part of the United Kingdom is about 17% Muslim. I think within three or four years, France will be 16% Muslim, and Germany is 16% Muslim. They thought, Well, we can appease our own unassimilated, unacculturated, unintegrated populations, and then they won't kill Jews and make us look bad on the world's stage. They won't attack another synagogue. Whereas they should say, if you are from the Middle East and you are not a British subject, French citizen, German citizen, and you break our laws, we're going to deport you. But of course, who are we to say that? We've only started it with Donald Trump, whom, by the way, hasn't deported as many people as Obama has yet. He's on a trajectory to exceed that.

But I never saw one ICE demonstration when ICE picked up somebody. I saw ICE people during the Obama administration, both on the internet and on the news, and then Fresno County. And there were people who got deported for various reasons, but nobody... Remember they said that Trump in the first term had created these animal cages for kids and stuff, and they were created by Obama. Four hundred thousand missing children or children that were unaccompanied that they're tracking down under the Biden administration.

Just back to the Europeans in this peace deal. A lot of them showed up in Egypt for the signing of the peace deal. Did you see what he did to Keir Starmer. He said, Oh, yeah. And then there's Kier Starmer, and he brought him up to the podium, and he turned his back on him, right? Immediately. And Starmer is just standing there like, What am I here for?

He's doing that because Starmer has, what, 8% popularity? It's the lowest of any European leader, yes. He's the worst Prime Minister in modern British history. And there's the reform party. And I think the Labor Party and the Conservatory Party together have less support than the reform party. He doesn't have to hold an election, I don't know, in three or four years. But if he did, he knows that people hate his guts and he'd be out. He's made a fool of Britain. Right now, under Margaret Thatcher, it was booming. But all Britain has to do, all France has to do, all Germany has to do, is for all those trillions of dollars they did to warp their economies, they didn't reduce world global climate change at all. All they did was destroy their economies. They just need to get back to fossil fuel. They can have wind and solar, but they need to pump oil gas. They have some. And to build nuclear plants, see if there's any more hydroelectric power, close their borders, deport people who break their laws, insist on the melting pot, and get rid of this utopian, green, radical, socialistic creed that results in a 1.

4 fertility rate because they are shrinking. And then arm themselves so that people don't think they're a joke. They have 500 million people in EU countries and affiliated EU countries, and they have a GP of all of them put together. If you do the NATO countries that are not in the EU and add them to the whole European landmass, they have a larger GDP than we do. So they could defend themselves. They're the birthplace of Western military technology. They're brilliant people. It's just sad. I mean, that you could see what they could do. Well, they did. I mean, that's why the British and the French and the Spanish ran the world.

Yeah. Since you mentioned it, let's go and we're into Europe, I wanted to ask you about, they have an immigration. The EU broadly has developed an immigration policy, which they signed in 2023. And you could either pay or accept immigrants, refugees that are seeking asylum. And the column today, and I can't remember what publication, but they were saying that most of the countries are choosing to pay because they don't want to bring in any more of these asylum seekers. So they're going to have a terrible problem with them.

I predict. The Europeans are very volatile. We forget about that. They have no history of a multiracial society like we do, and they're not capitalist countries anymore, so they don't have fluidity of class. So when you bring in people who are antithetical in terms of values, religion from a different region, and they're not European-looking, they have all these things that are challenges that need to be assimilated, and they can't or won't do it. And the people coming in have no desire to do it. And it's a socialist country that, as which is their guilt by giving entitlements that they cannot afford, and they don't have a defense budget because they can't afford it. And they've developed this strange ethos that young men and young women should not marry, buy homes, or they can't buy a home and have children. But once they change, they will go full Japanese. Japanese don't allow immigrants to come in and ever be Japanese. For most cases, can't be a Japanese sentence. I think everybody... They sold us this idea that the old wisdom of the United States is diversity historically doesn't work, and we have to work at it because we are, say, in 1960, we were 88% white, 2 or 3% Hispanic, 1% Asian, and probably 10% black.

And then Ted Kennedy came up with the idea of, so open the borders, et cetera. So now it's about 68% white, I don't know, 10% Asian, 10% Hispanic, 12% black. I don't know if that adds up. And that is a challenge for everybody on the diversest side. Look at the Balkans, look at Rwanda, it doesn't work, usually in history. Look at India, it doesn't work. Brazil, it works here, and it It works here only to the extent that people, all people, white, brown, black, Asian, say that their color or their race is incidental to being an American. Being an American is essential. But Europe has never really done that. And so when they bring in people of different religions and colors, they patronize them. And then these people think they're going to be treated separately, i. E. Better, they're not going to be subject to the full extent of the law, or they're to get more in because he's wealthy but drone like Europeans. H. G. Wells, Eloy. They feel guilty, and they're going to give them stuff. Well, when they reach a breaking point, they will act, and it won't be like what we act like.

They will deport people, and it won't be pretty. But it was an insane policy. So what I would say to people is I like diversity. I like diversity in food. I I like diversity in music. I like diversity in people. But I don't like diversity in the Constitution. I do not want to live under the Mexican Constitution. I do not want to live under the guatemalan ethos about women. I do not want to live under South Africa's idea of race now, either Apartheid then or what they have now. I don't want to live on any of these political systems or these value systems. If immigrants want to come here, I want them to enrich us with their fashion, their food, their music, their literature, their art, and then become American and share the same ethos. So when I walk outside my street, I don't see somebody, as I saw three weeks ago, open the car door and throw out two dogs. And then when I yelled at them, Tell me in Spanish to blank, blank and take off. I don't like to do what I did this morning and walk around and see a new...

That was last night, excuse me, a new dryer thrown. And then when I look in the dryer, there's a bunch of garbage with Spanish language literature. I don't like that. That's what they do in Mexico. I don't want it to do that here. And so that's a very conservative, but also a very liberal idea. You come, you You become American, you enrich us with all of the periphery, but you don't tamper with the core values. And that's what we've forgotten. And then we came up with this idea, diversity is our strength. Will you tell me what country it's Is China? I mean, most of the people are Han Chinese. Is South Korea falling apart because they're all Korean? Are the Japanese failing? I don't think so. Are Mexican Americans in bad trouble because everybody mostly looks alike and they all speak Spanish and they're all Catholic? They don't believe in diversity. I don't think they do. To the extent they have a diverse population of Nahautul speakers. They have a history of not being very worried about not being very nice to them. That's why many of them come up here. So diversity can be really great if you overcome its innate hurdles.

And that is that people, birds of a feather, it's Plato's laws, actually, it's a Greek idea, birds of a feather flock together. That's exactly the metaphor. It comes from the Greek. And people will be tribal. And to break up that tribalism, you have to have everybody surrender their national or religious or racial or ethnic identity to the larger whole. And when that happens, diversity can work. It can be wonderful if they enrich with other areas. I like having Chinese food Mexican food. I think it's great. I like to hear mariachi music. I like to hear regga music. I like all of that. But I don't want to import the Faws of Haiti here or Jamaica. Why would I do that?

No, the left does not make these things easier because they always convolute culture and race. They always do that. And they always say you're a racist when you're talking about-They were very smart to do that.

I don't mean noble or they were very evil to do it. But the Marxist revolution that tried to take off here, it only took off maybe in the Great Depression under Eugene Debs and some of gompers and all of these labor union movements or the Farmers' Worker Party in Minnesota. But it never worked because we are a fluid capitalist society, and we brought entrepreneurial people from all over the world. And today's wealthy, spoiled kid, if somebody is a third-generation wealthy kid and he doesn't want to go out and work, he goes back down to the middle class or lower. Or if somebody who grew up poor wants to be wealthy, and he fights his way into the upper class. There's fluidity. And that means it's very hard to have a class identity completely. Trump has done it pretty well with a middle class, but he understands this is the key, that it can be all different races. So once they knew that, they said, Well, we don't have an exploited class, do we? That we can demand a capitalist overthrow in a Marxist socialist revolution? They did pretty well. We've got a socialist entitlement system.

But so they said, It's race, and it's not black, white, it's diversity. Anybody that's not white is a victim and oppressed. Anybody who is white is an oppressor and victimizer and has nothing to do with class because class is too fluid and changeable and malleable, and our constituencies can on us. But race is permanent. It's odd when you say you can declare whatever gender you are and transition, and then they say, But you can't transition your race. Sorry, Elizabeth and you tried, but you didn't succeed. So the point I'm making is they said that race was a victim. Then you have the absurdities of looking at that view program, and there are all these millionaires on there talking about being victims or Eric Hilder being a victim or, Gosh, show, Obama was on the TV. Did you hear her? It was, Oh, it's so hard being famous and rich and always having to explain. Well, you can come to Salma. We bought nice houses here in Salma and blend in. Nobody wants to see you here, so nobody won't be bothered. Just do it.

Her recent thing is politics interferes with parenting, and they're all saying she's criticizing Obama about his parenting.

She doesn't like Obama, but there's I won't get into why she does not like him. But anyway, my point is that the Democrats were pretty successful for 20 years with race. They beat that horse, and now all of a sudden, Obama's mad because he said, well, why? Hispanic men are not voting for... They're supposed to vote as constituents, my ponds. And now all of a sudden, they think they're worried about their class status, and they want to get ahead in the world. And that means that sometimes they're with white people and Black people, and they have all this shared agenda, but they can't. They have to be permanent victims like me. That's what he's saying. And at Mondami, we're going to go into affluent white areas. Well, the white areas are poorer than the Indian Americans under our system. Your group, Mondami, is the wealthiest, and you're probably wealthier than 99% of most white people. So it doesn't work anymore, is what I'm trying to say. It's too rigid. And they thought that was good to be rigid, but actually it's not, because it's ridiculous when you have people of color far wealthier than people of YTS in many cases, and then vice versa.

It just... It doesn't work that way. There's no such thing as a permanent victimize class anymore.

No. So, Victor, the last thing before we go to comments is that Trump gave the Medal of Honor to Charlie Kirk posthumously. And I was wondering your thoughts on that.

He actually put a Christian Cross on, too. Yeah, I thought that was very good. As I said before, I think it was in the middle of August, I had a interview about two and a half weeks before he was killed. I did that once a year with his show. I went out there and talked to him in Phoenix a couple of years ago, and then he usually stayed after and talked. Each time I saw him, he was more inquisitive and would talk things he was reading. He was an autodidact, so he was very inquisitive. I think he was responsible for bringing in the Trump vote in maybe Pennsylvania or Michigan, along with Elon Musk. In Michigan, that was 49, 49 of voters, 19 to 29. That was an amazing achievement that Turning Point USA did. So he was at the cusp of being really influential. Not that he wasn't influential. I mean, he's going to the next level where he was determining presidential elections. I'm not a conspiracy buff, but if I was a radical leftist, and I thought of all the people who were the most successful on the conservative side for influencing young people and telling them in a very radical, brilliant, innovative fashion, what his message was, all of us, when we're under 35, are naturally rebellious.

That's what youth, we got this restless energy, and we always talk about the man or the establishment, or we just want to do our own thing. Well, hey, everybody, the man is not some old white guy out on the golf course anymore with a bunch of money bags. The man is CBS and CBS and the Tides Foundation and your university faculty. These are the privileged institutions that run your life. These are the people who make it impossible to build a new house or to get affordable insurance or affordable health care or opportunity. The left runs the media, the university, K through 12, foundations, popular sports, popular culture, the bureaucracy. And it's natural for you as rebellious young people to question the establishment. And then the left said, Well, they can't do that. That's insurrection. Now, when we do it, it's because the establishment is conservative. Well, it isn't anymore. You don't march on the Pentagon anymore. Under Obama, the Pentagon is where people used to march. They ran the Pentagon. You don't say, I'm going to go attack the President's office like we did in 1966. A President in 1966, was with you. Now he's President.

The radicals took over our society, and Charlie Kirk understand that fundamental truth that most people didn't. And when you tell young people, go ahead and be questioning the establishment. Be rebellious because the establishment is left wing, ossified, tired, without an idea, unimaginative, boring, monotonous. And that's what he said, and they could not handle that. So that was what was said. And I still think that Tyler Robinson and as mixed up as he was and pro-trans and all, that he understood that, and that's why he killed him. And we'll see to what extent that little circle of people he communicated with on social media to what degree they influenced him and who influenced them.

Well, I said the Medal of Honor. I'm sorry, I meant the Medal of Freedom. Mental of Freedom. I wanted to correct that. And did you notice on his last day that his shirt, it had just freedom written crossed it. I was wondering, when I saw that, I was wondering how much he was influenced by Graveheart. Yeah, because he yells that at the end.

Probably a lot. Probably a lot. That's the highest civilian award you can get. He deserved it. He really did. I still can't believe he was killed. I can't believe it. I can't believe he's dead. When you When I saw the guy, he was very tall, handsome, robust, said things you wouldn't expect, confident. He had a whole entourage of people. It was amazing what he accomplished. Each time I saw him, he was more considerate of people. He was more, not that he wasn't from the beginning, but he was maturing at a rapid rate to where he was at the peak of his powers. The thing about this whole left-right thing, we just a shrug. We just say, Oh, a leftist guy shot Charlie Kirk, the most influential conservative in America. Oh. And then they get on social media and they celebrate. Oh, just things happen. No, they don't. Nobody forgets what they did.

Well, Victor, with that, let's go ahead and turn to comments on yours and Jack's Tuesday edition, the first one back as the Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. And there were lots of people that said, Yey, you're back. We're happy. You're a national treasure. And this one woman said very quickly, So one But good morning, a little normalcy. So she was happy to have you back. Another listener, Brandon Piano Whisky, 8604. I'm very pleased to see you guys merge the Victor Davis Hansen channel with the Daily Signals. I remember when I discovered this podcast on Spotify almost three years ago. It's been a pleasure to see it uploaded to YouTube, where it's garnered hundreds of thousands of views, it will now, no doubt, continue to reach wider audiences and not a moment too soon. Our culture needs Victor's informative perspective more than ever before.

I think he's right. I went to Washington at the Heritage, and I met the Daily Signal people. And there's something really energetic for me at 72 to see these young kids. I'm not talking about their political affiliation or anything. I'm just talking about how, yes, we can do this, and we're going to do this, and I got an idea to do this. And they're so full of... I remember that age, only I squandered studying Greek or disking Thompson Vineyard. But the point is, they were so enlightened and energetic and full of ideas. I hope that... And so I think the Daily Signal is really going to grow. So we were happy to be their to have a home there, and I think it will be mutually beneficial. I had some criticism of a letter, and I got a long letter, and I won't mention the person who wrote it, but he said he had to quit listening to us because his wife is named Karen. And I have done that, and I plead guilty to that. But in my defense, I have members of my family who are named Karen, so it's not meant that way.

What the term came out of, of a particular group of people on the left that are nosy in other people's business, and it came during the COVID period, that they were insisting on everybody who was outside in the wilderness wearing a mask. People came up with a name that was common of that baby. When I was in high school, everybody was named Karen. I don't see young people being called Karen. But to the extent that that stereotype is unfair to people with that name, I plead guilty and I apologize, and I won't use it ever again. But I'll have to come up with some word, not for the stereo being mean, but there is a particular profile of people who will be named I'll call them the Unnamed. And they have been very nasty. Of all the people who have been nasty, and I get a lot of them, believe me, in email, phone calls, show up at my house, every Everywhere.

Airports.

I don't fly anymore. If I can help, I'm not going to... 99% have met that criterion of age, gender, political persuasion.

Well, Victor Davis Hansen. Thank you, everybody. I'd like to thank you for your wisdom today, and thanks to our audience for choosing to join us. We hope you continue to. Again, it's the Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. And so we're happy to have a new show with The Daily Signal. Thank you, Victor.

Thank you very much for listening.

This is Sammie Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.

Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. Can also check out my own website at victorhanson. Com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.