transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Don't confuse Iran in the war and having very few resources with its survival, because you can survive for a limited time with almost nothing. I do think there's porous areas are being resupplied, not necessarily by air, because we control the air spaces. For now, they were being supplied by sea, but they have a rail link to China, and they can be supplied across the Caspian Sea. I don't know if we're going to blow that up or not. We should, if we decide to renew hostilities.

Speaker 2:
[00:30] We have the critics against the war. But I was watching Cory Booker the other night, and he was giving a speech. Spartacus? Yes, Spartacus.

Speaker 1:
[00:40] I am Spartacus.

Speaker 3:
[00:41] I am Spartacus.

Speaker 1:
[00:43] There will be a regime change, not now. Just like the fall of the Berlin Wall, once you destroy the edifice of communism in that case, then the Soviet Union fell within two years, and Eastern Europe was free within six months. That will happen. So his view is that this is an existential moment, because it's going to change the entire Middle East. It already has.

Speaker 2:
[01:16] Hello, and welcome to Victor Davis Hanson In His Own Words. This is our Friday News Roundup, and we've, as always, got lots on the agenda. The Iran War will be first, but we'll be also looking at Donald Trump's critics, and then California, what happened to Newsom, and the Nick Shirley Act. Very strange thing, but we'll get to that in the show. Stay with us, and we'll be right back from these messages.

Speaker 3:
[01:44] Since the founding of America 250 years ago, many things have changed, but some things never do. The commitment of husband and wife, the importance of passing along our values to our children, the faithfulness of God. Some wonder how we can ensure America will continue to thrive. As long as we keep first things first, we've only just begun. America, the Beautiful.

Speaker 2:
[02:14] Welcome back. Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhansen.com. Please come join us there. It is called The Blade of Perseus. Victor, the Iran War, just a few things update from this week. There, Donald Trump has extended negotiations, grace to the Pakistani negotiators who asked for it. The US military has stopped a ship in the Gulf, and it had Chinese ballistics and missiles on board. They're trying to rearm themselves as these negotiations were extended. Then finally, the women that the IRGC has that were to be executed, they've stayed the executions, and in fact, they said they were going to free four of them, and four of them would have a month term for their transgressions against the regime, which I don't really know what they are, but I think it was because they were protesters.

Speaker 1:
[03:31] Well, as I said in an earlier video, don't confuse Iran losing the war and having very few resources with its survival, because you can survive for a limited time with almost nothing, and they're losing 400 million reportedly a day. I do think there's porous areas are being resupplied, not necessarily by air because we control the airspaces, and until now, not by sea. I mean, excuse me, before now, they were being supplied by sea, but they have a rail link to China, and they can be supplied across the Caspian Sea. I don't know if we're going to blow that up or not. We should, if we decide to renew hostilities. But basically, their strategy is delay, delay, delay, delay. Now, we're into month two. It was eight months before the midterms. Now, it's six. The left is getting emboldened. They can't really stop Trump. So, the War Powers Act there looked like hypocrites because they gave Obama a seven-month blank check without even enacting it. During the Libyan bombing, Serbian bombing, et cetera, with Clinton. So, they're hoping that by rooting for Iran in the manner of Tom Friedman who said basically that, Chris Murphy went over to Europe with Tim Waltz to Spain, Socialist Conference. Waltz called the effort fascistic, why Americans are fighting. Murphy had tweeted Iranian propaganda that their 12 ships go through. He was then, in other words, promulgating and spreading lives for the regime. And then he said it was awesome. So, he's on their side. He can deny it, but he is. So, that's what emboldens Iran. So, their strategy is delay, negotiate, delay. Go two steps forward, one back, and we can draw this out, and then the American left will bail us out. It's not going to happen because I think they would go broke first. The stock markets have adjusted to this new reality. Venezuela is putting more oil on the market. Russia sees opportunities, so it's putting more oil on. The Gulf states are now free to export under American protection. The Saudis are already maxed out on the Red Sea. So, the world is adjusting. It would be nice for it to be over, so Trump would have five months or five and a half months to concentrate on the economy, get the message out, raise money, et cetera. But as of right now, their only card is to negotiate. If they start to try to break the blockade or send missiles into the Gulf or Israel, they're going to lose all of their transportation system, a lot of their power generation, and they're going to start targeting the Republican Guard leaders. As far as the Chinese, this was China's pet project. They had invested billions of dollars in it. They were in charge of building their infrastructure. They were in charge of their air defenses, their missiles. They used North Korea as a surrogate to arm them with rockets and drones themselves. They helped create the Iranian drone system. All the chemical and electronic components necessary for their drones and missiles, as we saw with this detained ship come from China. Russia has kicked out. They lost the Assad regime in Syria. They have no contact. They can't really maintain their old relationship with the regime. But China is in a bad shape. It's afraid that what's going to happen in Iran happened in Venezuela. In other words, there might be, if Donald Trump persists, and I think he will, that if he forces them into bankruptcy or if they lash out and he inflicts a lot of more damage on their economic system, then there's going to be some type of change in the government in the next year. And whatever it will be will not be friendly to China, given they had at least supported this regime. As far as the girls, young women that were destined to be hanged, the resistance took pictures of them. And they didn't come across in burkas. They were beautiful young women, stunningly beautiful. They had western clothes on and they appealed to all over the world. And so the regime thought, you know, we're in a propaganda campaign. And if we execute these people, there might be more than just John Federman that's against us. It'll put so much pressure on the American left to be supporting a regime de facto that's killing young women and hanging them. Up to now, they didn't care. 35,000, 45,000 that were killed, the left, things happened. And we illegally attacked a regime. You know, that's what they say. They never say that we tried to remove a regime. They just murdered 45,000 people. And then they say it's fascist, but the 45,000 people were out in the street trying to get democracy and we were trying to help them. It's a very bizarre world the Democrats live in. It's an alternate reality on almost every issue.

Speaker 2:
[09:12] I had just along that line, I had a question. You know, you listen to the news accounts of the US military maintaining control of the Persian Gulf. And, you know, so I say, for example, they've stopped ships and a cargo ship with a bunch of Chinese missiles, etc. And then you hear the left saying, oh, they're committing war crimes by controlling this gulf. But in the undercurrent of all of that news coverage is that that's what the Iranians were doing even worse, even more so when they were in for years and years. And they weren't just stopping something to stop military arms. They were hijacking and stealing.

Speaker 1:
[10:00] They took British prisoners. They took hostages. Whenever they had a Democratic president, Obama or Biden, they were emboldened. It's really disgusting to hear this Ro Khanna, this Democratic congressman saying that Obama was a great statesman. And they didn't do the under Obama. They lifted sanctions. And that was where the first initial cash infusions came in. So they got all of this money. They were so embarrassed of what they were doing. They had to ship $400 million at night in frozen assets. They unfroze their assets. And then the Iran deal did not stop them from getting a bomb. It just delayed the trajectory. So Trump came in in 2017 and stopped it. Well, they didn't even try to cheat because they thought he was crazy after he killed Soleimani and Baghdadi and ISIS. Biden came in. The first thing he did is he removed the terrorist designation of the Houthis. He separated us from Israel. Hamas got that message. Hezbollah, he did a deal with natural gas in Lebanon and he empowered Hezbollah. And then with the Iranians, he begged them to get back in the deal. When they didn't do it, he rewarded their negativity by lifting sanctions. And that's where that period of 21 to 24 is when they went up to 60 percent in Richmond. So we had this congressman there who just gets on Maria Bartoloma and he just starts lying. He's been really one of the more unfortunate spokesmen because, unlike Chris Murphy or Tim Walz who are a buffoon, he always starts this moral argument. Another thing I think everybody's getting sick of is, they say, this is fascism. Trump is a fascist, it's not that fascism is coming. They don't define their terms. What do you mean by fascism? Did he cancel an election? No. Did he try to gerrymander? Well, not as well as the Democrats are doing. Did he use the government to go after his presidential rival? Is he going to have Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom be in five separate civil or criminal trials like Alvin Bragg, Edita James, Fannie Willis, Jack Smith? Going to do that? Jean Carroll? Maybe he's going to try to get them off the ballot. 25 red states, are they trying to get a Democratic leading candidate off the ballot? Did he raid Kamala Harris' house? Did he raid Joe Biden's house? They hadn't done any of that. Did the Attorney General say, I'm going to put Steve Bannon, I'm going to put Peter Navarro in jail for not honoring a congressional subpoena, but I'm Mary Gardner, I'm not going to honor it. He hasn't done any of that. They don't define their terms because if you look at what they did during the Trump years, and I haven't got into the two impeachments, which we're learning now that the Michael Atkinson, the Inspector General, he hand in glove with Adam Schiff and Eric Ceremella and Vindman allowed that first impeachment to proceed. Remember in the first impeachment, this is very important. There were 15 or 16 people in the National Security Council in that room, and they listened to that phone call with Zelensky. They had no problem whatsoever. Some of them were hold over Obama people. Only Vindman did. And Vindman didn't even have the courage to become a whistleblower. So he called his pal Ceremella. And then based on hearsay, this is what I heard. And then Ceremella was basically saying, I heard what he heard. And then he disguised his name and played the wounded faun. So you couldn't even talk about him. And then he lied as did Vindman when they went in to Adam Schiff. And cooked up the whole process. And then each of those three people lied and said they had never colluded. And the Inspector General knew they did. And he did nothing and allowed it to go on. And that was the second, that was the first impeachment. And that followed to the day after the Mueller collusion collapsed. As soon as that collapsed, they said, take a deep breath. Now we go into impeachment. And they ate up the entire 2018 and 19 presidential term of Donald Trump. So this idea that Trump is a fascist and the war is fascistic, it's on the side of people who want to be free. But more importantly, that's a subtext. The main thing is these people have been killing us for 47 years, blowing up the embassies, barracks, shooting diplomats, trying to kill the president, trying to kill the secretary of state. They're a horrific regime. They've killed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. They're horrible. And they hijack the Iranian illustrious Persian tradition. They're an aberration and they have no popular support. Everybody hates them. The Gulf hates them. Israel hates them. The Arabs hate them. The Europeans are too timid to express their hatred, but they are terrified of them and hate them. The Chinese don't even like them. The Chinese are one of the greatest Islamic oppressors in the world. They have a million Muslims in camps, the Uyghurs. The Russians do not like Muslims. They leveled Grozny in the Third Chechen War and killed 100,000 people, Muslim. So their alliance with Iran is Iran is a useful tool, a useful idiot. They say, this is what we want you to do. We want you to sell us sanctioned oil. We'll buy it off the books. You got to give us a discount and then we'll give you credit for our weapons. And then when we get those weapons, try to destroy Israel and any pro-Western country and intimidate the Gulf states. That's what their strategy was.

Speaker 2:
[16:11] Well, Victor, let's welcome back a sponsor, Allegiance Gold to our podcast. 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. 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 pushes its currency beyond discipline eventually paid a price. The wise never waited for collapse. They prepared for the correction. 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. Physical gold, not as speculation, but as insulation. Our reputation matters to us, which is why we've partnered with Allegiance Gold, a company distinguished by integrity, reliability, and an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau. For years, they've guided Americans through transparent education and long-standing relationships built on trust. Right now, they're extending a special liberty offer for our listeners to help you get started with real gold. Whether your funds are in a retirement account or sitting in the bank, if you believe, as we do, that the best time to reinforce your position is before the storm becomes obvious, call 844-790-9191. That's 844-790-9191 or visit protectwithvictor.com. Again, that's 844-790-9191, 844-790-9191 or visit protectwithvictor.com. History rewards those who take the long view. We'd like to thank Allegiance Gold for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor, I was wondering about this. As we move forward, if we think about what Donald Trump needs to do, I think that warning the Iranians that they're going to hit the bridges and the power plants, et cetera, just gets them out to, as you said, they don't have any concern for people, and so they'll just bring their women and children out to protect these things.

Speaker 1:
[18:49] They will, but there's hundreds of bridges in Iran.

Speaker 2:
[18:52] I know.

Speaker 1:
[18:53] You just say we're going to hit the bridges, and are they going to get people to come out every single day from dawn to dusk? No, you don't tell them. You just say one bridge today, one power plant. I'm not going to tell you where they are. If they start shooting at tankers, or if they send missiles at the Gulf States, or Israel, or our ships, our ships support, most importantly, and the point is that while everybody says the war is going south, we're losing, they're going broke, and they've lost at half a trillion dollars in a 50-year investment, essentially, in military, industrial, nuclear infrastructure investment. It's gone. They had over 12,000 targets, the Israeli and American Air Force, so they're going broke, and the question is now, will they be able to delay, delay, delay, before they give up their enrichment and any claims that they're going to try to stop the blockade, or will the propaganda campaign in the United States so embolden them and be so successful that they can drag this out for months, and then get the Democrats elected to cut off funds. I don't see that happening, but that's their deranged strategy.

Speaker 2:
[20:14] Yes, it is deranged. Yeah, if I were Donald Trump, I would just say you can even dallying too much. Take a bridge out, take a power plant. Don't let him dally.

Speaker 1:
[20:26] If you're Donald Trump and you're in the Oval Office, this is what's happening. Someone comes in and says, I'm up for re-election and we were a red state plus 10, but my polls show me even. I was five ahead before this war. The Democratic propaganda is killing us. Another senator comes in, gas prices in my state are too high. When is this going to end? The point is that he's trying to do something for the next century. If he can destroy this regime or destroy its ability to cause havoc, there will be a regime change. Not now, just like the fall of the Berlin Wall. Once you destroy the edifice of communism in that case, then the Soviet Union fell within two years and Eastern Europe was free within six months. That will happen. His view is that this is an existential moment because it's going to change the entire Middle East. It already has. The Gulf States are now partners with Israel. And this is very interesting because if you look at the Democratic Party and the Paleo-right and Europe, they are more anti-Israel than are the Gulf States right now. No question about it. And this is ironic because a lot of the people who have been hammering Trump about the war on the right have financial ties with the Middle East. And they are telling them, what are you doing trying to call off Trump? He's trying to eliminate this threat right across the Gulf from us. That for 47 years has threatened to destroy us. And for the first time, we've had an American president that might just neuter them permanently. So be quiet. The whole thing is so misrepresented. And, you know, there was a, I guess it was an MS, that's what they call MSNBC now. I think it was an anchor woman and she was listening to some Democratic guest come on. And she finally said, so you are saying, as Jimmy Kimmel said, that you trust the Iranian government more than you do us. And you want to think, well, what do you trust that they were telling the truth about nuclear enrichment? They just admitted they could make 11 bombs. Were they telling the truth about missile range? They said only 1800 miles. It was going to go 2500 miles all the way to Diego García, but had not been knocked down. So that's what they do is lie. But this Democratic Party, it's not the Democratic Party at all. It's something different, something weird. It's, I thought it was just a socialist party, but it's almost becoming an Islamist party because of the intense anti-Semitism. That candidate who's in the Democratic primary, El Said, not only did he get caught on a hot mic saying that his constituencies in Michigan might not want him to criticize to celebrate the death of Khamenei, but he is saying things now that are openly anti-American, anti-pro-Hamas, pro-Hasbalah. The other guy that he's aware of that was going to be on the Michigan Board of Regents, he's a pro-Hamas person, pro-Hasbalah. The Democratic Party, if you look at them, they're not even hiding it anymore. The only person in the entire party who has any semblance to Bill Clinton's party, I guess, is John Fetterman. And he will probably lose the Democratic primary in two more years.

Speaker 2:
[24:19] When it comes to his re-election.

Speaker 1:
[24:21] Yeah, I don't think he's going to make it because unless the people of Pennsylvania wise up, or the Republicans vote for him in the primary and cross over, I don't know, I'm not acquainted intimately with Pennsylvania law, but this party is, it's nihilistic. And this is what another thing just off the top of my head. When I hear Marjorie Taylor Green or Tucker apologize for supporting Trump. First of all, it's ego, narcissism. When Tucker says, I worked so hard to get, I was helping him get elected. You didn't help him get elected. The people elected him. You were a part of a vast machinery in 50 states. If anybody helped him, it was Charlie Kirk getting the youth to come out in six key swing states and Elon Musk, who spent a fortune in Pennsylvania to get registration and everything. But what I don't like is they said they regret it, and yet they want us to believe they're still conservative. So you're saying, I regret Donald Trump was elected, because if he hadn't been elected, the border would be open. We'd have 10,000 more illegals a day, we'd have now 20 million, and that would be a good thing. The crime rate would be at historical highs. We wouldn't have the National Guard or anybody going into a city like Washington. Thank God, we'd still have diversity, equity, inclusion. The trans thing would be on question. We'd be full blast into wind and solar right now. Gas could be $10 a gallon. I'm Stephen Chu. I like that. That would be great. Well, that's what they're supporting when they say that. Because I really like Tucker, I knew him very well. Do they understand what their trajectory is, where they're going to rendezvous with? They're going to rendezvous with the relevance of Bill Kristol, and David Fromm, and Charles Sykes, and all those people at the board. They have no constituency other than the left from time to time, and that cats them on the head and says, you're a nice, useful, this idiot. Now, they even think, well, I don't want to be a useful idiot. I'm not even a Republican or a conservative. I want to be a hardcore leftist. They're now all endorsing Mondami. That's where they're headed. I hope they can come to their senses. All Tucker had to say was, I really disagree with the Iranian war. I know a lot of you do. I thought I would categorize, I know a lot of you would criticize me, but I would call it a forever endless war, which he campaigned against. Now, I know it's only a few weeks long, and there's no ground troops, but maybe we can still say it's an endless war. But I voted for him on the totality of his agenda, and I like the border. I like the social conservatism, the DI, the trans, the crime. I like the idea that we've regained deterrence abroad. I like the tax cuts. I like the reform on deregulation. So 80 percent of it is exactly what he said he'd do. Now, a lot of people disagree with me. They think this is not an endless war, but this is a reaction to 47 years of Iranian provocation. So I'm not going to let my disagreement impair my support for his overall war. That would be very easy to say. But I don't think it would get the traction in the media, nor the clicks if he had done that because it would be sober and judicious. Yes.

Speaker 2:
[28:01] And what does apparently get clicks are people like Thomas Friedman, who says he doesn't want the war to go well because he doesn't want it to strengthen.

Speaker 1:
[28:10] Has anybody heard of Thomas Friedman lately? He's a has-been.

Speaker 2:
[28:13] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[28:14] I haven't.

Speaker 2:
[28:15] Wasn't he the guy that went over to China and was led around on China by minders?

Speaker 1:
[28:20] Yeah, they showed him the monorail and an airport and he came back and said, Oh, we could just have a dictator like the Chinese.

Speaker 2:
[28:27] That's the left for you.

Speaker 1:
[28:28] He's calling for the fascists. He supported fascist China. So now we hear about him all of a sudden because he basically said, Well, I've always written about, he can't get rid of his record. He was at one time a critic of this fascistic Iranian regime. And he knows that. So I always wanted him gone, but not gone if it empowers Trump whom I detest or NetYahoo. So what does that mean? What does it mean? It means the same thing as when Senator Murphy says, Well, I trafficked in Iranian propaganda and misled the American people by trying to further their war aims by lying to you that they had 12 tankers get through, and the American military was incompetent. And I said, Awesome. But I was being sarcastic. It means nothing that they showed their two colors.

Speaker 2:
[29:19] Yes. And John Brennan, who has said that the war is part of the evidence that Donald Trump is unhinged, given how his rhetoric has been. And that he should be impeached. That was Brennan's thing.

Speaker 1:
[29:32] What, a third time? How did that go the first two times? He wasn't convicted. It was a complete waste of time, Brennan. What you should be worried about is, there are going to be people who testified in the CIA that you had intelligence reports that Donald Trump did not, did not collude, collude with the Russians. And yet when Barack Obama told you to find evidence, you ignored that and made up and trafficked in this collusion farce. Number two, you went to Congress, as I said earlier, and lied under oath, bald-faced lie and said that your CIA did not spy on Senate staffers. There were Democrats that wanted him to be impeached and removed, and he was not. Then he lied and said there were no collateral damage on drone assassinations. And by the way, he never got them. They went on for months, and he killed four citizens Obama did, man Brennan. Nobody said he was a fascist for doing that. John Brennan, you're a fascist. You had 500 assassination missions. You never got authorizations on the War Powers Act. You killed four American citizens without due process. Nobody ever said that to him. And then when, as I said, when Anthony Blinken wanted to lie to the country and be rewarded with the Secretary of State ship under Biden, he cooked up the idea, well, this is going to hurt us in the last debate. The last thing the American people are going to hear before the 2020 election is that Hunter Biden on his laptop, confessed that his dad was Mr. Big Guy and Mr. 10 percent. And it's all there that they were a family's crime syndicate. And he never got any credit for shaking down all these foreign governments and distributing the money to all the, even, you know, and then there were a lot of racist things. Oh, I don't do Asian. Remember all that stuff? So what are we going to do? Well, I want to be Secretary of State. So watch this. I'll call up Mike Burrell and we'll get former interim CIA and we'll get Brennan and Clapper to round them all up, 51 intelligence authorities, and we'll word it in such a way that it's clear to the American people that Hunter's laptop was Russian and Trump is back to the old Russian collusion stuff, but we'll word it that when we know it isn't, that we can't be culpable because we'll say disinformation, we won't say disinformation, we'll say information candidate. And she got away with it. So what I'm getting at is when Trump tweets stuff about the Pope that some of us disagree with, not that the Pope wasn't political himself, and kind of asked for it by, as you said, meeting with Axelrod and other things he'd done, criticizing Vance and Trump when he was a Cardinal. You don't want to get into politics if you're the Pope, and if you're the President, you don't want to get into religion. And the sense of interfering with the inner working of a church. But that all said, when Trump does stuff like that, you got to remember the context. No one, no one, no one has had his house raided for what, 100 files out of 11,000 to 14,000 they took, fake photographs of that floor was messed up. No one has been impeached.

Speaker 2:
[32:55] That was at Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 1:
[32:56] Mar-a-Lago. Two impeachments, trying to get him off the ballot, five criminal, they just wouldn't stop. That's one of the things, you know, in this new book that's coming out, the counterrevolution, the fall and rise of Donald Trump. I tried to go through every, all of that. And I said to myself, I cannot believe this stuff when I went through it all. And that's the first part, the fall of Donald Trump. The irony was, the more they tried to destroy him, the stronger he got. Because more people said, this is outrageous what they're doing. And whatever they're doing is, we don't even care anymore whether it's true or false. It's just horrific. And every time they did something, Donald Trump's holes recovered. And it put DeSantis in a very strange, was it Nikki Haley? And what were they going to do? They're going to say, they had two choices. Well, Donald Trump asked for it. And so you're going to side with these crazy Democrats? Or you're going to say, this is outrageous what they're doing to Donald Trump. So you're going to agree with Donald Trump that he's been a victim? You see, so there was no way out for them. And it insured, what I'm forgetting now, I'm not trying to judge anything. I'm just saying that insured the nomination of Trump. And it gave him enormous amounts of leverage in the general election.

Speaker 2:
[34:16] Yeah, I just have one question on the things you've been saying. And not really for us or your audience. I'm sure they're very well informed about the cases that were brought against Donald Trump. But if you were a left-wing person, what you would say is the government right now is indicting people that were in the former Biden administration.

Speaker 1:
[34:41] Like who?

Speaker 2:
[34:42] Well, they have John Brennan that they have.

Speaker 1:
[34:45] They did call me.

Speaker 2:
[34:46] And they did call me.

Speaker 1:
[34:48] They couldn't get a grand jury to indict him. So no, he was never indicted.

Speaker 2:
[34:51] And they seem to be having trouble with John Brennan as well. They've been investigating him. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[34:57] The problem they have with all of these people is, if you go anywhere near Washington or New York, which are ultra, ultra blue states, you're not going to get an indictment from a grand jury. And that was, there was no accident that they, the left, whether it was Alvin Bragg or Latita James or the E. Jean Carroll case, or Fannie Willis down in Fulton County, Georgia, they deliberately targeted blue areas. So I think John Brennan is indicted in, I think it's either Georgia or Florida. I think Florida. And that'll be different. And the judges will be different. But they have not, the reason they went after Comey was that he went into the House Intelligence Committee or maybe it was the Oversight Committee, on 245 occasions, he said he didn't know. And I've mentioned that before. You know, once the IRS called me up and it was a mistake on their part, and they said, you owe us $10,000, can we ask you some question? If I had said no, I don't remember. I can't think of anything to say. That was out of my purview. What would have happened? I would have a guy knocking on my door in a day from the Fresno IRS. So that's why they thought they could indict him.

Speaker 2:
[36:23] Yeah. Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit more about these Democrats. Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Speaker 4:
[36:33] If you enjoy Victor Davis Hanson, you might enjoy The Daily Signal's flagship show, The Tony Kinnett Cast, the same common sense perspectives you love weekdays at 7 p.m. Eastern. And unlike some of the other evening shows, we work up until showtime to bring you the latest breaking news, analysis, and good old American sarcasm. Tom Tillis, I'm pretty sure might have been useful at one time as a doorstop. Find The Tony Kinnett Cast on YouTube, X, radio, TV, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2:
[37:03] Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hanson, In His Own Words. It's a subsidiary of The Daily Signal, and so we invite everybody to go to The Daily Signal as well. They got lots of other articles and information there that is very pertinent. So it's a great website for news. So Victor, I was thinking just in the left broadly, I know that we have these, the critics against the war. But I was watching Cory Booker the other night, and he was giving a speech. Spartacus? Yes, Spartacus.

Speaker 1:
[37:37] I am Spartacus.

Speaker 2:
[37:38] He seems to be mastering that Baptist preacher style, and he thinks it's going to work to bring people in to his campaign. Do you think that sort of Reverend Wright shouting and hysteria is going to work with a 50 percent of the population? That's all it has to be.

Speaker 1:
[38:01] First of all, it turns off people. Al Sharpton turns off people, Reverend Wright. But Reverend Wright was at least authentically, like when he said, Chicken's coming home to roost. Cory Bookie would go, Chicken's coming home. You know what I mean? He couldn't do it. Remember who he is. I was a visiting professor at Stanford when he was on football team and he was the smart football player. He grew up, I think, in a gated community with two parents that were corporate executives. He has no experience with the inner city whatsoever. He is the type of person that the racist Joe Biden said, and he's articulate and he doesn't speak like a normal black person. That's what he said. Everything he's done is crazy, like the Spartacus speech about Kavanaugh, and then the 26-hour filibuster.

Speaker 2:
[39:14] Was that the filibuster?

Speaker 1:
[39:15] Yeah. It was impressive that he could do it without urinating, but it's like a dog, as I said earlier with an anecdote about what somebody said about knowing Greek. It's impressive like a dog that walks on two legs, but what's the point? I think Samuel Johnson said something to the effect, I heard a woman, brilliant preacher, but it was at that point in English history, it was for what point? So he's not going to go anywhere because anybody who hears him knows that he's a showboat, that he's a spoiled, NEPO kid and he's masquerading as authentic and he never has an initiative or a policy or he's not a serious person. I agree. And he's like Newsom. Newsom, all these people don't have identities. That's the problem. You know, Hillary Clinton, I'm so tired, I didn't come here. Obama, remember he was, just want to tell you, that black fake patois and then Kamala Harris is doing it lately. The worst is Gavin Newsom. He gets in a room with people and he says, you don't have any statesman's credentials. He probably says, I don't know anything about foreign policy. Well, go over there to the Munich Security and say something trashy, get some clicks. Hey, you Europeans, you've been on your knee pads with Donald Trump. Well, that didn't work. Hey, we have to have a version of Trump. He uses capital letters and the f-word, and he does all these crazy things on social media. You got to go hire a team to do that. Okay. Then they come back. It doesn't work. They're not Trump. It looks, you look like an idiot. Then somebody says to him, you've got to, there's the big wide middle out there. You've got to be a Federman for a while. Get an old podcast and get old Bannon on there and Charlie Kirk. He did. Then everybody said, you fool, you're not a left-wing socialist like you should be. Then he dropped it. Then they said to him, Gavin, your problem is you come off as a swarmy little rich kid with your little hair fixations. You also were a nipo baby of the Getty family, and you never really had it tough, so you've got to write a memoir. Can you put some stuff in there? Maybe your parents got a divorce. And you grew up on macaroni and wonder bread, and you were dyslexic, and you had a physical disability, and people made fun of you like Trump. So they tried every little face they could put on him because he's not authentic. He doesn't know who he is. Cory Booker doesn't know who he is. And I give credit to Elizabeth Warren. She knows who she was. She was a rock-solid Oklahoma Republican conservative who wrote a book about how to make money flipping houses at one point. But once she saw Affirmative Action, and she was going nowhere from the University of Oklahoma, she said she was the first Native American lawyer and got hired in Texas. And then Calhoun went to Harvard and said, you don't have any indigenous people as lawyers on your law school faculty. It was brilliant. And that's how, but she did after that, at least be consistent, I shouldn't say that, I'm sorry. She was talking about million billionaires the other day, and they just caught her on a brand new private jet. She got off the jet and she saw people taking pictures. So she put her aid out in front of her and she kind of huddled behind and walked behind, like it was some kind of blocking tackle and she was a running back. But all these, it's like AOC and Bernie Sanders going to all those rallies on private jets.

Speaker 2:
[43:09] Well, since you brought up California and Newsom, there's been a lot of criticism of Newsom. I don't know if you want to say anything more about him, but the criticism this week has been that he's kind of absent from California and all the problems of California. So I don't know if he had more on that.

Speaker 1:
[43:24] I have some, what is he going to do? Somebody says to him, this high-speed rail is killing you, Gavin. Well, let's go down to Selma, California and go down on Mountain View Avenue, and we've got a big overpass. Yeah, Gavin, but you spent $20 billion, there's not one foot of track late. There isn't? We have no money. Okay. Give me another idea. Well, can you go to Pacific Palisades and get your little Abercrombie and Fitch vest on and dig some stuff? But you can't, Gavin. Why? Well, you haven't built anything. The regulations are killing them. Well, can you go out to that oil refinery and say that you're going to stop it and shut it down? Well, Gavin, two have already left. Now, they're trying to pump and gas is $8 a gallon on the coast and six inland. It's all because of you. Well, can we say that the refineries are doing it? I said, well, they're leaving because they're going to go broke here in California because of your regulation. Well, can I go up and say that I have a new fire plan? No, because you burned down the Paradise Fire, the Aspen Fire, because of your forest management suicidal policy. Well, how about water? We got a rainstorm. No, you let out 90% because you wouldn't dredge the Delta canals. So what is he going to do? Oh, how about the billionaires? Can you get, they support me, not anymore. They're leaving. They're all leaving because you went after them and they're part of the 1% that pays 50% of your taxes. And you've got everybody in the SCIU and your supporters saying, make the rich pay their fair share. When they pay 50%, the 1% pays 50% of your income tax revenue. So he can't stay here. So what he has to do is fly around and hub up with celebrities, go overseas, get on TV, but.

Speaker 2:
[45:29] You know, I, I know we, you and Jack talked about the problems of Gavin Newsom. The only thing that you guys did not discuss, and I don't know if you think it's significant or not, is his wife, Jennifer, and how she's been inserting herself in all of the worst ways. And I just remembered that and I was wondering, do you have any comment, comment on that? Do you think that a wife can really make a difference?

Speaker 1:
[45:51] I thought Jill, Jill Biden, she makes Jill Biden look like Madame Curie or Helen Keller or someone. I mean, she's just inept. And like Jill Biden, she's like a moth to a flame or she can't keep away from the spotlight. So she interjects herself. So the worst thing she said was that she basically said that she was taking two kids on a safari type of trip to look at the natural habitat of Mississippi, Georgia, as if there were some freaks. And then she was going to lecture her kids about here was the birthplace of racism, segregation, and all of this stuff. She wants to know where segregation and racism, she's just going to Stanford University and look at a graduation ceremony or a safe space or a segregated dorm. And then she said, she was trying to be empathetic to somebody who'd lost a child. She said, well, I happened to kill my sister accidentally on a golf court accident or something. That was inept. Everything and she, when you see her, Gavin thinks, well, I married my second wife after I got caught cheating on my first wife, Kimberly Gorforio. She's very attractive and younger and her family is very wealthy, so it was a wise move. But then he starts to look at her when she talks. After two seconds, she's off to the races about herself and it hurts him. It's like Michelle Obama in 2000.

Speaker 2:
[47:29] Not proud of her country.

Speaker 1:
[47:31] Yeah. Michelle Obama was told, we were told that she went to Harvard and Yale, Princeton and Harvard, and she was this brilliant woman and she was the brains behind Barack and they were a power. It was like the hill we built thing and then she got out on the campaign trail and it was, I've never been proud of my country and this is a downright mean country, and they always raise a bar on me no matter what I do. And then David Laxula just said, get the blank and they put a muzzle on her, she disappeared. Had she had that, if she had that prominent role the whole 2008, McCain would have been a lot better.

Speaker 2:
[48:15] Can I ask you, historically, do you know of any woman that has been a benefit to their husbands as among presidents at all?

Speaker 1:
[48:26] Jane Addams.

Speaker 2:
[48:29] That's going pretty far back.

Speaker 1:
[48:33] FDR used Eleanor Roosevelt to great effect, especially during World War II, but she was to the left of him even. So she was very popular among leftist circles. She's very bright and she's very well spoken. And at that point, there was a lot of racism and segregation. When she addressed that, it was very effect. Bess Truman was known as a common sense. She wasn't a professional woman, but she was a big source of comfort to Harry Truman. Dwight Eisenhower did not have a good relationship, I think, with his wife, at least because there were problems there. She was a nice person. And then Jackie was a big help.

Speaker 2:
[49:22] Yeah, I was going to say-

Speaker 1:
[49:23] She was glamorous. I mean, everybody loved Jackie. They didn't know much about her. They didn't know about the whole debutante, aristocratic, debauched New York scene. All they saw was she was beautiful and she had kind of that affected voice, and she brought style, and they liked the idea that they're- They liked the idea even in the heartland here that an American first lady went and awed the European. Melania Trump can do that.

Speaker 2:
[49:52] I was going to say, don't you think Melania's giving her a run for the money?

Speaker 1:
[49:56] She does. They don't know what to do with her because they hate Trump so much. So they keep her off Vogue, Fashion Magazine, they never give her any credit, but she's been an asset. A lot of women were misunderstood. Lady Berg Johnson was a very solid wife to put up with him, and she had that beautification campaign, that help. Pat Nixon was long suffering. She was very supportive, and they tore her and said she was plastic Pat, and the left went after her for no reason. Betty Ford was very positive. She did a good job, I thought.

Speaker 2:
[50:36] Didn't she have a drug problem or something too?

Speaker 1:
[50:39] The prescription drugs. Yeah. Then there was Rosalind Carter. She was probably brighter than her husband, but she knew not to steal the spotlight or freelance. The left always makes fun of a Republican wife that doesn't have a PhD from Harvard or a law degree. So, Pat Nixon, they made fun of, they made fun of Nancy Reagan. Man, she was a brains. I mean, she was pretty strong influence and moved him to the left.

Speaker 2:
[51:13] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[51:13] She was always trying to say, this is too unpopular, especially she and the two children, the second two. If you go through, Barbara Bush was really outspoken. She helped him. At first, people didn't like it because she was blunt. But I think she was a moderate. Most of the women are not as conservative on the Republican side as her husband, so that helps them. And Hillary Clinton was a mixed bag. He kept saying, well, if you're for me, Bill Clinton, you get two of us. Two of us for the same deal. You get Hillary and me and everything. Okay, she's got a law degree from Yale and then they saw her. And the thing she said, she was a lousy candidate. What kind of candidate goes to West Virginia and says, I'm going to close down the coal industry?

Speaker 2:
[52:08] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[52:09] So anyway, I could go on. Yeah, but Barbara, I mean, Laura Bush. Laura Bush. She was very dignified and helped George W. Bush. There's no doubt about it. Michelle was too outspoken, controversial and resentful. And she always said, they were always portraying me as the angry black woman. Well, you just don't have to act like the angry black woman and they won't do that to you.

Speaker 2:
[52:34] Yeah. Well, Victor, then let's turn back to California again. And next question is, Swalwell obviously is out of the race. Leave him out of there.

Speaker 1:
[52:43] But you know who?

Speaker 2:
[52:44] That was mysterious.

Speaker 1:
[52:45] Oh, he went from being a heart throb.

Speaker 2:
[52:47] Yeah, I know. And we know that how the Democrats work is what that showed us. But what I was curious about was this Xavier Becerra is the one who's benefited the most from Swalwell stepping out. I was wondering your thoughts about his possibilities versus that Tom Steyer.

Speaker 1:
[53:09] That's a hard one. Tom Steyer is a perennial candidate. His problem is he's worth a billion and a half dollars. And when you look at the source of his money, he first started out financing coal plants in Indonesia, and then he became a big green crusader, and he always talks about that he's the billionaire that wants to tax billionaires. Well, if you really are that way, Tom, why do you have all these tax accountants and investments offshore? So, and he's not a very good photogenic candidate. He has this weird commercial where they tell you that the commercial is over and now we're spontaneous. You have to tell somebody that he's spontaneous, that he's not spontaneous. But the lighting, he looks like he's been drained of his red blood. I had five transfusions and somebody's told me that I looked the same color as the white wall. Well, that's how he looks. Somebody has drained him. And he's not, I have a raspy voice sometimes, but because of the surgery, he has a natural, he has a Gavin News raspy voice. And his, what's his argument that he's going to do more of Gavin Newsom? He's going to help the SCIU? All the problem with the Democrats is California is destroyed and their party did it. Not just the governor, but they had the governor, with Newsom and Jerry Brown, who was an earlier Democrat. I'm not blaming Jerry, but Jerry had went along with the legislature. And they had supermajority. So there's nobody else they can blame. And so when you have a Democratic candidate, he's got to say, I got to continue Gavin's work. I've got to get more Democratic programs. We've got to get more transgendered operations for illegal immigrants. We've got to try a new plan, number 98 for the half million homeless. San Francisco is really beautiful today. Downtown LA is Santa Monica. It's just everything's going in the right direction. That high-speed rail, have you seen those overpasses in the valley? They're impressive. Are they going to say that? I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[55:17] Well, the one time I saw Newsom in California doing something, he was bragging about they're finally going to lay the first rails on the high-speed rail.

Speaker 1:
[55:29] He's been saying that for five years. And I love Bakersfield. I love Merced. I grew up in this area. I'm five miles from the high-speed rail overpass. But trust me, you're not going to get anybody that wants to save one hour off their 170 miles from Bakersfield to Merced. I don't know. Merced is about 100,000 people. Bakersfield, maybe three or 400,000. You're not going to get the traffic that's going to want to go to Merced or vice versa. A lot of studies have shown that if you gave them the high-speed rail, the entire project, the 20 billion and say, it's yours, we paid for it. Let's just say Elon Musk said, I'm worth 400 billion. You spent 20 billion and wasted it. It's going to cost you another 10 billion. I will give you 30 billion to pay all your debts off. Just run it to break even. They couldn't do it. They're going to have a union run it, and it's going to be DI, and they've already downgraded the speed. Everybody said, it's in some places almost parallel to the Santa Fe tracks. You had a line there, and the only problem with the Santa Fe tracks were they were old, and they didn't have two tracks the whole way. So for maybe a quarter of what you spent, you had the light of way already. You could have put a track right next to it, and trains go in either direction. You could have improved. You could have got the speed up to 90 miles an hour. But you spent 20 billion to go 40 miles faster, 50 miles faster from Breakersfield to Merced.

Speaker 2:
[57:13] Insane.

Speaker 1:
[57:13] And then they got the problem is, Californians are incompetent. All the talented people are leaving. I don't think that if you hired people to run it, it would be dangerous to be in it, because I think it would be a unionized hack group of people running it, and there would be no accountability.

Speaker 2:
[57:30] Yeah. It's a real problem, I understand, as is Gavin Newsom. Well, we have the Nick Shirley Act that is in the California Assembly, and so I wanted to get your views on that after these messages.

Speaker 4:
[57:45] Hey, I'm Bradley Devlin, and just like you, I'm a huge fan of Victor Davis Hanson. Whether it's his long-form podcast, Victor Davis Hanson In His Own Words, or his short-form content for The Daily Signal, Victor Davis Hanson In A Few Words, I always leave an episode learning something new.

Speaker 1:
[57:59] I think they forgot the 1982 Falklands War.

Speaker 4:
[58:02] And in the age of clickbait and rage bait, that's a really good feeling, right?

Speaker 3:
[58:07] The media, thank you.

Speaker 4:
[58:08] You can leave now. Well, if you agree, you might like my show, The Daily Signal's long-form interview podcast called The Signal Sitdown. Every week, we take you behind the scenes of the biggest battles in Washington, DC as they happen with some of the biggest names in politics. We explore big ideas and we analyze the policymaking process from an unabashedly and unapologetically conservative perspective. And that's important now more than ever with the Trump administration back in office, because in 2024, you sent Washington a message it couldn't ignore. It's your government. And together, we're taking it back. So check us out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple podcasts. Wherever you enjoy Victor Davis Hanson, we're there too. And drop me a follow on X at Bradley Devlin to stay updated with what's happening on the Signal Sitdown.

Speaker 2:
[58:54] Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hanson In His Own Words. If you want to find Victor on X, his handle is at VD Hanson. And on Facebook, he's at Hanson's Morning Cup. And there is a Victor Davis Hanson fan club on Facebook, which is not associated with us, but they do a great job of looking for his new things that come out and old stuff. So they'd be a good site to follow as well. So Victor, the California legislature doesn't like investigative journalists talking about how much fraud's going on in California. And so they are going to pass what is being called the Nick Shirley Act to stop investigative reporters. And I was wondering what that is.

Speaker 1:
[59:42] Here's what's embarrassing that you have this huge Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS conglomerate, with these huge budgets and all these reporters. And it takes some young kid, two young people, all these freelance journalists that basically their overhead is an iPhone camera with a tripod and a rental car. And they go there and they're courageous. They have nothing to lose. They're in their 20s. And they wade right into the Somali community and they get chased out. They go right into downtown LA. They see what's going on and they're not politically correct. So if they go into the $250 billion welfare morass, and there is a guy from India who's an immigrant, or a guy from Mexico, or a guy from Somalia, they don't care. It's not like, well, I graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism, and I have a five-year pedigree at the New York Times. And I just think that if I were to uncover this scandal, it would hurt people of color and hurt me. So I will just ignore it. Well, don't do that. They're like cowboys, you know what I mean? And they take enormous political risks. The young Hispanic girl that that family tried to push, the Oshunkos or whatever their name was in Minnesota.

Speaker 2:
[61:17] Osh-tru-kos, I think.

Speaker 1:
[61:19] Yeah, they're now saying, I love America, man. They go on there. They're on tape. This big, heavy-set guy in the blue shirt. He's on tape telling his daughter to get right in, what's her name, Savannah's ear, and blow this thing and pop her eardrums out, basically. Then the mother is confronting her in her space, pushing her back. Then he has to be restrained by people because he wants to hit her. Then once he sneaks around the side, she's looking around and he runs at full speed and pushes her flat on the ground.

Speaker 2:
[61:55] Yeah, from her back.

Speaker 1:
[61:56] Yeah, this big guy. Then they get on TV and say, people don't like us. We have, go fund me. We just need eight or $9,000. We might have to move. We might move to another country. Promises, promises. Get on the plane. We don't want you. You're bullies. You're thugs. The whole family are. And so they remind me so much, not that the Waltz family is that bad, but when you look at that Waltz family, his unit, he's bragging on his military record in the National Guard and they order them to go to Iraq. And he just retires right before there. And then he lies where he says he's in Tenement Square. It was a complete lie. He goes to Communist China as a high school coach or teacher for what? Seventeen times on Chinese Communist fellowships. And then his daughter, when Minnesota is up in flames, gets on social media from inside information and said, my dad's going to call, the National Guard's coming, he's going to let him in. You better be careful, tips him off. And then the mother says, I had the window open so I could smell burning rubber of the riot. I wanted to get a good authentic, who was being burned up? Ms. Walz, somebody was being hurt. 35 people were killed in the four month riots. So I don't know what it is about Minnesota, but those two families, if they're representative of anything, the Minnesota left, they're completely crazy.

Speaker 2:
[63:34] That's where Cory Booker was when he was doing his Reverend Baptist preacher thing. So he was getting a lot of response from it as well.

Speaker 1:
[63:43] I think I watched Gutfield the other night, and somebody made the point that the audience was like 45 people.

Speaker 2:
[63:52] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[63:52] It was not very many people there. I could see that. I used to speak a lot, maybe 50 or 60 times a year. My mom was debating. She was on a debate team. She went to University of Pacific and then she transferred. She got a BA there and then a BA at Stanford and a law degree from Stanford. But she was a masterful debater and she said to me once, because I was speaking right before she died of cancer. She said, you're speaking a lot and remember something and she used to give me tips. Don't use notes. If you're going to use notes and read off something, people might as well just send it in the mail and they could hear somebody else read it. So I never did. I tried to memorize it or ad lib it. But she said, if you don't ever order the audience to do anything, if they want to stand up and give you, they will. But don't say all, unless you're Billy Graham. She said that. So when I saw him say, stand up, if you're, everybody looks around and goes, why should I stand up? But that shows you that nobody wants to stand up for what he was saying. So he has to have a prop or a prompt or something. Everything, I don't know, I just find him off putting something about him. I don't know what it is. Because he never talks in normal tones. He just screams and yells. He's like a talk show, but not most talk show hosts. He's like the very extreme, extreme, extreme, that's how he conducts himself. He's never going to make it.

Speaker 2:
[65:38] I hope you're right. He seems to think that style is going to get him somewhere, but because he's been mastering it. It's been over a couple of years that he's been in. If you watch this recent thing, he's definitely a lot better at it than he was two years ago.

Speaker 1:
[65:52] All these people are competing with each other. They get up every morning, they open their computers and the DNC act blue, they have their talking points. Last week was, be sure you say that Trump is a fascist. This week it was, be sure you say that Trump's copying Obama's Iran deal. First of all, they just mouth that, so they're all the same. But the second thing is, they're competing for attention. They're all crazy. Tim Waltz said, I got to go to this socialist conference and call him a fascist. Then Senator Murphy says, well, I'm not going to say awesome and lie about it. That'll get me attention. Spartacus says, I got to scream and yell, and that's what they're doing for attention. Elizabeth Warren with that shrill voice, about millionaires and billionaires. I wouldn't mind if the screaming about millionaires and billionaires, but Bernie Sanders has three homes, and he's affluent now, all from government, he's never had a job outside of government essentially. She's very affluent. She lives in a very exclusive area of Boston, and it gets tiring to hear all this about millionaires and billionaires. You see how they travel, they dress, who they associate with, they're all wealthy elites.

Speaker 2:
[67:15] Well, speaking of that, our last topic today is, did you notice or see that Ilan Omar, who in her millionaire $30 million, said that there was an accounting error and that she was really worth, I couldn't get the exact figure, but it was somewhere around $100,000 or so.

Speaker 1:
[67:33] Yeah. What she basically is saying is, I lied to you when I said that we were worth $30 million, and now I'm lying to you when I say I'm worth $100,000. But it's better for me to lie the second time because I'm broadcasting myself as a woman of the people. So I took a lot of flack when I, when that came out, people said three things about her. This guy is either a crook because he didn't have that kind of money recently, so he's been using your name for, or he did have money and you didn't know about it, but you, we didn't know about it, but you did and you're a gold digger or you're a flat out liar. So when the flat out liar stuck to her, then she changed. But my only question about the whole thing is, those are federal forms that have to be signed under penalty of perjury. So if she's a federal elected official and she deliberately lied, getting back to the IRS, if you say to the IRS that you made $100,000 when you made $200, and then the IRS says you misreported your actual income, and you say the accountant, it was just a computing error. Well, they're going to subpoena all the records. So she says this bogus accounting firm she went to, she's got to show us the form but she won't. So I think that the truth is somewhere in between, that her husband made a fortune using her name for entree into government deals in Minnesota. I have a feeling that she's so well known if you wanted to have a social welfare agency, a childcare center, a green project, you had to go through her husband who was a political consultant. She was hiring him on her own money when she was friendly sexually with him, if I could use that term, co-boarding with him. This is her third husband. If you count her brother, it's number two.

Speaker 2:
[69:47] Yeah. I think she was one of the authors on the legislation that made all of those childcare things available, that path available to her.

Speaker 1:
[69:56] It was.

Speaker 2:
[69:57] Yeah. Well, Victor, we're at the end of our show and we're going to look at some comments from your viewers. I've got three quick ones and then one that's a little bit longer that was interesting. So Jimmy Yolson Blues says, love to Jack and Victor. This show is a beacon of light in a fallen world. Happy Easter and he has risen. This is on your recent podcast. Pegstah54 says, Oikaphobic, I always learn something new from you VDH. You truly bless my 72-year-old heart. May God heal, strengthen, and grant you his favor. Lisa Gemini said, so sad that these older baby boomers cannot get over TDS. They need to leave our great nation if they hate it. We won't miss them. They are insane.

Speaker 1:
[70:53] That's a good point. They always say they're going to Europe. Even Rosalind O'Donnell didn't stay away.

Speaker 2:
[70:58] Yeah, I know. Promises, promises. No, they can't. Here's the longer one, but it's from Stacey Winters, 7884. I remember my father sitting at the dinner table with the New York Post and screaming about the Vietnam protests and that woman, Jane Fonda, and she's still at it. But while she was now holding up placards with horrendous Singham slogans, like pro-Hamas, when asked why she was there, she responded, come on out, have some fun, meet some people. Singham hands these people a placard or a slogan in a day, and that's just a prop to get them out and create chaos. They have no idea why they're here. Thank you, Stacey Winters, 7884. Do you know what Singham is, Victor Davis Hanson?

Speaker 1:
[71:57] I like Jane Fonda in Barbarella, you remember that?

Speaker 2:
[71:59] Yeah, when she was on the screen.

Speaker 1:
[72:02] Yeah, she was almost naked. I guess she was naked, she floated around. But I liked her in Cat Blue and Sleuth, Clute, is that the name of it? She was with Dawn Sutherland in a movie.

Speaker 2:
[72:17] I think it was called Clute, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[72:18] Yeah. The thing about her was in say, 82 to 86, she created that video exercise for women. Remember, she wore those little tights and then she did all these exercises and she was fanatic and she had a huge following. Because her career plateaued, she was in her 40s maybe.

Speaker 2:
[72:41] Yeah, you could buy the tapes and then she was like a trainer only.

Speaker 1:
[72:44] So women at home would do this with her and that's why she's 88, 89. So that's why she's alive probably today. But the point I'm making is at some point, the fact that she sat on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun that was shooting down planes and we had these people who were tortured, the pilots became unsustainable for her. So she made a big public apology. She staged some veterans and she said, I really want to apologize. But that was so phony because then she married Ted Turner and he was the largest landowner. This is when CNN was roaring and he was before his crash. So she was apolitical then, not apolitical, leftist, but not obnoxiously so. Now she's gone full circle and back to where she was. So all those mea culpa and contextual, that was all fake. She is the same James Fonda. If she could, she would go over probably to Aranda Day and find a Sam Missal site and sit on it to be photographed. Because it's really tragic when you think, Peter Fonda was okay actor, but he was very hard left. Henry Fonda was a Democrat, but he wasn't hard left. He was a great actor. He was married, I think, four or five times. But he and Jimmy Stewart, they weren't like these people. And they want to know why nobody's watching these movies and the Oscars have no attendance and no viewership. Just look at the actors, the way they conduct themselves. It's kind of, I don't know, they don't have no class. I'm not saying that Hollywood was always, I mean, we didn't know the whole story. It was pretty decadent in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. But at least publicly, there was a sense of decorum. And they didn't support, you know, even when they supported the commies, the commies were on our side for a while in World War II. And then when they, in the Cold War, they got exposed and anything. But this, this Jimmy Kimmel stuff and this, all these people who are actively rooting for Donald Trump to fail and Iran to win, it's really disturbing. Yeah, it sure is. As I said earlier, I, I thought the Libyan thing, because I had been in Libya and it was reforming. And the Gaddafi dictatorship was handing over. They had given up their nuclear centrifuge program. They had handed over a lot of the authority to the second generation or Western educated. There was a transition, in other words, the kind of what we're looking at. So to listen to Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, who cooked up the idea that the Arab Spring means democracy and the French and, and British are there and we're going to be left behind. And so, I went to school, bomb Libya, and they bombed, they bombed an area right where I stayed at one point. And the clinic that I went to, I think, got bombed, where I was operated on. And they did it for seven months. And yet, I don't think I ever wanted the Libyans to win. I thought this is a misadventure, but let's get it over with and win.

Speaker 2:
[76:18] Yeah, which is the only sane position to have.

Speaker 1:
[76:22] It's still a mess.

Speaker 2:
[76:23] Yeah. And so we agree with our reader here that we just read that they are insane. So thank you. Victor, we will be talking about some people who have left the administration this week and the Southern Poverty Law Center financing their own enemies, if I can call them that, on the Saturday show. And I know that you were going to do another Greek god, another two Greek gods, and we'll see that. So join us for the Saturday edition. This has been the Friday News Roundup, and we'd like to thank our audience for joining us, and thank Victor for a great conversation.

Speaker 1:
[77:01] Thank you for watching and listening, and you can pre-order The Counter-Revolution.

Speaker 2:
[77:07] Ah, The Counter-Revolution. Yeah, we should talk about that on Saturday too.

Speaker 1:
[77:09] The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and his MAGA Movement.

Speaker 2:
[77:12] Yes. Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis Hanson and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.

Speaker 1:
[77:18] Thank you. 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 victorhanson.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.