Thomas Jefferson and American History

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The FIFA World Cup streaming live on Fox One, offers a subject to change CFOX dot com for complete terms and conditions . You ask any of those antiquif people, what do you really want and gave them a truth serum? You know what they'd say? I want what Al Gore has. I want what Barack Obama. That's what they really want. They're privileged, but they can't get that given their talents, which are not very great. And so they want to kill people. That's what the university is now. It indoctrinates people. When you look at those polls that the majority of Democrats don't have strong patriotic feelings of the United States, or when you hear joy say they're not going to participate in the two hundred fiftieth, july fourth anniversary. That came from the university . Hello and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. This is our Saturday Edition, and we do something a little different in the Saturday Edition. Victor's looking at the presidencies of Barack Obama and Thomas Jefferson, this Saturday edition . So stay with us for that. Before that, we'll look at some new stories. We've got the technology in the war with Iran on the agenda and a house bill that is attempting to oke the War Powers Act. So stay with us for those stories and we'll be right back. Here's a question. As we approach our two hundred fiftieth, is it possible for us to turn around our education to restore civic ers rehipad enjoy summer vacation with our family all at the same time , well Mount Titano Media says yes . This is the book for our two fiftieth and for all ages finding our words words that made America. This collection of the greatest speeches delivered in America, many almost entirely forgotten displays those very words that defined and can still drive the American mission and now you can take them anywhere this summer with the Audible Edition. These words that move the world are read by Michael Knowles, Andrew Clavin, Spencer Clavin, Bill Whittle, US Army Generals, and Leaders in Class ical education. Every speech includes a powerful introductory essay written by acclaimed scholar Tracy Lee Simmons , whose preludes set the stage for a deeper understanding of each work. Mountitano Media publishes single works and compilations of the greatest works of western civilization, for education at all levels and for independent lovers of learning and culture . Finding our words words that made America a great book for our two fiftieth and always is available now in paperback heart over Kindle Audible and even in Spanish. Get your copies at Amazon and on the Mount Titano Media website. That's Mountitano T IT ANO Mount TitanoMedia . com Visit W W Mountitan omedia . com Welcome back. Victor Davis Hansen in his own words Victor's the Martin and Ellie Anderson senior fellow in military history and classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Marcia Buskyisting,u dished fellow on his history at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website Victorhansen. com. The name of the website is the blade of Perseus and we'd love everybody to come join us there . He has all of his work s on there from articles to podcasts to links for his books . And you can join as a subscriber for six hundred fifty a month to give it a try or a discounted rate at sixty five dollars a year for an annual subscription, you get two written articles a week exclusive for subscribers and a podcast that a video podcast that's exclusive as well . So join us there. Well, Victor, the F fifteen that went down in April, I believe, they come back that there was a very strange swarming of that F fifteen E, I believe it was that brought it down of drones. And so we are curious about this new technology. I think they think the Chinese might have some way of attacking with drones that is multi angled , I guess you would say, but what are your idea thoughts on that? I think we have to remember we have a blockade or we had and sanctions etc , but there is a rail line to China and, there is the Caspian Sea to the former Soviet Union, Russia . And they have been transporting things. And the suspicion is that although their traditional air defenses were humiliated last June and again March . They may have developed because we know the Chinese and the Russians and we know that from some of the things that they've supplied to the Russ ian front that Ukraine's Ukrainians have had experience with , that they have the ability to coordinate drones, not just send out a navigator, but a navigator can have a lot of launch drones by many people and then have an overall mastermind . And the idea is they're making sort of bee swarms in the area . How an F teen or an F fifteen or an F thirty five or any of these jets that cruise at about eight or nine hundred miles an hour and can get up to fifteen hundred how they would be vulnerable to this. I'm not sure because these are mostly slower drones and they could each outrun them. I think what they must be doing, they're hard to see and I don't know if they're they show up on radar or they're so small , but they make barricades in certain areas and so you get the impression he ran into them . The two pilots did. And they were they were shocked about it. And some people said they're aliens because it's a new thing. It's something to be aware of . But myself, if I've said that, although this agreement is a trajectory, it gives Trump a four month breathing space to get the gas down and to prepare for the midterms . It was fifty seven percent. Today, I think it was fifty eight percent favor this temporary memorand um so that the kinetic part is stopped, but he has to enforce it. And that means he has to hit them hard if they send missiles, which I think they will do at some point either to Israel or to the Gulf States , or they will use Hezbollah to break the memorandum, or they will try to secretly get out the enrichment. He's going to have to use force and that 's something to worry about because they seem to be able produce these or get them from Russia or China . And it's something we've got to worry about , but to remember they've I think they've flown thirty or forty thousand Sordies . So you're talking about one plane that went down that we know to enemy fire . I mean, there has been Apaches and a warthog , but the other ones were hit by Kuwait. The odd thing about this pilot, he was the one that was shot down by friendly viral over Kuwait . So he's first I think he's the first pilot since Vietnam to have lost two aircraft men , and he's still alive. He walked away from two down missile hitting his plane twice , two planes. Do you ever foresee in the future that there will be no pilots that will just be doing things by drones . I imagine that's how it must be. It's not even in the future . I was at a lecture a year ago by Larry Ellison, the oracle CEO , and there was sort of a doom and gloom in the room . Some of the speakers were very anti Trump , but he came up and I don't want to it was a confidential cl osed audience, but he gave one of the most upbeat appraisals of the United States I've ever heard. And he was talking about what the new cryptocurrencies , AI, robotics , marine drones, submarine drones, air drone, land drones . And he was talking about Gs on pilots, you know, eight nine G's or these things can go up to fifteen or twenty . And so he was he was very relieved that Silicon Valley and private entrepreneurs are stepping up despite the general impress ion they don't like Trump because they're mostly left wing . But they are developing things that are , I think, that will nullify this very quickly. The Israelis are already dealing with fiber optic drones that are very hard to stop. And this gets back to the main problem I have with the Tucker Carlson thesis as it relates not to Jews, which I think is reprehensible, but to Israel . And he suggests it's a one way deal. And you can see that all of these socialist candidates, one of their talking points is they do not want want any more relationship with Israel. In other words, they favor illiberal regimes in the Middle East that are either theocratic, dictatorial, or autocratic or communist. That's what they favor . But they don't understand that when we give these weapons three and a half billion dollars , and I say give them because we give them the money and then they buy the weapons from our people . And then they're I don't want to be anesth tic about killing people, but they're a laboratory in their wars. And then they call us we have people on the ground every day. So I'm sure that the Israelis in the United States and there's no better engineers in the world are now talking about how do you stop fiber optic cable little tiny strands of drones against the Israelis in Lebanon? How do you stop these swarms? And they'll find a solution very quickly , but it's a wonderful relationship as far as what we get out of it. And that's never mentioned by the critics of Israel. And we're certainly seeing the span or the spread of this new te chnology as we look at the Ukraine too. I never thought I would see the Ukraine on an offensive bombing things in Moscow, but they are. Nobody's really made much of that, but it seems it should be extraordinary. The Ukrainians are now . They have a million drone . And what it is is the Soviet Union is a command economy. It's not communist, but it's more like Hitler's national socialism. In other words, the dictator Putin, like Hitler picked captains of industry and said, You do this, you do this, you do this. And then he would interfere in what they were doing, and he wouldn't allow competition . Whether it was Mr People like Mr. Smith or Porsche, they were making weapons on spec for the regime, but there wasn't competitors . And sometimes it worked. I mean, the BF one hundred and nine was a good fighter, but really if you think about it over six years, the Germans developed the BF one hundred nine and the F W one hundred ninety and then just the jets , that was pretty impressive. But the United States was putting out one hundred thousand aircraft, Thunderbolts, mustangs , light bombers, B twenty six's, B twenty five's, B twenty nine's, but they didn't do any of that. And that's not a good paradigm to keep abreast of technology , a command economy. And so the other thing, we have a military history program meeting that I chair at Hoover in October . And one of the things that we're going to talk about is can Western nations who excel in technology in science, technology, engineering, and math . Why does that lead that they establish with these new weapons systems? Why is it so easily copied? How did Iran get near parity? How does North Korea get near parity and how did Ukraine get near parity with Russia? And the answer is that a couple of answers is in this globalized world, so much stuff is put out on the internet . And with the end of borders, we have no idea. I mean the architect of this Antifa attempt to kill Trump at the White House was an illegal alien. So we have no and then when you add into the equation, we have one point one million foreign students . And among them are three hundred thousand Chinese students and over one hundred fifty thousand from the Middle East . And they are not just at places where I used to teach Cal State Fresno, which has a good business school. They are at Harvard, Yale, MIT, Caltech, Stanford , and Georgia, Texas, A and M. And about five percent of them are appropriating that technolog y and sending it back daily to China. So it's very hard for a Western power to maintain that superiority when you have such diffusion now in this post modern globalized world and we're seeing that in Iran . I mean , they didn't invent anything that the drones that are they are making are very wise but they are adaptations from Western from general atomics or from remember we had a drowned latest model in Iran during the Obama administration. People begged him to destroy it. And he was afraid even to bomb an inert drone and they took it and that was the basis of reverse engineering some of their latest models. Yeah, and Donald Trump is a strident difference. He bombed their nuclear facilities quite easily too. It seems like, I mean, maybe our military is just super impressive and I 'm told that the Iranians now are reading art of the deal and talking to psychologists to figure out Trump because they can't figure him out. One day he talks about sending them to hell and the next day he says he's going to build a new Middle East and he loves Iran and wants to make it great again and there's moderate and they have no idea what he's doing. So the left says sees this as confusion . But when you read Art of the Deal and Art of the Comeback and for the new book, you know, the Counter Revolution, I went back and looked at those books and it's textbook Trump come in there and say all kinds of crazy things that confuse the partner and then storm out , say negotiations are off, say negotiations are doing well , demand one hundred percent. And then your whole agenda was to get fifty five. So when he says, they can't have drones, they can't give any money to Arab terrorists, they have to have regime change. They have to get rid of all their nuclear. We have to get rid of all this he just had that whole agenda, but nobody could achieve that agenda unless you were occupying and destroying Japan or occupying Germany or going and taking out the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and incurring seven thousand dead to occupy that country. But his point was if I can get them to open the strait and keep it open and have no nuclear enrichment, it was worth it. And so I think when they get criticized, they don't know what his technique because we've never seen it before. Yeah. Victor, don't give the enemy too many ideas about what happened. They have their own they have, I'm sure there was a academic at an American university and they called him up and said, we'll pay you a million dollars to come over here and psychoanalyze Trump for us. So I don't think they're Iranian psychologists. Iranian psychologists are Theocraft. Yeah, that's true. Well, Victor, let's welcome back to the show. One of our sponsors, Pure Health Research if you want to drop extra pounds, boost energy levels, and reduce swelling in your legs and feet, this message is for you. Pure Health Research is on a mission to make America healthy again two. And of their best sell ing health supplements are leading the way. First is liver health formula. Over one hundred million Americans have a sluggish liver riddled with fatty deposits. This can kill your metabolism, pile on the pounds , and make you feel tired. Liver health formula takes care of all that. It supports thriving liver health with special nutrients like artichoke extract and milk thistle. This is one of the easiest ways to slim down and revitalize your energy levels next is lymph system support . If you struggle with fluid buildup or swelling in your legs, ankles, or feet, this one's for you. The natural ingredients in lymph system support gent helply flush extra fluids and toxins out of your body. And right now for a limited time you can get thirty five percent off liver health formula and lymph system support along with all fifty plus health supplements pure health research has to offer. So head over to purehealth research . com that's pure healthresearch dot com and use the coupon code Victor at checkout. That's pure healthresearch dot com with a coupon code Victor to save thirty five percent on your order today. And we'd love to thank Pure Health Research for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show . So Victor, let's turn then to the House Bill that they've just passed to put restraints on Trump in his war in Iran , and I don't know a military campaign. I don't know what you can't really call it a war because he's now in the peace process. So has he escaped the War Powers Act by that peace process? What are your thoughts? The War Powers Act, if you read the Constitution , every president has considered it unconstitutional because it specifically says that the president is the commander in chief of the military and is in charge with protecting the security of its citizenry. Now that's broadly defined . That's number one . Number two , the War Powers Act then is from the House and I guess it's part of a budgetary. They can cut off funds or something like that. But they don't control the House . And so they have to get renegade Republicans, but the Senate can then, you know what I mean? It has to go back. And then if it is treated as a bill , it would have to be approved by the Senate. And it never is during the present war. During Bill Clinton's period, the Republicans thought about it, then they thought better of it . When Bill Clinton for seventy eight days in nineteen ninety nine bombed Milosevic to get him out of Kosovo , they talked about it Republicans, but they didn't do it. Did he go to Congress and say I went the Word Powers Act ? No, did they say you can't bomb Milosevic because of the war? No, did Obama is a good leptist when he said when Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice came to him and said, We have to join the French and the British and bomb Qadhafi because there's going to be an Arab spring and we're going to have a utopia in Libya . And so he bombed for seven months . He obliterated their ports, their TV stations, a lot of dual use targets. Did he ever ask for Congress for permission? No. Did they ever invoke the War Powers Act? No. So it's a partisan ploy. Three , it will have no effect because we're not at war . I mean, he had a forty day bombing campaign that came within the window of the War Powers Act sixty or ninety days, depending on how you define it. And then he stopped . And nobody would say nobody would have said to Barack Obama, you have five hundred and seventy drone assassination flights during your tenure. Each one of them you have to get permission from us because that's violation of the War Powers Act. By the way, killed a sixteen year old U . S. citizen in it. Nobody said a word. So this is very partisan and now we're in a peace. And so when you're in peace , all Trump will say is, well , we had a war power , we had a war and it came within the window of the War Powers Act. So it was over. That was called Iranian War one and now we're in if I have to do it again it'll be Iranian War Two, but it's not sustained. They're not going to have any look the people on the right are very people that I very I like a lot and admire and they, you know, like Mark Teson, for example, or Mark Levin, they're very angry about the deal . And I can see why there are things in there that are unrealistic, but it's not it's a trajectory, it's a parenthesis. It's an interim cessation . And I don't think they're going to be able to do much in four months, the Iraqis as far as building rebuilding their infrastructure. It's designed to get the price of oil down , get the Western Europe ans and our allies, Japan off our backs about a recession, keep the strait open , get oil down for our allies , went over public opinion. As I said, fifty seven percent of Americans support the cessation and the memorandum , and then hope for redistricting and red legislatures, the Supreme Court racial geramanding prohibition , let everybody see these candidates who they are don't fall for the socialist smile that seems to be the tr ademark of Talerico or Mandali and then look at their issues and they're very radical. They want to bring back the subsidies for the new Green Deal. They want open borders. They don't see any difference between citizenship and residency . They hate Israel, they want to disengage from Israel. They don't like Jews. It's open season on Jews in many places . In addition to that , they're going to bring back DI and racial fixation. The trans thing is their obsession as well. They all have thirty seventy issues. So expose those , count on the in count on out gerrymanding the gerrymanders count on whittling down these racial chauvinistic black caucus, Hispanic, all that stuff shouldn't be it's contrary to the Civil Rights Act . And then hope for the economy to kick in because the tax cuts, deregulation, foreign investment , energy development, that should all start to kick in slowly. And maybe by October the inflation will be down to it's already going down a little bit. Yeah . Well, Victor, let's change directions a little bit more radically. In Texas, there were nine Antifa terrorists that had attacked an IC facility on trial and they were tried and sentenced and they got a total nine of them, four hundred fifty years in federal prison. So we have gotten some convict ion on these Antifa thugs that have been out on the streets since wanna say Michael Brown, since George Floyd . Texas is not the ninth district federal court of San Francisco. It's not California . Don't mess with Texas. So if you go into Texas and you think that you're , let's say you're a high school teachers or a new in Portland or you're a nurse's aid in New York and you're going to go down to Texas and get on your little garb, your little black uniform and cover your face and get your little backpack with your mask and your breather and your little oxygen bottles and then you're going to have your weapons, your club or whatever you do, your shield . And then you're going to go out and you're going to go beyond insulting mostly middle class IC officers, hitting them, but you're going to try to kill them and they shot one in the neck . And they conspired to do it. And they crossed state lines. So it became a federal matter . And there hasn't been any state charges. I'm sure the Texas attorney generals say, well , well, yeah, we can get these guys and put them in their next life when they're dead. They'll do what they did to Trump when he was out of office. They'll try them. I'm just kidding, but they're going to be in prison. And this is very good because it'll be a deterrent. It will tell all these upper middle class pampered people that are in the professions or that you don't just go and try to kill somebody and think it's neat. And I mentioned in our last broadcast , I looked at that twenty fourteen interview with Bill Ayres , who was in the third row of the Obama dedication ceremony for his new library, and he was bragging about what he did, had no regrets , even though he and his wife were responsible for people being blown up . So they don't stop. They think that they're part they're privileged and they're part of the thinking classes, the intellectual classes, the upper professional classes , and they're very angry that people don't appreciate their geniuses . If you ask any of those antifa people, what do you really want and gave them a truth serum ? You know what they'd say? I want what Al Gore has. I want what Barack Obama I want what Tom Steyer has . That's what they would say. That's what they really want. They're privileged , but they can't get that given their talents, which are not very great . And so they want to kill people. So the direction of their animus goes into what they've been taught from the university . Universities I think the universities that I said before are like a granite boulder that we all sort of looked at a dist ance and it's a rock solid and a stem and all then you get a cow bar and you force it over and underneath it's a creepy mossy worm like all these creepy animals are underneath it. That's what the university is now. It indoctrinates people . When you look at those polls, the majority of Democrats, the vast majority, seventy five percent, don't have strong patriotic feelings of the United States , or when you hear Joey Reed or Sony Hausten say they're not going to really participate in the two hundred fiftieth july fourth anniversary , that came from the university And you know what? And they don't feel like they have to educate anymore because AI is going to do all of the brain work for these people. They can just indoctrinate them and send 'em out with their AI to be doctors or whatever because AI will do it all. I had children that went to school , two of them in the U system and one of them in the CSU system , and some of them had professors that I knew . So I said to them , So what was it like because I knew what the answer would be ? And they would say it was five minutes of ranning about at that time time Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush or George W. Bush . And then it was and then it was personal stories about themselves , how they were heroic, and they fought off and they were they were St. George and the and the assistant dean was the dragon and they were heroic and or they, you know, that's how they do it. And now if you think about it , you can sign up for free Hillsdale and you can get the best teachers. I'm not talking about my own classes at Hillsdale. I'm talking about other people. They have some brilliant people there and they're rigorous courses and it's free . And all the only thing about it is, do you really care whether you have a little BA ? It used to be Yes, Victor, because a person with a BA is analytical, they know how to write, they know how express themselves. They have a sensitivity to culture. They know what the Renaissance is. They know what classical Greece is. They know what the Pythagore Evid general no they don't anymore. It's all green this and DI and trans Latinx that. That's what they're taught. They don't know anything. So the degree means nothing . So why pay two hundred thousand dollars when you can say well I want to be an educated person. I want to be able to speak well. I'm a very good plumber, and I'm a very good electrician. I'm a very good drywall guy. But you know , I might not be able physically to do this when I'm sixty. So I'll just take some courses and be enlightened and then some of them I'll take for credit and I'll just stay home and I'll save all this money and at some point if I want to get a teaching credential or something I will just soar right through the classes . And I saw that when I was a professor at CSU. There were a lot of people came in and sat in my classes and they were from the trade group. And they were so much they were in their thirties and my students were eighteen to twenty five and they were so much better and they had never gone to college . But they knew things . They should just go back to as I said before, the university should have a class called freshman problems or my class was one of the best classes I ever took was senior problems in high school . Victor, here's how you write a check. Victor, if you're in the mountains and somebody falls, here's how you make a bandage out of your t shirt. Victor, if here's how you shake hands. No, you look the person in your eye, firm, but not too firm. Don't crush us, but don't be limp wristed. That's what they taught us. And nobody has that commonality of civic virtue or protocol or behavior. And the university's responsible for it. So they're up against it. There's declining demography. There's fewer and fewer students . They have raised the tuition three times the rate of inflation in the last thirty years . They've doubled or tripled the number of administrators. They've cut down on the teaching mode. The research is more and more esoteric and irrelevant and funded by left wing foundations in many parts. And so they don't bear any resemblance to the University of the Early sixties or fifties. And you forgot one last thing that they are putting out students that hate their own parents when they get out. They come in liking their parents and they go out hating their parents. So my dad said when I went to UC Santa Cruz I want to say something to you . I don't want you to come home on Thanksgiving and give us a lecture how we're clueless about and it was like filling the boxes , you know, about the Vietnam War or I don't want to hear about bougeoisie capitalists. All I want to hear is that I'm paying your four hundred fifty dollars registration fee every quarter . That was no tuition . And so I think every parent's nightmare is Thanksgiving and they send it off junior to college . And I've talked to so many parents and especially a number of Jewish American parents, they've written me or, you know, text me and it goes something like this . My son or my daughter has straight A's perfect SAT s, but could obviously why would I send her to Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Stanford where she'd be constantly harassed or he wouldn't be in some safe space you walked across or the Muslims people would, you know, chase him around when he could go to Vanderbilt or he could go, as I said, a Texas A and M or somewhere like that where it's Sane . And isn't it funny how the left keeps trashing the old Confederacy, Confederacy, Confederacy, southern states? And I just read that eleven southern states , eleven of the fifty states have a GDP that's number three in the world aggregate together . And isn't it weird that there are less censorship efforts in southern universities than northern s? And isn't it weird that blacks and whites get along better in southern universities than northern universities ? And isn't it weird that employers are now looking at southern tech programs , where they really do teach tech and they don't go to HR their graduates on the first day on the job . Human resources was the worst title and the worst thing we ever did. We could have just had in every corporation and university, the education, the employment bureau, here's your contract. If you have a grievance, here's the way you go. But instead it became oh I'm depressed. He looked at me in the wrong way. I know he's racist. You know, that kind of stuff . And it's going to go too. All of us , all of this depends on you have the money to do it. We don't the university they don't pencil out. Yeah , you know, I since you're mentioning that, I just read an article about UC Berkeley. It's law school. thirty seven percent of the students have a psychological disability thirty seven I think it was almost half. And they said that especially in law school They were comparing it to because they didn't have that exact statistic the law school but they had grad students in twenty twenty . Only three percent had claimed psychological disability. It's really funny . I have a good friend who's a master gutter installer and he's kind of slow now. So he came out and I have all these old buildings on the ranch that I never had enough money to protect . And when it rains, there were no gutters, so the water would pool and kind of rot the wood. So I've been trying to fix them even though I don't know what to do with them. I mean, they're a packing shed, a cold story, et cetera. But before I kick off, I'd like whoever's going to inherit this, my kids, they're going to sell it. I want it to be in good shape. So he's installing all the gutters and I have solar, but twenty two pigeons took over the solar roof on this packing shed . And I mean, they burrowed underneath the solar panels between the met al woof and the solar panels and they nested . They started with two and I said, Ah, there's just a pair . And now there's eleven pears, twenty two. So I was going to go up there and clean it off, and then I got whatever this last year I had cancer and they just kept I couldn't breathe. I didn't feel well and I didn't know it was cancer. So then I had it operate. So I couldn't do it. So he was doing this putting gutters and he said to me, Well, you have a terrible problem. I said, I know it. And he said, Let me go and look at it. So he looked up there and he said, Oh my gosh . I looked on the other side of the road and I climbed up to the pitch , the roof cat. And I looked down there and it looks like white cement . From the roof, four inches is solid and they burled out kind of little tunnels for their nest . And he said they don't even have room to like they used to . So before I put what would be the purpose of putting gutters on them as I get rid of them? So he went and developed his own little plastic pipe thing where he swish back and forth. First of all, I use a pressure washer and got it all damp, but it was pretty gross . And then he went and swished back and forth and knocked like a tail on an animal and just knocked it loose and then he got a blower and blew it off and then he pressure washed it and it was spot less. Then he put in wire mesh around the whole thing sixty by forty . What's the purpose of this? It was one hundred five degrees when he was doing this and he was up on a metal ro of, and I said to him, You got here at seven and now it's noon. Go home. No, I want to get this done for you. We got to get this done. They're destroying yourself. He worked for twenty hours over it. And I'm just looking at them every day, you know, and I thought you know, I used to do stuff like that. I would if I was well, but I thought and these people are at Stanford and a third of them say they they and have these beautiful dorms, they have coffee bars , they have all these leisured activities. They sail on Lake Laughanida . They're pampered. They're all from wealthy pampered families and they're all thinking they're depressed and life's too rough. And this guy's out here trying to make a living and support a family of six . It's just and I think that's why people have no patience with university. They're hard working Americans, and they don't have that , you know , that's the only thing that saved me from being one of those. It wasn't my character, it wasn't my brains, nothing. I would have been just like them. The only thing that saved me every morning I got up on a farm and I saw my brother and my cousin working and my father . And then I went to university twenty eight miles away and I saw a whole different world. And then when I went to Stanford, I saw it was two years over there as a visiting professor at the center and I came home every week and now I'm doing the same for twenty one years . And the divide, the schizophrenic divide , it grounds you . Because you see people in the real world who are very smart and you're told at the university they're very stupid . And then you see people in the real world who are versatile and self reliant and can make or do anything as Americans. Then you go to the university and you see these hot house plants that would wilt once they got out of their greenhouse. What about those people that cross over like your surgeon , for example, he's in there for eight hours trying to save your life and that is got to be hell. Like imagine the stress of doing all that. That's a good question. And I had this discussion with a professor of medicine who was like that . And she gave me a typology because I said to her , I've had two or three thoracic surgeons talk to me and then I met, you know, I know the one that saved my life for now . And they're not like academics. She said, They're cowboys. And I said, What do you mean? She said, I mean that in a good sense . How many people can cut your chest open and be one millimeter, two millimeters from there all the branches of the pulmonary artery and can take out a whole lobe and not spill the cancer into your body cavity and get it out in time so at seventy two you don't die. I mean, I had problems, but it wasn't necessarily the surgeon's problem. Were there other problems that caused it? So my point is , yes , they're meant they're people of action, surgeons and oncologists , but they're not really professors . I mean , I don't know. I just don't think I think the worst thing that happened at the University separated itself. In World War two, we didn't do that from society. The president of Harvard was involved in weapons systems for the US war effort. It was I thought you mentioned to me that your surgeon actually had been an engineer originally or something he had or not but I know that he had to be an engineer to engineer that and when a couple of surgeons called me and said, How did you do? I introduced themselves . They said it's a very tricky operation to take out the right lo lower be for somebody seventy two with a seven centimeter mass in it . And you can get a fib, you can get anemia, you can get two operations. You can to have I had all those two percent chances, but anyway. Yeah, I really admire surgeons and doctors and oncologists. I really do. I mean, some of them can be I've had some in my Odyssey the last two years that are not very sympathetic to patients and that's because they have so many of them . So when you go and say to somebody , well, with all due respect , if you staged it at three or four, I only have forty five percent chance of surviving two years . But if you stage it at one aid three as Grock said , I have seventy percent yes , that's possible . However , we can't change the staging . So that's how they have to be. You know, everybody is looking for , I don't know, a pathway or sunshine or optimism . Nobody ever says , well, look at the odds, I'm going to die. Ben Sas said that. He said, I'm going to die. He had pancreat, advanced patty crack. And even when he said he was going to die , they found out that the mutation that was untreatable , they had just developed immunotherapy. So he went down to MD Anderson and he's alive . And that's wonderful . And I don't know what the ultimate prognosis is, but he's fighting like crazy and he survived that really difficult . So a lot of it's your attitude, but they have to be stone cold because if they say hey Victor , you're cancer free. Everything went great and then I get cancer and then I go, but you told me I was cancer free and now I'm not like a stitch. And then if they said , You're dead , and then I said , But I'm alive with three years. And they said, Well, that's great. We compliment you. You came over You see what I mean? Psychologically it's they can't be too they have to be a fine line . They can't say nah, you're dead. Sorry to hey like they're in the what's that? Yes I mean they can't say, you know, I don't want to be you you later, Alligator. They can't do that , but they can't be overly optimistic and they can't be overly pessimistic. They have to follow the evidence. I don't want to quote Dr. Fauci follow the sign . And pretty much they do that. Okay, Victor, we better get to Barack Obama and Thomas Jefferson. So stay with in today. Yeah, we'll go for a break and then we'll be right back . We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal , but they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. But among these are life, liberty , and the pursuit of happiness . But to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men , deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends , it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as shall to them seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness . For the support of this declaration for the firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives , our fortunes, and our sacred honor . Sacred Honor, the declaration that defines a nation . Presented by the Daily Signal, premiering on YouTube july second, twenty twenty six . Welcome back. Victor Davis Hansen in his own words, you can catch Victor on X. His handle is at VD Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup. So go ahead, take it away, Victor Regen. Well, I can be very short with Barack Obama because there's nothing to talk about. I mean , the new presidential library, I've told, doesn't really have a lot in it . Michelle said we should be impressed during her speech . She was very angry, of course . Of course, he had to trash the founders and said the founders kind of failed because the Declaration of Independence didn't end slavery . I can go on, but I won't on that . She said he had basically three or four achievements . One was getting the Nobel Prize, as I said, he didn't do anything . He admitted he didn't do anything. It was kind of a reward for being the first black president from left wing Scandinavian . And then Obamacare , and as I said, about seventeen or eighteen percent are in it. I think everybody has the same story . They had United Health or Blue Shield or Edna, whatever it was. Before Obama tampered with it, it was affordable . And after he tampered with it , it was either bureaucratically impossible or I can just remember that it used to be if you had two health care plans and you were willing to pay the premium, they would overlap, you know what I mean? And you'd have one hundred percent. So I had one from Cal State and one from my retirement, one from Stanford. As soon as Obamacare came in , it was like, you pay, no, you p aid, no, you paid, no, you pay. No, they were fighting and they neither would pay. Well, this was the primary. No, you're the primary. I'm the secondary . And then you would see your dog to it used to be hi, Victor, come on in and looked you in the eye. Here's what we're going to do. And then it was like, Oh my gosh, I have to fill out this computer thing and I have to and he would just type, you know , and they look he'd try to talk to you why they were typing because it was all going to be digital ties . I don't know why they don't just use your iPhone and record the whole thing, you know what I mean? My doctor records now so she can just talk to me and then she can put it into text on the record. Yeah, they should do that. But everything about it, and I kind of blame John McCain for that because when Trump tried to repeal it, they had the votes and he had run for Senator on repealing Obamacare . And they had a substitution for it . And he was carried in, I think. You know, he was in the late stages of illness, and he voted against it just out of a spite for Trump and gave us the Obamacare because it was going to be repealed . So that was that. And then she said all of his foreign policy, like the Iran deal . They enriched during the Iran deal. The reason that they had sixty percent in Obama's Trump second term was not because Trump got out of it, because they had the mechanism at any time to do it because they were creating their whole subduge pro plot all during Obama the Iran deal. So there was no there was no accomplishments, but there was one accomplishment. We came in very quickly to the Obama era in two thousand nine with race starting to be incidental to who we are. And he had said in two thousand four, I think it was in Boston. There is no red state. There is no blue state. There's no black, there's no we're all the United States of America . And what did he do? He first of all, during the campaign , who said this , we cry and we try and they always raise the bar on us no matter what we do . That was Michelle Obama. I never was proud of this country till they nominated Barack . This is a downright mean country. And then they said, You know what? She's going to lose you the campaign. She's a angry, spiteful person , table her. And they put her on ice . And then he was a socialist and they said, No socialism, please, please. And every once in a while they would say , remember Joe the plumber ? I just wanted to spread the wealth a little bit. And then was it Tito the builder? Yeah, he was a construction. He had like four employees. I love that guy. He was great. And he gave him the little socialist Obama did he came on TV all the time as angry. He would say, oh, they want to the socialists want to put you in your little corner and give you a little pittance. That's a horrible system. That's what it is pointing. But they kept that. And then when they got in it was off to the races. We had the Beer Members the Beer summit Obama said that the police always stereotype and then even the Liberal Washington Post disposal that lie that police shoot unarmed blacks at a higher propensity of the pull of arrested suspects. They didn't, quote . And then he Trey Ballen was the son I never had . And then he went on his apolog y tour starting to autocratic turkey Erdogan, he started talking about all of our sins that we have done. Those prayer breakfasts he always would go into a da da da da da da. And then Ferguson rem ember that, he tried to gin that up . And he tried one time to say that young black men should be more responsible and be fathers. And then they shot him down, Jesse Joe, everybody, and he said, I'm not going there again. So he really created the worst thing he did in conclusion is he redefined race in America. It was a historic binary between the white majority and the black minority and trying to come to terms with , you know, slavery and then Jim Crow in the South. Of course, they never said that there was California was a free state. They never talk about that, but we were making progress. We had affirmative action. The great society, whether you like it or not, had transferred twenty two trillion dollars to poor people through entitlement program s . And with all of that , he redefined race and said, No, no, no, no, it's not black white. It's anybody it's not white. We're not just twelve percent of the pop ulation . We've got a lot of people from India. We got a lot of people from Egypt. We got a lot of people from Korea. We got a lot of people from China. We got a lot of people from Mexico, Ecuador . You know what you all have in common? You all have been expl oited by white people. So we're going to call you diversity, equity, inclusion. And now we are thirty two percent of the population . And don't worry about class. Mr. Mandami, you can be a multi millionaire, you can come from your Uganda settler family, colonial family doesn't matter . There was a woman just recently that posted in London how don't celebrate the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of America, how awful it is . And I saw her name and sure enough she was from the Indian subcontinent, whether Muslim, Pakistan, like Mandami, I get Mandami's Muslim, so it comes from, I guess, more Pakistan than India . But she was from Uganda. And I thought to me, you're lecturing me from England about how horrible my country is because it's racist, this, that, that , when your family have no problem immigrating to Uganda to a black population in which you were able to, if I could use your own terms, siphon off capital and have a great life that sent you to Oxford . And you're talking to us about the Israelis settler colonists . So that's what he did. And now we have oppressed oppressor victimized victimizer, and we're stuck with it. And racial relations if you see with Carmello, Carmelo Anthony , you've got a whole movement that sees the facts and doesn't care . Day after day, you see people say, I don't care . He's black, he's my tribe and white is your tribe and we're not going to look at the evidence . So and by the way if Mr Poor Mr Metcalf had killed Calarma Anthony and survived and stabbed him in the heart with a knife, the city's right today would be in flames. They would. So his legacy is he made racial relations just to get political advantage for himself and his agenda much worse. And now he's got to live with it. As far as Thomas Jefferson to finish , along with Alexander Hamilton, he was the brightest, most versatile Renaissance man of the founders . And he was president for eight years . Vice president under John Adams, under the old system, the second person who came in an election , the second candidate became vice president, even though their parties were very different. He was a state's writer , so you have people in the Confederacy who claimed him, Jefferson Davis, named after him . And you had people in the North who said no, he was a person who wrote the Declaration of Independence. All men are created equal, so he was a champion and he had other items other points in the Declaration that wanted to abolish slavery . But the Committee of Five, John Adams supported him and two other Franklin probably supported him, but there were two others who were from the north . They said the southern pressure was too much and you'd have a war. It's important to remember because Obama attacked Jefferson for that or attacked the founders . And they did not want a fragmented thirteen nations and the British picking them off one by one. So they said, let's just swallow our differences for a generation till we get this act together and then we'll deal with it. But they never could deal with it because it was antithetical to the Declaration because of Jefferson . He was a great architect, Monticello , it was a brilliant architectural . He was an inventor. He was like Franklin and he was a farmer . He was from an old Virginia family, very aristocratic. He inherited five thousand acres, he inherited more money from his wife who was very wealthy . He had slaves . He ed them on his death and he was in his thirty, he was only thirty two when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Think of anybody thirty two today. They live in their basement . He was a brilliant stylist. He was our envoy often to France , he was a Franco Phil. He had weaknesses. He , unlike Adams and others, he had a soft spot for the French Revolution. And he missed that, the nature of what it would ultimately end in. Wait a second, didn't he still have a soft spot for it when it was fully known how many people were killed in the French Revolution? I think he was still in support of , even though there was over two hundred thousand people . Yes . But there's two Jeffersons. There's a Jefferson of the radical Jefferson, the redhead radical young young thirty to fifty , twenty five to fifty. And then there's the last thirty two years. He was born, I think in seventeen forty six and he died in eighteen twenty six just a few hours before Adams who said, Jefferson lives, but he wasn't , that was kind of odd. The two founders died on the fourth of July and the same within a few hours of each other . And they were friends at the end, not really friends. Adams wanted to be friendlier with Jefferson than Jefferson wanted to be friendlier . But so and he had a hand in the Constitution. I think we would not have had a bill of rights. When he looked at the Constitution, he insisted he was more influenced than the other founders who were influenced by John Locke, and he was influenced as well, but he had a soft spot for the French enlightenment, which was very different, Rousseau Voltaire , that was very unrealistic and sort of therapeutic . I can't write the great thinkers off so simply, but they were different than Adam Smith or David Um, or John Locke . And his wife died tragically after ten years and she had I think seven or eight children. Only two of them survived . And then his daughter that survived died at thirty . They said he just walked around circles for days . So he only really after all those births and his wife died probably from diabetes and And he had all of these slaves. So the argument is he had an affair with Sally Hemmings, his personal servant, and he had five or six children . She was African American. There's still controversy because you can't determine by the DNA whether his brother was involved, whether he was also at times or he was. I think the evidence might suggest he was more than his brother but on circumstantial evidence . But it can't be proven as the left says . And then when you look at his correspond ence , he became more and more and more pragmatic and conservative as he got older. So by the time he's seventy , and he's still, you know, still writing , he is saying that he's still for abolition . We're talking about the eighteen fifteen, twenties you know ? I'm still for abolition, but I'm worried how to do it. And we'll have a civil war because people were getting polarized over the issue. But my point is he became a pragmatic person where he was an idealist earlier . So there is two Jeffersons. A lot of I just wrote an article for the Hoover Institution called Jefferson the Agrarian . And he said when America's piled up in the cities it will be morally bankrupt. It won't work. And he envisioned a permanent class of agrarians with forty acres. How willistic is that at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution ? Then he went to France and then he saw the wars of eighteen twelve and the French Napoleonic wars . And then he said, wait, wait, wait, we have to have industry and manufacturing . And so we want agrarians and we want small businesses and industry. So he changed . But he thought that agrarianism anneling Hesiod and Theophrastus and the Elder Cato, that agrarianism made moral people . Anyway, that's our third president. Yeah, we bet we have to we have a hard stop, but we got to finish we got a last segment here. So let's go to some messages and then we'll come right back for our last segment. Stay with us. Hey, I'm Bradley Devlin. And just like you , I'm a huge fan of Victor Davis Hansen. Whether it's his long form podcast, Victor Davis Hansen in his own words, or his short form content for the Daily Signal, Victor Davis Hansen in a few words, I always leave an episode lear ning something new. I think they forgot the nineteen eighty two Falklands Ward. And in the age of clickbait and rage bait, that's a really good feeling, right? The media, thank you. You can leave now. And if you agree, you might like my show , the Daily Signals long form interview podcast called The Signal Sit Downs. 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 policy making process from an unabashedly and unapologetically conservative perspective. And that's important now more than ever, especially with the Trump administration back in office because in twenty twenty four, you sent Washington a message it couldn't ignore. It's your government and together we're taking it back. So check us out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, we're there too. And drop me a follow on X at Bradley Devlin to stay updated with what's happening on the signal to him. Welcome back, Victor Davis Hansen, in his own words. So Victor, let's just look quickly because the New York primaries are had and Mondami's candidates , Valdez was one of the woman's last names. And then Chevalier . Both of 'em have won the Democratic nomination for the seats. And I was and they are out on a victory tour . This is a great thing for socialism and communism in America because they are stridently socialist communists. They are stridently anti police, defunding the police and anti will see if their success in a local liberal state transforms itself into a national movement that can win the presidency or even a statewide Senate race. I'm not sure Puerto Rico's going to win Texas . I'm not sure El Said would even win Liberal Michigan . Well, do you what about hold on? What about Plattner? He also is in the news this week for saying Susan Collins quote voted to send him to Iraq. And when she voted to do that, it was two thousand three and he wasn't in the military until two thousand four. So he's just mister One Lie after the other. And yeah. The problem is that Susan Collins gave an interview the other day and she had some elements of Biden esque aging . So she's kind of like a Diane Feinstein institution, but she's been there a long time. And he's playing on that now and saying that she's, you know , everything he says is the lie. It really is. And he always gets angry when people call him on it. He's not the smiling socialist like Telagrico. He has the different type of the angry Bernie Sanders and Talib and AOC he's the other side of socialism . He's not going to try to win you over with his fake smile . And then the last he's a very dangerous person, Clapman. Yeah, he does seem to be 's a very strange person to write along with Talarico and just this week Talarico has or an interview came out of Talarico that in twenty twenty one he said that there he his favorite one of his favorite authors that have got him really connected to the book was a theologian who was trans queer Latinx theology and now that's come out. And I just can't see Talerico get into Latin. He's not going to do it in Texas. I think he just won't be in that interview, he said he got to a point where he hated Christianity. How can you won't win in Texas by saying your main cause is transgenderism and you hate Christianity And anyway , I have a doctor's appointment in five minutes, ten minutes. Okay. All right, Victor, so we are at the end of the show, just a couple of handwritten notes to you. I learned something new in every podcast , letting me letting me know you and your family and making me laugh at your stories and making me so sad with others. And that was from Mary Ann Houston. And then also some of these are from longer letters, but a whoo, what was his Michael Fiona says, You are a hope and a light for us all and knowledge the knowledge you share and your passion to share it, delivering it all in a way that even someone like me can understand inspires me to look further and do my own research. And so thank you, Michael Fiona . And that is the end of the show. We're on a hard break here. Thanks to everybody for joining us on this Saturday, and thank you, Victor for your wisdom. Thank you very much for listening and watching everyone . This is Sami Wink and Victor Davis on and we're signing off . Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share and su,bscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at Victorhansen. com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition