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VICTOR DAVIS HANSON | The End of Everything (Ep. 637)

August 20, 2024 51m 23s Full transcript available
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON | The End of Everything (Ep. 637)
0:00 / 51m 23s
In this episode, I sit down with Victor Davis Hanson to tackle the chaos engulfing America and the world. We dive into pressing issues like the Middle East, the upcoming election, and the Southern border, all while addressing the deep state and the consequences of our current leadership.
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1:20 This is an indaunted life a man's podcast.
1:24 I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
1:26 Let's get into it.
1:27 All right, guys.
1:28 We've got a special guest on the podcast today.
1:29 His name is Victor Davis Hanson, so he's an American classicist, military historian and
1:33 conservative political commentator who has provided commentary for The New York Times,
1:37 the Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Washington Times and many others.
1:40 He's also the senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a visiting
1:45 professor at Hillsdale College.
1:46 He's also the author of many, many books, including two of his latest books, The Case
1:49 for Trump and The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation.
1:53 If you've ever watched The Tucker Carlson show back when he was on Fox News, he would
1:57 be a contributor on that quite a bit as well.
1:59 But in this interview, I took a little bit of a different tack than I do in normal interviews
2:02 because normally with an interview, I'll read the person's latest book or last couple
2:05 of books.
2:06 Then we really dig into the content of that book and we go into specific quotes and we
2:09 go really, really deep, but Victor provides a lot of commentary about a lot of different
2:14 subject matters, not just the stuff that he writes about.
2:17 What I did is I just put a list of all the things going wrong in America, in the world.
2:22 And I'm like, we're just going to start digging into these different subject matters.
2:24 And so we start light.
2:26 We talk about the Middle East.
2:27 Okay.
2:28 So we talk about what's going on there.
2:29 How did it get here?
2:30 Why piece through strength is actually a really, really good idea.
2:33 Then we get into the discussion of the November election, obviously with Kamala Harris going
2:37 against, you know, not technically going against Joe Biden, but going against Donald
2:41 Trump and what that could look like for the country, what we can expect if either one
2:45 of them is elected.
2:46 We talked about the Southern border.
2:47 We talked about the deep state.
2:49 I got his opinion as to whether or not the assassination in Tampa, Donald Trump was kind
2:53 of more of an inside job than it wasn't.
2:55 And then at the end, I kind of teed him up to talk about, Hey, what's the subject matter
2:59 that people aren't talking enough about that you think we should be talking more about?
3:02 So you want to stick around for that?
3:03 But guys, without further ado, let's get into it.
3:07 Victor Davis, handsome.
3:08 Welcome to adult to life of man's podcast.
3:10 Thank you for having me.
3:11 I am so excited to have you on here.
3:13 I've wanted to have you on here for a very long time and the thing is I was trying to
3:17 find the right time and the right subject matter to actually tee you up to talk about.
3:22 But the thing is, is the news cycle that we are currently living in, I feel like we've
3:26 been living in for the last several years is so crazy and turns over so often that if
3:30 it's all right with you, we're not going to do my normal cadence, which is, okay, let's
3:34 read the book and let's really dig into certain quotes.
3:36 There's a lot of subject matters going on on the planet right now and this episode will
3:40 come out here in another week or two.
3:42 If it's good with you, let's just launch into all these different topics.
3:45 Yeah, you're the host.
3:46 Go ahead.
3:47 Anything's fine with me.
3:48 Okay.
3:49 Well, we're going to start easy.
3:50 We're just going to find a soft place to land.
3:53 So let's talk about the Middle East.
3:54 Okay.
3:55 So obviously there's a powder keg over there right now.
3:58 As it sits right now, again, this will come out in a couple of weeks.
4:01 Iran is obviously very flummoxed and flustered by some of the things that Israel has done.
4:07 Obviously every leftist in America is saying that, you know, Israel is basically being
4:11 the bad guy and they're increasing the temperature of what's going in the Middle East.
4:15 Obviously, the Middle East is a myriad of contexts and a myriad of different conflicts
4:20 kind of in this witches brew that is really hard to understand.
4:24 But from where you sit right now, what is your read of what's going on in the Middle
4:29 East and specifically how America can influence what will go on in the near future?
4:35 Well, Jake Sullivan said right before the October 7th massacres at the Middle East
4:41 portfolio was his calmest and what he was really saying, he didn't want to articulate
4:46 it was that under Trump, Iran was neutered.
4:52 It had lost $100 billion in revenue.
4:55 We were out of the Iran deal.
4:57 We had declared the Houthi appendage terrorists.
5:00 We cut off Hamas in the Palestinian Authority and we killed Soleimani.
5:07 We killed Baghdadi.
5:09 We moved the embassy to Jerusalem.
5:13 We told the al-Qaeda, Syrian, Assad, people, all of those people that the Golan Heights
5:18 was going to be Israeli.
5:20 So according to the left's logic, that should have caused a war.
5:25 But it didn't.
5:26 It had the opposite effect.
5:27 And that's because Iran is an opportunistic bully.
5:31 And any time they see us distance ourselves from Israel and pander to Iran, they interpret
5:42 that left-wing magnanimity as weakness to be exploited rather than to be reciprocated
5:47 and kind.
5:48 That's just the way they think.
5:50 So right now, we have turned on the oil, speak its for them, they're flushed with cash.
5:57 They're a new ally of China and Russia because of the Ukraine war.
6:02 And the only problem, the only hesitation they have is they are baffled about certain developments.
6:08 And one of them was they sent over 300 missiles and drones and none of them hit a target.
6:15 They don't know quite how the Israelis are killing all of their top people and not just
6:21 in Gaza, they're killing them in Beirut, they're killing them in Damascus, they're
6:24 even killing them in Tehran, and they know that that could not happen unless people within
6:29 their regime are working for Assad.
6:33 And that really scares them because Nasserallah, Khamenei, all of those people think if they're
6:38 killing these people and we retaliate with a massive show of force, they're going to
6:44 kill us too.
6:46 And for now, they're testing the waters is what I'm trying to say.
6:50 And finally, they're looking at the presidential election and they think there's a window of
6:56 opportunity.
6:57 They feel that last time Trump was too unpredictable, he was too confident in the United States'
7:04 ability to strike back and they feel that there's a 50/50 chance he'll be president.
7:10 So they feel that at least for now, they've got three months before the election and they've
7:17 got three months after the election and in that six month period, they feel they're never
7:23 going to get an opportunity again to see such disarray or passivity in Washington.
7:28 And so I think it's going to be very dangerous.
7:30 They're going to try to do something.
7:32 But they're still unsure because they can't quite figure out what Israel is up to.
7:37 And the Israelis for their point of view is we can't count on the United States.
7:40 We've got enough weapons.
7:41 We're stockpiling them and we're going to go ahead no matter what they tell us.
7:45 They're very smart because they said we're going to kill some people that have killed
7:49 Americans that had bounties and that'll embarrass the Biden administration.
7:53 They'll have to condemn us, but then they'll be condemning people that they themselves
7:57 put a bounty on.
7:58 So this administration is probably the most anti-Israel that I've seen in my lifetime.
8:07 And yet I think if you look at everything across the map, Israel's in a pretty good position.
8:13 That's counter to what most conventional wisdom says.
8:17 But if they get in a war with Hezbollah, Beirut will be worse than it was in 2006.
8:24 And the economic minister of Lebanon said it took them 20 years.
8:29 It will take them 20 years to recover and they haven't yet.
8:33 So they know that.
8:34 And so we'll see what happens.
8:37 Yeah, I would certainly echo the sentiment that this is the most anti-Israel administration
8:41 that we've seen probably certainly since the Obama administration and potentially what
8:44 we could see with a Harris and now Walsh administration.
8:49 Something that I try to do whenever I'm doing these intellectual exercises or trying to
8:52 evaluate different ideologies or philosophies is I do try to steal man the opposite side.
8:59 And so Victor, I've tried my very best in my limited mental capacity to steal man the
9:06 people that are anti-peace through strength to steal man that ideology.
9:11 But again, I'm fairly young in my attention span in terms of what's happened.
9:16 My first election that I voted in was in 2004.
9:19 Obviously, you've seen a lot more regimes and how they've operated in the international
9:24 space.
9:25 So is there a way to steal man people that are anti-peace through strength or is it just
9:30 basically vapid nonsense?
9:33 Well, as it applies to the Middle East, Obama came up with this idea because he didn't
9:39 like Israel and he favored Muslim countries and he was a community organizer.
9:46 And all three of those positions fueled kind of a crackpot idea.
9:50 But his idea was that if you tilt it toward an axis of Tehran, Damascus, Beirut, Gaza,
10:01 West Bank, he liked that because it filtered in with his underdog idea that these were
10:07 the Shia, these were the Persians in Iran.
10:10 They had always been the on low on the Islamic totem pole that she has had.
10:16 The Persians were always at odds with the Arabs.
10:19 He could not stand Saudi Arabia and the moderate Gulf States and Israel.
10:24 In his way of thinking, he was going to create tension between these two blocks.
10:31 And that would mean that we wouldn't let Israel tell us you guys have to help the only democracy
10:36 in the Middle East.
10:37 They would say, you know, we're going to stand back and then these two forces will be at
10:43 each other's throat.
10:45 And from time to time, we will step in and adjudicate as the puppeteer.
10:51 And that just completely obliterated any reality that this one regime, this terrorist regime
10:59 in Tehran was responsible for 90% of the deaths and killing in the Middle East and killing
11:05 Americans with shape charges in Iraq.
11:08 And it also obliterated the idea that Israel was the only liberal democracy constitutional
11:15 system in the Middle East.
11:17 And so that's where all this started.
11:21 If you go back to the Clinton administration or even earlier, the Carter administration,
11:26 Carter had some anti-Israeli feelings, obviously, but there was pretty much a bipartisan consensus
11:33 since the '67 war that Israel was a unique country in the Middle East and it echoed our
11:41 values and it was incumbent upon us, especially in the Cold War as a proxy.
11:46 But even after the Cold War, that it was smart to help Israel and check radical Islamic
11:52 terrorism and radical Islamic states.
11:55 And once we adopted that position, we had certain advantages.
12:00 We were able to flip the Egyptian government from Nasser to Mubarak.
12:04 We were able to flip Jordan.
12:06 We were able to get the Gulf kingdoms on our side.
12:10 And then that was superseded with the Abrams Accords, which said, you guys not only can
12:15 be neutrals, you can be allies of Israel because you have a common enemy in Iran.
12:22 And then that blew up the Obama paradigm.
12:25 And now we have found out, I think, over the last four years that Joe Biden was a puppet
12:30 of veneer, a waxing figure.
12:32 And he was coronated in March of 2020 when mysteriously the front runners, Bernie Sanders,
12:39 Pete Buttishig, a little bit of war and all were forced out, almost like dominoes.
12:45 In a week, Biden hadn't won a single primary, then he won South Carolina.
12:50 They said, he's our veneer.
12:51 We'll have a third Obama term, kind of a coup.
12:54 And then when he was not able to fill that function any longer, it was too embarrassing
12:58 that same group of players got rid of him.
13:02 And so my point is they are the people in control.
13:05 It's mostly the Obama people.
13:07 When they're running Harris's campaign now, yeah, that's what I've, I've seen in, let's
13:13 go ahead and switch into talking about that because when, when Donald Trump was shot,
13:20 when the attempted assassination did not actually happen, I think most political pundits are
13:24 like, this is over, like this is done with.
13:27 But then as we've seen over the last several weeks, the mainstream media in a very coordinated
13:32 effort has created out a Kamala Harris and Obama light-esque figure who is not going
13:38 to be put in front of a microphone to answer any difficult questions and they're going
13:42 to do everything they can to try to shine her up.
13:44 But you know, as, as we've seen throughout, throughout history, you can only shine up
13:47 a turd so much.
13:48 But the thing is, is Biden hid in his basement and became president.
13:53 Kamala Harris can certainly do the exact same thing.
13:56 And the media will allow her to do so, but elections have consequences.
14:00 We just got through talking about a lot of the consequences that came from an, you know,
14:03 an impotent national security and, you know, foreign policy.
14:08 And so my concern, Victor, is that no matter what happens in November that the country's
14:13 going to burn.
14:14 Now I know conservatives aren't typically the ones that destroy things, conservatives
14:18 are the ones that build the things so they know what it takes to build it so they don't
14:21 destroy it so easily.
14:23 But if Donald Trump wins, that means orange hitlers back in the White House democracies
14:27 over with all these types of things in the, you know, George Floyd summer will look like
14:31 a picnic.
14:32 But also I think there's so much angst and anxiety on the right right now about them
14:38 worrying about stealing the election again and Trump's definitely going to win.
14:41 But what if he doesn't?
14:43 What is your read about what happens in November, depending upon who ends up taking the White
14:47 House back?
14:49 Well, the elections going to be decided, I think, in just Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
14:59 I think for all of the loss of traction in Georgia, Arizona and Nevada that Trump will
15:06 still win those states.
15:09 I think he's got a good chance.
15:11 That means that you're talking about Midwestern states and we just learned this morning in
15:18 a colossal blunder that Kamala Harris excluded Josh Shapiro.
15:23 He's very popular.
15:24 I don't know why he's very popular.
15:26 He's a leftist, but he was very successful in posing as a moderate and he won an election.
15:33 He won an election as attorney general.
15:34 He beat Republicans in Pennsylvania.
15:37 And now not only is he not going to be a player to get that swing state, but there's
15:42 going to be moderates and independents are going to be angry that she didn't pick him
15:46 because he was Jewish and she vowed a radical of Muslims in Michigan.
15:50 And I don't know if she's going to pick them up for doing that.
15:53 And then the second thing is about election fraud in November, we're going to still see
15:59 in these states the effects of the 2020 kind of stealthy campaign to change the voting laws
16:05 in all these states.
16:07 The Republicans didn't try to stop but they didn't know what was going on.
16:10 But when the effect of all those, whether it was ballot curing, third party ballot harvesting,
16:19 10 days after the election, suddenly a mail in ballot was still valid if it was mailed
16:24 in, partial names were okay, addresses didn't have to match.
16:28 Sometimes a registrar's list didn't match the mail.
16:31 All of that stuff gave the Democrats an enormous advantage because 70% of the people in these
16:37 states didn't vote on election day.
16:40 But there are a few things that give me hope.
16:43 And one of them is it looks like the black vote might be as high as 15 to 18%.
16:51 Even with Kamala Harris, the Latino vote in places like Las Vegas or Nevada might be 45%.
16:59 So you're going to have a lot of constituents in these big cities like Detroit, like Milwaukee,
17:09 like Pittsburgh, like Philadelphia, that you didn't have last time.
17:13 And their guy is Trump and they're going to be working with the ballots.
17:17 The other thing is Trump is a little bit wiser now.
17:21 And he knows when Mark Zuckerberg gives $419 million as he wants to help ballot integrity,
17:28 he means just the opposite.
17:30 So everybody knows that Zuckerberg and Bloomberg and all these people are going to give money
17:35 and try to warp the election by absorbing the work of registrars.
17:38 So they're a little bit more savvy.
17:42 And the other thing is Trump himself, for most of the time, is a lot more disciplined
17:49 and he's got people around him that are much more astute than he did in 2016 or 2020.
17:55 So if he hits, if he is elected, he's not going to appoint people like a John Kelly or
18:03 a Jim Mattis or people in Homeland Security that are not on the agenda.
18:11 And more importantly, people that I like, I've met them.
18:14 They're fine.
18:15 Steve Bannon and I don't know Omarosa or Scaramucci, but these people were not suitable for those
18:21 types of jobs.
18:22 They were liabilities.
18:24 So he's not going to have those types of problems.
18:27 So I think if he can stop the voter fraud, he has a good chance of winning the electoral
18:32 college and yes, they will protest.
18:36 But this time, Trump knows that the FBI hierarchy, the CIA hierarchy, the Secret Service hierarchy,
18:44 the Capitol Police hierarchy, the Pentagon hierarchy have to be, to the extent their
18:49 political appointments, they have to be replaced because, and I think he will understand that.
18:55 I mean, every day we realize that the FBI or the, today the Secret Service basically announced
19:01 that the cocaine that was found in the White House, the director of the Secret Service,
19:08 she, he tried to destroy the evidence and career Secret Service people prevented that.
19:13 So I think there's a, he's a little bit more prepared.
19:18 What the left tried to do very successfully was they basically sent the nation a message.
19:25 If you're a rioter or the 14,000 that were arrested in 2020 and you looted or even killed
19:31 or hit policeman, you got exempt.
19:34 If you were at the Capitol, you're facing four or five years and your local community
19:39 has ostracized you, your name is in your local paper, you lost your job and they tried to
19:45 send a message that we can demonstrate against Trump, you can't demonstrate against anything.
19:54 And so that's something to be worried about because there's a lot of people are very angry
19:59 about a two tiered system of justice, but the, the remedy of that is for Trump to win the
20:07 electoral college, maybe the popular vote and to win the House and Senate and then to bring
20:12 in an experienced team and fire 20,000 of these people in the IRS, the Pentagon Secret
20:18 Service, FBI, CIA, Victor, I don't like to, I don't really like to get into conspiracy
20:28 theories or conjecture too much because again, a tribute to incompetence, you know, as opposed
20:32 to malice and I believe all those things.
20:35 But going back to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, you know, you keep hearing
20:39 all these bumblings about the deep state and they're out to get Trump and all these different
20:42 things.
20:43 And then every single bit of data that we get that comes out about the attempted assassination
20:48 stinks and stinks to high heaven about how anything like this could even vaguely be possible.
20:54 It's either one of the biggest blunders in the history of any type of, you know, policing
20:58 of any kind or security of any kind, or there's something more nefarious afoot again, even
21:04 saying that I'm like, okay, just be calm.
21:06 Look at what's real and don't just like create these, these narratives.
21:11 But from your perspective, doesn't this situation seem like there were a lot of things that
21:17 were coordinated so that that bullet didn't just graze the former president's head, but
21:21 that it would actually would have met its target.
21:24 I don't have the information to say, but I will say it's sort of analogous to a babysitter.
21:30 So a babysitter goes to one house and the child, she for some reason, she just adores
21:35 the child.
21:36 She loves the family.
21:38 She thinks they're great.
21:39 They're politically aligned with her.
21:42 The next day she asked a babysit somebody down the street.
21:46 She hates their politics.
21:48 She can't stand them.
21:49 The kid she feels is disruptive.
21:53 In each case, she's supposed to take one to a park and let them run around and watch.
21:58 Human nature being what it is, the family that she worships and they are aligned politically,
22:03 she's going to be a helicopter parent right on that child.
22:06 The other family, because she's probably not a professional, if that child wanders too close
22:11 to the pond, she said, ah, he's just a disruptive kid, he'll be okay.
22:16 In other words, there's an asymmetrical action.
22:20 So if Barack Obama was at a rally, or Joe Biden was at a rally, or Kamala Harris was
22:25 at an open-air rally, then the Secret Service would have had a very different approach,
22:31 at least the hierarchy would.
22:33 So what I think happened is people involved said, you know what, it's another one of those
22:39 crazy rallies with those crazy MAGA people, do we really need the FBI drones out here,
22:48 do we really need to get coordinated with these yokel law enforcement?
22:53 The guy just blusters and don, and nothing ever happens, and basically we'll just kind
22:58 of sleepwalk through him, you know, we don't like the guy anyway.
23:01 That was the attitude, I think, but it would not have been the attitude had he been a leftist
23:07 or a revered iconic leftist like Obama.
23:12 If Michelle Obama was speaking to a rally, they would have had snipers everywhere, they
23:16 would have had drones, they would have had balloons, they would have done everything.
23:20 I don't know if that constitutes a conspiracy, but I do think that from what we know about
23:26 the FBI and CIA and Secret Service, they have, the people who run those agencies are very
23:33 left-wing, and they adjust their behavior.
23:36 They would have never gone after Obama the way they did with the steel, but I'll say
23:40 after Trump, and we found that out with Lois Lerner.
23:44 She used the IRS to punish Bush non-profits right before the election, and she took the
23:51 Fifth Amendment, basically, because she said, I can't testify because I'd have to lie to
23:55 save my skin, and they let, and they never punished her.
23:59 So yeah, I don't know what that is, but it's definitely a different way of reacting.
24:04 Just like the January 6th, one day, one person dies, it's maybe two by the hand of another,
24:13 and one person is an unarmed 105-pound young woman who shot while unarmed, and suddenly
24:20 the officer who shoots that suspect, traditionally his name is plastered over every paper in the
24:25 United States.
24:26 Suddenly, we don't know who he is for six weeks.
24:28 Then we find out he got promoted for shooting an unarmed woman, and he lied and said that
24:34 there were, everybody was in danger when there were all these SWAT people armed to the teeth,
24:38 looking at her, who didn't shoot her.
24:40 And yet, you juxtapose that with $2 billion in damage, 35 people killed, 1,500 law enforcement
24:48 officers injured, 2020 riots, 14,000 arrests, precinct, police precinct burn, federal courthouse
24:58 torch, historic church, St. John's, across the street from the White House, torched,
25:04 and the people trying to break into that White House grounds to kill Trump, nothing.
25:09 Almost all of those people were let go.
25:11 Is that a conspiracy?
25:12 I don't know.
25:13 It just seems to me that they don't even go through the motions of a conspiracy.
25:19 They just overtly treat one group of people very differently than the other.
25:25 And the brazenness of how overt they are with it is somewhat shocking.
25:29 And I think the brazenness is a feature and not a bug.
25:33 This all kind of gets into a discussion about the supposed, if you will, deep state.
25:37 And so, again, Trump was very big in 2015, 2016, leading up to the drain the swamp narrative.
25:44 That was a big thing, and a lot of people bought into that.
25:47 And for all intents and purposes, in the four years he was in office, the swamp got bigger.
25:52 There was no draining of the swamp, at least not that I could see from my perspective.
25:56 And so, I do have some concerns as a person who did not vote for Trump in 2016 in the primaries.
26:02 I didn't vote for him in the general.
26:03 I voted for nobody in the general.
26:04 But then I kind of held my nose and voted for him in 2020.
26:07 And now I feel like I'm going to swim through lava to vote for him in 2024.
26:11 I'm not very optimistic that if he gets into office that he's going to be able to do from
26:17 the Oval Office, to be able to dismantle the parts of the deep state, that might be part
26:22 of these conspiracies that we don't know for sure or not if they are conspiracies.
26:26 What's your read?
26:27 It's going to be very difficult.
26:28 Supposedly the Heritage Foundation, I know that that was a very controversial project 2025.
26:35 They've separated from Trump, or he's separated from them on the policy.
26:38 But privately, I'm told that the 18,000 names of people who they were going to appoint, that
26:46 they have vetted for over a year, that's roughly corresponding to the 20,000 political appointments
26:53 they're responsible for.
26:54 So I do think that will happen.
26:57 They will do what Obama did.
26:58 Obama asked for the resignations.
26:59 I was a presidential appointee on the nonpartisan American Battlefield Monuments Commission in
27:06 charge of overseeing cemeteries of the U.S. dead.
27:09 As soon as Obama came in, we all had diplomatic passports.
27:14 They were all nonpartisan, some were appointed by Clinton, some were appointed by Bush.
27:19 He had everybody gone.
27:21 Just get out.
27:22 We don't want you.
27:23 And he didn't even appoint anybody for a year, but it was so important for Obama to clean
27:27 house to the most minuscule position.
27:31 And he stalked the DOJ.
27:33 Most of these attorneys going after Trump are Obama people that Trump allowed to stay
27:39 in.
27:40 I don't think he'll do that again.
27:41 He understands if he does that, and he has Comey's, McCabe's, and Brennan's, and Clappers,
27:46 and Fauci's, and he's in trouble because they'll go after him and they will use the administrative
27:52 state to destroy him.
27:53 It's either him or them, and he understands that.
27:56 I think.
27:57 And he's got people around him this time that are not so much in the rhetoric, but more
28:02 in the operation.
28:04 The problem they had before is they talked a great game and they were loud and they said
28:09 and then they didn't really do anything, they weren't disciplined.
28:13 But let's, it's going to be very hard for him to be elected because I've written a three
28:18 or four columns.
28:19 He has only 90 days to get Kamala Harris out of her basement, out of the Biden-like
28:26 cocoon, and into a form where she is not teleprompted or scripted.
28:32 Anytime she sits, speaks off the teleprompter or to a real journalist, it's embarrassing.
28:38 She's like a child.
28:39 But if he goes after Governor Kemp, or if he goes after her DNA, or he goes after her
28:46 relationship with Willie Brown, or he talks about the rig, Georgia election, these are
28:51 all legitimate, but not now, because he only has 90 days.
28:54 She hasn't been out there for two years because she was hidden as vice president.
28:59 And so he's just got to get one-on-one as many debates as he can, as many venues and
29:05 say, this woman is a Bay Area socialist.
29:08 She was proud of it as soon as she's flipped now.
29:11 But if she were to be elected, she'll flop right back, and you'll have a government to
29:15 the left of Biden.
29:16 And if he can do that, he'll win.
29:19 But if he gets angry and goes into all of these old feuds, I don't know how it helps
29:26 him to say that Joe Biden was the worst president in the world.
29:28 He was demented.
29:29 I slotted him in the election, all true.
29:32 But Biden is not running.
29:34 And, you know, a lot of people think, I'm so glad Biden's gone.
29:38 I feel sorry for the guy who's decrepit.
29:41 They took the president, the nomination from him.
29:44 I kind of feel sorry.
29:46 So why is Trump bashing this poor old man on the head?
29:49 That's what an independent voter feels right now.
29:52 So he should just forget all that stuff and go after Harris, the hardcore socialist.
29:57 And there's a lot of stuff in her record that supports that.
30:04 Hey guys, real quick, if you're anything like me, you are constantly on the lookout for high
30:05 quality products that are actually made here in America by American hands.
30:10 The problem is that a lot of American companies have outsourced their labor overseas.
30:14 So it's an American company, but it's supporting people that don't live here.
30:18 So I've always went to partner with an American company that prioritizes America, American
30:22 workers and making all of their materials here in this country.
30:26 That's why I want to remind you that we are partnered with origin.
30:29 Origin is an apparel company based in Maine and they are focused on getting as much manufacturing
30:34 back to the United States as they can possibly do.
30:37 What do they make?
30:38 They make the best jujitsu geese on the planet.
30:40 And these are the only jujitsu geese that are made completely in America.
30:44 They also make jeans.
30:45 Yes, they're stretchy and awesome.
30:47 They also make amazing hunting gear.
30:48 And I know you guys love your kuyu and your sicka, but those companies use overseas labor
30:53 and they don't do that to help you guys out.
30:55 They do that to increase their profit margins.
30:57 Origin also makes boots and work boots.
30:59 And yes, that does include steel toe boots.
31:01 And in the fall of last year, they launched a line of everyday clothing, their Versa pants
31:05 are their everyday pants and they are just especially phenomenal.
31:08 They also make other outdoor clothes and workout clothes and they're launching new apparel
31:11 stuff all the time.
31:13 If you haven't already, you need to check them out and support a company that supports
31:17 America and America's workers.
31:19 Try origin out today by going to www.originusa.com.
31:24 Use the promo code undaunted to get 10% off of your order.
31:29 Again, that's originusa.com promo code undaunted to get 10% off of your order.
31:36 Yes, certainly.
31:37 I think that Trump and his team could just easily point at Harrison wall some be like,
31:42 if these people are elected, it will be the most left wing, most socialistic, most communistic
31:48 regime that we have ever had in this country and again, I think, I think most voters forget
31:54 the fact that they're not just voting for one person.
31:56 As you've already alluded to, you're voting for an entire federal apparatus, thousands
32:00 and thousands and thousands of employees.
32:02 So you might not like Trump personally as I very likely would not like him personally
32:07 or some of his foibles or some of his moral failings.
32:10 I'm not a fan of those things, but I am a fan of the people that he would hire that
32:14 are, for instance, not into killing babies, not into having a completely wide open border,
32:19 not into cutting off the healthy breast tissue of 13 year old gender confused girls.
32:24 And so that's what they really need to focus in on and they can deal with all the petty
32:27 stuff after the election, after that, after you get your moving boxes packed to go back
32:31 into the White House.
32:32 But I do actually want to circle back to the, well, did you have something else to add to
32:36 that, sir?
32:37 Well, you can see that with the Supreme Court had Trump not been elected in 2016, that Supreme
32:44 Court would be now all left wing and it would have destroyed the country.
32:49 And Trump would be in jail right now because of a willing that would favor Jack Smith.
32:57 There would be amnesties approved.
33:00 You name it.
33:01 You could mandate the confiscation of guns.
33:05 That's what Kamala Harris said.
33:06 She said she wanted a mandated by back.
33:08 Right.
33:09 I don't understand that.
33:12 She left over 400,000 assault weapons and turned them over to the Taliban, but they want
33:17 to take them away from American citizen doesn't make you sin.
33:20 Well, look at what's going on right now in England.
33:22 I bet a lot of those people wish that they were armed whenever they're going up against
33:27 fundamentalist Muslim gangs that are roving the streets of Manchester and those people
33:31 are just basically sitting there with their limp wrists trying to fight back.
33:34 But I do want to circle back to the Southern border.
33:37 So obviously this is a concern to a bunch of Americans for a myriad of different reasons.
33:41 So obviously the fentanyl crisis, it's an absolute crisis.
33:44 Most of that coming through the Southern border.
33:46 Yeah, people that are undocumented coming through the Southern border that are criminals,
33:50 not saying that all these people are coming through our criminals, but any time any American
33:55 or any Americans property is stolen or harmed or someone has killed or maimed or injured
34:00 by someone that shouldn't be here.
34:01 It is an absolute travesty.
34:03 And again, when Trump was in office, it was better, but it still wasn't good.
34:08 The Southern border was open, it just wasn't wide, completely open like it's been for the
34:13 last almost four years.
34:15 And so the thing that most people have kind of come to the conclusion is eventually Republicans
34:21 will cave and provide amnesty or not be able to stop amnesty for well over 15 million people
34:28 that are here illegally.
34:30 And then that will create a new voter block for Democrats to dominate states that are,
34:36 you know, states like Texas, that would fly potentially straight from red, skip purple
34:40 and go straight to blue, thus baking a national election in the election of a Republican nationally
34:45 and impossibility moving forward.
34:47 What do you think about what's currently happening on the Southern border and what Trump can
34:52 tangibly do?
34:53 Because some people get this cartoonish idea that, oh, we're just going to build the wall
34:55 and then we're not going to have to deal with the border anymore.
34:58 Like the cartels are smarter than that.
34:59 They can build tunnels.
35:01 People get in, you know, with vehicles and all things through normal ports of entry.
35:04 They're not just walking across the desert.
35:06 But what's your read of that situation?
35:08 Well, that's certainly what the left wants.
35:12 And anytime that what you just said, they caricature is the great replacement theory,
35:18 the paranoia is of so-called white Americans, but they're unabashedly confident about what
35:24 you just said because they write books called the new Democrat, the new Democratic majority
35:30 or demography is destiny or they have this, you know, like when Mark Zuckerberg gives
35:35 over $14, $419 million, it's to register new people automatically.
35:42 So their idea is if you're in California, the DMV sends out a ballot, the unemployment
35:47 office sends out a ballot, they all do.
35:49 Every state agency you come in contact and they don't trace them.
35:53 Millions of ballots, California has no idea where they were.
35:55 So that's what they want to do.
35:58 I don't know that, but the problem again gets back to he was orphaned from both the Democratic
36:04 and Republican parties.
36:07 He didn't really, he'd only been to Washington, D.C., he said, I think it's 15 times.
36:12 So he started making these appointments that were traditional Republicans because nobody
36:16 else wanted to serve with him.
36:18 And I think if you look back at John Kelly, when he was Homeland Security person, or you
36:22 look back at Anonymous, the New York Times person who wrote, was Chad somebody, he said,
36:31 our duty is to stop Trump from within.
36:34 He was working in Homeland Security.
36:36 Then you count, I counted up the lawsuits, they filed against them.
36:40 It was over 30 lawsuits and they stopped for all practical purposes.
36:47 They stopped the wall.
36:49 They didn't stop the 500 miles he rebuilt, but he only got about 30 miles of the new wall.
36:55 He asked the Pentagon to go down and help.
36:57 The Mattis Pentagon and most of the later people in the Pentagon just said they weren't
37:03 going to do it.
37:04 What are you going to do about it?
37:05 We're not going to do it.
37:07 So he had people within his administration and in the courts who were cherry pick liberal
37:14 judges by left wing lawyers.
37:16 They spent millions, probably over $1 billion over four years to do what they did.
37:22 And finally, finally by 2020, he had gone down to Mexico and he told the Mexican government
37:31 that he was going to renegotiate NAFTA and they was going to tax the $60 billion in remittances
37:40 at 10 percent and he was going to force them to patrol the border, say that people had
37:50 to apply for refugee status in Mexico, tell the border patrol to stop catch and release.
37:55 If you look at the numbers, suddenly around June of 2020, it went like this.
38:00 So he had solved the problem.
38:02 And we know he solved the problem because for two reasons.
38:06 Joe Biden's had about 30 or 40 executive orders and he deliberately focused on everything
38:14 Trump had done.
38:15 Stop the wall, bring back catch and release, refugee status in here, tell Mexico it's okay,
38:23 send more people.
38:24 And then when the election came up, he and Harris went back and you look at what they
38:28 did, they starting to turn the spigot off again.
38:32 They're working with the Mexican government now and they do not want an open border in
38:37 the next, but what they're doing is they're just reviving what Trump did.
38:41 And so we know, I guess what I'm saying is if Trump, if Biden and Harris are doing it,
38:46 what Trump did, we know it works.
38:49 And so all Trump has to do is get somebody like Stephen Miller or somebody who agrees
38:54 with him and they know how to do it now and they will shut the border.
38:57 Once you shut the border, then you can start dealing with all of the other issues.
39:03 You can't deal with any issue if the borders open, but you've got 10 million people who
39:07 came in under Biden.
39:09 They all have to be deported.
39:10 We have no background checks, nothing on them.
39:14 Then you get into the next group.
39:16 There's about 25 million other people and there and various gradations.
39:21 Some have been here a year, some have criminal records, some have DUI, which are criminal
39:26 records.
39:27 Some have been here 15 years, some have been here 20 years.
39:31 And I'm in ground zero right here in Selma, California, 95% Hispanic.
39:36 So I found a dead person in my orchard.
39:39 Every Sunday I go out with a pickup truck and pick up trash.
39:42 It's all in Spanish.
39:43 I'm talking about wet garbage, car seats, appliances, just all these illegals are living
39:49 out in the country in trailers, in tents, winter bagels that don't run rented by their landlords.
39:56 40, 50 of them an acre in some places.
39:59 And they don't sign up for garbage.
40:00 Their dogs are not vaccinated.
40:02 You get bit, you're in trouble.
40:04 So all of that has to be deported.
40:08 But then on the other hand, I see some guy who comes by and rewiring my house.
40:17 It's a licensed contractor.
40:19 Everybody's licensed, I say, to the contractor politely.
40:22 Is this person legal?
40:24 Well, he's been here 21 years.
40:27 He came when he was four.
40:29 He served in the military.
40:31 He's never been on welfare, and he's my best electrician, and he's a Trump voter.
40:37 And then you say to him, well, don't you think they should deport him?
40:41 And he says, well, where would he go?
40:43 So what I'm getting at is in order to deport the 20 million people you should deport, there's
40:50 going to have to be some -- some -- and I don't mean citizenship.
40:55 I don't mean amnesty.
40:56 I'm just saying for the 5 million who have been here over 10 years, they've never been
41:01 on welfare.
41:02 They're working.
41:03 They've never been arrested.
41:04 Many of them have been in the military.
41:06 If they want to apply for a green card, then that's up -- I think we could give them a
41:11 green card.
41:12 And then they can decide what they want to do.
41:14 But they'll have to apply for citizenship, the way legal immigrants do it, to take them
41:18 10 years.
41:19 And Ronald Reagan did that on the Simpson-Mazoli Act.
41:21 It was kind of a disaster.
41:23 He gave everybody who was here 6 million people a chance to apply for citizenship.
41:30 You know how many people applied for citizenship?
41:32 Thirty percent.
41:33 Thirty percent.
41:35 The rest said, you know what, I'm just going to get a green card and go back to Mexico.
41:40 I don't think very many of them would apply -- because you know what, to be cynical, what's
41:45 the advantage of citizenship anymore if you think about it?
41:48 What can a green card holder do that a citizen can't?
41:54 He can serve in the military.
41:55 He can get federal welfare.
41:57 He can get state welfare.
41:58 He can apparently go across a border without a passport, just like Americans.
42:03 He can do -- they're voting in Berkeley.
42:07 Non-citizens are voting in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
42:10 And California and non-citizens are appointed to offices.
42:14 So citizenship is really evaporated.
42:18 So I don't know what he's going to do, but he's got to deport -- start -- if he can deport
42:24 the 10 million people who came in on the Biden, that will create a different climate.
42:30 And you won't see people -- if he departs 10 million, you won't see people in LA Coliseum
42:38 rooting for the Mexican national soccer team against their own team.
42:42 If he can do that?
42:45 That's something that I've seen and I've commented about on the show before to where
42:48 it's like, if you come here because you want to be in this country so much, because the
42:53 country you come from is so bad, then why are you cheering for your home country against
42:57 the country that you're actually taking a residence in?
42:59 It's absolutely an affidavit to me, I don't understand it.
43:02 But Victor, we're running short on time, and so I've got a million other subject matters
43:05 I'd like to talk to you about.
43:06 But I just want to tee you up to talk about whatever you want to talk about.
43:10 Is there a particular topic because of the craziness of the new cycle in the election
43:15 year and everything else that's going on?
43:16 Is there something that is flying under the radar that people aren't talking about at
43:22 all or nearly enough that you want to make sure that we're aware of?
43:27 Well, if you look at all of the Biden issues, the border, the economy, crime, foreign policy,
43:36 he's not even getting close to 50% approval.
43:40 And when you talk to people, and I talk to people of all walks of life, because I live
43:45 two existences, one at Stanford University during the week with the most left-wing wealthy
43:50 people in this country, and then here in southwestern Fresno County, some of the poorest people.
43:57 But wherever you are, there's an anger, and I don't know how to describe it, an anger
44:04 that there's a two-tiered system of justice, and there are bicultural elites that are using
44:13 their globalized money and influence in the media and entertainment, in the universities
44:19 and foundations on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, to push utopian agendas that nobody
44:26 wants and which they themselves would be hurt, but they are so wealthy and they never expect
44:33 to experience the consequences of their own ideology.
44:36 So they hate charter schools.
44:42 They're all for teachers' unions, but their kids are in parochial schools or private schools.
44:47 They demand 30 cents a kilowatt, so nobody can turn their air conditioner here, but they've
44:53 got 9,000 square foot homes and they don't care because they make so much money.
44:58 And down the line, they want to ban natural gas, but they have Italian natural gas stoves
45:03 in their homes.
45:04 I've been in them.
45:05 They say that everybody's got to have to an EV, a trucker should have to charge his
45:10 semi every 300 miles, but they fly on $50 million jets.
45:15 And everybody understands that now, and they're getting really, really angry about it, and
45:19 I don't know how that anger, it seems to me that it's manifesting in two different ways.
45:26 One way is the monastery of the mind, where the guy says, and I talk to these people all
45:30 the time, I'm done.
45:32 I'm going to Nevada, I'm going to Montana, I'm going to Wyoming, I'm going to Tennessee,
45:37 I'm going to Texas, or I'm going up the Sierra Nevada foothills, or I'm going up to Northern
45:44 California, above Sacramento, and I've never turned on the Oscars.
45:48 I don't know what the Emmys ceremonies are, I could care less.
45:51 I haven't watched an NBA game in years.
45:54 I don't know.
45:55 I don't know what Hollywood movie, I haven't watched a network news program in 10 years.
46:01 I'll never watch a Disney movie, I'll never drink a Bud Light, that kind of person who
46:07 just says, America lost me, and I'm not participating, and they don't vote a lot of them.
46:14 Many of them are very religious, homeschooled, et cetera, et cetera.
46:19 And then there's the other half of the pushback, and that pushback is very, very angry.
46:24 I don't think it's as big, but it's very angry.
46:27 And that pushback says, put it this way, if something should happen to Trump because the
46:38 left has called him Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, even after he was shot and created a climate
46:45 in which some deranged 20 year old thinks he would be Jesus Christ if he shot Trump because
46:51 he would be in the pantheon of left wing heroes.
46:56 Or he looks at the Secret Service and says, my God, they are so lax and they really don't
47:02 take much effort to protect Trump.
47:04 And if that 20 year old buffoon can do that, I can do a lot better.
47:09 So I'm really worried in the next three months that we're going to have further attacks on
47:14 Trump and violence from the left.
47:17 But this time, if the left, I think the people on the right are so angry, if the left starts
47:22 to be violent, half of them won't just say, I'm dropping out of American society, they're
47:29 going to be very, very angry.
47:32 And I don't know how that's going to express itself, but if, well, I think I already know
47:39 how it expresses, it's very BLM and Antifa don't go into certain places.
47:45 We all know that.
47:46 They don't go into rural California.
47:48 They don't go into rural America in general.
47:55 And it's a very dangerous time.
47:59 It's going to start in Chicago because I think Kamala Harris was so scared of a riot from
48:06 the Islamic people had he had she appointed Josh Shapiro.
48:11 But I still think they're going to cause trouble for cause a lot of trouble.
48:14 This time, everybody on the right will say, go ahead and do it.
48:17 It's your people, but it's going to get pretty frightening and we'll see what happens if
48:27 Trump were elected, there's going to be some pretty wild things.
48:32 I think he's going to pardon most of the January six people, which most of them need to be
48:37 pardon, almost all of them, but that's going to be a very contentious issue.
48:41 I think before anybody knows it on day one, there's going to be bulldozers down at the
48:46 border, building that wall to finish it all the way.
48:51 And they're left is going to go hysterical.
48:52 I mean, they're going to go crazy and they're going to try to do stuff that makes the steel
48:57 dossier and the Russian disinformation and getting them off the ballot and teaching them
49:02 to look like child's play because they know they've lost it.
49:07 They've lost the American people if Trump can get elected after all the stuff they threw
49:10 at him, impeachment, dossier, disinformation, get him off the ballot, five civil and criminal
49:18 lawsuits, assassinate, and they still, he still gets elected.
49:22 I mean, that's pretty amazing.
49:25 And I think they'll, they'll go crazy.
49:27 They'll say, how do you stop this guy?
49:29 Yeah, I mean, it'll be Teflon Don to a new level and to a degree.
49:33 I think it'll be the Jason Aldine song, try that in a small town, but across the entire
49:37 country.
49:38 Victor, we are completely out of time.
49:40 I'm so happy that we're able to weave an out of all these different subject matters.
49:43 But that's all for me.
49:44 Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?
49:45 No, that's it.
49:46 Thank you for having me.
49:47 All right.
49:48 Thanks for coming on.
49:49 Okay.
49:50 There you go.
49:51 Guys.
49:52 Hope you enjoyed my time with Victor Davis Hanson.
49:53 But before we let you go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost.
49:55 Add on to life or mission is equipping men to push back darkness with content that forges
49:58 spiritual mental and physical resilience.
50:00 And so I've got a link to Victor's website here.
50:02 I've got a link to his latest two books, the case for Trump and the end of everything.
50:06 Make sure you go and check all that out.
50:07 Thank you for listening to this podcast.
50:09 Wherever you're listening to this, please subscribe, rate and leave us a positive five
50:12 star review.
50:13 If you want me to come speak live at your event or on your podcast, shoot me an email
50:16 to info@undonton.life.
50:18 That's I N F O at undonton.life.
50:21 Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook and check out our website for everything else,
50:24 including how to donate to keep more content like this coming your way.
50:26 Just go to www.undonton.life.
50:29 And as always, we want to thank the band Holy Name for allowing us to use their music for
50:32 our content.
50:33 The music on this podcast is our song Perpetua, which is off their self-titled debut album
50:37 on Face Down Records.
50:39 The links are in the description.
50:40 I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.
50:42 Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual, mental and physical resilience.
50:49 Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
51:07 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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Victor Davis Hanson
There's an anger that there's a two-tiered system of justice, and there are bicultural elites that are using their globalized money and influence to push utopian agendas that nobody wants.
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