Victor Davis Hanson: DHS Shutdown Is All About the Economy, Not ICE

Do you think that Iran will strike the U.S. homeland that seems to be a concern with those drones?

Oh, drones? No. How would they be launched? Even if they had a range of four or five hundred miles,

they would be tracked by a U.S. Navy and destroyed. Any ship that got between Hawaii and the United

States would be destroyed. But they've had a attack. We've had four attacks by naturalized

citizens, and we have no idea to what degree they were influenced by Iranian people on the internet.

They looked at the fourth quarter of shutdown, longest in our history,

last three months, September, October, November, and they said to themselves,

we reduced GDP by two or three points and stole the economy. And Trump was going to have this great

fourth quarter and enrawer into 2026. So then they said, we're going to shut down the government

unless you do the following to DHS. So here, the Congress going into an administrative cabinet

and telling them what they can and can't do, which is an executive branch. They're saying to them,

we knew you were going to do this. So we've already funded it than the big beautiful bill. They're

funded. It has nothing to do with DHS. And they said, okay, but we're going to hurt you in a different

way. We're going to stop all the security at all the airports. We're going to not pay these

people for over a month. And we're not going to pay anybody else in DHS. It does all this stuff.

And then the Republican said, well, why don't we just talk about ice? The Democrats can't

talk about it because they have the party, alien Omar, you know, and AOC and always, they don't

want any ice. The new Ayatollah may, his sexual preference may be gay, which is no big deal in

the West, but for Islam, that doesn't seem to comport. I was wondering whether they were going to

hang him on a crane as they do or throw him off a building or stone him.

Hello, and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. We're glad you could join us. This is

the Friday news roundup and we've got a lot on the docket about Iran and Cuba and what's going on

on the hill. So stay with us and we'll be right back with those stories. If you enjoy Victor Davis

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Welcome back and we're happy to have everybody. Thank you for joining us. We are a subsidiary of

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Foundation. So please go to their websites and have a look at what they do. Victor is the Martin

Inelianterson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the

Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his

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there. So Victor, lots going on. Still with the round, I know that you and Jack discussed

a run on your Thursday show, but I had other questions to discuss with you on that. And so I'd like

to start with a couple of things that have been floating around in the press either this week or

last week. And one of them is, do you think that Iran will strike the US homeland? That seems to

be a concern with those drones. I was wondering your thoughts on that. Oh, drones. No, but I mean,

how would they be launched? Even if they had a range of four or five hundred miles,

they would be tracked by a US Navy and destroyed. Any ship that got between Hawaii and the United

States would be destroyed. But they've had a attack. We've had four attacks by naturalized

citizens. And we have no idea to what degree they were influenced by Iranian people on the

internet. And we had a Hezbollah guy's, the person who ran the synagogue in Michigan's brother

was in Hezbollah and they are directly controlled by Iran. No doubt he communicated with his Hezbollah

relatives. And so yeah, I mean, they have ways of, and they've almost, they almost killed the Saudi

ambassador. They went after Trump, Bolton, Mike Pompeo. So yeah, we should expect that. And

they're doing the same thing in Europe. Yeah. It also seems that Trump is preparing the

much feared and awaited perhaps ground offensive. Do you think that that is going to happen?

It seems that he's moving more troops over to the region. Now, that's a tripwire because so far,

he said that the mega reluctance for a forever war or endless war did not include preemptive

one-offs. So kill Soleimani one off, kill Baghdadi one off, bomb ISIS one off, kill the Wagner

group one off, go into Venezuela one off, take out the nuclear facilities at Fedor and other places

and around last summer one off. But once you bring ground troops and they're not just

in and out, it's going to be difficult. And why would he do that? I think

Carg Island is up to the north, but it's where 90% of their oil is pipeline to the island. And then

it gives you the advantage that ships can come on all sides of the island. So it's a massive

export center. And he hasn't hit the oil on it. He's hit them. It's got subterranean,

assembly plans of everything, weapons. So I think the idea is that now that he's taken all the

military installations out and now that they're watching every second, every foot of that island,

there must be a lot of Iranians ready for them. So it could be dicey, but I think the idea would be

one of two goals. One would be to take Carg Island and then start processing the oil when the

straight of a moose was open and say you're going to put it in account for the Iranian people and

starve their regime of its money. And then say to the Iranian people, this is going to get

dicey, but the money will come to you if you get rid of these people. And the other is right across

the street of our moose, I think he's trying to create a sanitary corridor. They have ballistic

ballistic missile silos along the coast aimed at the Gulf petrol nations. So the idea is that

did they get them all by air power? Probably not. So you would put marines along the edge of the

coast and make an enclave. And then they would guard that shoulder of the streets of our moose

so that no missiles or troops or boats could come anywhere near. They would occupy the land and

know Carg Island, they cut off the oil. And that would require ground troops, but that's an

escalatory step. It's going to be difficult. So it's a way, it's like a rock scissors paper

game you played. They are hoping that we'll quit and they're ropey-doping. They're just saying,

yeah, you know, money pith on the guy that got his, all his limbs cut off and said he was ready

to fight. Or I remember in John Wayne's, the shootest, Richard Boone played a character where John

Wayne on the last day was life was going to kill three bad guys. And he had a little table in the

saloon and he charged him. John Wayne relaxed his shot right through, right through, right through,

right through, right through. And the more that he shot and he moved it, Richard Boone, he said,

take that. Richard Boone said that, kind of like an lonesome dove. Well, it devolves running

away from these awful blue duck people, the bandit blue ducks men. And they were screaming,

there were Indians, so-called Native Americans with him. And one guy, he had shot about five of

them, but he charged him and he's yelling, he just smiled them and just kind of relax and put

his 45 right at his head. And the guy, he blew him up. So that's what Iran is. They're feisty,

they're angry, they're say they were winning, but they're being annihilated. And their hope is

very briefly, you can see what their hope is, the American left, the European left, the

self-loathing, oikofobia of the Western nations and culture in general. To intimidate the golf

monarchies, 40% of the 20% of the world's oil goes to the straight of our moves, cut that off,

and then just last. And Trump says, we've got to put so much punishment and he's telling his

generals no doubt, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on. One more week, one more week and they

say, okay, but we're running short of this and that and then we've got this two carriers,

they've been out there for months. Come on, come on, come on. So he's something's going to break

and the question is whether it's going to be the willpower of the administration given that

for the midterm and Maga pressure, it's under or the Iranians. The Iranian people can't really,

these ratings are doing something very unique. They're going after the people that kill the

protesters. So they're going after checkpoints with drones. They know from their intelligence,

they've got so many people that hate that regime and there's so many cell phones and there's so

many starlink stuff that people are able to contact them. There was a really bizarre story

today where he called up a Republican guard officer and they said, you're going, you're a dead man.

He said, I'm, yeah, I'm a dead man walking, but I didn't do anything wrong. So they're contacting

individual people and saying, you're going to die. This is a new dimension. So if there's a lot of

that and the Israelis just wait for a phone call and a guy calls up and says, I'm going to six floor

of my apartment and there is a checkpoint way onto the street. Here's my address and they know the

GPS anyway from his phone. They can keep hitting those with drones and that's what they're doing.

But there's a lot of them. So the Israelis want to go through four more weeks to eliminate the

command and control. They're doing the command and control mostly and we're doing the infrastructure.

We're trying to find the assembly. Apparently they must have a lot more missiles through 4,000

than we thought because they're still sending these cluster bomb missiles which are impossible

to defend against because when they break up or when they explode, these little bomblets go everywhere.

Yeah, that looks really dangerous too. Well, since you mentioned the Strait of Hormuz,

it seems like the European countries, meaning Britain, France, Italy, Spain and Germany have all

said this is not NATO's mission to the Iraqi war. And so they're taking a step back and there's

been a lot of pushback from people in the United States. The one that I thought was the most

interesting is the commentator wrote, don't they realize that the United States has lost

a hundred and two thousand men since the end of World War II helping to defend the European

continent. No, thanks. No, Colin Powell said that during the Iraq war when they said

we should get out or we don't want you here. And he said, does that include the cemeteries of

all the people who died saving you? I mean, in my own family, Holt Kather was my mom's first cousin.

He was killed right after Normandy. And then my grandfather, Frank Canson, was gassed in World War

I. He was just on a farm in Kingsburg, money in his own business. He was 26 years old.

He didn't even know what was going on. And they said France and England would have been

the German spring offensive would have crushed it. So they got there just in time. But

yeah, their argument is we didn't, we told Trump not to do this and he did it all alone. So he

didn't want allies and he intended us in Greenland. And therefore we're just going to sit here

and watch it. And the subtext is we're going to be the beneficiaries of that because they'll,

they'll be no more ran with nuclear weapons, hopefully. We won't be in misal range and we won't

have these terrorists. And if we want to get rid of some of these Muslim Islamic enclaves in

Europe, there won't be a terrorist reaction because this Iranian pathological government

funds everything. They're the only ones that have the money. The Gulf have stopped funding for

the most part. Cutters a different story. But most part. So Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis are

getting money from Iran. So they want them to be removed. And they want Trump to keep doing it.

But they, they don't want to be involved because they're scared of a their own Muslim populations

that are not assimilated. Be, they don't have many assets. I think Britain has maybe,

if you call them combat ships, 35 major combat ships. And they've got like 45 admirals.

So this is the army, I mean the Navy of Lord Nelson. It's just a joke. They can't even get

to Cyprus with one ship after two weeks. So they don't, they won't have much to offer except

credibility. And we have allies in the world United. But they're not going to help. I think

they should be very careful because the next time they get in a jam in a unilateral fashion

that's not a NATO mission. Like the British going into the fall clums, you know. And then

if they call up, if this is Margaret Thatcher in 1982 and she calls Reagan, say,

we need your sophisticated intelligence. We need your sophisticated,

naval intelligence. We want to know where the Argentine submarines are. We want to know about

your intelligence on the ground in Argentina. We need your fuel. We need your weapons. We need

your trauma. And we need a extra carrier if we lose one. Could you give that all to us?

Yes. I think the answer is going to be no. That's pretty crazy.

Because we were in the same position. We were like Margaret Thatcher. Can we use Diego Garcia

just to lands and be, be to nope, nope, you can't do it. Okay, that's the new rule. So I would

be very careful, especially when we're the deterrent that protects them from Putin going further west

from Ukraine. But they hate Trump and they know their populations do. So even the people that

like us, the polls, the Italians, they know that if they were to send a ship or two, their own

populations would be furious. Yeah, that's certain. Well, Victor, let's talk a little bit more about

the Israel Lebanon front and then also whether the Ayatollah is gay or not. But first I would like to

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So Victory was just wondering your thoughts on this Israel Lebanon front. Do you think that

the Lebanese government that is not part of Hezbollah will join and help the Israelis is

kind of a curious. No, they haven't done it in 50 years. They're not, I mean,

if you put the Sunni population of Lebanon and the Christian population, which by the way is

shrinking, people are fleeing to Europe and the United States from Lebanon, and you add it up,

the Shia are only about half as I recall. So they have the numbers, but the Christians don't get

along with the Shia, and they're, they have more in common actually than the Shia and the Shia,

and the Sunnis do. The Christians don't get along, I should say, with the Sunnis, I think

surely don't get along with the Shia, but the Sunnis and the Christians are not good partners,

and they have a rotating government. So they just don't have, and we gave them weapons, and we,

the Biden administration tried to beep them up, and they're not particularly fond of Israel either.

So it doesn't seem to me that they're going to do anything, and that's why these Israelis

are in there, and they've gone in there so often. The graveyard of the Israeli Army, we were told,

given their bad experiences in the 80s and going in there, but getting bogged down. But

they're just trying to create a corridor along the border where there's no Hezbollah people,

and they can make sure that short-range drones and rockets don't hit them, and then they're trying

to get their informants to tell people exactly where their rockets are.

You know, I saw on the internet there were some leftists deploying what we're doing to Beirut,

but they don't ever say that Hezbollah comes in and puts these missiles in the basements

of all these apartment buildings, and everybody knows it, and then in the middle of the night,

they take them out to a launching bat. So why don't they just, you know, if they're going to allow

that to happen, and then I don't know what I would do if I was on an apartment, and a bunch of

thugs came in and said, we're going to use your apartment to put a missile, and you said,

well, you're going to blow us all up, and put a gun to my head. That's what you're talking about.

Yeah, you sure are thug-tactics. Well, there's been a lot of news in the very recent press,

and we are recording on Wednesday, that the new Iatola may, his sexual preference may be gay,

which is no big deal in the West, but for Islam, that doesn't seem to comport, but I was wondering,

I mean, that's rift for, you know, missing places. I was wondering whether they were going to hang

him on a crane as they do, or throw him off a building, or stone him. It was very interesting,

because the first reports came out that he was a hypocrite. Not only did the coming A family have

a lot of investments put it that way in the United Kingdom, but he was going there for impotence

treatment, but that wasn't the story. Apparently, the gay- the gay tolla is impotent,

only when it comes to women, that his family had known that, that he wasn't able to procreate,

and they pass it off as impotence among the rumor mill of the elite, but he was not able to perform

his marital duties, because he was married to a woman, apparently, and he had no enjoyment of it,

but so I don't know how you treat somebody for that, but he may be okay if he's with men,

but he might be dead if he's with men. So it doesn't matter, he's out of commission.

That's the least of his problems right now. They're killing everyone. Lauren Johnny,

they're going down the list, Israel, the head of the intelligence, the head of the defense,

the head of the Republican, the revolutionary guard, the head of the Bosch Gs, Bosch Gs,

whoever, whatever he pronounced that, they're going down, a person by person, and the Iranians

say that we're a system, it doesn't matter who leads it, and then Israelis say, no, at some key point,

everybody that has any responsibility at all knows they're going to be dead, and they would,

they're not going to go to work, they're going to hide out, and that's going to cause

the collapse. You know, the strange thing about that is that it doesn't seem for all the talk of

hitting all the heads of various organizations, either in Iran or of the Hezbollah. They still

seem to come back and come back and kind of stay alive in ways, but I mean, I hope they can get

rid of them, but it doesn't. That's the tactical, tactically they can, but the question is not

tactically, the question is, is there somebody in charge who says, this morning we have

89 landmines, we have 500 sea mines, we have this number of ballistic missiles stored up in

the mountains, and we're going to distribute it to these locations, I don't think they have those

people. So you have people, it's like they're dying on the vine, you have berries on the vine,

but somebody's cut the cambium layer of the stump and they can't get nourishment. So it's just a

matter of, the whole key is at what point if you're an Iranian, do you feel safe enough

and angry enough after they killed 30,000 of you to go back out and hope that people who killed

you before are going to flip or not leave you alone and have a mass protest, like 100,000 people

in the streets. And what would happen if you did? Would you be killed? Would some of the people

defect to your side? Would Israeli drones be monitoring it and kill the people that want to kill

it? Nobody knows. Yeah, how the coup and overthrow and the assumption of a civilian government would

happen. I know they have a parliament that under the IITO law obviously didn't do much, but

how that will turn to a functioning civilian government seems to be the big question.

All right, and then I last thing on Iran that I have, it's, I've seen sort of some, you know,

whisper of this in the media, but it seems like if you look at the entirety of Iranian, the history

of Iran or that region, they have two large traditions, the Persian tradition which is earlier

and subverted in the seventh century by the and eight century by the Islamic tradition.

Wouldn't the Iranians or it seems to me that culturally you could say, well, the Islamic

tradition has really turned this place into a disaster. Why don't we go back further to our roots

as Persians and Persian society and Persian society that I know was brutal, it was dictatorial,

of course, back in those days, but it also had informed most of what was called the golden age

of Islam, meaning that most of the scholars came out of a Persian tradition. So it has a very

strong cultural intellectual tradition. I think that's the problem that the regime is having,

that they have a zirasterism, religious tradition, and there were three peoples in most of around,

there were the Persians and the Meeds who were conquered as we learned from Herodotus,

and then there were the Parthians who came into prominence during the Roman period.

But there were all Iranian Turkic people, at least the Parthians were, and they had a,

they're mentioned all over classical literature as the main rivals to the Byzantine Empire,

was always the Parthian Empire, and then later the so-called re-emergence of the Persian Empire,

and of course, we have Darius I and Xerxes and Darius III that Alexander conquered,

but that was hijacked, that tradition by these Islamic Shia radicals.

And that's important because when you go to the Middle East, there is a prejudice

that Arabs, in many cases, do not feel comfortable with Iranians and vice versa because

there is a sophistication that exudes from the Iranians, that they have an older literature,

they have an older corpus of religious studies, they have, they predate Islam as a great civilization,

and they, before they molestook over, technologically, they were more advanced in the Arab countries,

and I mean, what the Shah envisioned for Iran by 1980 was pretty much what we see now in the

Emirates or Dubai. He wanted a secular, sophisticated, highly technological society, and he was getting

a new golden age maybe, huh? If only they could shake Islam, which doesn't seem

friendly to intellectual progress. Well Victor, let's turn to Cuba after we take a moment for some

messages, stay with us and we'll be right back. Since the founding of America 250 years ago,

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we've only just begun. America, the beautiful.

Welcome back to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. So Cuba has been in the news as well recently,

and I guess given, right, the power grid shut down. Some Latin American countries have expelled

Cuban officials, and we also see that Venezuela, they've lost their Venezuelan oil, which is

part of the energy crisis for Cuba. And Trump thinks that Russia's kind of out of the game to be a

supporter of Cuba since it's got its Ukraine war going on. And I was wondering, given all of those

conditions, are we primed for real change in Cuba this time? I think the problem with Cuba was that

they were propped up by the Russians and by the Obama administration that opened up relations

and allowed tourism and fought that castorite government up. But and the Maduro Chavez,

Chavez Maduro, Eugene gave them subsidized fuel. So Trump, they'd never think he's a geostrategic

thinker, but he is. So you chase the Chinese or try to chase them out of Panama and Latin America,

cut them off a Iranian oil and control Venezuela and oil, which they were getting a lot of,

then you get rid of the hardcore Stalinist and Venezuelan. They're still probably socialists,

but they're under control of the United States. And then Russia can't get in there because it's

embargoed and they're tied down in Ukraine and you've got Cuba starving to death. No oil,

their airlines are all parked, they can't fly. Most of the cars can't run. And so they were

falling apart. So the government, the surviving Castro brother, is it Raul Castro? I think he's

95. He's just irrelevant. They've got a technocrat running it or an old apparatus check.

So just a question of how do you survive? And what they think is, well, Americans are going to

come here, a bunch of Cuban right wing Americans with a lot of money are going to come here and

they're going to put beaches on the hotels and they're going to bring in fix the airport.

They'll have cruise ships. This will be all great, but will still be communist. And the Cubans

think, from America, no, you won't. We're going to come in over there and we're going to not just

take over the tourist industry and you won't not just have carnival booths there, but we're going

insidiously undermine the government and turn it into a constitutional system.

It's kind of funny because if you ask a leftist on campus, they love Castro. They love Cuba,

but they never would want to live there. But if you said to them, we're going to free the Cuban

people. There's going to be spirit airline charter flights and caravan cruises and you've got

a mobs of Americans there and it's going to be like Key West on steroids. Oh, no, why would you

do that? So they don't want that, obviously, but McDonald's, Starbucks everywhere. If you read

it about early Spanish literature in the 16th century, that's what Cortez was. Most of the Spanish

Hildogos that came to the New World went to Cuba first. They didn't know anything about Mexico or

the Mexican coast. So they went to the Caribbean and that's where Castro, I mean Cortez left Cuba

to go land in what was the little shrine of Veracruz to conquer the Aztec Empire. He left because

and they had most of the indigenous people on Cuba, the native had been extinguished by the

Spanish and they brought in a lot of African slaves. So today in Cuba, it's a little bit different

ethnically than say Mexico or Bolivia or Peru. It's mostly direct descendants from the ruling

Spanish and then Macitos who intermarried with former slaves and black Africans, but you don't

have a lot of indigenous people alive in Cuba. So it's unique because that island was ethnically

cleansed of indigenous people by the Spanish. There weren't very many of them and they were very

violent and they had pretty much existential wars with the Spanish. All right, Victor, I'd like to

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Hansen Show. Victor, let's turn to the Hill and talk a little bit about the controversy

is going on up there this week. The first one is the SAVE Act, SAVE America actually act,

and they're trying to get voter ID through Congress, and they're in the Senate now with the bill,

and it's having a little bit of trouble. Some Republicans don't support it, and Lisa Murkowski

of Alaska is one of those, and that was a strange vote that she voted against bringing it forward.

They have ranked voting in Alaska, and she didn't really win her nomination. She won as a right in.

As a general, I don't want to be too cynical, but Democrat Republican, if you were elected

with a sizable portion of mail-in ballots, those can't be verified as we know, so you're not

going. I mean, Rand Paul is a libertarian, he will vote against it, but her attitude would be,

why would I want to do that? Because if you had to go to the polls and have ID and everything,

I'd lose, she probably would have lost, and so a lot of Democrats would have lost too. That's

the subtext behind it. It's not that they have any. I don't know how many times I go into my small

town, or it's 20,000 now, and I see people so-called people of color, and they're showing me

IDs, showing me. I was at the lab getting a blood draw the other day in this town, and people

were showing their IDs when they said, are you so-and-so, and there was all these rooms,

they all had showed IDs, they even asked for my Medicare card. It's not about that, and they

know that even Montgomery, when he wants snow shovelers, he asks for ID identification. They

have become so dependent on registering and having people to vote who have no-no-nodress

or won't-you know, won't-can't show up or don't exist, that they just won't do it. And Project

Veritas, the former director, as you know, he was down in Los Angeles posing as a homeless person,

and he saw people coming through with the Democratic affiliations registering voters.

Among homeless telling them you don't really need an address, and these were all going to be

mail-in voters. So that's what it's aimed at. And in the 2024 election, they ran a poll,

and usually the Democrats cite these polls, and it runs something like this, if you had a voted,

if you had been registered, that's everybody, not the people who-you were just registered and didn't

vote, or just the people who were registered and did vote. Usually the Democrats get that margin.

In this particular poll, and I think another one, Trump would have won more by a greater margin

than he did, had all the people who supported him, who were eligible to vote,

registered to vote, and showed up at the polls. And so that shows you that the Democratic

base is shrinking, and why wouldn't it be given their agenda on the border, the trends,

stuff, the crime, for all of the people angry that we watch on television or on the internet,

that not one says, I disagree with Donald Trump. I have this plan for the border. I have this

plan for crime. So we had these senators, they are incongruous people. They don't even know how

silly they sell them. You have a guy on TV, and he'll say almost on spec. Iran was very dangerous.

They had killed so many Americans. But there was no immediate threat. There was no immediate threat.

And so you say, well, there was no immediate threat right before the Beirut bombing.

There was no immediate threat right through the Iranian hostage. That was a complete surprise.

Did anybody say, I think they're going to blow up the embassy in Tanzania and Kenya? No.

Did anybody say, hmm, I think they're going to try to kill Trump. No, nobody said that. How about,

oh, there might be an immediate threat because they're going to put thousands of shaped

charges, IEDs in Afghanistan, but the particular Iraq can kill anywhere from 600 to 3000 Americans.

So it's not that the point is twofold. There's been a lot of provocations over 47 years that have

gone down an answer. And number two, it's not that they're immediate threat. They are an immediate

they're a midterm threat. They're an existential threat. They're a long-term threat. They're just a

threat. That's who they are. They can't help it. You know what I mean? That's who that's what they

are. You know, I quoted that once, but in Dury Harry, when they say, why does the kill,

I forgot his name, Zodiac or something, why does he does do it? In Dury Harry's, because he likes it.

And he can too. They like it. They like killing Americans. They hate the West unless their kids are

in school here. Yeah. Well, let's turn then to the shutdown of the DHS. And while I all I see

out there is that the Republicans are blaming the Democrats and their constituencies believe that

and the Democrats are blaming the Republicans and their constituency believes that. But is this

going to be a net benefit for either side or is this just going to be a civil war divide between

parties type thing? They looked at the fourth quarter of shutdown, long as in our history,

last three months, September, October, November, and they said to themselves,

we reduce GDP by two or three points and stall the economy. And Trump was going to have this

great fourth quarter and then roar into 2026. So then they said, we're going to shut down the

government unless you do the following to DHS. So here the Congress going into an administrative

cabinet and telling them what they can and can't do, which is an executive branch.

And they're saying to them, we knew you were going to do this. So we've already funded

it than the big beautiful bill. Their funded has nothing to do with DHS. And they said, okay,

but we're going to hurt you in a different way. We're going to stop all the security at all

the airports. We're going to not pay these people for over a month. And we're not going to pay

anybody else in DHS, it does all this stuff. And then the Republican said, well, why don't we just

talk about ice? And they don't, the Democrats can't talk about it because they have the party

Ilya and Omar, you know, and AOC and all these people's, they don't want any ice. AOC's, I think

her father was a naturalized citizen. Her mother may have been naturalized. I think we know how

Ilya and Omar came here. I should say we don't know exactly given the details. But so many people

now are invested in having no immigration system that the idea that anybody would be deported

is Gestapo like to them. And then the real cause, the Greeks had a good word for it. It's

in Thucydides. And he always says, there was this, so he spoke, this was the pro-fascist, the

pretext, the ITA, the real cause. So they're talking about the pro-fascist is DHS. And that's a

silly one because they can't come up with any reason why you would shut down the government to hurt

DHS when DHS won't be hurt. So then the ITA, the real cause, they want to repeat what they did last

year and hurt the economy by destroying the airline industry, making people wait, making people

angry, slowing down a lot of stuff that the DHS does. And they want to or have Trump crawl back to

them and said, please, please, you're interrupting air service. And they've counseled a lot of flights

and they want to hurt the economy because they don't have an agenda. I've never seen

thing like it. I mean, that sincerely. I've never seen a political party without an agenda. If

you ask any Democrat on the street, okay, we know you hate Trump. We know you hate ICE. Would you please

tell us your foreign policy? What's your policy on the border when you get in power? Let's say

Gavin Newsom's president, is he going to have the wall there? Is he going to tear it down?

Not one inch, as Joe Biden said, is he going to tell us? Are you going to, what are you going to do

with the economy? You're going to have, you're going to cancel all these pipelines offshore. You're

going to go back to green subsidies. Is that what you're going to do? Are you going to empty the

petroleum reserve? Joe Biden almost did 60% of it. Empty. Just tell it, they won't because it's not

because they don't want to. We know they don't want to, but they don't know what they want to do.

They have no agenda. It's just, it's a bunch of Congress women dressing up in kickboxing and then

using the F word, the S word, and then it's this geriatric schumer and Pelosi hobbling around

and screaming, and then there's these young people who, if anybody said, what is Jasmine

Crockett known for for legislation? She's known for one thing saying that white people are satanic

basically. That's all she yells out. And she's this prima donna from the suburbs who went to

preps school and then fakes an inner city ghetto accent depending on the audience to which she's

speaking. Now you mentioned the democratic agenda and I did notice besides hating Trump,

they do have another thing that they're putting on the table. And that was, there was an interview

of JB Pritzker and then Susan Rice was talking about prosecuting anybody who in this administration,

they see as criminal and they'll prosecute them either criminally or civilly. JB Pritzker said

that and Susan Rice came out warning corporations that if they comply with this administration,

they too will be subject. Yeah, she didn't say she just said you elites out there in the media.

So what do you mean, Susan? You mean that if there's an executive order that DEI must be eliminated

because it doesn't follow the Supreme Court ruling on racial preferences? You're going to do what?

You're going to call in Microsoft and say we're going to cancel all your government contracts

unless you do what? Are they going to cancel them unless they reinstate DEI?

So I don't know what she meant. I do know that she's very sensitive because in the Obama years,

she was revealed as a buffoon. In other words, when they wanted some

ignorance, ignorance to go out on Sunday TV and light of the American people that the

Benghazi deaths had been caused by an accidental release of a filmmaker's video that an American

supposedly a right-wing copdic immigrant did a video, which he did, but he was an obscure person.

And that triggered the whole demonstrations that led to the death in Egypt, excuse me,

the death in Libya and each of all this mass across North Africa. No, it didn't. She just did that

because the Obama administration had ignored warnings that the security at the consulate

was nonexistent, basically. And then she, when they wanted somebody to lie that the

all the W&D had been moved, we moved from Syria under Obama's red line, they wheeled her out.

And then she still couldn't stop saying silly things. And then she goes to a meeting where they're

plotting to go after Trump. Obama's basically saying, I'm going to be out of office. And you guys

in the CIA, you know, Comer Clapper, call me Brennan, I want you to do this and do this and find

him Russian collusion. And then she writes on her email to herself. There was a meeting in which

the president and people were very concerned that everything be constitutionally correct. And so,

you know, she wrote it to herself and then mailed it and then showed people. See? I mean, how silly

is that? And so she was kind of the fall girl for the Obama administration. I was on the Harry

Guggenheim board and I served with her mother, Lois. And she was from a very aristocratic family,

Caribbean origins, very wealthy, sort of the doyen of the black community in Washington. So,

she was an aristocrat. She married a multi-millionaire, very privileged woman. So it's

kind of ironic that she's on the barricades of stuff. She's some crusading civil rights leader. And

she's, you know, always haranging people about the injustices in the country when she's a member of

the ultra, ultra, ultra elite, both plutocratic and aristocratic. And so I don't think what I'm saying

is she has no judgment. So if you really believe that, that you're going to punish people,

then you keep quiet about it because Trump has two and a half years left. So then you think

somebody called her up today and said, you idiot, he runs the DOJ. We've got a lot of people in

Minnesota that are crooks. We've got a whole scandal in California that are crooks. New

sim and walls might be have known about it. We don't even know if Comey and Brennan and Clapper are

out of the woods yet. We don't know if Fanny Willis and Latita James are out of the woods yet

or Alvin Bragg. What are you doing? If when they hear that, they'll just go after us.

It was so stupid. All right, Victor. Let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a

little bit about Cesar Chavez and then California as well. Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. You can find Victor on X. His handle is

at VD Hanson and on Facebook at Hanson's morning cup. So if those are your social media outlets,

please follow Victor on those venues. So first, I wanted, there's been recent news that came out

that Cesar Chavez has during his time ahead abused young girls while he was the icon of the

American immigrant labor movement. But there was interesting thing and left news outlets.

And this I'm using the Atlantic that had a story that Cesar Chavez and it's not, I guess it's

somewhat complimentary, but it's also got an edge to it. They said Cesar Chavez

oscillated between a Christ-like asceticism and a Chicago political tactics,

like informing on illegal aliens taking the place. He said the teamsters were hiring illegal aliens

and he called them wet packs and he sent people down to the border with clubs.

And they worked with the border patrol and ratted people out when people, all these ice people

should say to themselves. We're on the front lines trying to stop ice, just like Cesar Chavez

pause, tried to help ice. So in other words, left wing crowds are now trying to stop ice, but the

Locust classicus was the same thing with Cesar Chavez, but he was organizing with mobs down

to the border where they were trying to go after illegal aliens and then help ice in the

border with the precursors of ice. And I grew up here in a farm at the very center of this

Delano where he started is about 45 miles from here. And in the park in town, I remember going

and listening to him. In fact, when I was a senior, there was a big strike at a table grade.

And all of the guys wanted to watch it because we had all worked on packing houses and everybody

said that Cesar Chavez threw nails at the UFW threw nails all over the driveways. They cut down

little trees with chainsaws. They sabotaged trains that had refrigerated cargo on them going

eastward. And it was mostly Chavez's brother who was in charge of the shock troops. So a bunch of

guys, I think there were two Mexican-American guys and two of us. Let's go watch a big strike in

Delano. So we drove down and there were maybe a thousand people protesting and there were people

picking early table grapes and they were trying to get the people to come out.

And I was kind of naive and I said, well, he's non-violent. There's not going to be anything

happening. And everybody said, oh yeah. So a pre-arranged signal, they just went into the fields.

The Chavistas and pulled everybody out. And it was one of the most violent things

I'd ever, excuse me, that I'd ever seen. And the weird thing was we were there watching it

sitting on the car and the Tolary County Sheriff's came over and wanted to arrest us.

And they said, you guys are from Berkeley and we all had like short hair and

San Joaquin Valley accent. No, we're not. We're just watching. Oh, you're an outside agitator.

The problem with Chavez was he was never an angelic. He gets credit because I grew up in those days

and I were in summers. I either worked on my grandfather's farm. I worked for local packing houses

and I picked peaches and grapes. And it was pretty rugged. I mean, there weren't beautiful bathrooms

and waterbray, all that. So he got all that in mostly by fear. And then the big companies,

they weren't even big companies. They were family owned companies. And he started with the

table grate because the others were so dispersed. In other words, peaches, plums, nectarines were

40, mostly small growers. They became greater, bigger. But in those days, and the raisin farmers,

we were raisins and plums. But they were all members of the community and their kids all worked

in the fields. And you might have like 20 workers for one week a year picking grapes on your place.

So it wasn't anything you could organize. And the people were local. So the kids got out of school.

We all got out of school early. So my grandfather and my uncle who were farming at the place would say,

okay, you're going to get well one through you four boys and get well one four. And I want you to

pick 200 trays a day so that the workers see you. And I don't want to he's horsing around. And when

you roll, I want you to roll 2,000 or 2,500 trays when it was time to roll. So everybody could see you

because that was, you know, you didn't want a bunch of snotty white kids with Filipino workers or

people from Oklahoma or Mexican America. So he didn't target that. He targeted shipping. And most

people when they go in the stores don't go rush to the sun made raisin counter. And they don't rush

to get some nectarine. They love those big beautiful green and red grapes. So he knew that.

The problem he had was these were not vast, tinnico type farmers. They were the best farmers. They

were the most savvy farmers. And they were hard knuckle farmers. And they were from immigrant

families. So you had Derigo from Sicily, the Derigos. You had the Jamara family from Italy, I think.

And then you had the Zeno, Zeno, Zeno, Zananovic family from Croatia, the Pando family from

the Balkans. I think Croatia, the Zulan, all of these people, they were hardcore people that had

not been. And they built up this stuff. So when you saw them on TV or you talked to them,

these were guys that were tan, leathery faces, cigar in their mouth, they'd worked their whole life.

They were not the type, you know, like a suit, you know, a guide with an MBA or something.

Hey, Mr. Chavez, well, no, no, these guys were tough as nails. And they had done all the work

themselves when they were young. And they had built these kind of, they were large acreages,

but compared today, I mean, they might have been a thousand or acres, but not like these 20,

30, 50,000, 100,000. But so it's very hard to, it took him about five or six years. And you

had to get, he thought he had to get violent. So what he did was, he, he wasn't a very good speaker,

but he had very expressive faces. I remember, I listened to him with the growers, the growers,

you know, the growers, they, this is more than just grapes. These people don't want people to

live. They don't want them to drink water. They're killing us with pesticides. And that was very

effective. And, and, and these guys were kind of like, wow, I am $2 bucks, and you know, I

went out, I did it, it's so bad about it. That kind. So they won that optics war. And then they got

Robert Kennedy. And he came out, and he blessed the program and all the people boycotted grapes.

And they did a secondary boycott, which was illegal. In other words, if Safeway

had non-union grapes, then you nobody would go to Safeway. They bought, they know, wouldn't

boycott. You couldn't go to Safeway and not buy grapes. You couldn't go to Safeway at all. So,

even at the local Safeway where I was growing up, they had pickets all the time. Don't go into Safeway.

And it's very funny. I was in this period in 71. I was 17. I went to University, California,

Santa Cruz, the most radical campus, probably in the nation, had just opened three years ago.

And I had grapes, but they weren't table grapes. They were the same species, Thompson seedless.

But we dried them into great, they were the little yellow ones. They're not the big fat green

that you girdle and use jibrella and you artificially make big. Same plant, same vine,

but you cultivate it differently. So, I had them in my room and everybody would come in and

eat them. And then one day, a very, I won't mention her name. She was very famous for parents

on a huge cosmetic company. And another guy whose father was a pretty well-known producer

came in and they said, these are grapes. We boycott grapes. And I said, I picked them myself.

You're a non-union. I said, they're not even table grapes. Well, they looked like grapes.

I said, we dried them into raisins. Well, they should. And all of these are grapes. So,

they put all these stickers on my door, my dorm boycott. And then I walked out and everybody said,

you hate chavez. And all these. So, that's how he won. He had all of these

wealthy white kids that felt so guilty. They wouldn't eat grapes. Most of them didn't need the grapes

anyway. But in cafeteria, if you had grapes, they had big signs. Union, pick, you know, all of this.

And it was very effective. The problem with him was that beneath that angelic face,

he was ruthless. So, he drove almost all the people that he worked with out of the movement.

His closest confidant was Dolores Werta. And even on camera, he would scream out of her.

They were supposed to be, and they became intimate. Nobody knew that. But now we're going to celebrate.

Every town in the valley has Caesar Chavez Boulevard. He's a folk hero, but nobody,

there's almost nobody who is Mexican-American, second, third, works in agriculture. I mean,

in a sense of picking thing. That's mostly immigrant labor, first generation. But the point is,

everybody reverses it, reverses it. And I don't know what's this going to do because they've all

yesterday and today canceled their Caesar Chavez. And why did they cancel it? Because these

revelations are coming out, and it coincides with two things. The Me Too movement and the Epstein files.

And the accusation is that according, and it's not some white MAGA nut on a talk radio who's

screaming and yelling that they can easily character, it's Dolores Werta. 95-year-old Dolores Werta,

who knows everything about the, and whom Caesar Chavez treated very shabbly and drove out of the

movement, especially with his little flirtation, a big flirtation with Sinanon, that weird cult where

they played the game, where they got everybody in, and they just said, eth you. And that really turned

off the Catholic community of Mexican American hierarchy in the union. And he was very vindictive.

So he turned over the apparatus of the whole UFW to Sinanon. And by 1975, 80, he was zero. Everybody,

it just imploded. But the weird thing is, the accusations are, I shouldn't say weird,

tragic is that Dolores Werta, the most radical Mexican American political figure in California,

is now saying that she was taken to a vineyard and raped, raped by Caesar Chavez. And then other

situations was forced to have intercourse with him. And she mothered two children that were his.

She was so bothered by it. I think she had eight of her own, that, and I think, excuse me,

Chavez's wife had eight children. Dolores Werta might have had 10 or 15, and she was very fertile.

And she had them raised by somebody else as I read the accusations today, and they did a DNA test.

They are his children. But that's not the worst that he raped his most trusted advisor,

then keep quiet that he was having other affairs with women. He also, there's an allegation that

he had groomed young girls as very, very young. I won't get into the ages, but they were

considerably younger than 15, 14, and he had sexual intercourse with him. So he was a rapist and a

pedophile. Well, you don't know what this is going to do. I mean, nobody wants to cover it,

but the New York Times is going to run. And you know what they're going to do. So-

The New York Times already ran a story with that. Yeah, but I mean, they're doing a deep investigation,

because apparently it's a tip of the iceberg. He had affairs with a lot of different women,

and many of them were under age, allegedly. And so it kind of, you know, he always played the idea

that there wouldn't be any women in the UFW that were vocal and high profile, except Dolores

were at the, and he would always tell her what to do. And his wife's never, you never saw his wife.

She stayed home. He good mother, good Catholic woman. He always said he was a good Catholic.

And so that whole facade and down South of Bakersfield where they have the compound, I debated

somebody there once. It was very strange. It was kind of a synonym. Has no formal relation with

synonym, but it had to cult like many of the people who worked there and operated that were

second, third generation, Chavez family members. But it was kind of a hero cult cult. And

mind me of a hero cult, archaeologists find in Greece, you know, the hero cult of Ajax. And then

there's all these little buildings and relatives and stuff that were worshipping Ajax. Well,

they worship him. And we don't know what it's going to happen now. If the left is consistent in

their protocols and policies and iconoclism, I suppose what they're going to do is we'll see

Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer and AOC, Jasmine Crockett, introducing motions to do what?

tear down Caesar Chavez's statues, rename all of these boulevards to someone else. They've

already canceled all of the, they've already canceled all of this commemorations.

So it's quite stunning if these allegations are true. And what's weird is the UFW and the

Caesar Chavez Foundation have not denied them. In fact, they've said, if true, we are going to

have compensation with the victims. So what that tells me is that everybody who was an intimate

who are now in their 80s and 90s knew about this. And they knew about it for years. And they felt

it was not these girls, if it's true, that had coerced sexual relations with the great icon who

were under 18. They were sacrificial ponds or collateral damage. And you could not, we veal that

because it would hurt a lot of resistance, la causa. And that's why it kept quiet. And now Delaris

Dororis worked as 95. And she's, she's going to meet her, her lord. And she wants to get this

off her chest and tell the truth. Yeah. So it's coming from one of the most, I shouldn't say one of

the most authentic United Farm workers organizer administrator who's still alive. Yeah. So it's

going to be very hard to refute. Yeah. And she has the DNA tests. She says of these two daughters

are now in their 60s and they're alive. Yeah. And if their mother in their 90s says this, then they're

going to collaborate that. I think what else is interesting is that the New York Times and the

Atlantic are running the stories about that. That's because they want to get it out first and

they want to package it. And so you've already said that they had a duality that he was charismatic

and sort of reflecting like and yes, and political tiger, right? I had no strong feelings, but I

had grew up with people. I worked at packing houses when I was in the summer. And they despised

him. These packing houses meant you were pretty wealthy and you had your own land. And they'd always

say, ah, you know, you never worked today. When I went out one day and he got sunstroke, he didn't

have a long, he always said he had back problem, but I don't think he was a farm worker for very

long. He was a very adroit. He got all of gosh, he got the UFW, the AFL, CIO, Walter Ruther,

and the auto work everybody. The UFW was under his control, but also you had all these people

traipsing down to Lainel. And then he had something called, let me remember, the Robert F. Kennedy

Medical Plan. And he got a lot of money from private foundations to fund what was necessary was

healthcare for farm workers. Good idea. And it was so poorly run and we plead with an efficiency

that it kind of was broke very quickly. And some of the workers never got covered.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show and we have a few comments of those who send in their

comments. Here is from Russell Doe. There are a few conservatives that maintain a gentle humble

and empathetic nature as you do. If Trump could harness just a small percent of what you have,

his approval ratings would go through the roof. As his policies are transforming this country and

the entire pecking order of this world, he is a great president, but the tiniest bit of your humility

would make him lovable. I like that. That was sweet. Thank you, Russell Doe. And this is from Matt

Thrasher, frustrated in California. He titles it. Our family recently moved to the foothills of

California from Flagstaff, Arizona. My wife's brother who has special needs also moved with this

as his mother can no longer take care of him. I knew when we moved to California that everything

would be more expensive, but what I didn't realize was that my brother-in-law would get so little

given all the taxes we are paying. You would think high taxes and being in a blue state would mean

they take care of their most vulnerable. Not even sure how we will pay for everything. Arizona

was much lower taxes and they took care of those with special needs. I'm disappointed in the state

of California. Well, we have all of these disclosures that there's a multi-million if not

billion-dollar fraud and hospices in the LA greater area where these people just went to hotels and

said they were a hospice and they were getting $6,000 a month in some cases for people supposedly

dying and they had nothing. It was just a multi-fraud and the new sum, the new sum are Walt's attitude

to these disclosures. It's never okay. Let's find the people who did it. Let's indict them and

jail them as a deterrent. Let's cancel this program until we need more money. Because they believe

Walt's and Newson believed the money is there. So they would say, well, Victor, these people are

needy. These are victims. They're the oppressed. So what does it matter the delivery systems? They

can go in and get fruits down so they can go get pailgrounds or we can just say, we want to give

you the money and try to help out the dead. But if they don't do it, it's okay because the money

is coming from the wealthy to the poor. They're really socialist, communist.

And then in the very last thing I'd like to do is just show a picture sent to us from down under

Judy James. And I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do this for those who are,

it's not going to focus in very well. It's an absolutely beautiful picture from down under.

Yeah, it is beautiful. Oh my gosh. So Judy James, thank you for the picture and the nice note

as well. Thank you, Victor, for everything today. It was great and informative session. We'd

love it. Thank you. And thanks to everybody for joining the Friday News Roundup on Victor Davis

Hanson in his own words. Please come back to join us. Thank you for tuning in to the daily

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