PBD Podcast - 5 Things That Could Destroy America - Victor Davis Hanson | PBD Podcast #856

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

Patrick Bet-David sits down with historian Victor Davis Hanson for a wide-ranging conversation on what happens if America loses its place in the world. Hanson breaks down immigration, Europe’s future, Iran, Israel, the limits of American power, the Founders, farming, and the five forces he believes could threaten America’s future.------ 👞 Get the NEW Billionaire Suede Loafer: https://bit.ly/4ym5oRA.👕 SHOP THE ICON COLLECTION: https://bit.ly/3TuUU3x.Ⓜ️ CONNECT ON MINNECT: https://bit.ly/4kSVkso.Ⓜ️ PBD PODCAST CIRCLES: https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP.👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: https://bit.ly/4lzQph2.🥃 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE: https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj.🇰 KALSHI: http://kalshi.com/pbd.SUBSCRIBE TO: @VALUETAINMENT @ValuetainmentComedy ABOUT US:Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller "Your Next Five Moves" (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

What happens to the world if America falls? It will be utter chaos. For all the criticism on the left, they don't quite understand that they would be killed if there wasn't the United States. If you were to give a warning to actual Americans, we have to be very wary about taking people who were part of the failed state. Ilyan Omar, her father was a colonel in Saeed Berry's army, responsible for killing 200. thousand people. We saw what happened in the UK, we saw what's happening in EU. I'm not optimistic about the future of Europe.

This is the future for Europe. Illegal immigration. At numbers, you cannot assimilate or integrate. The only reason that they have survived major existential terrorists that in the United States military. How do you prevent the Islamification from taking place in America? I mean, if you look at Rashid Taleb or you look at Hassan Piker, they have a desire to change a system because they can't win within it.

The Supreme Court, obviously. They hate the very system. This entire system that birthed them. They're just making us more angry. You know what that makes us do. When we went into war, did you support the decision and two, now that we're in, did you expect it to be at this point? I never thought we were going to start negotiating with a lunatic that doesn't care about

the welfare of its own people. How do you think this is? I think that's where we leave them to stew in their own Jews. So I'm going to ask an indirect way. of helping our guys, our production team that works so hard, get a raise. Do you want to help them get a raise? This is how you can help us out. 49% of you watch our podcast that our editors work so hard.

Producers, cutters, all of them. Our production team, 32 of them that work here, they work very, very hard to deliver a good quality to you. If you enjoy our show and you want to help this thing get bigger so we can take our talent that we have in-house that support this production all the time and maybe even give them a raise, then please subscribe to the channel that allows us to get more viewership

and indirectly it makes bigger opportunities for our current team that we have. Thank you so much. Mr. Victor Davis-Hanson, how are you? Very good. Very good. Thank you for having me. Thanks for making the time for being here. I've been following your teaching for many, many years.

You're on the list of mine of yourself, Thomas Soul, Milton Friedman. The amount of wisdom you share is I think everybody should consume more of your content. And it looks like millions are. and thank you for your time. Thank you. You know, for somebody like yourself who, you got your PhD from Stanford, you love farming,

you've done a lot of different things, senior fellow at Hoover Institute, you've very well read in the history, you know, different things that happen in America. Open-ended question, what happens to the world if America falls? Well, it will be utter chaos. And for all the criticism on the left,

they don't quite understand that the United States is a disinterested player in international finance. I know it has things that favor it, but it doesn't manipulate currencies like the Chinese. It doesn't cheat on patents or copyrights. It doesn't dump product below the cost of production. And the U.S. military is the only reason why these choke points, whether it's the Strait of Ramos, the Bosphorus, Suez, Gibraltar, Panama Canal, their old. open to international commerce. It would be a Hobbes-in war of everybody against everybody

if the United States was not there. And the other thing to remember very quickly is the Europeans, for all their occasional ankle-biting, are not a viable entity anymore on their own. They have immigration problems, open borders problems, energy problems, fertility problems, defense project problems, problems. And since World War II, the only reason that they are, that they survive the Russian

onslaught into Eastern Europe, and the only reason that they have survived major existential terrorist threat is the United States military. So it would be a very, and there would be no for people who objected to their totalitarian governments, I don't know where they would go. We have the largest number of immigrants legal and illegal. Some of that's problem. of course, but a lot of them are legal immigrants, and they agree with the founding and the values of the United States, and they would be killed or they'd be imprisoned if there wasn't the United States. What is the chance?

Like, what needs to happen for America to fall? And I think some of it is, a lot of it is in our control. But if you were to give a warning to actual Americans, well, these are the five things that if we continue to do when America is going to fall and somebody else is going to be the lead dog. So what does that look like if America does end up falling? Well, I think we have a good example because we have a fellow Western paradigm in Europe. And I'm not optimistic about the future of Europe. So the five things would be, one, open borders and unchecked illegal immigration,

but also legal immigration at numbers you cannot assimilate or acculturate or integrate. And we're seeing all that already, how it affects the government in Britain or France or Germany. especially when people are coming from, let's be honest, Islamic countries, and they don't feel they want to acculturate through the melting pot into their host country's civilization. So illegal immigration and open borders. And then ideological, I would call it, nealistic ideologies, such as that wind and solar are going to power us in the 21st and 26th century.

That's not demonstrably true. and when people in Germany tried it, it almost destroyed the German economy. That's a self-inflicted wound. The third is the idea that you tamper with what has worked over 2,500 years. By that, I mean the slow, steady evolution of constitutional consensual government. And we know now that a prime minister-dash president, an executive, balanced by a parliament,

whether the U.S. model of a bicameral Congress or the European model of a parliament, checked again by an independent judiciary is what makes freedom and liberty possible in the West. And so when you hear people that want to eliminate the presidency or eliminate the Senate or pack the court, they don't quite understand that that was a norm, that attack on consensual guns,

government or that lack of the type of consensual government that we have was the norm before the United States and Europe adopted this process dating back to classical Greeks, the Roman Republic, the Renaissance. So it was a tried and true method. That's a third. The fourth is utopian pacifism that you want to, and we're hearing that now, you want to abolish the Pentagon or that we can, that we don't really have existential differences with different cultures or alternative civilizations, and diplomacy can work our way out of it. I don't think whether we like it or not, the Roman idea that if you want peace, prepare for war is classical deterrence. Deterance is what keeps the peace, and that's important to remember in a Western society.

Finally, our baines are not foreign. I don't think necessarily there are going to be, you know, barbarians crossing the Rhine and the Danube in the 5th century of the Roman Empire, which happened. But it's this problem in the West, it's not a problem that's our strength, but free market capitalism when combined with consensual government and freedom of speech creates what the Romans called a luxus luxury. and people soon become not just self-critical, which is our strength, self-criticism, but they become neelistically self-critical. They hate the very system that birthed them. And we're starting to see that on the left, that the more people have freedom, the more they have affluence,

the more they think they don't need to work, the more they think they can take things that they haven't earned, the more that they can call for people to be killed, under and so that creates an indulgence and that always creates a backlash and we have to be careful about both but I don't think the Democratic Socialists to take one example understand that they think what they're saying is new but for every onhinged new reform so-called reform that they're demanding it's been tried before somewhere in the world it's not worked you know the

So out of the five you talked about, one of them was immigration. So we saw what happened in UK, we saw what's happening in EU, and what the best case study is Poland, lowest rape, lowest unemployment, lowest, and they don't allow anybody in. Yes. And we saw what's going on with the Rupert-Loe report on UK, the 250,000, 87% Pakistani, rape gang, all this stuff that was going on. But somebody may say in America, but, you know, when our founding fathers started America,

they had freedom of speech, they had freedom of religion, of course, free market. And so what do you do if Islam grows here? And we learned in Trump's administration when he tried to push voter ID in a 6-3 Supreme Court, they still voted against it. So to get that protection there. So if eventually a Democrat takes over and say a couple of the Supreme Court justice a step away, and then it flips to the other way around 6-3, they can really push the envelope the other way even more. And so based on the way our fact,

Founding Fathers created the Constitution, how do you prevent the Islamification from taking place in America? Well, we have innate checks, so we've had existential dangers. In the 1930s, there was an active communist movement that grew out of the Great Depression, and it intensified during the war with our alliance with the Soviet Union. In fact, I'll give you an example. We had a $2 billion funded Manhattan project to create the bombs, and we found out later that scientists that were working in New Mexico

were sending the blueprints of both the uranium and plutonium bomb, and the Soviet Union had not invested much, but along with German physicists after the war, it created a bomb within four years after we did. And that was a shock. How could that happen? So what I'm getting at is if as long as you have a problem, free press and we have podcasts like this where people can be informed and as long as you have an

opposition party and that's what the socialists are they understand that so when they say they want to destroy the senate what they're saying is we want to destroy the traditional check on mass populace what the Greeks called o'clockocracy the rule of the mob we just want the a huge House of Representatives and maybe double the number every 300,000 people get a per and then we want whatever they say will be instant law without a Senate to veto it

or two-thirds majority to override a president and they want to get rid of the presidency and have a committee. So they understand what you're talking about and they look at the present system and they say well we don't have the Supreme Court we don't have the White House, we don't have the Senate, we don't have the House, and we're polling 80, 20, 70, 30 on all these issues.

And this isn't fair. So we want to open the borders again, bring in a new demography, and we have 54 million people who weren't born in the United States, 16% of the population. They want to up that, not to bring in, you know, immigrants that really help us and believe in the American system, but people who don't believe in the American system and want to tear it down.

And we've seen a lot of that lately. And so they are, they want to change the system. They want to bring in two new states for four senators. They want to pack the court to 15. We haven't done that since 1869. They want to get rid of the electoral college and complete ignorance about what the Federalist paper authors had shown us why it was important to have it. and you could go on and on,

but they have a desire to change the system because they can't win within it. And that's sort of what the Jacobins did in France during the French Revolution and what the Bolsheviks did in the Soviet Union. And it's scary. So we have to have a free press and we have to have people to speak up

and we have to have an alternate media. When you have a media nexus, that's joined at the hip with government, and you have a permanent bureaucracy that's judged jury and executioner. You've got a real problem. The founders never assume that we would have three million people

working in the federal government, another 20 million working for state governments. That was just something they didn't, they think. And they also thought that even though they were deists, many of them, that is they were not active Christians, they did believe that religion, in this case, predominantly Christianity, would offer a moral break on excess.

But they never dreamed, I don't think, that a large number of the population would be atheists, agnostic, or hostile to organized religion. Because even people like Washington or Madison or Jefferson that didn't go to church every Sunday and didn't pray daily, they still believed in the principles of Christianity

to take that particular religion, and they still believed that it was invaluable, invaluable that immoral people could govern themselves. In other words, there was a religious break or religious restraint on their innate desires, which could become excessive and dangerous. What blind spots do you think our founding fathers had when they create? I mean, of course, you can't create a perfect, perfect, perfect system.

There's going to be some leaks in it. Where were some blind spots that they had, meaning there were issues that didn't even think about back then that now we're dealing with today. Well, they were modest people. So I don't think when they set up the Constitution and the amendments that followed, they didn't have any idea that it would be so popular. And I mean it in this context. The Spanish Empire from our southern border to Chile,

the Caribbean, to the degree it was run by the French or the Spanish or the Portuguese, they would not let immigrants come in to any of those countries unless they were subjects of the Crown or they had special dispensations as traitors, but they all had to be Catholic. And so that didn't work out well, I don't think, compared to ours. So ours was a innate in the Constitution, was a bargain. and it said, all men in the Declaration are created equal. There's no mention of race in the, there's one mention about three-fifths representation

for slaves in the census. But it's not what most people usually think it is. But what I'm getting at, there's no mention of an official race or religion. So they felt that there was going to be this free market, this free system, and it was open to the world, and they were going to form a city on the hill. and when they founded the country, 94% of the people were European.

And that is they had a shared, if you were from Scotland or Ireland or Britain or France or Germany or Dutch. And then later in the 19th century, if you came from Eastern Europe, they felt that people were coming already with an experience of the Western tradition so they would be easily assimilated into the American people. But I don't think they ever imagine that we would be bringing people from all over the world without audit, without acculturation, without assimilation, without integration. And they would immediately believe in the Constitution and Declaration rather than attack the country almost. I mean, if you look at Rashid Talib or you look at Ilyan Omar or you look at Zoran Mandami or. You look at El Saeed, or you look at Chevalier, or you look at this socialist in New York that people have been talking about, or you look at Hassan Piker.

There is a similarity. They're either first or second generations, which is fine, but they come from failed states, which is understandable to want to come in the United States. But they're also very wealthy. Their parents are very successful, and yet as first or second generation immigrants, they don't, they don't. don't show a graciousness, a gratitude to the host. They come over here and they do very well, but they're completely exempt from criticism. They plug into DEI and then they try as much as they can to dismantle the U.S. system. And they're exempt from criticism. So if I say, well, Mr. Mondami, don't give us any more lectures about settler colonialists. You came from the 1%, the 1% of the Indian

community in Uganda. And they control 65% of the wealth. According to your own standards, you're a settler, colonial. I would never say that, but since he does all the time, he should be aware of his contradictions. So I should say to Hassan Piker, you want to confiscate wealth and all this, you drive a Porsche, your parents are multimillionaires, you bought a multi-million dollar home in Hollywood. Or I could say to Rokana, you're talking now about a tax on the wealthy and you're driving this socialist message, which you find convenient all of a sudden. Your father-in-law came over here. He made $250,000. Your kids have golf courses in their name and your trust. Your wife drives a range over $180,000 car. You get the picture that given that success and that

bounty, you don't think they would be calling for the destruction of the system of their adopted country that gave them so much opportunity. And I don't think the founders ever thought that was going to happen. And it's a result of the therapeutic left saying, you know, we don't want to be too proud about our achievements in the 1960s, 1970s. They abandoned civic education, Western culture, Western heritage, and they'd adopted this therapeutic, you know, salad bowl, rather than the melting pot. So when you're saying that, that kind of goes back to,

what do you now do knowing these guys are growing? In 1970, 5% of the American population was immigrants. And you go 30 years later, it hits 8, 9, 10%, and then today it's at 16%. If on any leader's bulletin, they're growing, they're winning, and they're expanding in different markets. So now, you know, one could go back and study in the 20s and 30s when immigration went up to 14, 13%,

and we brought it down to 5%. But during that period of bringing it down, there had to be a unification of people, and it's the same problem, you know, on both sides. And for the most part, the left and the right agreed on some of the things being the same problem. You don't have that today. So what can a president do to slow this down?

What can a president do to slow it down? Well, I think Donald Trump, I never thought he could take 10,000 people coming in illegally a day and get it to zero. And he did. And that was, so right now, at least for the near future, we don't have a problem with new illegal immigration. The problem is finding the 12 million people who came in illegally

and then what to do with the 30 million who were here illegally. But on immigration, I don't think it's chauvinistic. It's not racist. It's not imperialistic. It's not nativist. Just to say at this stage of American history, we're only going to take X amount of people that we can assimilate a culture rate and integrate.

And it's going to be easier for us if we are allowed to select people who believe in the American system. So I think we should audit them, should have them give a test to see if they have some English fluency, some familiarity with American institutions. And I think we have to be very wary about taking people who, not dissidents, not people who were a dissident community within a failed state, but people who were part of the failed state. For example, Ilya and Ely and Omar, for all her rhetoric and sharp criticism of the United States and Israel and other places, her father was a colonel in Saeed Berry's army

that was responsible for killing 200,000 people in the war between Somali and the breakaway Republic of Somaliland. And the reason they fled and thousands with them to Minnesota wasn't because they just picked America out of the hat, it was because they lost that genocidal campaign and their opponents were after them. So they fled to the sanctuary of the United States. And yet she gets here and then she starts lecturing us on fascism and white supremacy. So I think you could say we want a temporary hold on any immigration from Somalia to we can audit these people.

We obviously can't, given the staggering fraud. We need to be very careful about people coming from the West Bank or Gaza until we can audit them. Any country that's at a veritable war with the United States, it has people who don't believe in the values of America, and they're not willing to take a citizenship exam or a visa exam or some way we can find out who. they are. And I don't think, I think we always did that. But the problem was before you were bringing people who had some experience, not as rich as our own, but some experience with constitutional government and the long tradition of Western values. And they were, for the most part, 95% Christian. And they came to a 95% Christian country. But the idea that you would bring people with another

religion who did not want to assimilate and whose goal was to supplant Christianity with Islam. The founders would find that, you know, suicidal. Yeah, but we're here now, right, to see what's going to happen next. It's going to be interesting. So now let's look at the war today, Iran, U.S., Israel. One, when we went into war, did you support the decision that we went into it? And two, now that we're in, did you expect it to be here? months later, where there seems to be a gridlock that the president is now going and threatening

China to say, you've got to stop providing support to Iran so we can suffocate Iran more. Did you expect it to be at this point? No. I, and I wrote, on February 28th, I thought that within about 90 days, the U.S. military with help from Israel, but also with help, we forget that, the Gulf states have 600 late-model combat aircraft. They have double the number that Israel has, the six Gulf states. They have more than our permanent-based combat forces in the region, not counting our two carriers. So I thought there would be this huge armada of 1,500 planes hitting all of these targets, and then they would, after six weeks or seven weeks, they would consult and say, have we met our goals of dismantling this

nuclear program, have we attrided the military such that it will not pose an existential threat? Yes. Have we kept the sanctions and blockades so they can't subsidize these Ring of Fire terrorists,

Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis? And then they would leave a carrier group, which is always in the region, to patrol the Straits of Hermuz and go home and say we've pretty much done our job, and And now this, and we have the sanctions and the blockades on, and I think they could have been

much stricter as we see now. They're very strict, but we could have done that much earlier. And then we would have said, we're going to let this awful theocracy stew in its own juice. And when 93 million people come out of their apartments and homes, and this government has a, they see a wrecked half-century investment, half a trillion dollars, in fact, in this military industrial nuclear complex. And then this theocracy still wants to rebuild it and still wants to give their precious money away to Arab terrorists in the Middle East, that that subversion we saw earlier would increase. And almost like the fall of the Berlin Wall, we think the fall of the Berlin Wall

was the end of communism. It wasn't. It took about a year for all the Eastern Europeans to be liberated in two years for the Soviet Union to fall. But that mechanism would be in place. As long as we kept the sanctions and as long as we had enough naval support to keep the straight open. And then I think we would have done that four months before the midterms and gas would be normal. But I never thought we were going to stop right at 38 days and start negotiating with a lunatic unhinged regime that is not attached to reality and doesn't care about the welfare of its own people. And I thought we would help the dissidents as well. I said that we should have an in-term government and exile representing the different ethnic groups

and parties in Iran. And we should not talk to the theocracy at all. We should talk to a government in waiting and just deal with them and then turn over Iranian frozen assets to them. And then they know best how, with media and propaganda and arming, they know best how to weaken that regime. And we could offer our help. But we should not go into the country on the ground, and we should not talk, fight, talk,

fight endlessly. Just hit them so that they can't hurt anybody for a long time, keep the sanctions to bankrupt up them and create the conditions where they can't close the straight, can't get, can't get oil out, can't get imports in, and let the people then deal with them. Do you think, so two-part question, do you think it was the right move to take out their Supreme Leader? Because typically Trump's model is, he takes out the number two. He took out Gassam Soleimani, but you don't go to the main guy and take them out.

One, do you think it was the right move to take out the Supreme Leader and number two? Do you think that was Trump's plan, or do you think Israel got ahead and took him out to keep Iran to keep U.S. longer involved in this war. Handmade in Portugal, their craftsmanship is a way of life. For those who move through life differently, from sunlit decks to nights that never need an occasion, every detail is considered, every step, effortless, crafted from fine swayed and built with builder technology designed to move with you. because true luxury isn't about being noticed.

It's about how you feel when you arrive. The FLB iconlofer, made for the life you've earned. The more that I've talked to people, I think it's a little bit more complex than that. I think the United States was very worried because of the criticism he got, taking Soleimani and Baghdadi and Obama got with his 500 assassination drone missions on the Pakistani border,

which he killed. We remember three civilians who probably deserved it. So there's always been a reluctance. We use this euphemism, targeted assassination, but really talking about hitting killing somebody. So the United States, although they did do a little bit, they divided it up, I think, on our initiative. They said, we're going to hit the targets.

we can see aerial but we don't have intelligence on the ground we don't know the intricacies of the Iranians we don't have the knowledge that the Mossad does we don't have any of that so Israel said well we can take out the first second and third echelon of their leaders but we don't have the ability with B2 bombers to hit the nuclear facilities we don't have the wherewithal to sustain the bombing campaign. We don't have the munitions. You do the heavy stuff, and we will do the selective targeting. And that's where that happened. And I don't think at this point it made any difference because I think he's dead, but they assume that they're acting as if he's, the Supreme Court is dead, but I think his son is too, but they assume that he is.

but anytime you have chaos, your enemy is in chaos, it's a good thing. The reason why we think it's a bad thing and why you ask that question is Donald Trump has a unique art of the deal style. I mean, once he killed Soleimani the next day, he said, well, the Iranians kind of felt bad, so I let them shoot some missiles in an hour. And they called me up in advance and said, lockdown. and that's what happened. No other president would have done that. Or when they sent missiles into the Gulf,

he said, well, they got to get it off their chest. So with him, he's a transactional president. He thinks he can always make a deal with rational actors. I'm not sure these people are rational. So I think that's the problem. That if we, in a normal way that we do business, knocking out the entire leadership would create care. chaos, but we didn't care because we're not going to negotiate with them. We're going to

inflict such military damage unilaterally. They're not going to be able to do anything. And by that, I mean, we should have hit all the bridges to China and Russia on rail from day one. We should have taken out their airports on day two. And we should have had the economic sanctions of freezing bank accounts, embargoes, blockades on day three. When Bill Clinton said he wanted to bomb Serbia, again, without Congressional, authorization. With NATO, U.S. flew 85% of the missions to extreme criticism. Russia was very angry at us. We had a lot of people on the right who were opposed. Our allies like the Greeks were very upset. It was a complete failure for 55 days. And then they said to Clinton, you're

going to have to hit dual-use targets. So he said, oh, my God, what do I have to do? And they said, you're going to have to take out every bridge on the Danube. And he did. And it weakened Melosevic. And then they came back about two weeks later and they said, you got to get more. And he said, what? You got to take out the power grid. Don't destroy the generators. Just magnesium bombs, chaff, whatever you have to do. So they blacked out. And we did that for another what, two weeks. And on days 78 or nine, they capitulated. I don't know why we didn't follow that Clinton model. It would have been much more successful, I think. So then doesn't that show a contradiction, if you go that strong and then you want to negotiate,

what makes you think they're going to be negotiating truthfully? What makes you think they're going to be honest players? They're not going to be, they're never going to be negotiating truthfully. They're going to be negotiating either without desperation or with desperation. And what I'm getting at is he did not inflict enough military. and economic and physical pain on that regime for them to cease what they were doing. And that was making a bomb, trying to disrupt the straight-of-your-moos, sending missiles into the Gulf, and funding all of these Arab terrorist groups.

He did with the Houthis, the Israelis did too. They said, if you keep doing it, and they took out their port facilities, they hit one of their airways and then they gave him a list of targets. And so far, the Houthis haven't been attacking us, as they did under Biden. So I think if he had inflicted that type of pain, then I think we wouldn't have negotiated. We would have just said, this is what we want from you. And if you don't want to do it, we're going to inflict a level of pain that's going to cost you trillions of dollars to recover, and your own people are not going to like the way you choose to recover and divert funds. we're going to help them find freedom.

And then basically you can't open the straight. You can't have commerce. We don't want to get near you. We don't want to get on the ground. See you. Wouldn't want to be you. And that's months before the midterm. Everybody says it's cynical that Trump is got the midterms and he keeps denying it.

But it's not cynical because if he loses it. the House and Senate, his MAGA counter-revolution is essentially over with. It's going to be like Obama, executive orders. And Obama, the last year was his eight years, he just spent it on the golf course. He was a non-entity. And Trump is trying to wage a multifaceted counter-revolution on economic, cultural, civilizational, social, military, political realms. And if he can't get a maintain majority. And history says it's going to be very hard. 39 now the last 41 elections. And he's got the lowest approval rating right now since 2017, 33, whatever, the numbers just came back. And so that's going into the midterm. But just to isolate one of the questions,

based on what you said, you said, we don't have that kind of intel, Masada, so it's fair to say if anybody did approve to take out their Supreme Leader, Chaminé, it wouldn't have been Trump. It would have been Israel. Is that a fair assessment or no? It is if you allow some latitude, if the scenario went like this, the Israelis went to Trump and said, we know who their leadership is, military, theocratic, Islamic Revolutionary Guard, and taking them out will help disrupt that regime. But we don't have the wherewithal to hit their nuclear facilities.

we don't have the type of heavy aircraft that you do. So why don't we have a division of labor? And Trump would say, yes, with the full knowledge, what they were doing, yes. And he would think that would aid his task of disrupting command and control. And that's not to say the Israelis did not take out conventional targets. They did. And it's not to say that we didn't hit some people. We did.

But I think there was a concession to the Israelis. who had a lot more intelligence of who was actually running things, where they lived, who they were, where they traveled. But do you think there was a conversation to say, Mr. Trump, President Trump, are we good, are we on the same page if we take out their Supreme Leader? Because there's nothing above it. That's not number two. That's their Supreme Leader.

Yes. Do you think there was a concession or an agreement to say, are we good taking them out? And the President said yes. I think, yeah. But I don't know if. If he said, you take them out or we're going to take them out, I think the answer was, we're going to hit these military targets, which include command and control.

And he's not exempt. So I don't think they, you know what I mean? They obviously, when they hit that big compound right in the middle of Tehran, they knew that there were top people there, and they kept hitting them. And I think that was the American approach. I think the Israeli approach was this particular person is going to, work in this particular building and we know him and he lives at this particular address. I don't think we had that level of knowledge, but we didn't have the rough idea that where they

lived. So I don't know who actually killed him or killed which particular command and control, but it was done with the knowledge or the aid of the United States, obviously. Yeah, the only reason I'm asking that question, the purpose, the motive behind that question is, if you killed a Supreme Leader and you did it intentionally and you approved it, A logical player cannot say, well, now let's go and negotiate. Those two don't go together. If you kill our hero, our second to God, whatever my religion is, you kill him.

Vengeance is permanent. That vengeance is not going to go away. So you better put us out instead of just come back and say, let's do a memorandum of understanding. Those contradict each other. That's what I'm asking. We did that. I mean, we were knowledgeable all during World War II, the OS. and M5, the British intelligence, were sending people into Europe to kill their top leaders.

So they killed Reinhardt, and he was the pro-consul of most of southern Eastern Europe. And they killed him. The Czechs killed him on the directive of the British intelligence. We killed the most beloved senior commander in the Japanese military, Admiral Yamamoto. We knew we got intelligence where he was. we sent P38s on long distance, and we shot him down and killed him. Respectfully, this is a religious leader. This is a supreme leader. This is like somebody killing the pope. This is like somebody coming out and taking out the pope, and you're going to war

against Catholics. I mean, yeah, but you have to remember, at the time he was killed, there was a Pakistani national who was on trial for a plot to kill Donald Trump. And we know, now the Iranians for a long time have tried to kill Trump. And this came after three attempts. I mean, we've had, if you count the one in Florida and you count the one in Washington, excuse me, if you count

the one that went into Marlago and was killed and you count the person at the D.C. White House correspondence and then you count the Palm Beach and you count the Pennsylvania. There were four it's the first time in American history

when four people had shots exchanged with the Secret Service. So this was, he was a big target and we know in addition to those there were attempts and the Iranian government made no, they were talking before we were bombing that we were, they were going to kill Trump for Soleimani. They put a hit out on Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and Donald Trump and that was that was free everybody and they would have done that had they got. But respectfully, that's not my question. My question is this. My question is if you're a proven to take out the supreme leader, there's no way you can think,

let's come and negotiate now. You're only doing that because you want regime change. You're only doing that because you want to topple the regime. You won't do that because it's, now let's come and talk to you about what we can do. Don't you think? Well, if your question is, what is the ultimate solution that 93 million people who have an illustrious history in Iran and prior to the theocracy were a stabilizing force in the region and have pro-Western sympathies innately and have been hijacked for 50 years by this odious regime and you're trying to deal with it you're trying to corral it seven presidents said that it had to they couldn't have a nuclear weapon.

Seven presidents have tried in vain to weaken it, except for Obama, perhaps. And the ultimate and only solution is regime change. You're right about that. But why didn't he say from the beginning he wanted that? Because we'd had a 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan. We'd had a 10-year misadventure in Iraq. The Obama administration had bombed for seven months

and remove Gaddafi and what happened. It turned into an utter mess. So the consensus, not just in the Trump administration, but bipartisan in Washington is we do a lot of things very well. But one thing we don't do is go into the Middle East, get on the ground, and nation build. It just doesn't work. So we're not going to try that.

We're not even going to profess that we want the regime change. But deep down in their hearts, they knew that all the other methods were five or 10-year solution, but not ultimate solution. Right. The ultimate solution is to remove that odious regime. Okay, so then if that's the case, so now the basic innocent question is, so how is it possible that Iran is able to stand against Israel that is historically, we always hear how amazing their militaries, how amazing their intel is,

how amazing their air forces, is able to stand against the six Gulf states that are now united, let's just say with U.S. and with Israel and the 600, you know, and U.S. as known as the greatest military in the world. How was Iran, who was ran by these folks, these extremists, how are they able to stand up to all of these countries combined together? How? Public opinion. I mean, you really believe that the United States military,

if they said destroy the Iranian regime and destroy Iran as a, they couldn't do it in a week, they could do it in five days. They could send 2,500, They could get, we have 11 carriers. They could send six, park them right off the Persian Gulf, and they could obliterate Iran as a modern nation and send it back to the Stone Age. And Israel could do it in six weeks. And the Gulf states could probably now, after it's been a try to do it in a month.

But the reason they don't are political calculations. The Gulf states, they feel, well, we can't account for every missile. One missile can hit a distillery or water. We wouldn't have water. their own fears repressed them. In the case of Israel, they're afraid that if they were to do that, they would lose all of the support of the United States.

And the Trump administration knows that he's got public opinion, and half the country, or more than that, would not approve of that type of annihilation. Sure. And especially when you put in the... I don't think we're talking about the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is the United States doesn't believe that the Iranian people are culpable.

They believe that they're captive. And you can argue, well, if they're captive, 50 years should have given them. Well, it's not that easy because they murdered 40, 50,000 of them without even blinking an eye. So in the American way of thinking, every target, and I know this for a fact

because I've talked to people in the military, every target was evaluated on the following criteria. Will this hurt the Iranian people to the degree will have starvation or illness, pandemics, or retard their ability if they throw the regime out not to have a good recovery. If it does, let's not take out this bridge. Let's not take out this power grid.

Tomorrow, we could ensure that the theocracy was in darkness. And we could ensure there wasn't one drop of gasoline. We could rom every gasoline distillery. We could blow up Carg Island and 24 hours. But we don't do that. And why we don't do it, it's not because we're bought off or there's conspiracy theories. We really do believe that the Iranian people deserve a different government, and that government, we hope, would solve the problem.

It's not that we're going to go in and build it or try to do what we did in Afghanistan or Iraq. We're just saying the Iranian people are different. They have a different tradition than other Middle East countries. They're very sophisticated. We had good relations with them. We have a large expatriate, loyal, patriotic community in the United States. So let's try to remove the problem of that theocracy without hurting their ability to have a consensual government. And that's a very hard thing to do.

We didn't do that in World War II. The idea was the German people, even though they're our second largest minority in the United States in 1941, we're going to bomb carpet bomb. Same thing with the Japanese. If they're in Tokyo and they're building propellers and their homes at night, we're going to burn down Tokyo. Same thing in Vietnam. Same thing in North Korea during the Korean War. But we don't do that now. And that's the decision that was taken.

So then doesn't the leverage there, it's almost like, you know, a bunch of married husband and wife couples go out with kids. and one of their friends shows up who's single, just got fired, doesn't have a penny to his name, doesn't have kids, doesn't have a girlfriend, mom and dad are not alive, no siblings, nothing, and they go out, he acts like a fool. And he starts a fight, and the other guys are like, well, I can't afford to fight, because if I've got a wife, I got kids, I have to make the right, no, let's just go and take them out. So doesn't this almost say that Iran has the leverage because they have nothing to lose

and everybody else has so much to lose? so Iran's going to play the waiting game. They're just going to sit there and say, let's wait for Trump to be out. That's what they think. Well, I don't think you have to speculate. They said that explicitly. They're waiting them out to another Obama-like administration that's pro-Iranian and pro-Iranian theocracy.

Remember Obama's idea of the Middle East was the Shia, Persian minority has been the underdog, and it needs some community organizing. So I want to form a, allow. to be formed a Shia crescent with the Assad's in Syria, the Shias in Iran, the Hezbollah people in Lebanon, the Houthis, and that will balance out Israel and the Gulf states in creative tension. And every once in a while I'll adjudicate that. But I feel that this group has been the victims of oppression by the Sunni Arab majority and the Israeli. That's how Obama believed that.

And that's part of our problem today. And he empowered that. He delivered $400 million at night on pallets. And more than that, in some cases, cash, he unfrozed all of their assets. He paid interest on the money that we had frozen. They had killed over 1,600 people with shaped charges in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they were behind about 50% of the money. of the terrorist acts in Europe.

So we had, they blew our troops up in Lebanon. They blew up the Barat by Beirut embassy. They were behind some of the bombings, USS Cole. They were behind some of the bombings in our African embassies. They had a lot of culpability. And so, yes, if your question is, has Western restraint, or the use of Western restraint on other entities, made it very difficult, yes, because we haven't wanted to inflict a level of punishment and pain

on that theocracy because it can't be distinguished by design on their part from the Iranian people we want to help. How do you think this sense? How do you think dissent? I think it ends favorably. I think what we're going to see is Besant and Trump and Rubio are going to be. get together and they're going to say, how can we function pre-war in terms of political power, price of gas, the economy, and still inflict a level of pain on them that doesn't hurt our normal

operations? And they're going, in other words, how do we make it, how do we make the destruction of the the theocracies a status quo everyday event that will culminate, say, successfully without impuging or impinging or doing it, damaging or political apparatus. And I think they came up with something. So now they're saying they're not going to send any rail out. They're not going to send any ship, nor is any rail, nor missiles, nor anything's coming in. Nothing's coming in, nothing's coming out. And no Iranian, no matter how wealthy he is with the theocracy, is going to have a mansion in London. We're freezing all of those accounts. We're freezing in the United States. And we have a list of people that are

completely ostracized from the Western world. And then we're going to the Europeans and saying, you know what, if you want to keep doing this, we're not going to free, we're not going to deal with you either. And that's a pretty powerful message we sent. And I think that level of economic coercion, and it can be done now because we did the hard lifting of destroying their military, essentially, and I don't know what they're going to do, but I guess the alternative for them is to live at about a 1920s level ad infinitum, and I don't think the people, again, are going to put up with that. At some point, they're going to say, I don't have anything to lose. We're back in the medieval period. We're going to, and who did this to us, this theocracy,

and what do I care about the Houthis, and what do I care about, you know, Israel and Hamas? It's It's none of my business. I don't care about any of that. I just want to eat and want gas and we're naturally rich. And these people did it to us. And I think that's where we leave them to stew in their own Jews. Hopefully you're right. Hopefully you're right. I hope so. I'm not, I mean, nobody's been accurate. Tucker Carlson said it would be World War III and on one end and then we had other people saying it's going to be over in two weeks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we're in a good position now.

once we finally saw that we have to go back to standard operating procedure, normal business, and can still inflict a level of pain on that theocracy that's not sustainable. But we are sustainable. We're going to be sustainable with our economy and our military, and they're not. And it's just a matter of time. Let's see what happens. Let's see what happens. So you earned your PhD in Classics, and then you from Stanford,

and you decided to go back to farming. And you worked as a farmer. Some people know that. Some people don't. I think even one time you were trying to get into academia, they didn't believe that you had a PhD, dressed as a farmer. They made you go back and get your degree and come back,

which is a great story. But do you think being a farmer makes you a conservative? And I don't mean politically. I just mean a conservative because a bad idea can last in academia for 30 years, but a bad idea cannot last on a farm for a day or two. Yeah, I'm speaking from my farm today. Yeah, I farm full-time myself with my brother for six years and then five years, and then I did it why I was a professor for another 10 with my brother and cousin.

Yeah, I mean, you can talk all, we've been talking about all this, but if I said to you, should I pick a Santa Rosa plum crop when it's 90% ripe, 80% ripe, 100% right, 110%, any of those decisions, There's a right decision, but you don't have enough information to know which one is right at that particular time. But if you make the wrong decision, you lose $70,000 of borrowed money. And then you have to tell your family, I'm sorry you can't have braces on your teeth. And so there's immediate consequences. And so what it develops in your mind is you're flexible, and you understand there's forces in the world you can't control.

And it's a tragic world. It's not a therapeutic world. And you can see people who are not talented sometimes thrive, and sometimes the race doesn't go to the swift. So you get a resignation. It doesn't mean you quit or anything. But when I look at farmers and I see every single day, the money goes out for insurance and maintenance and pesticides and energy,

and nothing comes in until the crop is harvested. And then there's labor and weather and volatile markets. and mechanical breakdown. I don't know how they make it. The funny thing is, after I left, I mean, I still have 40 acres here, and I rent it out. But the more that I look back at my full-time farming and more that I see people farming,

I have enormous respect for farmers above anybody else. I don't know how they do it. Why is it such an emotional thing? Why is it that every time I listen to Paul Harvey tell the story, so God made a farmer, why is that so? Why is farming so emotional? Because they live on the land. Not all the corporate doesn't,

but most people traditionally had lived on the land. And it's generation after generation. So I'm speaking in the house right now that I remodeled. This was a manger. And there were horses that my grandfather had in here. And over here, right here was where they put the hay. So this building was built in 1878 by his, grandfather. So I'm the fifth generation to live here. My children, if they want to live here,

will be the sixth. And every time I walk around, I see things. You know, I'll see if I'm digging out by a tree, I see a horseshoe. And I think, was that Cyrus Davis's? Or was that Wendell David? And then I'll see something. It reminds me, the barn was about ready to fall, and I replaced some of it, but it was built with eucalyptus poles in 1880, and then I remember all these people carved their name in it, and I remembered them. And then as a boy, I was up on a ladder trying to fix the barn. I said, gosh, I remember when I was five years old,

a barn owl got trapped right here and flapped his wings and couldn't get out and died, right when I were replacing this. So the whole thing is memory and tradition and shame and honor and all these ancient ideas. And it's not about money. It's about a way of life. And unfortunately, if you don't understand it is about money, and maybe it should be, but romantic farmers,

everybody's romantic, but the dividing line between those who go broke and those who endure the ones who check romance and have to make tough market decision. Yeah, and you see that they're going through a lot of challenging times right now, bankruptcy is being up, suicide is up three and a half times the average person. Yeah, I saw when the raisin market, collapsed in 1983, the price went from $1,400 to $400.

And I saw the ditch tender shoot himself. I mean, he killed himself. But one of my best friends, who was a raisin farmer, he put a noose around his neck from his garage. He closed the door. He let the truck exhaust go on. He took sleeping pills, and then he shot himself all at once. Wow.

So, and I, it was a pretty bad time. And I'm speaking on 40 acres. We used to have 185 acres. And my twin brother and cousin lost it. And it wasn't their fault. It was just the market conditions were globalization, you know. It was, it was tragic. And their lives were never the same.

And it's, I, it's a lot of tragedy. I mean, I, I asked myself, we have pesticides we were told in the 60s and 70s when I grew up, they're perfectly safe. My mom who lived here died of brain cancer. My daughter who lived here died of leukemia at 26. My sister-in-law died of leukemia at 48, and I have lung cancer. So I've never smoked a cigarette or used drugs or drank. So it's a very complex, you know, a lot of stuff going on.

Yeah, some of these questions you won't get the answer to afford. Yeah. Well, anyway, I hope I haven't gone on too long. No, this was, I can't finish it off without asking you last question. If there's five books you recommend, you're a very well-read person. Five books that one must read, what would those five books be? I believe that the New Testament is, and I've taught it in Greek many times, so the Gospels especially, I would recommend that.

I would recommend, of all of ancient literature, Homer's Iliad and Eucydidt's history of the Peloponnesian War. I think everybody, Dante's Inferno or the Divine Comedy would be, I think that's a brilliant exposition of human nature, religion, consequences. And then I would read a great novel. One of the greatest novel, I think, is Conrad's victory, or Nostrad. Nostromo, either one of them. So those are just arbitrary, but those are the ones I would recommend. Fantastic. Sir, you have to know this from me to you.

Men like me look up to you. We respect your wisdom. We respect the content you share with the rest of us. And I know sometimes you do your thing, and I'm sure you hear this from a lot of different people. Your work is heard and is making an impact around the world. Thank you so much for your service. And thank you for your time.

Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Anytime. Have a good one. Take care. Thank you. Handmade in Portugal, their craftsmanship is a way of life. For those who move through life differently, from sunlit decks to nights that never need an occasion,

every detail is considered, every step, effortless, crafted from fine suede and built with builder technology, designed to move with you. Because true luxury isn't about being noticed. It's about how you. feel when you arrive. The FLB iconlofer, made for the life you've earned.