On this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler dive into how President Donald Trump’s newly revealed national security strategy statement takes Europe to task. They also ask the question, “Will Western civilization in Europe be around in 100 years?” Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment from today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.  Jack Fowler: We’ll talk about Europe. And we’ll start off with [President] Donald Trump’s latest national security strategy statement. I’m looking at today’s New York Post, which has an article on it.  And here’s what the statement says: “We want Europe to remain European, regain its civilizational self-confidence and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation,” reads the Trump-signed document that was posted online yesterday from the day we’re speaking.   “We will oppose elite-driven anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies.”   The report says, “We reject the disastrous climate change and net zero ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States and subsidize our adversaries.” There’s much more to this report. Victor, what are your thoughts on this?  Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I read the report, and everybody’s angry about it because it didn’t have the usual boilerplate, “The United States is going to partner with our European allies and strengthen NATO, our role of the U.N. is essential, we need to increase our foreign aid to get the message about democracy abroad to our brothers in Africa and Asia, and we’re working with our partners” and that kind of stuff.   The last one was the most controversial because we were lecturing Europe. They said, “Now they’re letting us just go our own way.”  No, they didn’t. They said, “We just can’t defend you anymore because we just pay the bulk. We’re the most generous of the NATO allies, and we’re the most distant from where the problems are. And we keep telling you that your GDP is declining radically as a percentage of the world’s economy. Your fertility rate’s down to 1.4. You’re aging.  “You’ve got millions of these antithetical immigrants coming in that hate your culture. They’re going to be dominant majorities in 30 or 40 years.  And you have to rearm, but we can’t we just can’t beg you anymore. You don’t do it.   “So, we’re trying to suggest you follow our model because we made the same mistakes that you do. Get back to natural gas and oil and nuclear and hydro development and get competitive. Open up your economies. Your capitalists, not socialists.   “Close your borders, encourage family formation and two or three children, and rearm, rearm. And if you can do that, we would like you to be an equal partner, not a higher lien or a client.”   And that’s got everybody angry. But that was the message. It was more of a message that I read that they wanted to be a partner with a strong Europe, and they were tired of being the patron and they were the client. And that’s why they’re angry now suddenly.   The subtext, Jack, was everything that we outline that’s wrong with Europe is known to Europeans. And there’s probably a majority of Europeans in the 30 EU nations that now, I mean, the NATO nations, 31, who say to themselves, “We know what the problem is. We don’t produce energy we could. We’re spending too much on electricity. Our businesses are not competitive. We can’t assimilate these people. They hate us. They hate Christianity.  “We’re over-regulated and socialized and we’ve got to get people more independent and we’ve got to spend more defense.” And that group is probably 53% or 54%. And the people who run the institutions and the government say we’re not going let them speak. They’re Nazis, they’re racists.  In England, you said they’re canceling trial by jury in many cases. They delayed the local elections. They said, “No, we’re not going to have local elections,” because they know that the Labour Party will be wiped out.   And in Germany, the Alternative for Deutschland has some radicals, it has some extremists, but it represents 40% of the people. And if you keep demonizing it as Nazis, you’re only going to make it bigger.   France, [President Emmanuel] Macron has no popular support. And Spain is a lunatic country now, the government. But most of the others are starting to become more conservative, and the ones I mentioned have conservative oppositions that are growing in strength. And so, Europe knows now what it has to do with just a question of how obstructive will be this post-war left-wing utopian order. And they’re going to do anything.   They’re going to fine Elon Musk, what was it, $170 million? $140 million just because he won’t censor speech?    Fowler:  Yeah, I think it’s $140 million.   Hanson: They’re going to delay elections. They’re going to do anything they can. And what Trump is saying is that if you do all that, we’re not going to be your friend anymore. So, let’s hope they don’t. Fowler: One of the end games for Europe, Victor, is the assimilation. Let’s say you’re Germany and you had the moxie somehow to take all the Syrians and other illegals who came in thanks to [former German Chancellor] Angela Merkel and throw them out of the country, get rid of them. You still have a country with a [low] fertility rate. So, it’s just a death wish. It’s a death spiral.   I certainly advocate, personally, Europe getting rid of people that will not assimilate into Western civilization. The larger issue is: Is there going to be a Western civilization in 100 years if people just have an inability or refusal to reproduce? Hanson: Well, there’s just three choices. Can people who were born in Europe have 2.1 children? Better to have three. And number two, will the 50, 60, 70 million people that are in there, will they acculturate and become European?  And right now, it looks like answer number one is no, they’re not going to harm their lifestyle, when they have full benefits for everything, by having to stay up at night with little babies and change diapers. And number two, the Islamic community feels that—they say this all the time—they can do with the womb what they couldn’t do with arms.  So, they’re going to keep having three or four children and they’re not going to assimilate.  And given that, three, what is the plan? What is the plan? And the plan is Europe is going to go back to what, 1100, 1200 AD when you have independent fiefdoms or you’re to have an Islamic Al-Andalus in like Spain, a whole enclave and a Dearborn, Michigan the size of a country? I don’t know.  But I’ll tell you one thing, listen to Ilhan Omar when she says Somaliland is only for Somalis. There’s one big difference between Islam and Christianity. And the historian Tom Holland mentioned that a lot in his writings. He’s a great historian.  In the Christian world, you can be an apostate. You can be an atheist. You can be agnostic. You can be a deist. Christianity is tolerant for that. They try to save your soul, but they understand there will be a kingdom outside of Christianity as long as Christianity is not threatened by it. That’s a free choice. That’s why the Founders did not require a national [religion].  That’s not true of an Islamic country where you have a Muslim dominant population.   If you say, I am a Pakistani, I am a Saudi, I am a Syrian, I’m an Iraqi, I am a Gazan, and I don’t like Islam. I’m not going to be a Muslim. You’re not going to have an easy life. That’s not going to be tolerated.   Maybe in Egypt you can say you’re a Coptic, but even there the Coptics are shrinking and leaving. You can say I’m a Christian in Bethlehem, but you’re mostly going to Israel or Europe, the United States, to survive.   Fowler: Yeah, if you convert to Christianity in Bangladesh or Pakistan, you’re going to become a martyr. These things are just not tolerated. Where am I going to go to mass in Saudi Arabia? Where’s the Catholic Church? Hanson: And the weirdest thing is the alliance between the Left and Islam. The Left will say Christian fanatics are destroying the country. And then they’ll look at fanatic Islamists and they’ll say, “Don’t engage in Islamophobia.”   Because they feel that they share a hatred of the West. The Left hates the West. So does Islam. And then you get into the Orwellian situations when they start to bond. And you see them, and I could see gay students at Stanford protesting for Hamas next to radical Islamist students, and it didn’t look very congenial, believe me. If anybody with pink hair and a nose ring and a Pride shirt thinks that they’re going to go to Gaza and help out, good luck. You’ll be hanging from a crane.   We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Victor Davis Hanson: Trump Calls Out Europe in New National Security Strategy appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Mammals tend to invest a lot in just a few offspring. Dinosaurs went a very different route.

People are talking about a “new strain” of the winter bug – what’s the situation?

On Sunday's The Weekend: Primetime, MS NOW hyped the case of immigration enforcement agents detaining an American citizen even though she was stopped because she was driving the car of an illegal alien they were searching for. The show also provided an unchallenged forum to ex-Mayor Mitch Landrieu to push the conspiracy theory that federal agents wear masks to conceal involvement in the Proud Boys or the January 6 riots. Co-host Antonia Hylton set up the segment: Week after week, we keep seeing new cases in which American citizens are caught in the immigration crackdown and mass deportation dragnet. In this viral video, federal agents drag a woman in medical scrubs out of her car during a traffic stop in Florida. She screams out for help when they handcuff and put her on the ground... After a clip of the woman being forcibly detained by agents, Hylton read a DHS statement explaining why the woman was stopped, and that she was detained for refusing to cooperate. Hylton then suggested that there was something wrong with agents demanding that the woman identify herself: "Agents did finally release her about 10 minutes later, once they checked her driver's license and confirmed that she is indeed a U.S. citizen, as she said so, it seems to be detain first, verify later." The MS NOW host then fretted over another case in which there was mistaken identity, and agents chased a woman back to her parents' home because she resembled someone they were searching for. Hylton made another disapproving comment: They said no arrests were made, but they've also made no public apology to the woman that they chased through her neighborhood. However, this all appears to be part of the cost and course of doing business for border czar Tom Homan. Then Landrieu appeared as a guest and was allowed to rail against the Trump administration's efforts to track down illegal aliens. Early on he contradicted himself on the issue of racial profiling when he suggested that only areas with large Hispanic populations should see enforcement actions: "It doesn't make any sense. First of all, they should not be in New Orleans. New Orleans doesn't have a large Hispanic population." But, a bit later, he was accusing agents of wrongly detaining suspects because of their skin color: ...in law enforcement, if you're hired and you're trained right, you should be able to articulate that reasonable suspicion has something to do with behavior, not the way you look. And essentially what they're lying about is if you are brown and you look strange, that gives ice agents who are improperly trained reasonable suspicion to think that you might be an illegal immigrant. Then, in spite of the big increase in violence and death threats against immigration enforcement agents, Landrieu pushed his flaky theory about the real reason they wear masks: I understand that ICE agents have masks on their face so nobody knows who they are. And the excuse that they're using is they want to protect ICE agents. Has anybody actually thought that what they're really trying to do is shield their identity? Do we really know that these guys are not from the Proud Boys? Are they people who attacked the Capitol on January 6th that have been pardoned? As part of a followup, co-host Catherine Rampell went along with this premise: But, as you point out, the U.S. citizens in these areas that are being targeted by these raids are being put in harm's way effectively. They don't know if they are being abducted by the Proud Boys or lawful agents of -- of the federal government. So what is the role of the -- of the state and local officials to keep people safe? These people don't worry about the safety of law-enforcement agents. The illegal immigrants are always the victims, as long as they are in threat of deportation. Transcript follows: MS NOW's The Weekend: Primetime December 7, 2025 6:34 p.m. Eastern ANTONIA HYLTON: Week after week, we keep seeing new cases in which American citizens are caught in the immigration crackdown and mass deportation dragnet. In this viral video, federal agents drag a woman in medical scrubs out of her car during a traffic stop in Florida. She screams out for help when they handcuff and put her on the ground, but take a listen to what she yells out as they try to apprehend her. Watch. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: I'm a U.S. citizen! Please help me! This is unfair -- why are you doing this to me?! HYLTON: In a statement on X by DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, she claims the woman was driving her undocumented boyfriend's car who was previously arrested and refused to comply with law enforcement's orders to identify herself. Agents did finally release her about 10 minutes later, once they checked her driver's license and confirmed that she is indeed a U.S. citizen, as she said so, it seems to be detained first, verify later. Then there's this footage out of Marrero, Louisiana, where a woman is seen being chased by masked agents before she made it into her parents' home, according to local reports. She told the agents twice that she's a U.S. citizen before running away from them. In a statement on X, DHS said that Border Patrol was conducting a targeted immigration enforcement operation against a criminal and encountered a woman that matched the description of the target. They said no arrests were made, but they've also made no public apology to the woman that they chased through her neighborhood. However, this all appears to be part of the cost and course of doing business for border czar Tom Homan. Take a look at this. TOM HOMAN, BORDER CZAR (from CNN's State of the Union): If they have reasonable suspicion to stop and question somebody and shortly hold and detain them briefly for questioning -- if they have reasonable suspicion, they can stop ... (editing jump) ... I'm not aware of these specific cases, Dana. I'm not there, but I'm going to have faith that ICE agents are gathering articulable facts for reasonable suspicion to detain somebody and question them. HYLTON: And joining us now, Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans and former lieutenant governor of Louisiana. Mitch, good to see you. Thank you for joining us tonight. So the Trump administration has launched this brand new operation in New Orleans. I want to get your reaction, though, to the video that we just showed there of a woman from Louisiana running back into her home to her parents. What kind of lasting effect do you think incidents like this are going to leave on residents in your city? EX-MAYOR MITCH LANDRIEU (D-NEW ORLEANS): Well, first of all, it was terrible. I've seen it many, many times, and I'm heartbroken by it. But let me just make this comment first. Tom Homan lied through his teeth on CNN today, and he and Steve Miller and Greg Bovino are the architects, with the permission of the President, for this really awful example of trying to do the right thing on the streets of America. It doesn't make any sense. First of all, they should not be in New Orleans. New Orleans doesn't have a large Hispanic population. Although, as you know, New Orleans is one of the famous world multicultural cities of all time. We're a port city. We've always been a city of immigrants. We're a welcoming city. If, in fact, the Trump administration wants to fight violent crime, there's no mayor or county executive in America that wouldn't work with the ATF, the DEA, the U.S. attorney's office to go after violent criminals, whether they're American citizens or not. But that is not what this operation is. This operation, particularly as it relates to New Orleans because it's a blue city, is about intimidation. And when he says it, they're not arresting American citizens. He's lying. You saw two examples, one in Florida, one of New Orleans, where they're arresting first, and they're asking questions later. And it is really simple. American citizens should not have to be fearful on the streets of America that because of how they look, they're going to get pulled aside. Now, if you go back and look at that Tom -- Tom Homan interview, she -- Dana asked him, "Well, what is reasonable suspicion?" Because in law enforcement, if you're hired and you're trained right, you should be able to articulate that reasonable suspicion has something to do with behavior, not the way you look. And essentially what they're lying about is if you are brown and you look strange, that gives ice agents who are improperly trained reasonable suspicion to think that you might be an illegal immigrant. Now, when they say that they're only going after violent criminals, that's a lie, too. And a couple of months ago in New Orleans, ICE agents grabbed a grandma who was gardening in her yard and put her in a -- in a van and took her and put her in a hold where her family did not know where she was for 24 hours. And so I think that most people in America look at this and say, listen, if you're trying to -- to accomplish a goal, you're overreaching. You're not being thoughtful. The ICE agents are not doing what they're supposed to do. And finally, let me just say this. I understand that ICE agents have masks on their face so nobody knows who they are. And the excuse that they're using is they want to protect ICE agents. Has anybody actually thought that what they're really trying to do is shield their identity? Do we really know that these guys are not from the Proud Boys? Are they people who attacked the Capitol on January 6th that have been pardoned? And if the -- and if the administration wants to be transparent, they can do two things. They can release the names and the records of everybody that's been arrested, that's in in custody in Louisiana. They can also release the names of all of the people that work for ice, so that the people of the United States of America can make a determination of whether or not the Trump administration is actually being truthful and honest. CATHERINE RAMPBELL: So, Mitch, what is the role of state and local officials in keeping their residents safe? I've talked with officials in other parts of the country, including in Chicago, who have basically said the goal is not to have a shootout, obviously, between the local police department and these federal agents who are coming in. But, as you point out, the U.S. citizens in these areas that are being targeted by these raids are being put in harm's way effectively. They don't know if they are being abducted by the Proud Boys or lawful agents of -- of the federal government. So what is the role of the -- of the state and local officials to keep people safe? LANDRIEU: Well, first of all, it is the role of local officials to keep people safe. And many police chiefs have said and implored the Trump administration, "You're making us less safe because when people can't trust law enforcement, they don't report crime." So if there are domestic abuse events, if there are rape events and someone calls the police department, if they think that what they're going to do is turn them over to ICE, they never report the activity so long term. RAMPELL: Right, right, but I'm asking -- I'm asking: Should local police forces intervene when acts like this happen? LANDRIEU: I was coming to that. I was just making two points. The second point is this, that because of the way the Trump administration is handling this, it is -- it is in fact against the law to get in the way of federal officials doing what they perceive their job to be. So I don't think local law enforcement can actually get in the way and provoke a conflict. That would not be a smart thing to do, and that, in fact, puts you in harm's way. But it is possible. And the mayor-elect has done this in New Orleans. The police chief in Kenna has not done this, has basically said, "I'm going to do everything I can to let people know what's coming, to advocate for transparency, to communicate with the governor and the President and homing in on these guys and say, 'Listen, if you're going after violent criminals, that's fine. But all this other stuff is a real problem.'" This is this has been devastating for communities. I've talked personally to three small business owners who are conservative Republicans who said this is outrageous.  Folks are not coming to work -- businesses are closing. There's got to be some kind of balance in the way that they're doing that. And that is not what the Trump administration is doing right now. They've gone way overboard.

Boy Bitten by a Lizard and other Baroque treasures shine at St. Petersburg’s Museum of Fine Arts.

A New York bureaucrat pressured banks to cut ties with the NRA. But regulators like her could enjoy immunity unless the Supreme Court acts.

The Nvidia deal could help China beat us in the AI race.

This week’s Chinese trade numbers can leave little doubt that the country’s trade surplus is unsustainable.

Tucker Carlson finds an alluring alternative to the United States.

Senate Republicans should quit trying to expand it.