Eeyore Is Dead: Real Hope For America

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Speaker 2 Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen, to the already giggling duo of Victor Davis-Hansen and Jack Fowler.
Welcome to the Victor Davis Hans. I'm happy.
Trump won. I'm happy.

Speaker 2 I don't have to apologize. That's right.
Eeyore is dead.

Speaker 2 Never say never. Hey, welcome, folks.
This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show. We are recording on

Speaker 2 Saturday, the 1st of February. This episode will be up on the 6th.
The Victor Davis Hansen is the Martin N.

Speaker 2 Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. And he's got a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Speaker 2 The web address there is victorhanson.com. More on that later.
Lots to talk about culturally, new issue of strategic

Speaker 2 some

Speaker 2 Kennedy family stuff. But we're going to start off the show

Speaker 2 today to get Victor's views on

Speaker 2 a little bomb Chuck Grassley, Senator Grassley, dropped on the FBI. And we'll get Victor's thoughts on that when we come back from these important messages.

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Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show. Victor, here's a headline from Just the News.
By the way, justthenews.com. That's John Solomon founded that.
Excellent site.

Speaker 2 John Solomon does wonderful work as an investigative reporter.

Speaker 2 And it's the mothership of this podcast. It is.
It is. Which is also now, it's also on video on Rumble.
You can check it out any which way.

Speaker 2 Here's the headline. Grassley drops FBI whistleblower records that show anti-Trump agent was behind Jack Smith 2020 case.

Speaker 2 I'm just going to read very quickly here the beginning of the article. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley on Thursday, which I think would have been January.

Speaker 2 30th, released the series of whistleblower records that allegedly show a former FBI agent who was known for being anti-Donald Trump played an important role in Jack Smith's 2020 election interference case, Grassley, and Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Chairman Ron Johnson, who's a senator from Wisconsin, claimed that internal emails and records show that former FBI agent Timothy Tebow, Tebow, T-I-Boltz, B-A-U-L-T,

Speaker 2 who was fired in 2024 for violating the Hatch Act, sent a subordinate an email that included the language for what ultimately became Smith's false elector case.

Speaker 2 I believe Victor Thiebaud came up once before, maybe came up many times before,

Speaker 2 but Tony Bobalewski was, I think he was the,

Speaker 2 he interviewed with him or talked to him and never

Speaker 2 hear the truth. He was the one that shepherded the FBI's effort

Speaker 2 to squash all of the evidence that implicated the Biden Consortium in quid pro quo bribery with Ukraine, Romania, China.

Speaker 2 But he was most prominent, as I remember, I'm doing this by memory, that he was the point man on suppressing the

Speaker 2 existence of the Hunter-Bidop

Speaker 2 laptop, which the FBI confiscated and they held for over a year. And they had

Speaker 2 Post facto, we know, they knew that it was authentic, and they not only knew that, the 51 intelligence authorities who signed that letter and then said it had all the hallmarks of Russian information, and we've talked about that, they didn't use the word disinformation because they wanted to say, well, we're lying, and we know we're lying, and they're going to catch us.

Speaker 2 So then we'll just say, we just said it was information, not disinformation. And the same thing, but hallmarks of rather than is.
But they were lying, all of them.

Speaker 2 But the point is that he was the person that was coordinating that and the suppression of the news about the authenticity of that laptop with you know with social media to repress the story, like in the New York Post and stuff.

Speaker 2 So he's gone because he was so flagrant in using his office for political purposes. They got him under the Hatch Act.

Speaker 2 And that whole eighth floor, I mean, that's one of the things Cash Patel had said, and they went after him. They said, Did you say you were going to fire the whole eighth floor?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I did. He's going to have to.
But everybody should remember, as I said to Sammy,

Speaker 2 there are literally hundreds of old hands at the FBI who did not like what is going on under.

Speaker 2 They didn't like it under Mueller, they didn't like it under

Speaker 2 Comey, they didn't like it under McCabe, they didn't like it under Ray, they didn't like the DEI, and they are probably in their 60s, and they're willing to come back and

Speaker 2 be his

Speaker 2 top echelon and straighten out the FBI for three or four years. And I hope they do come back.
They need them.

Speaker 2 You know, Victor,

Speaker 2 we've talked

Speaker 2 so many hours about the FBI and disparaged what requires being disparaged,

Speaker 2 but a weak FBI, ineffective,

Speaker 2 misplaced, whatever, is not good for America.

Speaker 2 It does.

Speaker 2 I don't know what it was. It got into the intelligence gathering.
And I didn't understand that right after 9-11. Comey and those people got it in there, Robert Mueller.

Speaker 2 And we have the director of national intelligence that's supposed to coordinate, but we have the National Security Agency. We have the Defense Intelligence Group.
We have the CIA.

Speaker 2 We have all of these intelligence. What we don't have is investigatory experts.

Speaker 2 And the old job of the FBI was to, A, when there was a federal crime and the feds had jurisdiction, they flew in and they looked at the murder scene or whatever.

Speaker 2 And they had the sterling reputation for their forensic labs and everything.

Speaker 2 And then they also helped local law enforcement and they had a registry of most wanted. That was what the FBI did really well.

Speaker 2 But when they got into the counterterrorism, globalism, they put agents all over the world and they got full of themselves and they got politicized and weaponized.

Speaker 2 As many of the people should remember that the intelligence community is mostly left-wing.

Speaker 2 They draw out of universities like Harvard, Yale, Princeton to go into the CIA. I've met a lot of people in the CIA.
I haven't met too many that are conservative, to tell you the truth.

Speaker 2 They're kind of like officers. Any officer who's a general or an admiral who's a four-star person and spent a long time in Washington discovered very quickly that the Congress likes you.

Speaker 2 the left-wing Congress, because you have a chain of command that can greenlight or fuel social cultural change. Trans? Abortion, go get the generals in here.
They can get it implemented.

Speaker 2 They don't have the storm and drag of

Speaker 2 Congress, and they tend to make the necessary judgments politically.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor,

Speaker 2 let's talk about an old American family, the Kennedys. So

Speaker 2 again, that we're recording on February 1st. This shows up on the 6th.
And for all I know, Victor, by the time the show airs, the

Speaker 2 vote to

Speaker 2 the committee vote for Robert Kennedy to move him ahead or the full Senate vote, they may have may have happened. But Caroline Kennedy is his famous

Speaker 2 first cousin, and she's put out, I think, a quite vicious

Speaker 2 attack on him. And

Speaker 2 here's the beginning of a

Speaker 2 story on it. In a letter obtained by the Washington Post and sent to lawmakers ahead of Kennedy's confirmation hearings, the former ambassador to Australia and Japan, that's Caroline Kennedy,

Speaker 2 alleges that her cousin, quote,

Speaker 2 addicted to is addicted to attention and power, and quote, and has given hypocritical advice to discourage parents from vaccinating their children while vaccinating his own.

Speaker 2 She alleged that his, quote, crusade against vaccination, end quote, has also served to enrich him. I have known Bobby my whole life.
We grew up together, Caroline Kennedy wrote.

Speaker 2 It's no surprise he keeps birds of prey as pets because he himself is a predator.

Speaker 2 I thought the Kennedys all stuck together, Victor.

Speaker 2 It's really disturbing. I mean, we all have people in their family that disagree with us, and I sure do.

Speaker 2 I think I'm the only Trump person in my immediate family. But I can't imagine them.

Speaker 2 If I were to get an appointment, and heaven forbid I would never want one, but I can't imagine them coming out and writing that. I'm surely that I wouldn't do that.
I love my brothers.

Speaker 2 I wouldn't do that, even though we disagree.

Speaker 2 I can't imagine why she would do that, especially given the, and she was almost blaming all of the Kennedy pathologies on Bobby, which made no sense because most of the older generation

Speaker 2 had worse appetites even than Bobby's generation. Talking about the chronic alcoholism of Ted Kennedy, his culpability with,

Speaker 2 you know, the bridge and the death of Mary Joe Kopeckny. I'm talking about the philandering of very young interns by JFK.
I'm talking about

Speaker 2 Grandpa Joe.

Speaker 2 I really liked JFK Jr., John John, but he did something very reckless when he did not know how to fly by instruments, and he took up his wife and her sister.

Speaker 2 That was very reckless to be flying at night without an instrument rating.

Speaker 2 So there were things that had nothing to do with Bobby, and he's never mentioned all that stuff. And I noticed as soon as he opened his,

Speaker 2 announced his candidacy as a third party, remember they started, that was when we heard the bear story and all of this stuff about he had a parasite in his brain, and then he kept trying to preempt the stories and come out and explain it.

Speaker 2 That was all coming from the Kennedys.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 you know, and then you asked Caroline, what have you done? What have you done?

Speaker 2 You You used your name. You married somebody who's very wealthy.
Are you a great writer?

Speaker 2 Are you a great politician? Are you just a Kennedy that people give you things because of your name? Did you really study Australia? Do you really know about the Outback?

Speaker 2 Do you know Perth and Melbourne and Sydney, Canberra? You know the Australian people. That's why they selected you? And then

Speaker 2 you strengthened ties with Australia during the Obama administration? I don't think so. Remember, on the the political side of things, Victor, she was, gosh, I forget now what happened.

Speaker 2 Maybe it was Hillary Clinton. Why was there a New York Senate seat open? But she was talked about as the person to be appointed.

Speaker 2 That was good to remind me. Remember that interview with her?

Speaker 2 It was like a

Speaker 2 it was a within 10 minutes of her interview, the sympathetic interview was basically saying, we've got to stop this because if you open your mouth one more time, you're going to confirm that you're an idiot.

Speaker 2 And she didn't know anything. Remember that? She couldn't even articulate an answer.
I was really shocked by that. I thought, wow, you grew up in a political family.

Speaker 2 You went to all these finishing schools. You must have had an education.
But she knew nothing, nothing.

Speaker 2 And so that was the end of her political aspirations. Yeah.

Speaker 2 The Kidney family, your other question is so large now, and it's so

Speaker 2 It's so distance from JFK. That was the only president.
You know, there was a senator, two senators, three senators, senators, JFK, the three brothers. And there was the tragedy at Joseph, Joseph Jr.

Speaker 2 Kennedy was supposed to be the star of the family, was killed in a war, bombing accident, piloted a radio-controlled bomber, got killed.

Speaker 2 And there was a lot of tragedy in that family, but there was a lot of recklessness, too.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 Bobby Kennedy,

Speaker 2 he's got one mission, and we'll see if he sticks to it. If he tries to tell the country that diabetes

Speaker 2 and obesity are killing us much more than 300 or 400 people dying of measles that don't get vaccinated, it's not even that high.

Speaker 2 If he can do that and change the way we look at,

Speaker 2 you know, if he can do it in a way different than Michelle Obama, she just lectured, lectured, and pontificated.

Speaker 2 If he can do it in a way, like he said the other day, if you want to have your occasional hamburger, go ahead and all that.

Speaker 2 But if he can do that and cut the obesity rate and and the diabetes, especially for minorities, in California, one out of every three people who go into the hospital for any cause is found out to have pre-diabetes or diabetes.

Speaker 2 It's epidemic among the Hispanic community. It really is, the immigrant community.
And

Speaker 2 he could do a great service.

Speaker 2 And something's wrong with HHS. The guy who's there is just a joke.
from

Speaker 2 I mean, I don't even know who he is. He's in California.

Speaker 2 Isn't he from California? Yeah, he's a Hispanic guy. He hasn't done anything.
All I remember is that,

Speaker 2 you know, he didn't.

Speaker 2 He's very left-wing. And I mean, it's just, it's kind of a.

Speaker 2 I don't know. There are the elements underneath that are very important.
CDC, NIH, FDA.

Speaker 2 Medicaid. Medicare.
Medicare. And you've got you've got Dr.
Oz on that one. You've got Jay on the NIH.

Speaker 2 And you've got, I'm trying to remember who the CDC is. Oh, is it

Speaker 2 Marty Makari? He's the CD, either the FDA or CDC.

Speaker 2 And I'm hoping Scott Atlas, I mean, they haven't used him yet, but he would be a wonderful scientific advisor. You know, technically, every president has a science advisor.

Speaker 2 Scott is his great strength. He's blunt.
And he's candid, and he'll tell anybody the truth. And sometimes that rubs people the wrong way.

Speaker 2 And maybe where he really belongs is attached to the White House, where Trump can say, you know, Scott, because he's got a photographic memory. I've known him for 20 years.

Speaker 2 He's a colleague of mine, and

Speaker 2 he's extremely bright and extremely knowledgeable. So he would be the type of person if Trump said, look,

Speaker 2 what's the deal on the mRNA vaccination?

Speaker 2 What do we do? Or what is it on,

Speaker 2 can you find something about AI? He has contacts with all the people in Silicon. He would be wonderful.
And he wouldn't be out in the public very much.

Speaker 2 He'd just be a good advisor for the president as a tech science advisor, medical advisor. Hopefully something like that would emerge for him.
Because he's a talent that hasn't been used yet.

Speaker 2 And he's very pro-Trump. Well, I've got to follow up on that.
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Speaker 2 Scott Atlas and Jay, my Scott,

Speaker 2 boy, oh boy, he'd been to Hell and Back again. Does he

Speaker 2 want to return? And with Jay, I'm just curious,

Speaker 2 Jay Bhattachari,

Speaker 2 have you seen him or talked to him since?

Speaker 2 Nobody has. I haven't seen him on campus.
I think he's just so busy

Speaker 2 preparing.

Speaker 2 I don't know if he's had, has he had his confirmation hearing yet? I don't know. I don't think so.

Speaker 2 I don't think so.

Speaker 2 He'll be confirmed. He is one of the most personable,

Speaker 2 charismatic guys in the world. I've never met anybody that doesn't like Jay, and he's very knowledgeable.

Speaker 2 And had they listened to him and Scott, we would have had a different lockdown. But

Speaker 2 that was Fauci and Burks.

Speaker 2 But no, I think Scott would.

Speaker 2 I think Scott doesn't want to be,

Speaker 2 I'm not speaking for him, so this is my impression.

Speaker 2 But I think he doesn't like administrative work. You know what I mean? He likes science and medicine.

Speaker 2 And so when he was a direct advisor on the lockdown, he was talking directly to the president about his knowledge of medicine, but he didn't have to supervise people.

Speaker 2 Jay's got a $50 billion budget of research, and that's mostly academic research. And he's going to, I think, if he fills his mission statement, we'll stop the DEI 30%.

Speaker 2 That's a distortion of what that agency was founded for, is actual pure research, things like cancer and diabetes and stuff, cardiac problems. But Scott, I think, wants to participate.

Speaker 2 And I was thinking the other day, this is just,

Speaker 2 he would be, every president, I don't know if Biden did, because what good would it do to Biden to have a scientific advisor?

Speaker 2 You know, from what Mike Johnson said, he said, why did you close down the oil terminals that were, I mean, the liquid natural gas? He said, I didn't do it. Well, you signed it.
I didn't do it.

Speaker 2 So it would be superfluous to have one for him. But Trump is so busy, he needs a guy just to scan

Speaker 2 the cuts that are coming, scan the scientific, scan the health, especially the health.

Speaker 2 And he'll have Bobby there, and Bobby, trust me, they'll go after Bobby, as you will never believe, once he's confirmed.

Speaker 2 And Scott will be a liaison there, and he knows Jay like that, they're best friends.

Speaker 2 And he knows everybody. Marty Makari knows him.
He knows Oz. So he would be a wonderful kind of behind-the-scenes advisor because he's got such expertise.
He wrote the textbook on neural radiology.

Speaker 2 And I remember when my mother had a brain tumor,

Speaker 2 I later read it very carefully. It's an edited book.
It's wonderful. And it really gives you

Speaker 2 methodologies how to diagnose problems of the brain. and spine.
And he was the world's expert in it. So he's very exact.
And the story is going to make the world healthy again. That's good.

Speaker 2 Stanford?

Speaker 2 You know, it's funny, isn't it?

Speaker 2 I wrote an article once that said, this is ironic, that Stanford, when the COVID crisis came, they had the four people in the world that were the best on just general health policy and how the government should react.

Speaker 2 and spend its dollars on health crisis. Scott had written about that for well beyond his field.
He was an expert in health policy, as he had been a neuroradiology.

Speaker 2 Then you had Jay and Jay had been writing about the economics of health power. He had a PhD in economics.
He had an MD degree.

Speaker 2 And then you had the brilliant John Yannidis, the immunologist, and he was the one that broke the whole Theranose scam when he looked at the evidence of that

Speaker 2 crazy little iPhone, you drop one drop of blood, and we're going to give a complete readout. And he said, that is impossible under today's technology.

Speaker 2 One little tiny drop would give you enough blood, given the variations in blood throughout the body. And he broke that.
And then you had Michael Levette,

Speaker 2 the Nobel Prize winner. And all four of them were at Stanford, and they censored Jay, and they censored Scott, and they took, I don't know if they censored John Yannidis or not, but

Speaker 2 they tried to take Scott's medical license away.

Speaker 2 And so they took their greatest asset, is what I'm saying,

Speaker 2 and they blew it. And then they had a chance to rescind the censure of

Speaker 2 Scott, but especially,

Speaker 2 yeah, Scott and Jay. And you know what they said? It was in late October.
They said, well,

Speaker 2 basically, they said, yeah, it was kind of wrong, but we're not going to lift the censure because that would help Donald Trump before the election.

Speaker 2 That's the kind of faculty we have at Stanford.

Speaker 2 I taught 21 years at Cal State, and I found the Cal State faculty more commonsensical, just as good as the Stanford faculty, believe it or not. Dang.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 Victor Stanford is where Hoover is located. Hoover has a publication that you oversee.
It's called Strategica. It's got a new issue out.
And

Speaker 2 when we come back from these important messages, we're going to talk about the new issue. And now,

Speaker 2 here are our important messages.

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Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. We are recording on Saturday the 1st of February.
This episode is up on the 6th. I know on the 7th and the 8th, the great Sammy Wink and Victor will,

Speaker 2 the ensuing podcast, will talk about the politics that surely will have happened in the intervening period from when we're talking now.

Speaker 2 Victor's got a website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com,

Speaker 2 $6.50 a month to subscribe, discounted for the full year, $65. Why would you subscribe? Because if you're a fan of Victor, he writes...

Speaker 2 uh two articles a week exclusively for the blade of perseus and he also does one exclusive video there meanwhile hey you'll find the archives of these podcasts links to every Victor's many other appearances on other podcasts, other shows, links to his books, his

Speaker 2 weekly essay for American Greatness, his weekly syndicated column. It's a cornucopia of Hansen.
So go there, the blade of Perseus, VictorHansen.com, and do subscribe.

Speaker 2 Victor,

Speaker 2 as you know, because

Speaker 2 you are the boss. of Strategica, issue 96 just came out, and it's on military recruitment, which you've talked about at some length before.

Speaker 2 You told me you were at an event lately and

Speaker 2 I didn't get into it, but some, yeah,

Speaker 2 let's talk about the new issue and things related to it. Go ahead.

Speaker 2 Well, we had two authors. I assign the topics, and then my managing effort,

Speaker 2 David Berkey, is he

Speaker 2 rounds up the assignments, and he and Bruce Thornton edit them. So we have a team that operates.

Speaker 2 But we want to talk about recruitment because it's been in the news so much. And the subtext is that the last three years we've been short 40,000 to 50,000 soldiers in total.

Speaker 2 And when you look to the Pentagon for answers, both

Speaker 2 active generals and admirals and retired, you get arguments that don't seem rational. And the arguments are something to the effect,

Speaker 2 well, the unemployment rate's 3.5 the last 10 years, so we can't compete with the private sector. But military wages are almost 83% of civilians now.
And that's not computing housing and health.

Speaker 2 It's not like the 70s with it, when they were very below paid. Number two, they'll tell you, well, they're out of shape, they're obese.
That's true, but that's been true for 20 years.

Speaker 2 So you just wonder what is the new element, the new factor, the new criterion that is explaining these.

Speaker 2 But before I say what that article found, what the military has been doing, given this crisis in recruitment, rather than to have this public relations disaster keep going

Speaker 2 and have people like myself and you and other pundits suggest they know why people are not joining the military, they have lowered what they need. So very subtly, without much discussion,

Speaker 2 somebody will come up to me. Well, Victor, you're just completely, that's just a civilian.
You don't know anything of it. I've been in the military 20 years.

Speaker 2 And we made all of our recruitments. And then you say, well, yeah, because you said you had needed 40,000 less soldiers.
Well, it's more complicated than that.

Speaker 2 What they've basically been doing is lowering the requirement of recruitment, and then the lower recruitment meets it, and then they announce to all of us we're not short. But they are short.

Speaker 2 And why are they short? And if you try to tell people in the Pentagon or right about it, that the combination of humiliation in Kabul

Speaker 2 and the humiliation of

Speaker 2 the inability to achieve strategic results,

Speaker 2 and I'm not talking about tactical brilliance, a military boy, when you get to sergeant, captain, major, lieutenant, colonel, colonel, one star, those guys are, and private, they're brilliant.

Speaker 2 Brilliant. But when you go and bomb Libya or you have all these installations in Syria, or you try to nation build for 20 years Iraq, or you try to do the same, you can't

Speaker 2 turn that into strategic resolution in our favor. And the Israelis are having the same problem.
I wrote an article in Mosaic explaining why this was, in part.

Speaker 2 So you don't get an answer from them why people are not recruiting. Then you say, well,

Speaker 2 they're afraid that they're going to go out there and get killed in something in Anbar province or in Fallujah, and then you're not going to win. And then their family is going to see it was wasted.

Speaker 2 And then the second thing is, when

Speaker 2 the number of women shot from 2% or 3% to 16% or 17%, and then you deliberately, deliberately, but you really put emphasis on commercials that you were going to facilitate pregnant women in flight suits.

Speaker 2 You were going to give abortions on federal property and red states that had outlawed abortion

Speaker 2 under many circumstances. You were going to appeal to trans.
You were going to have the DEI, Hispanics, black, and all that.

Speaker 2 Then you went the next step after George Floyd, and you did what the FAA, you started having repertory promotions and retentions. So white males

Speaker 2 were...

Speaker 2 came to the collective conclusion that they were not going to be promoted on the basis of their military record on the battlefield. What does that mean?

Speaker 2 So if they were a captain and they were in charge of a carrier and they had a high percentage of their planes landing on the second cable on the first try, just what you want, that wouldn't be a criteria.

Speaker 2 They would be asked, to what degree did you have diversity in the control wheel? How many black navigators, right?

Speaker 2 All that.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 they were angry at that. And then under the Biden, it came to a head.
We had that infamous 2020

Speaker 2 remember that? Is it Admiral Gilead? And then we had Milley and then Austin. And they were actually recommending us to read this Marxist diatribe by Kendi,

Speaker 2 anti-racism. And then they were talking about Austin said that he was going to check through the ranks and find out about white privilege, white rage, white supremacy.
And they did.

Speaker 2 They ran a witch hunt. And then in December in 2023, they did like a little peep.
They waited right before Christmas, and the Pentagon issued, well, kind of, sort of, we didn't find anything.

Speaker 2 There is no organized cabal of white rage, white conspiracy. Well, yeah, we could have told you that.

Speaker 2 So, what happened is that the grandmother

Speaker 2 that you go talk to, and I talk a lot on military history, and as I said to Sammy, you get these people to ask, well, you know,

Speaker 2 my dad,

Speaker 2 he served in World War my granddad served in World War II. My dad served in Vietnam.
My husband served in the First Gulf War. My oldest son fought in Iraq.

Speaker 2 I am not going to let my grandson go into that military because they'll get him killed in some far-off place and nobody will care. And he'll hit a roadblock.
He will hit a roadblock.

Speaker 2 And you tell the military, and they deny that. And then you look at certain statistics.
And I've had this conversation three or four times.

Speaker 2 You say to a general, I'm really worried about the military because you guys compile

Speaker 2 gender, sexual orientation,

Speaker 2 race on every type of promotion, every type of unit, but

Speaker 2 you don't do it on the dead. But I did look at the dead, and they're in the high middle 70% of those who died in Afghanistan and Iraq in combat units.

Speaker 2 And then I did the second thing,

Speaker 2 and I looked at which particular group that you are so meticulously chronicling their race and gender and sexual orientation has not met their traditional percentages.

Speaker 2 It's not gays, it's not Hispanics, it's not blacks, it's white males. And do you think there is a connection between all the things you're doing and the message you're sending white males?

Speaker 2 And do you think, secondly, that is important?

Speaker 2 Because whether it was fair or not, you depended on white male volunteers, mostly from rural places like upstate New York or the South or San Joaquin Valley, to volunteer in numbers at twice their demographics and then to die in combat units at twice their percentages in the population.

Speaker 2 And now they're not doing it. And when you say that, Jack,

Speaker 2 it is like you should see the face of the command. They get so angry at you.
Oh, that's so racist. You've been publicly.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I've been to town. I don't want to reveal too much, but I I don't want to talk about it but I have been ostracized I have

Speaker 2 I've had a commanding officer walk I've been walking across the street he walks on the other side of the street when he sees me I've had one of my assistants tell me that this person wants me to knock it off I've had another military officer said a high-ranking officer at the Pentagon said you better stop it but the point is These were op-eds.

Speaker 2 These were, I'm a historian, but we finally got the expert, owen west the son of bing west and he's very close he's not has no axe to grind he's military he's he's formerly he was in the pentagon he was a brave he was in the military in the marine corps combat veteran like his father who my god bing west has been everywhere

Speaker 2 one of the bravest man men alive so he did this study with a colleague and he found out that he was meticulous and he showed that the Pentagon's DEI practices and their

Speaker 2 less than spectacular strategic record, not their tactical excellence, has hurt recruitment.

Speaker 2 And it's pretty devastating.

Speaker 2 And it will be much more credible than me saying it, because he is a combat veteran, and this was his area of specialty. And he spent a great deal, and he shared that research with us.
Who said that?

Speaker 2 And he's published it elsewhere. Yeah, who co-wrote this lead piece? I'm trying to remember.

Speaker 2 Kevin Walston. Yes, Kevin Waltz.

Speaker 2 So he's got really great people that wrote that. And then there are some supporting articles that we have in the issue as well.
And we're going to discuss that

Speaker 2 we have on March

Speaker 2 7th. We have our 100 people.
We fly them in from all over the world. We get a big roundtable.
And we have controversial topics. It's closed to the public and the media.

Speaker 2 And I think this one will be, one in session will be,

Speaker 2 do nuclear weapons still detour people? And we lowered the threshold of using them? And another one will be: why can't we turn strategic resolution,

Speaker 2 tactical brilliance into strategic victory? And we're going to have a lot of great things going on. We've got generals,

Speaker 2 got admirals, we've got enlisted men, we've got special services, we've got historians like Andrew Roberts, Neil Ferguson, retired generals like General Maddish, General

Speaker 2 McMaster. We've got a lot of historians there

Speaker 2 as well, Stephen Kotkin, Barry Strauss. It's a really good group of people.
And there's no rules. I'm the chairman of the discussion, Ed Lutwack.
And we had the late Angelo Cotavilla.

Speaker 2 He was wonderful. And it's a free-for-all.
I have no rules except you can't quote what you say and you can't personally insult somebody. You have to be polite about it.

Speaker 2 Other than that, it's lucha libre in the middle of the arena. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I have a lucha libre.

Speaker 2 People have asked us before,

Speaker 2 could we do another show on wrestling? We'll think about that another time. Victor,

Speaker 2 I want to recommend to our listeners to visit the Hoover website and

Speaker 2 search for Strategica or Google Strategica. It's issue 96.

Speaker 2 And I'll just say that

Speaker 2 an important point in the lead piece by Owen West and Kevin Walston to me was how central the family, the military family

Speaker 2 conduit is to

Speaker 2 our military, and it's been disrespected.

Speaker 2 It's very important. People should realize that the reason that the U.S.
military works so well

Speaker 2 is that there is a small percentage of the population that generation after generation after generation join the military. And they just don't do it for job training.
They do it for combat. They

Speaker 2 feel

Speaker 2 because of their ancestors, their parents, their culture, that they feel they want to go over and

Speaker 2 in what I would call the ninth ring of Dante's Inferno and fight some of the most despicable, mean, creepy people in the world and beat them for their country. And they are a very precious resource.

Speaker 2 And if you tamper with that multi-generational devotion to the military in any slight way, you're going to turn them off.

Speaker 2 And if you turn turn them off, you're not going to find anybody else who's willing to go over there and die at twice their numbers.

Speaker 2 So you have to treat them with respect, not more than any other people, just the same, but you have to acknowledge that that is the backbone of the combat units in the U.S. Army and U.S.

Speaker 2 Marines, especially. And

Speaker 2 why we did, why we

Speaker 2 Millie was lecturing about

Speaker 2 reading Professor Kendi, and Austin was talking about white rage.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 Pete Hexeth is going to shake things up. And I know for a fact that he is going to reach out to this demographic and says, you have been insulted by us, and you will no longer be insulted.

Speaker 2 If you talk about what Pete Hexeth has talked about,

Speaker 2 He came out here

Speaker 2 at my farm and did a documentary on classical education. But his book was being written at the time, and I was talking just for a few minutes.

Speaker 2 And he touched on all the issues that appeared in this book. But I mean,

Speaker 2 that is why there was so much anger at him. If he gets his way,

Speaker 2 he's going to really radicalize it. There is not going to be this huge overhead.
There's going to be a different type of procurement.

Speaker 2 He's going to widen the field of people who offer weapons, more weapons and cheaper weapons. And he's going to take a hard look at Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed, Northrop.

Speaker 2 These are great companies, but he's going to say you have to diversify. You have to partner with startups.
You've got to get more competition.

Speaker 2 And we're not going to have generals that revolve right out to the Pentagon to these boards. You're going to have to wait a bit.
And we're going to enforce a uniform code of military justice.

Speaker 2 You're not going to get a federal pension and still be subject to recall and violate Article 88 and just call the president a Hitler or Mussolini or like General Hayden did, that he's creating Auschwitz-like camps.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 Hayden did, remember when Trump was president, time man of the year, General Hayden, who is subject to Article 88 of the military code,

Speaker 2 he put on X a picture of Hitler as man of the year in 1933 or four.

Speaker 2 In other words, he was saying that his commander-in-chief, that he has given an oath as an active officer, and he's subject to that oath if he's still in retirement and receiving a pension and subject to recall, was Hitler.

Speaker 2 And so then that's not going to, I think Pete will just say, look, he'll call them all in and say the next person who calls the President of the United States publicly a Hitlerian, Mussolini, liar, pathological, should be removed before an election, is going to be subject to ADAI.

Speaker 2 And if you read it very carefully, it says they're subject to court-martial and they're subject even if they're retired.

Speaker 2 And so I think there's going to be a big change, I really do. And one of the things he will do is make bring back meritocracy to the military and bring back some of these families that have been

Speaker 2 estranged. I like that he took Millie's picture down.
Now, Victor, it's February 1st. It's in Milford, Connecticut, where I am right now.
I think it's about 15 degrees out there.

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Speaker 2 And we thank the good people at SolAir for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. And I know Victor has a SolAir.
And I've seen I do. And

Speaker 2 I have a little camera on the deck of my little Sierra home. And I check to see if there's a Bobcat or something.

Speaker 2 And I see my solar grill there sitting on the deck, waiting to be turned on very quickly. I wonder if

Speaker 2 Bobcat would taste.

Speaker 2 It looks good to us. I want my Bobcats to keep away from it.

Speaker 2 Hey, Victor, we're going to talk about one other thing before we head into the final, final section. And there's so much media stuff happening.

Speaker 2 But let's stay on political and media. And that we all know how much our taxpayer dollars are involved in some degree of media, public, television, PBS, NPR,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 our mothership here at the podcast, which I think we talked about before on this podcast or the previous one. John Solomon's Just the News has a story.

Speaker 2 NPR, PBS, and Voice of America I'd for defunding reform amid reported bias concerns. And here's just one little paragraph from a story, and it involves Michael Pack.

Speaker 2 And Michael, you interviewed Michael a few weeks ago on a special edition of the Dr. Davis-Hanson Show.
And Michael's also,

Speaker 2 he produced that phenomenal documentary on Clarence Thomas.

Speaker 2 Just terrific.

Speaker 2 But anyway, he's the president of Manifold Productions, and he told Just the News on January 14th,

Speaker 2 two weeks ago, three weeks ago, that his Iraq war documentary, it's titled The Last 600 Meters, was principally funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Speaker 2 The corporation provides funding to both PBS and NPR. However, after initially accepting the documentary for air, PBS declined to air it for being quote-unquote too pro-military, PAC said.

Speaker 2 Anyway, Victor, it's just one example of many things cited in the article about

Speaker 2 why these things need to be hacked. I think we should just tell the truth.
The people at PBS and NPR are hard left. There's no doubt about it.

Speaker 2 Both of those stations were envisioned in the late 70s when you basically had a choice between ABC, CBS, and NBC,

Speaker 2 commercial television. And so PBS started out wonderfully.
Brian Lamb was a saint with book talk and C-SPAN and all of that.

Speaker 2 And NPR started out as an alternative to commercial AM and FM radio. Okay.

Speaker 2 Now we are,

Speaker 2 well, we're 40 years later and you get your DirecTV or your streaming station and there's 150 channels. And if you think that PBS offers great documentary, you can get them on a documentary channel.

Speaker 2 If you think they have great

Speaker 2 English

Speaker 2 melodramas or crime stories, you can find it on Amazon. The same thing.
I like Endeavor. I really like that to watch it.
You can go on Amazon right now and get it. If you think

Speaker 2 you want to listen to type of radio there, you can go onto a podcast. There's hundreds of podcasts on every different topic, history.
So my point is

Speaker 2 to keep NPR and PBS in a special category immune from market forces and the idea that they should not be political, that's non-sustainable now.

Speaker 2 And then they're going to say to us, well, we are political, but we fulfill a need that no one else does, and that's no longer true. So what good are they? If other

Speaker 2 outlets, some commercial free, offer the same product without the bias, or with bias on the left and bias on the right, why do we have to subsidize these people?

Speaker 2 And they usually get pretty high salaries and they're not subject to market forces. So they compete with local TV a lot.

Speaker 2 and local TV has to survive in our market environment, and they don't, and they're propagandistic. So every statistic that has tried to monitor their content comes out with 60%, 70, 80, 90% prejudice

Speaker 2 for the left. So I just don't think people 40 or 50 years after their creation is going to put up with it anymore, especially Trump.

Speaker 2 But I mean,

Speaker 2 it's an important brand to a lot of people to say I listen to NPR. It is, and I understand that.
I've been on NPR a lot, and

Speaker 2 I've been on PBS, and I enjoy it. But at some point when you're driving, and you turn it on, and it says,

Speaker 2 I just wanted to talk. Here I am with the news, and there's a really interesting phenomenon occurring at UC Berkeley campus.
There's a transgendered movement, but it's a little different.

Speaker 2 It's about people wearing purple hair and being transgendered and not wearing shoes. And they have kind of fused with the radical Palestinian movement in a force multiplying effect.

Speaker 2 Can you report on this? That's what we hear. And no one wants to hear it.
And the group of people that do want to hear it can find it somewhere.

Speaker 2 But we don't have to subsidize it. So I think there's two things that Trump could do.
He can either abolish it.

Speaker 2 Or he could give it a little shove and say, you know what, you are a semi-quasi da-da-da-da, and you will be 100% supported. And look,

Speaker 2 Sam, the Bankman Freeds gave $60 million.

Speaker 2 Soros gave $80 million in 2020. Mark Zuckerberg gave $419 million.

Speaker 2 Mike Bloomberg spent $1 billion.

Speaker 2 You look at those oligarchs. They have enough money.
If they really want it, why don't they just fund it?

Speaker 2 Totally agree, Victor.

Speaker 2 The top 20 philanthropies in America are all left-wing. They're more concerned with growing their

Speaker 2 bottom line than they are with distributing. But they could easily fund this.
It's couch-changing. And they really got into the Me Too.
I mean,

Speaker 2 I don't know whether Garrison Keillor was handsy or what, but in the great scope of things, whatever he did, he apologized. But they just went into a Stalinist mood with him, remember?

Speaker 2 And I'm speaking of a person on the left. I'm not a big fan of his.

Speaker 2 I think he's talented, but they just banned his books and they made him a persona non grata. They just took everything he did off the air.
You can't get it. It was like he tried to

Speaker 2 dehumanize him. And they did that with a lot of people.

Speaker 2 Charlie Rose got

Speaker 2 the same thing. I mean, these people were these icons, and then they hit the DEI.
And now nobody, I mean, it's just, it's for a particular university

Speaker 2 bicostal elite professional class in law, medicine, law, insurance, capital, media, but especially academia. Everybody listens to it.
If I had, I haven't done it in a while, but

Speaker 2 I did, you know, I used to do Talk of the Nation with Neil Conan. Remember him?

Speaker 2 And I do, and then people would come up, you got on NPR. Oh, wow, that is so wonderful.
And you could go on limbo and nobody would say a word. But

Speaker 2 so what? They're very biased. When Trump first came in,

Speaker 2 NPR asked me to come on, the San Francisco station, but it was a national,

Speaker 2 and they asked me about the Trump cages. Remember the Trump cages? Oh, sure.

Speaker 2 And I said the Trump cages, they had a Hispanic guy who was very radical at the border, saying these people are in cages like Mike Hayden said,

Speaker 2 all that stuff. I said, those were built by Obama.
He was the first person that lost track. And then under public pressure, he had to start deporting.
As of right now,

Speaker 2 he was able to deport more than Trump has because you did not dare tell him not to deport because he was your iconic figure. Now all of a sudden you say that Trump is Hitler or what?

Speaker 2 I was saying this and this guy was arguing me. And then I said, thank you, get off.
And then when I got off, he started attacking me, which is not... protocol when I got off the air.

Speaker 2 Well, that was kind of a right wing, something like that. And so the producer called me, very sweet, and said,

Speaker 2 thank you for being on. I said, I just listened to that.
I was driving, and I got in my car. There was a, you know, you had an advertisement.
I got in. They do have advertisements.

Speaker 2 And I started being attacked by it. I'm never going to, she said that.
Yes, I didn't want to bring that up. That was unprofessional.
I said, I'm never, ever going to go back on your show.

Speaker 2 And I had, you know, it's a good rule to have. I was once on Bill Maher's show, and the producer called me and said,

Speaker 2 you know, the Iraq war is in the surge and da da da da. I had just been operated on, got back from Libya, so I was really ill.

Speaker 2 And she said, well, if you go on, I said, I don't want to go on Bill Maher. I know what he he that was when he was hate Bush, hate Bush.

Speaker 2 And he had Gandalf on, Ian

Speaker 2 McClellan.

Speaker 2 and he had another left-wing guy, I can't remember. And I said,

Speaker 2 so they said, no, no, no, no, Bill, Bill,

Speaker 2 he's disinterested. He wants just to see what the surge is like.
And I got on there, and he said, here's Victor Hansen. He's out in Fresno.
He's a Chinese war guru.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 Gandalf said, I can't believe he's a professor.

Speaker 2 Hear that. No professor.
He's not a legitimate. And it was just vitriol.

Speaker 2 And I just said to the person, I'm never, ever going to go on that show again.

Speaker 2 And I never have. I've been asked once or twice.
I'm never going to go on that show. It's good to do that just because you know what they are.

Speaker 2 And I've been, I did the New Yorker magazine, Isaac Cheutener, and he did this and he said he was going to have a transcript and I could look at it to check whether he was going to edit it.

Speaker 2 He never sent me the transcript. He did not tell the truth.
He cut and pasted.

Speaker 2 He didn't.

Speaker 2 Anyway, I said, I'll never go to the New Yorker again. I'll never talk to you.

Speaker 2 He did the same thing to Michael Lawrence. What? Yeah, we were both misquoted in the New Yorker, the piece about Sarah Palin.
Yes.

Speaker 2 I was too. And the New York Times, I used to write op-eds, and they did the same thing to me.
The other day, a guy named Baker called me for a quote about Trump, and

Speaker 2 I said to him,

Speaker 2 He had done that before, and I don't know if he remembers, but I said, I don't want the editorializing. He said,

Speaker 2 No, no, we just want to get ⁇ just give me a quote. So I said, about the Biden-Trump transition and whether Trump has exceeded his constitutional authority.

Speaker 2 So last week or the week before, I said, Joe Biden vastly expanded the prerogatives of the presidency to enact by executive order policies that were on

Speaker 2 popular.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump inherited

Speaker 2 that new

Speaker 2 ability to enact policies that were popular, like the border clothing. And

Speaker 2 he broke his word. He printed that, and then right underneath mine, he says, of course,

Speaker 2 the pardons were not popular,

Speaker 2 January 6th. So he editorialized in a way that, you know, so I'm not going to do that anymore.
And

Speaker 2 if you get a call, if I get a call from CNN, I just got one the other day. I don't do it.

Speaker 2 Nothing.

Speaker 2 Because you know, you get a certain point in life and you know who you're dealing with. You're dealing with some 20-something, 30-something smart,

Speaker 2 blank-blank who thinks they're smarter than anybody and they're partisans, and they're going to get some older conservative guy and they're going to entice him and flatter him, then bring him on, and then try to sabotage him.

Speaker 2 Life's too short to do that anymore. I have nothing but contempt for those people.
I really do. That are in the New York Times, a New Yorker.

Speaker 2 I had a woman, they ran an article on me in the Washington Post that Dick Cheney was reading some of my books. This is 2003.
And so this woman called me from the Boston Globe.

Speaker 2 So, I'd like to come out. I hear you're a farmer.
I said, no, I don't want to talk to you. No, no, I'll come out.
She flew all the way out and spent the day with me. Oh, this is so great.

Speaker 2 And then she wrote this article. We can't believe that a vice president, only a vice president like Cheney, would talk to this hick guy who lives in this house out in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 2 He's a raisin farmer.

Speaker 2 Then a guy from the LA Times called up and said, I'm not like her. I want to write a whole thing on you.

Speaker 2 Can I go? And I said, you know, I'm really busy. He said, no, I'm just going going to drive up.
And I said, I have to go speak to an evangelical church today.

Speaker 2 And I'm too busy. I'll go with you.
I said, okay, you spend it. So he spent the day.
And sure enough, Victor Hansen spouted out right-wing to an evangelical right-wing church at an audience.

Speaker 2 And it was just so typical. Why do it?

Speaker 2 This is the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune.

Speaker 2 It used to syndicate. Now it's Tribune.
And I would send a column in, and they'd say,

Speaker 2 well, they'd fact-check. I said, that is not necessarily not true, but it needs context, context.

Speaker 2 And then they would, about every three years, they go, well, we don't know how to ask you this, but you're getting people very angry. And we've got a lot of Stanford professors.

Speaker 2 And underneath your byline, it says Victor Davis Hansen, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution,

Speaker 2 Stanford University. Now, I know you wouldn't lie to us, but they claim that you're not Stanford-affiliated.
And you're speaking for them. I said, What do you want?

Speaker 2 They said, Well, can you send us your pay stub?

Speaker 2 And I said, Now, what would be needed on my pay stub? We need the name Stanford University. I said, I'll be happy to.
And I did that every two or three years.

Speaker 2 And it was always professors that were so angry to see Stanford University with anybody affiliated with anybody that didn't have their views.

Speaker 2 Well, Victoria. Oh, well, if it was medieval times, I would have been burned at the the stake.

Speaker 2 I bring this up, Jack, because

Speaker 2 just to finish,

Speaker 2 we went through this with Sammy. They took the security details away from Brian Hook, Pompeo,

Speaker 2 John Bolton, Fauci.

Speaker 2 And I said at the time that they were distinct cases. The people who were involved for a long, long time fashioning the Iran deal and Solomani, and that was Brian Hook and Pompeo.

Speaker 2 Bolton came in later.

Speaker 2 I can see that I think they should. I don't know what their circumstances are, but I thought I said, and maybe somebody wrote me a note and said, you're wrong.

Speaker 2 And it was my impression that neither one of them had a lot of income.

Speaker 2 And that that was wrong because they would not be able to afford private security. But I did say that I know that for a fact John Bolton had a $7 million pack.

Speaker 2 And I know people who give lavish amounts of money.

Speaker 2 So I said, John Bolton has private means, and I know that Anthony Fauci and his wife were the highest paid couple, you know, almost $900,000. And they were being paid by the NIH the security detail.

Speaker 2 And it was Biden that cut it off, not Trump. But my point was this.

Speaker 2 Trump was right. Nobody gets lifetime security details.
Nobody. Mark Milley doesn't.
Nobody should.

Speaker 2 And in cases where they made courageous decisions that put them in danger,

Speaker 2 they got security details for four or five years, three or four years.

Speaker 2 And Trump is doing more for them than the security details alone because he is warning Iran, if you dare touch a person's hair, you're going to regret it. And Biden didn't do that.

Speaker 2 So he is deterring them. And the Iranian president confirmed that about a month ago.
He gave an interview and said, no, no, no, no, no. We do not

Speaker 2 assassinate anybody. Now, he may have been lying, but he felt he had to say that.
So they know that if they touch any of those people, they're going to be killed. And they will be killed.

Speaker 2 So my point was just if they have a lot of money, why would the government keep giving them security details?

Speaker 2 And then the people who didn't have money and were involved to a much greater degree in the decision to kill so

Speaker 2 like Pompeo or Brian Hook, I think that they probably should get some more details.

Speaker 2 But the other thing I said was, go ahead.

Speaker 2 The inner city mom in Chicago deserves a private protection detail.

Speaker 2 Exactly. And I said that.

Speaker 2 If you're in the arena and you write stuff or what we're talking about today, you're going to get a lot of hate mail.

Speaker 2 And I said to Sammy, I had a guy who said he was going to kill me when I got to Washington. And I printed that letter, and somebody who was a Texas federal prosecutor wrote me and said,

Speaker 2 I found out who that guy is, and I wrote him a note that that was a felony.

Speaker 2 And then I've had another guy who parked out on my almond orchard. He wouldn't leave.
He just, and I had that a lot. I would say once a month somebody shows up at my house.
99%

Speaker 2 are wonderful. The 1% is not.
Or if I go to an airport and somebody confronts you, 99% is... are wonderful.
One person hit me in the back of the head, cowardly, and then ran away.

Speaker 2 But my point is this. All of us have problems with security, and it's not just pundits.

Speaker 2 Everybody does. And

Speaker 2 you know, there was, I won't mention a pundit, but every time I read him, he said, somebody threatened me. And I'm writing, I'm courageous because somebody, no, I thought, no, this is part of the job.

Speaker 2 Everybody threatens you. When you write stuff, people threaten you.

Speaker 2 And I get, you know, my angry reader, I just let it pile up, and I usually, it's all F you and this, you're an idiot, and I publish it. And

Speaker 2 if they put their name there, I put their name there. You've got some nutcases there.

Speaker 2 Hey, Victor, what's the problem?

Speaker 2 I got a backlog. I got to get to the angry reader.
No, no, that'll bring the ER out.

Speaker 2 Let's close the show,

Speaker 2 today's show, by talking about a pundit who is pulling a mea culpa and get your thoughts on that. And we'll do that when we come back from these final important messages.

Speaker 2 We are back. We haven't talked about this.
You're not talking about Brett Stevens, are you?

Speaker 2 No, no, I'm not. Maya Culpo?

Speaker 2 Chris Saliza. But we can talk about Brett Stevens also if you want.
No, and Sammy and I talked about Brett. Oh, okay.
Well, Chris

Speaker 2 Saliza, who was a Washington Post journalist and then

Speaker 2 on his own, he put a very out a very

Speaker 2 long

Speaker 2 X

Speaker 2 tweet thing. I can't even know what the hell it's called.
Post with a thread.

Speaker 2 I screwed up. That's how it begins.
Back in May 2020, I wrote how Anthony Fauci had crushed Donald Trump's lab leak theory for COVID-19.

Speaker 2 The CIA said over the weekend they now believe this virus leaked from the lab. So a few thoughts.
And then he had many.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Yeah, why are they saying that now? Because they know that the research all along said that, but they were in trouble because people like Chris Saliza and the media demonized.

Speaker 2 Even Jon Stewart, remember he got on, they got angry at him for saying it. He just got...

Speaker 2 I wrote, I think it was for Salon or Slate. I can't remember.
I mentioned that to Sammy. That I wrote in, I think it was March or April.
of this whole thing that was just logical.

Speaker 2 Here's the Wuhan lab. Here is the first patient near the Wuhan lab.

Speaker 2 There's no bat or pangolin found anywhere near that's infected. There has never been an animal found that was infected before a human was infected,

Speaker 2 meaning that it didn't come from an animal. If there was a rare animal that had COVID, it came from a human.

Speaker 2 The Wuhan lab was under the osmeats of the People's Liberation Army. They did not release all of the genetic information like they promised.

Speaker 2 People who were involved in the escape and were worried disappeared. We don't know where they are.
Anthony Fauci broke the law of 2014 and routed $600,000 through Echo Health, Peter Dosek, to the lab.

Speaker 2 And not even that, he allowed transfers of expertise, visits from scholars, and instrumentation to go there.

Speaker 2 And the moment he heard that

Speaker 2 Wuhan was the center of this outbreak, he and Francis Collins had a flurry, as Ryan Paul exposed, of emails, worried that it might be misinterpreted, that their subsidy of this lab and their interest in gain of function biology, which was outlawed in the United States, could be misinterpreted as supporting what went on in the Wuhan lab.

Speaker 2 And then they cooked up Peter Dasick to get the

Speaker 2 Venerable Lancet Magazine, the New England Journal of Medicine version in Britain, to ruin its reputation by rounding up a bunch of hacks that goes over there and gets communist propaganda and then writes, oh, well,

Speaker 2 it didn't come from here. The commies told us it didn't come from here.
Then they had to retract that. So they all embarrassed themselves.
And

Speaker 2 everybody who listened to this knew it because it was just common sense. They tried to suppress it.
The only mystery is twofold.

Speaker 2 We still don't have the answer to that. Was it an accident, how it escaped?

Speaker 2 One, or was it deliberately...

Speaker 2 And I only say that because there were rumors that I don't know if they've ever been confirmed that they were working on types of vaccinations of the types of viruses they were creating.

Speaker 2 And I don't know if that's... They came out very quickly, almost as quickly as we did with the vaccination.
And then second of all,

Speaker 2 why was it under very quickly under the auspices of the People's Liberation Army? And when they were

Speaker 2 were they thinking that gain of function research had a military component in it? And I don't understand that.

Speaker 2 They tore up Robert Kennedy because he had said

Speaker 2 that the virus

Speaker 2 was

Speaker 2 designed to be more infectious to immune differences between races. Remember that? And they really got him on that.

Speaker 2 I had a very close friend who is a PhD and worked for our intelligence agencies and worked for the government and grew up in China, fluent in Chinese, and one of his tasks is he reads local newspapers in China every day.

Speaker 2 And he said to me, off the record, I'm not going to identify him, years ago, and I didn't believe it, he said he was very disturbed because there were some articles writing that gain and function research, and he reads medical journals and everything, could have a component where they could be designed to target more successfully particular groups.

Speaker 2 So Robert Kennedy didn't dream up that conspiracy theory. It was floating around.
I don't know if it's true. I think it's false.
But there were elements in China that advanced that.

Speaker 2 And that was picked up by American intelligence. and that was discounted as kind of a threat or a fantasy.

Speaker 2 But it didn't mean that Bobby Kennedy just made it up out of his head and some racist.

Speaker 2 I guess, Victor, I'm sure. He wasn't like Reverend Wright, was he? Remember, Reverend Wright said that the Israelis had an anti-Arab missile

Speaker 2 that had a guidance system. They could find Arabs and kill them.

Speaker 2 You think if you can have sickle cell,

Speaker 2 because you're black, maybe you could be white and have sickle cell, but

Speaker 2 there is some evidence out there of

Speaker 2 medical

Speaker 2 badness affiliated with race.

Speaker 2 It is with COVID, with blood type. We know that certain blood types, I think O or more than A,

Speaker 2 there's a greater immunity for a particular type of blood types vis-a-vis COVID. And we know that certain,

Speaker 2 you know, people that are, there's was very a lot of I don't believe that I don't know if they've been substantiated, but early on in the epidemic people were talking about the role of nicotine, especially nicotine gum.

Speaker 2 Cigarettes were problematic because the tar would weaken the lungs as much as nicotine might have prede prevented the infection. But there were all sorts of

Speaker 2 scientific studies that that talked about which particular groups were more vulnerable. They uh

Speaker 2 there was a long article I read the other day that women are much more vulnerable because they have more sensitive immune system to long COVID. I think 75% of people have long COVID are women.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there was a big article here that. Yeah, and when COVID broke out, there was a lot of worry about the Hispanic community because statistically they had a higher incidence of diabetes and obesity.

Speaker 2 And those were two cofactors for COVID. Don't say it, though.

Speaker 2 So people were talking about this, and they were talking about it not in racist terms, but in scientific terms.

Speaker 2 And they go after Bobby Kennedy. Anyway.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 the wrong people were talking about

Speaker 2 racial things.

Speaker 2 The other side can do it whenever they want, but you have to scientific.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 Everywhere can do it whenever he wants.

Speaker 2 He can have a nose cone that has a little sensor on it, a nose or a camera, and it tells,

Speaker 2 as he used the word DEM, dim Jews. I can't talk to Morocco anymore because dim Jews keep me from him.
Remember that? Oh, my gosh. What a.
God bless America. No, no, no.
God blank America.

Speaker 2 Chickens. Chickens coming home to roost.
Chickens coming home.

Speaker 2 And then Barack Obama asked about an interview in the Chicago Sun-Times. You surely, are you really a member of that congregation? Yes.
Haven't missed a service. Haven't missed a service, he said.

Speaker 2 And then they said said later, well, that means you heard him when he said that. No, I was never there.
Well, he married you. No,

Speaker 2 I wasn't there on those occasions. Gosh.

Speaker 2 What a liar.

Speaker 2 Not that he believed all that, but he thought it was valuable politically.

Speaker 2 Well, he made up his head.

Speaker 2 He made up his life in his memoirs, so why should he make up everything he does, right? Composite. Well, it's like Hillary said when he made that slip of the tongue and he said, my Muslim faith.

Speaker 2 And then they asked Hillary, and she said, do you think he's a Muslim? And she was running against him at the time, and she said,

Speaker 2 He says he's not.

Speaker 2 We can't. This is not even a rabbit hole.
This is the Holland tunnel we can go down with him. I don't want to go down with Barack Obama.

Speaker 2 I don't want to. He's made his peace with the world.
Well,

Speaker 2 he's made his peace. He's got his four mansions and

Speaker 2 his

Speaker 2 multi-millionaire lifestyle.

Speaker 2 Well, we've got to head to the exits, but just to say that Chuck Todd is out at NBC. Oh, my gosh.
He was my favorite. Chuck Todd, that brilliant mind on, was it Face the Nation?

Speaker 2 Used to be Meet the Meet the Press.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he used to be the

Speaker 2 boobah there.

Speaker 2 I remember him just shaking his finger

Speaker 2 at people from back in 2020.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God. Think of those old days.

Speaker 2 I know they were biased, but my God, when you look at Chuck Todd compared to John Chancellor or Eric Sevry,

Speaker 2 even Cronkite, they were just pathetic compared to those old guys.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, so many people take means to

Speaker 2 communicate with us or about us. So on Apple,

Speaker 2 folks can rate this show zero to five stars. Practically everyone gives it five stars, 4.9 plus average over the over 7,000 plus, 8,000 plus

Speaker 2 votes. So thanks folks who do that.
Some people leave comments. We read them, read them all.
I cry at some of them because

Speaker 2 I'm such a weenie.

Speaker 2 And people leave comments also on Victor's website. And I grabbed one

Speaker 2 from that today. And this is from Allison.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 she writes, Professor Hansen makes me laugh. His humor is so dryly hilarious, and his impromptu impressions are a riot.

Speaker 2 I'll be listening intently to a serious topic, and then he hits us with a remark like Confederacy of Dunces, and it cracks me up.

Speaker 2 I wish I had the opportunity to be his student, but I'm certainly grateful for the podcast. Thank you, Professor.
Thank you, Sammy. Thank you, Jack.
Allison B. from Sonoma County, California.

Speaker 2 And Allison B. Thank you.
You're not very far, Allison B.

Speaker 2 In his previous life, Victor was a stand-up comedian.

Speaker 2 He is a very funny

Speaker 2 man.

Speaker 2 Whether he's Happy Victor or Eeyore Victor,

Speaker 2 he's funny.

Speaker 2 I'll just finish by there was one person who could have been a stand-up comedian and an impersonator, and that was Rush Limbaugh. Oh, yeah.
He was funny, and he could.

Speaker 2 When he did Ross Perot, it was just funny.

Speaker 2 I liked him.

Speaker 2 Johnny comes around.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 he was funny. We miss him.
I miss him every movie. Yeah, he's very kind to me.
I've got to say. He's very kind.

Speaker 2 He's one of the kindest people I've met with people. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Hey, Victor, let me just say: I write Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society that every Friday provides 14 recommended readings.

Speaker 2 Here's an excerpt, here's the links,

Speaker 2 great pieces, interesting pieces I've come across the previous week. I think you'll like it.

Speaker 2 Not selling your names. So go to civilthoughts.com and sign up.
Go to victorhanson.com and sign up.

Speaker 2 Subscribe there. If you're on Twitter, Victor's Handle is at VD Hanson.
And on Facebook, there's the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club, which is a friendly group.

Speaker 2 Recommend that to you. Victor's got

Speaker 2 his VDH's Morning Cup on

Speaker 2 Facebook and on Rumble. Check it out on Rumble.

Speaker 2 This podcast is there. And Victor's also got...
Victor's everywhere. The daily thing.
single overexposed Victor, overexposed Victor. Everybody's getting sick of me.
I'm overexposed.

Speaker 2 Not enough. Skeletor's got to go back into its hole.
Oh, my gosh, the Skeletor stuff. All right, Victor, you've been terrific.
Skeletor, you've been terrific. Thanks so much.

Speaker 2 Thanks, folks, for listening, watching, whatever. How are you taking this in? We thank you.
And God bless. And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.
Bye-bye.

Speaker 2 Thank you, everybody, for taking the time to listen.

Speaker 2 I really appreciate it. Thank you.