Trump, Davos, and the New World Order

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Safeguard your wealth, protect your future while there's still time. Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
This is our Saturday edition where we look at something historical in the middle of the show in the second segment. And today, Victor is going to be talking about the lighthouse at Alexandria,

one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. But before that, we have lots of news on our

agenda. We've got Trump sent a video to Davos with his vision of the United States and the

international order. And Victor has some more words to say about Bishop Wood, I believe is

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.
You can find him at his website, victorhansen.com. The name of the website is The Blade of Perseus.
It's going through lots of changes right now. So come check it out if you haven't been there in a while.
It is to join the website. It's $6.50 a month, or $65 a year for a subscription.
So please come join us there. Well, Victor, I know that you wanted to say a few things about Trump's recent video that he sent to Davos and our international community.
So I'll just say you go ahead and take it. Well, he's Trump today, and I'm speaking on Thursday of the first week of the Trump administration, he sent a video and then he had questions and answers.
And I thought their heads would explode when I listened to it because he said things like beautiful liquid gold is for oil and that crappy new green Deal was a joke.

And that's kind of a biblical canon among Davos people that we're all going to transition to immediately to so-called renewable fuel.

So almost everything he was saying was, what, heresy

because he was talking about how we had been ripped off.

We run about a $135 billion deficit with the EU. A lot of that is because of their tariffs.
They don't call them tariffs, but they are. We run about a $50 billion year with Canada.
We run $100 billion. And by the way, a lot of that $100 billion deficit with Mexico comes from remittances.
So the point that he was making is that we were being screwed over. But he did then kind of fixate on the Ukraine war.
But what he did was very interesting. I mean, it was the art of the deal and millions of being killed.
I think there's, we don't know how many people, 1.7 million, but wounded dead. So he was on the right track there.
But the point I'm making is, it was really a humanitarian speech, because he just kept saying, this is terrible. It's a flat country.
The bullets are just going back and forth. They're killing.
It's not an insurrection. It's not hill country.
It's just a World War II battlefield. And he was really sincerely lamenting the cost.
I think the Europeans were very shocked to hear that. And then he talked about Russia and China.
But here's my point. I thought after that, when it was me and talking about my, if you were listening to Trump, he talked about how great is, you know, Art of the Deal.
He won and he just made shredded the EU approach to the economy with tariffs and open borders. And he mentioned that the Biden administration had kind of emulated the EU.
And I thought they were going to tear him up. But when you look at the questions, they were all international bankers and financiers.
And I can't characterize them all because they had their differences. But there was one theme.
Are you serious? You're going to promise us that you're going to ensure liquid natural gas exports to Europe, even though your predecessor shut these plants, you're going to get them built. I did it already.
I've already done it. They're open.
I've green-lighted the permits. We're going to build, build, build.
Well, what about when what happens if the price goes up in your country and then it becomes an issue that you're exporting it

to us can we rely on you when i make a deal i follow the deal that's what trump said and then some of the bankers said well what do we do about all this right well we're going to have to on on deregulate and that's what we're going to do in the united states cheap cheap cheap, cheap, cheap fuel. Deregulate.
Lower taxes.

And the International Finance Committee ate it up.

Everybody was trying to, I think, as I said, their heads were exploding. I thought, because of his heresies about DEI, ESG, neo-socialism, Green New Deal, they weren't.

It was like, okay, he's speaking, and now it's okay to make money and to have profits and get the entire world's GDP going again. So I thought it was very successful, but I was shocked at the questions and the reception that he got, at least from the little bit I heard, but I read the entire transcript.

And it was, are you serious? You're really going to do this? This is great. All right.
To turn to a less successful topic, I know that we talked about the Bishop Boudre on Friday, but I know that she's been raked over the coal since then, and there's more that you wanted to say, address about her particular dressing down of Trump in her sermon on a day when it seemed very inappropriate to most people. She's the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C., so I guess, I don know why she has spoken before.
They should have been warned about that, but I guess she slipped through the cracks. So she was waiting till the end so nobody would walk out apparently, but she gave sort of a touchy-feely therapeutic Christianity.
And again, she's not worried from the speech. She's not worried about 80,000 Americans killed by imported fentanyl across an open border.
She's not worried about mayhem, rape, assault, murder by illegal aliens, 500,000 criminals in that category. She's not worried about our social services tax.
She's not worried about 63 billion in remittances. It was all about show some kindness.
And it was almost how dare that you deport people. They have a perfect right to break your laws and come in here and break your laws again by residing here.
But what was fascinating, that she didn't care about the toll, the people who suffer, but she was more worried about the transgendered and the illegal alien than she was the people who have to pay for this huge illegal immigration problem. The funny thing was, almost immediately, it surfaced that after all those lectures about the nobility of the poor, and let's have mercy mercy and don't be so sharp, well, I thought she lived in a hut.
And she was, you know, I don't know what, Albert Schweitzer or somebody? Mother Teresa, maybe. Mother Teresa, Gandhi, that's how she sounded.
Well, then it was within a nanosecond. They said, wait a minute.
She lives in one of the toniest neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., and she has a six-bedroom

two-bedroom, $2 million-plus house with five-and-a-half baths? Who needs six bedrooms? Why would a woman of the cloth think that she should live like Caesar and then preach that she's blessed are the meek, sermon on the mount, blessed are the poor. It's easier for a camel to get through an eye of a needle than a rich man to get to heaven.
That's where she came off. It was so redundant, redolent of Barack Obama, Martha's Vineyard, $14 million estate, 2,000 gallons worth of propane tanks, right on the coast, lecturing everybody about rising seas are going to inundate beach houses.
And then he has one in Hawaii that's on the beach. So he doesn't believe that.
And then all the nobility of the poor, and you look at that aerial view of Martha's Vineyard and you think, well, you could put tents up there. You could put a thousand people there.
And then when you have any inkling of the consequences of the ideology of these people actually reified, actually coming in a concrete manifestation to their doorstep. And we remember when Ron DeSantis, in a very brilliant move, started bussing illegal aliens up to Martha's Vineyard.
And they were, this is so good. Everybody's going to come and we're going to have the city center.
What time? How long are you going to stay here? A couple of hours? Well, we're going to show, hey, everybody, you've got national news. Here's our puff jackets and our stocking caps and our heavy-duty gloves and food.
How long is it now? Oh, we're going to have buses for you. We're going to bus you to Chicago and then New York so you can go where you belong in the inner city.
Because the inner city doesn't have what we have, and it won't be that big of a problem for them. They're poor, downtown, inner city Chicago, the Bronx, the Queens, Harlem.
That's where these people belong. And she just was the same.
Everybody, that's so, I don't like to use the terms of it. That's so gone, that's so old, that's so yesterday, that we get a very, very wealthy, white, white, bi-coastal elite who lives in the upper, upper, upper, upper, upper 1% of the country as adjudicated by their clothes, their lifestyle, and their home.
And then they use a pulpit to try to insult a conservative as if they're greedy and insensitive. And then, of course, if she was really a woman on the cloth and people ask her, she would have said, I can't go on the view.
I can't go on the map. I was just giving a sermon, and I'm not trying to commercialize it.
I'm not trying to, you know, I'm the omega. I'm not the alpha.
I shall be last. That was my message.
I don't want to go on TV and get all this fame and merchandise or whatever it is. I refused to do that, but she didn't do that.
So once again, we're back to the central problem of leftism, that it's an elitism.

It's a party of and for the well-off. And they feel guilty.
And unfortunately, we're not in the Middle Ages where you could write a little check and say, I am an urserer. I am very wealthy.
I don't want to go to hell. So here is a thousand gold florins so that I can go to heaven.
And you can use it for the Dome of St. Peter.
So we don't have penances and we don't have contractual deals to get into heaven. We just feel guilty.
And how do we express that guilt if you're the bishop? You try to embarrass the President of the United States on global TV, and then you retreat back to your mansion, and that's it. Yeah, sure.
If she had been honest and was really going to do that in the middle of her sermon, she would have at least said, we understand you're trying to take care of a border problem that has brought across

all, at least, but she shouldn't have done it at all. Well, let's move on to another elite group, the Techies.
And there's, usually I wouldn't say anything for the New York Times, for our audience, but they have a interview by, what was his name?

Ross Duthra.

Yeah, and of Mark Andreessen.

And he's trying to ask him, what happened to the Silicon Valley techies? Why did they turn to Trump? And it's a fascinating interview, but I would like to hear your reflections. It's very interesting.
If you were to boil that interview down, we all know that techies and everybody in Northern California is liberal on social issues. And they're not going over to Trump because of the tax cuts.
That helps encourage investment. They're not going over to Donald Trump because he's ending welfare or he's cutting back on the sides of the government.
They're going over to Trump because they enlisted with the left and they saw glimpses under Obama. But Biden pulled apart.
I shouldn't say Biden. Biden didn't know what he was doing.
It is the Obamas and their second incarnation, Obama 2.0, that wing of the Democratic Party. And as Andreessen said, they were going to say, listen, this is artificial intelligence.
We're going to control it. There's going to be six or seven big corporations.
There's going to be no startups. We want a lid on this thing.
We're going to control it. Social media, just like partnerships.
And they thought, wow, I'm an artist, and I have to be creative. And whether it's an Apple phone or a Google search or a Netscape product, my forte is expressing myself and making money and making new products.
They really do believe that. And I don't mind when they take something from me with taxes.
And I don't mind when they make me fork up. That's the cost of doing business.
But I do mind when they don't allow me to express myself and make a profit. When they start telling me, you are going to do this with your investment, and these are the people who can play in your game, and these are the ones I don't like that.
That's not America. The second thing I don't like is when we get killed overseas by Europe and Asia, and we go to Biden or we go to Obama and they don't help us.
Case in point, the EU has a much higher corporate tax depending on the country than we do. So if a company like Google or Apple go over to the EU and they're making money, the EU says, ah, what's your tax? 15%, 20%? Ours over here is 30%.
So we're going to tax you whatever your tax is, the difference from our tax. So Andreessen and these people, they're brilliant business people and they're paying the tax here and then they go over to Europe and the Europeans want to hit them so, they're brilliant business people, and they're paying the tax here.

And then they go over to Europe, and the Europeans want to hit them so that it's an equality of result. Oh, Mercedes pays 30% to the EU, the countries, and your companies only pay 12%, so we're going to take 18% for us.
And when they complained, and he's not really getting into this in the interview, I'm trying to give background why a person like that's angry. When they complained to the Biden people, the Biden people took the side of the EU on this logic.
Well, how do we do this? Oh, I know. If Mr.
Andreessen's company comes over here and he has to pay the difference from our corporate rate and the EU's, he's angry. But we'll just raise our tax up to the EU level so we get the money.
And so he's saying, you're on their side. You're using their exorbitant tax rate to steal money from my company, and you should be on our side.
So then when Trump comes in, of course, he gets the Googles and the Apples, Tim Cook, and the investors and Netscape, the ex-Net, and Peter, and he says to So they are screwing us over. And he says to them, they are screwing us over.

And he says this in the interview. And I want to make you rich.

And I want you to make me rich.

I want you to make America rich.

I want you to make the middle class rich.

I want to be preeminent.

Here's the deal.

Cyber, preeminent.

Artificial intelligence, preeminent. Biotechnology, preeminent.
Artificial intelligence, preeminent. Biotechnology, preeminent.
Artificial intelligence, preeminent. I want all of those things to be here.
And I'm going to turn you loose. And you're going to pay the lowest corporate taxes in the world.
And we're going to bring all this money. And you're going to have capital, and you're going to have a government behind you.
And any country that tries to screw with you, my fellow Americans, I'm going to screw with them. That's Trump's position.
That's Trump's position. And they, as he said, Trump wants us, Trump called them in, and he says this during the end, basically, he called us in and said, I know you guys don't like me.
You haven't been with me. But we're on the same team, basically.
And you can make the middle class, you can make everybody more prosperous if we just unleash you. And if they, I consider you my fellow Americans, and they're not going to screw around with you.
Well, that's a very different message from the globalist message or the left-wing progressive or the European neo-socialist. So basically Trump was telling Andresen, Biden, Obama, all those people, they're like the Europeans.
The Europeans are your enemies. The enemy of your enemy, me, is your friend.
And they thought that was. And then he added other things, and he said some very startling things in passing, he got onto DEI.
It's a very good interview. Ross Duthock did a very good job, but he said, well, what caused you to be skeptical of diversity, equity, inclusion? And he basically said, we're a merit-based competitive organization and we have to have people.
We don't care what they look like. We don't care what their sexual orientation.
We don't care, but they have to be the top. But we were bringing people in from these universities with this DIESG woke New Green Deal and they were attacking us.
And then one of my colleagues, I'm quoting Andreessen, basically came in and he said, what's going on? And he said, they want to destroy us. Our own employees want to destroy us.
So this is a revolutionary idea that Donald Trump is going to enlist this people. And on an earlier broadcast, it's so similar in reverse fashion, not the conservative enlisting the leftist, but the leftist, FDR, enlisting the conservatives to win World War II.
When the war first started, or we started to be armed in 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, we knew we were going to be in that war. And we were not prepared.
Our army was smaller than Portugal's. We had, I think, three carriers.
And everybody got together. And some people said, let's do the new National Recovery Act deal stuff.
We'll get everything into control. And the government And FDR said, no, it won't work.
1938 had been 18% unemployment. So the new deal, everybody says it worked.
It never worked. What worked was the war.
So what he did was he said, William Knudsen, you go redo the car industry. I need vehicles.
I need tanks. I need trucks.
I need six-wheel trucks. I need

mobile artillery. And then he said to Kaiser, him to Kaiser, I need liberty ships.
I need cargo

ships. I need to get all this stuff over to Europe.
We're not going to be fighting a war here. It's

going to be all the way in the Pacific and all the way to Europe. We don't have any ships.

And he basically said, give me the tools and I will have a liberty ship every four or five days.

Then he said to his arch enemy who hated his guts, Henry Ford, can you have the same principles that made the Model A, the Model T and the Ford Motor Company? And can you apply it to bombers? He said, I can make a bomber an hour. And he did.
And Willow Run, biggest plant in the world at the time. Yeah, it's amazing.
He made a war production. He turned it over to DuPont.
He turned it over to General Electric, Charles Wilson. And that's what Trump is doing.
And you can argue, do you trust these guys? I mean, Steve Bannon has made the argument he hates Elon Musk and everything. But I think he's not missing the point.
It's actually, it's not antithetical to MAGA. It's actually parallel to it or even enhancing because it's a very Jacksonian nationalistic idea that these people who were so wealthy in their sector have never been turned loose to make all of us wealthy.
And we're in a war with China, and we're in a war with the EU economically, and Japan and South Korea, and these guys can win it. So they're going to be turned loose.
I'm going to watch them, but they're going to make huge profits. They're going to get the best products on all these developing fields, and they're going to bring investment here.
And that was the message. It was very similar to World War II.
Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the lighthouse at Alexandria, one of the ancient world's wonders. Stay with us, and we'll be right back.
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Your cash back really adds up. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
You can catch Victor at his social media outlets. His handle is at VD Hanson and on Facebook, where he has Hanson's Morning Cup.
So please come join him there. So, Victor, I'm excited to hear, since the lighthouse in Alexandria ended up under the Mediterranean Sea, today you can't really go to its foundations, as far as I know.
And so I'm very curious about it. You can go on the quake.
Yeah. You can see where it was.
Well, remember, everybody, we're looking at the seven wonders of the world. They're easy to remember.
It's just two in Greece, two in Egypt, two in Turkey, one in Iraq. So we have done the two Greek seven wonders, the majestic statue of Zeus at the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, gigantic, beautiful statue.
We don't have any of it, of course, but we have descriptions of it. And then we had the Colossus of Rhodes, that 300-foot with the base, huge Helios statue, talked about that.
Then we went into Turkey and talked about the mausoleum, the temple, I should say the vault or the cenotaph, it wasn't a cenotaph, the burial chamber of Mausolus. That's where we get mausoleum, one of the biggest buildings in Asia Minor at the time.
We also talked about the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, this huge 380-foot-long temple that had been rebuilt from Greek times in Hellenistic and

then again in Roman. It was considered the most impressive temple in the world.
And now we have three left. We're going to talk today very quickly about the lighthouse at Alexandria.
next week we'll talk about the two

the second of two

the Pharaoh's

pyramids

at Giza.

I went there and tried to climb. I went there in 1974.
You could climb up on them.

And then we'll finish with the so-called hanging gardens of Babylon, which is about 20 miles

outside Baghdad. When I went there, they didn't look very hanging.
But the thing about Pharaoh, these were all, most of them, some of them are earlier, like the Giza, this was this great cosmopolitan, bustling age at Alexander. Remember, Alexander invaded, in 334, he invaded the Persian Empire.
And in less than 11 years, he broke it apart. Four monumental battles, crushed the Persian army.
But here's what was important. They had huge amounts of capital, capital in the ancient world, or gold and silver coinage, in their treasuries at Susa, at Persepolis, at Sardis.

And he opened them up.

He confiscated them. And then he brought in Greek expertise, engineers, generals, architects, city planners.
And all that money that had not been used was opened into a free market economy. And out of that came these monumental, idiosyncratic buildings, monuments, graves, etc.
And in Alexandria that Alexander founded, after his death, Ptolemy, one of his generals, he might have been also his secretary, he wrote a history, it's not extant anymore, but we can see pieces of it in surviving historians of Alexander the Great.

It makes its way into Plutarch.

It makes its way into Arian, except Icurtius has a little bit, as does Diodorus.

But he built this—the Ptolemaic dynasty, Ptolemy and his son, built this monumental lighthouse on the island of Pharaoh.

So if you're going into Alexandria, and remember, Alexandria is at the mouth of the Nile River. So you're going to go up the Nile River, or I think you call it down the Nile if you look at a map.
If you go up the Nile River, everything that comes down or up has to originate from the coast. So it became a very beautiful city.
We know about the great library there. They had over 100,000 papyrus rolls.
So this was a renaissance of the Ptolemaic. It ended with Cleopatra, who was a Ptolemaic Greek.
I know that a lot of people are going to be upset. No, no, Victor, she was African American.
No, she wasn't. She was Greek.
The point I'm making is that they built this huge tower, and it was about 350 to 400 feet high. People disagree because we have descriptions of the ancient world, and it survived from about 300 B.C.
all the way into the 9th, somewhere around 950 or 1,000. So it was there, and it was massively built out of limestone blocks, and it was tapered.
So the first story was broader, and then the second element was like a three-stage rocket, but they were tapered. And at the top, they had an interior corridor, and they had a stairwell to get through it so people could see and maintain it, and tourist attractions.
That's one of the reasons that's in the Seven War. All of these were tourist attractions.
But they had a dumbbell, a system of pulleys they could bring up fuel all the way up. And they had all night, every night, they would have a fire going.
And then they made a huge mirror, probably some type of tin or metal,

and they shot, you know, very highly polished.

And during the evening they could reflect that light and rotate it out to sea. And then during the day when the fire wasn't there, they could just use that.

The fire would be lit if it was a foggy day or rainy day. But usually during the day, they use it to reflect the sun.
This was important because people, it's a very narrow harbor. And this island of Faroes, P-H-A-R-O, sat right at the mouth.
Today, there's a quay as it's silted up. And you can walk out there.
I walked out there in 1974. I hate to say how long ago that was.
And in antiquity, people said that you could see the beam 100 miles out in the Mediterranean. So it became very famous that let's go to Alexandria.
Let's do business in Alexandria. You'll never get lost along the coast of Africa.
It was hard to know where each port was. And whether it's foggy or rainy, you'll be able to see where to go, it'll guide you.
And it was very lucrative in comparison to other ports at Ephesus or Constantinople later. And in any case, it became famous.
And then as the Ptolemaic dynasty started to deteriorate, Rome, as everybody knows, after the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, they appropriated Egypt. It was an imperial province of the Caesars, and it was well kept.
So we hear a lot about it Roman literature. And as I said, for another 850, 900 years, when the Islamic Muslim acquisition entailed, they occupied Egypt.
It became a Muslim country. The Byzantine Empire lost control in the 7th century, 8th century of it.
It still was maintained. And then it suffered a series of major, maybe 8.0 on the Richter scale, people have just estimated.
And it began to crumble, and it wasn't repaired after, and finally it just fell. There were some rumors that people in Constantinople, the Byzantines were jealous of it because it got too much attention, or I think this is made up up.
But it's a prevalent myth so that they said there was treasure in the foundations that you could dig. So they hope people just came on their own and dug and then undermined it.
But I think actually it fell. The Egyptian government has found most a lot of it.
And they are going to make a maritime museum where you can skydivers can go down and actually see it. And then some of the pieces will be taken up.
The island, I don't know. There's a etymologically, a lot of philologists go back and forth where the name Pharos came from.
Does it come P-H-A-R-O-S? Does that represent peros without the A? Was it an aspirated P? Was it not? Does it represent pharaoh and Egyptian? Or does it refer to phaios in Greek, which means light or flame? And so there's an argument of why they called the island. The island's not there anymore.
It's part of the harbor. But you can imagine to be on a trireme or later a Roman galley and to be the Mediterranean at this point is about 300 miles long.
And all of a sudden you're sailing for two or three days and you look out and you see this big beacon, 350 feet high. I've often thought, I mean, why don't we have these things today? We have, I know, we've talked about the arch at St.
Louis. We've talked about the natural, you know, the Grand Canyon.
But we have all these billionaires. I was thinking the other day, between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, maybe Phil Bloomberg and a few others, Apple people, Google people, you probably have a trillion dollars.
Why don't one of them just say, we know what, we're going to do the same thing here. We'll take a billion dollars and we'll make a colossus of roads in New York Harbor, or we'll make a lighthouse or something like that.
It would be a model or an inspiration for people to see that. Is that what you think the lighthouse was intended to be by the Egyptians? It was going to say, we are the greatest harbor in the world, and we are a beacon on the Mediterranean, and we welcome you in here.

Just like the Rodians said, you might not want to go to Rose, but you sure do want to sail by the great legs of the Colossus. And just as the Greeks said, Athens may be famous, it's becoming famous.

You all hear of Thebes or Sparta, but no one, no one has a statue like Zeus. It's huge, 100 feet.
And the same was true of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. People need to build things.
That's why Donald Trump today, we're getting back to that speech. He says, I'm a builder.
I am a builder. We got to build, build.

We got to build pipelines. We got to build ports and liquefied natural gas.
And he was even mentioning Los Angeles. I want to build Los Angeles again.
It's going to cost us a lot of money. All I ask of Los Angeles is I can't get the government and all the taxpayers to rebuild Los Angeles if you're going to periodically let it burn down by not harvesting trees or cleaning up the forest or cleaning up the chaparral or not letting sheep and cattle graze or having driving out your insurance companies by prescribing how much they can charge and how much they can't or letting water go out of the delta, or having a DEI situation where we're not getting meritocratic people.
I can't do that. We're not going to ask that.
But I know you have the Olympics, and we only have three years. And so he's making kind of a Colossus of Rose, Alexander, let's do something really big.
And that's why people are very excited because people forget that these are inspirational things. People need to identify with things.
They need to feel that they're expressions of national greatness. And when you had Obama in all those years saying, well, Mr.
Obama, don't you think that we're exceptional? Well, you know, we're exceptional in the sense that the British and the Greeks think they're exceptional. But they're not the same, Mr.
Obama. They're not.
They're not as big. They're not as powerful.
Well, everybody has that sense about themselves. That was the whole attitude.
You know, not that he talked like that. It was more or less, it was cooler.
It was, well, I just want to tell you, you know, the Greeks and Americans are not going to just fall on that trap. You know, chauvinism, et cetera.
So this is very different, this mood. This is, hey, we are Americans, and we looked around the world.
They don't know what they're doing. We do, and we thought we didn't.
We can be more powerful than China. We can be more powerful as we are than China and Russia and the EU put together because of our system.
It's a very exciting time, I think. Yeah, maybe one of those colossal buildings could be put in San Diego.
I think San Diego is also becoming a tech center for new developments in the military. Maybe a process of roads where you go under his feet and given earthquake-proof technology, maybe Elon is worth $400 billion on paper with a Tesla and a private SpaceX.
Elon, if you're listening, just take $1 billion and build some aspirational, huge eighth wonder of the world.

I shouldn't be endorsing things. I was like, oh, I want to say one other thing before we leave this topic.
I've noticed something, that all the ambassadorships are taken except Cyprus. And I mentioned our friend of this program, Max Nikias, the wonderful, spectacular president of USC, who was unfairly treated by DEI.
But he's an expert in the eastern Mediterranean and talking about building. One thing Trump's going to do is allow the Israelis to partner with the Cypriots and the Greeks to build that East Med pipeline.
Remember Biden canceled that? He canceled it right when they needed all that natural gas because of the Ukrainian war and the shutoff by Putin. So you need somebody who knows the languages and knows the area.
And I'm making a final plea. Let's all get together and do the right thing and appoint Max Nikias as ambassador to Cyprus would make all of us very happy.

If you're listening, Donald Trump. And if you're listening, he is on.
Victor Davis Hanson is trying to spend your money for you. Yes, I am.
Two things that make me very happy. I know that you have to reward donors, ambassadorships, and there's all these people.
But the ambassador to Cyprus, if I'm not mistaken, was a State Department bureaucrat under Biden and stayed in there. And so this would be a great appointment because what Trump would be telling the world, I want somebody that knows the area.
I want to know somebody. If I go to Cyprus, this person's going to say, Mr.
Trump, how can I get that pipeline built? What can we do about investment from Russia here in Cyprus?

What do I need?

And then he can converse in Greek and, you know what I mean?

Everybody knows him and they're all proud of it. It would be great.

But he's a hyper patriot.

George Shultz once said, I didn't talk to him very much, but he related the thing that he related to everybody.

When he talked to the ambassador, he always said, well, you may have affinities for that country, but remember, you represent us first.

and there's a lot of people He related the thing that he related to everybody. When he talked to the ambassador, he always said, well, you may have affinities for that country, but remember, you represent us first.

And there's nobody that's more MAGA than Max Macias.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back to talk a little bit about Fauci and John Brennan.

And we'll find out what they have in common when we get back.

Stay with us. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
So, Victor, George Bush, I was going to say, Biden has given Fauci a preemptive pardon, and John Brennan has had his security clearance taken from him. And I was wondering— I don't understand how shameless these people are.
So Fauci was asked about that. And by the way, to set the record straight, as we said on an earlier broadcast, when you're given a pardon, you can say all you want, but it has no effect on it.
If somebody calls me up, Victor, we're going to pardon you for anything you did the last 10 years. I said, I'm not going to take that.
It would reflect badly on me as if I needed it. It doesn't matter.
The person who gives the pardon makes the decision. And then accordingly, you may say, I'm not going to use it, but if you get charged for something, you will be pardoned.
And so my point is that there were three of these. I know the Biden family and the J6.
I just want to look at three because the left has been hammering Trump on the J6 protesters. But those were not preemptive pardons in the sense that everything they did the last 10 years, they're exempt.
They're only exempt for something on that day. So if they committed something, you know, they find out that six years ago they cheated on their end, they're liable.
These people, for anything that they have turns up that they did in the last 10 years, they're okay. So take Fauci.
He went before Rand Paul's committee, and he said that the United States did not give money for gain and function research. Rand Paul brought in evidence of emails with Francis Collins and Fauci and communications with Peter Daszak at Echo, that they were helping the Wuhan lab with gain in function.
Robert Redford at the CDC said that. He was no friend of Trump.
So what did he do? And then, of course, this is all part of a record. It's public knowledge.
So when people had freedom of information, he stonewalled that. He tried to cover up the fact.
If you think about it, everybody, Victor, why are you getting so upset? Because if you think about it rationally, it starts to dawn on you that this might have been the greatest scandal in the history of the world, that a lab, Wild West lab, with no real security precautions that were necessary for that level of intricate research, created a virus a hundred times more infectious than any known virus. And they were probably under the auspices of the People's Liberation Army.
I'll leave it up to conspiracy theorists or rationalists to tell us whether it was designed as a bioweapon or it got out intentionally. My own version is it was just a bunch of stupid people and it got out accidentally.
But at this point in my life, I'm not going to rule out anybody who said, no, Victor, it was a bioweapon. And they probably wanted to destroy the Trump people and they let it out.
Okay, I don't believe it, but I'm open-minded. But my point is, if you think about it, this man, the head of the Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, took the money, and as we had Stephen Quay on here, the great geneticist, biologist, everything, he pointed out it wasn't just the money, Victor.
He allowed people to lend their expertise to expedite that research in China through communications, etc., and instrumentation.

If they needed supplies, they shipped it over there. They were not capable of doing that.
And then when it broke out, he almost immediately went into a panic and started emailing two or three people and said, oh, my God, they might think, well, they do think that. And then he almost immediately did not only deny a gang and function origin, he cooked up this pangolin bat story that the communist Chinese did.
And he didn't just stick to it. He demonized anybody who objected.
And then they ran a phony Lancet investigation where they took a bunch of toadies and went over to, I could go on, but he's pardoned. Mark Milley did three things, three things.
He went out and had a photo op, just like Colin Powell did with George H.W. Bush.
Donald Trump said this thing is getting out of hand, the 120 days of ridinging in 2020. Just like George H.W.
Bush said in 1992, the L.A. Rodney King riots are crazy.
Just like Colin Powell said, you need 5,000 Marines, Mr. President? I got them.
Good. Send the Marines in and keep order.
That's what happened. Mark Milley goes, I was used.
Why? Because all the left started attacking him. I didn't want to have a photo op with Don.
That's not my job to be a military, to confuse my... And he was just guilty because he was awed by all this left-wing megaphone.
And he really was ahistorical. We've had a lot of use of federal troops to restore order.

We've had a lot of chairman of the Joint Chiefs that take pictures

of the president. But he deliberately

tried to destroy Trump on that.

Second thing,

this chairman,

the Joint Chiefs

represent each branch of the service

and then another person from that branch

is the chairman.

It came up during World War II, okay? And the idea was that you have the theater commander, CENTCOM, AFRICOM, you name it, ASIACOM, they report to the secretary of defense. So the CENTCOM guy says, I need another 20,000 troops.
So then Lloyd Austin or Don Rumsfeld, whoever says, well, I'll take it to the president. That's the chain of command.
At times, a president calls the chairman of the joint chiefs or the defense secretary calls, says, look, I know you have no problem, but you're an advisor. You're my brain trust.
What do you think of this? What did Milley do? He plunged in, took a big chainsaw and cut that in half, that chain. And then he said, he called them all in and said, you report to me if we get in a crisis.
You're not going to go, you go to me. You don't go to the president's representative in the Pentagon.
That's disloyal. That's probably against the law.
Third, then the worst is he, Dr. Milley now with a MD and PhD in psychiatry and psychology decided, well, if I diagnose the, because there was all this Donald Trump is crazy.
Donald Trump is crazy. We got Bandy Yee.
She came in and said he was crazy, the Yale psychologist. And then Rod Rosenstein was going to wear a watch.
Remember that hysteria? And then he finally had to take the Montreal assessment to show that he was perfect. So anyway, in that furor, he said, if I diagnose – I'm paraphrasing – if I diagnose the president's order in an existential crisis, and I think it's dangerous and it might lead to a nuclear weapon, I'm going to call Mr.
General T or whatever his name was at the People's Liberation. He did that twice, twice.
He did it right before the election of 2020. So here you got a guy freelancing as a psychiatrist who diagnoses his own commander-in-chief and is more worried about the Chinese to be a prize than he is the president.
In any other administration, in any other normal line, that would be a treasonable act. So there's a fourth thing he did.
After the Douglas... Wait, can I ask you something?

And so now he's just fine with Donald Trump as the commander-in-chief, and we don't hear anything from Milley.

No, no, no, no, no. Hold on.
Fourth. after Douglas MacArthur systematically, serially, chronically said that Harry Truman was an idiot

because he wouldn't let

MacArthur go back up with nuclear weapons, etc., and win the war.

Trump, I mean, Truman fired him. He fired him in late 1950, and he put in Matthew Ridgway,

who saved it. Matthew Ridgway came in December 1950, and by the spring they had retaken Seoul.
And by the late summer they were back up to the dividing line at the DMZ. Okay, so the Congress got together and said, can't do this, this is crazy.
These military commanders cannot insult the president because MacArthur was giving lectures and he was going to run for president. So they passed something called the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
And it tells you this is the behavior of everybody because the Army had one, the Marine had one, the Air Force, and they were kind of in rivals. Sometimes they say, come and join the Air Force, not the Marines, because we have a better deal for you.

It's systematic. But in Article 88, it says that no officer can publicly disparage the commander-in-chief, as well as the cabinet.
And they have actually invoked that against lower-ranking officers who made – I'll give you one example. General McChrystal was, I don't know, foolishly allowing a left-wing Rolling Stone reporter to be embedded with him when he was CENTCOM commander.
And during that conversation, he was in the room and Joe Biden was on the phone and somebody said, it's Joe bite me again, meaning he was a blowhard. And McChrystal either agreed or didn't stop it.

So they brought him back and they said, you know, you allowed the president of the United States to be publicly disparaged, the vice president. So you're going to have to quit.
And by the way, if you're a retired officer, there is a clause in the uniform code. It says, if you are retired general subject to

recall a national, and they all are, then you can be court-martial. So what did Milley do then?

Trump leaves office out of all this. He gives all these interviews to Bill Kristol.
I mean, to,

you know, what's his name? Bob Woodward. Excuse me, everybody.
Bob Woodward. And he trashes Trump, Trump.
And he says that he is the biggest disaster in the history. And he's a fascist.
He's a fascist. So now Milley is thinking, this is before the pardon.
Oh, my God. I have exposure for breaking the chain of command.
I have exposure for calling my Chinese counterpart. And now I'm subject to court martial because even though I'm retired now, I called the president of the United States a fascist.
And we know that the other generals had done that. And we know that there were people in the Trump administration that said, if we ever come back, we are going to make the statutes of the Uniform Code of Millie Justice alive.
They're not dead. We're going to really treat them seriously.
So, Millie, then, you said that. Well, now he's just kind of back, I didn't mean it.
I didn't mean it. But he was angling for a pardon.
And then third, so we had Fauci and we had Millie, high profile, and we had Liz Cheney. And Liz Cheney said, I don't need one.
Well, Liz, as we said earlier, you're a lawyer. And you should have asked yourself, as the ranking Republican on the committee, why it was that for the first time in the history of the House of Representatives, 235 years, that the House minority leader was not allowed to select the Republican members of that committee.
And they selected Adam Kissinger and you, and Nancy Pelosi put a lid on it. It wasn't a bipartisan committee.
It was a rig committee. And why did she pick you and Adam? It's because you had two things in common.
You were inert. He was not going to ever run for office again because he was going to be

defeated. And you knew that when you ran, you were going to be wiped out.
She lost by 40 points in the primary. And second, you both voted to, just days ago, you voted to impeach Donald Trump.
So that's why we like you, because you'll just rubber stamp what we will. And then, of course, there are missing documents from that committee.
We know the names of people who testified, and apparently we know some of the parameters of the things they testified, and we can't find them all. It's not quite accurate.
It said they destroyed everything, but there's things that are missing. Sort of like Robert Hur's transcript of Joe Biden.

Remember that?

When he said he sounds like an old man and he would be empathetic and everybody said, let's hear the transcript.

Yeah, and it was kind of.

Oh, it's gone. It's gone.
And so the third thing that she did is, I remember when I was growing up, my mother worked for the appellate court in Central California as a researcher and a lawyer. And she'd always bring games about the law called verdict to board games.
And she would teach me. I was kind of a nerd.
My brothers were very athletic, outgoing. And I was like thick glasses, left-handed, kind of underweight, kind of sickly, but I'd always read nonstop.
So we were very close, and she'd say, so I was, not that I was, my dad, I had work on the farm. I liked my dad equally well, but she would always play these games.
So I always kind of got a legal education, and then she became a superior court and a state appellate court. So I'd listen to this, and she'd always tell me things.
And I'd say something, and she says, Now remember, if you're ever in trouble and you have a lawyer, the prosecutor cannot call you directly and ask you certain questions outside the courtroom when your lawyer is not present. You could stop that right there.
You just tell them your lawyer, your legal counsel is not there. That is called witness tamper.
I remember that. And so Liz Cheney called Ms.
Cassie Hendricks, or whatever her name was, or something, and she asked her questions about her future testimony and apparently might have given suggestions that would have been more convincing for the case she was trying to, and her lawyer wasn't there. And she had criminal exposure as well.
So they're all very self-righteous about a bunch of poor people that went out there, And some of them did get too violent, the January Sixers. But when you start to read about the pardons very carefully, there's not a lot of people that clubbed a guy over the head or sprayed masonous.
There's some, but they're talking about somebody who was in a rush of things and he pressed up against the cop. But the vast majority didn't do anything.
And they were then, some of them were there for four years. Some of them were in boxer shorts laying in the cells.
Some of them were pardoned and they wouldn't let them out for 24 hours. So this was the, and you compare that with the May 20th, as I've said so many times before, it was, I'm glad that he pardoned them.
I really am. Well, what about this John Brennan and his

security clearance being revoked? He's back. He's like a, you know what he reminds me of?

A worm. No, he reminds me of an old moldy catfish that you catch and you pull this

despicable thing out and then you look at it and you throw him back and you think I'm done with

him. And then you fish again and he gets on your hook and you bring him back and he won't leave.
So John Brennan, as I've said so many times with his partner, John Brennan was a CIA agent, everybody. He was under Obama and he was under George Bush.
He was Mr. Conservative after 9-11.
We got to go out there and get them all at Guantanamo. We've got to be tough.
Is that what Bush wants? I'll be even tougher. What do you think, George W.? Yes.
You think I get... And then Obama came in and they said, no, no, we don't want him.
He was Mr. Guantanamo.
And he said, well, you know, I was always objecting to Guantanamo and Bush people got me. And I'm a very left-wing people.
And by the way, I was a Muslim secret and I voted for Gus Hall when I was young. I was a communist voter.
Oh, you were? You're pro-Islam and it's true that you might be a secret Muslim and you voted for Gus Hill? You voted for communists? Oh, you're hired. That's great.
That's the best thing we ever heard. So that's what he does.
So then when Obama was there, he joined eagerly the whole Trump-Russian collusion and all that. Well, in that process, he went on television with using his security clearance after he retired.
But let me just back up. Before he retired, as I said earlier, he swore under oath to call, I have never tapped into your staffers' computers.
I resent that. Two weeks later, evidence, I kind of sort of, I'm so sorry.
Perjury charges? No. January 6th person, they would have put him in jail forever.
And then the next time he came in, they thought, this guy is a liar, pathological liar. So we're going to ask him, what is going on with Obama's assassination drones? Because we're getting these reports from the Pakistani government.
They're killing a lot of people. Mr.
Brennan, are those CIA drone assassinations? Are there a lot? There is not any collateral damage. Are you sure? Yes, I am.
Under oath. Yes, that was a lie.
And he was a knowing. He knew he was lying.
Was there a penalty? No, no. So that's who he is.
So now Trump is president. He's out.
There's a new CIA director, Mike Pompeo, and he has his national security clearance, as they all do when they leave. And he goes on CNN, I think, or maybe it's MSNBC, I think it is.
And he uses that, whether he's actually getting actual knowledge. But he goes on there and he says things like this for four years.
Donald Trump has, he's obviously subservient of, as Mr. Clapper said, he's a Russian asset.
And he's obviously subservient of, I don't know what's going on, but something. And my sources tell me, as I have been told, I can't relate the source of that information.

As you know, I was a former CIA director, meaning, hey, everybody, subtext, I have a national clearance.

There is raw intelligence, quote, unquote, that says Donald Trump is a Russian.

There was no such thing.

And that's what he did.

And he weaponized it.

So now Trump comes in and says, you know what? No more for you. No more for Clapper.
No more for any of those 50. Leon Panetta, the senior statesman, he went on and said, I'm happy I did it.
Happy basically I lied. I said that it had all the hallmarks of Russian information.
When that thing came out, I wrote an article and said, this is very clever what they're doing. They're saying this has all the hallmarks.
They didn't say it was, but all the hallmarks. And they didn't use disinformation.
They said of Russian information. And everybody thought, and this is what happened.
Joe Biden said 51 intelligence experts. It was all cooked up by Anthony Blinken and the CIA interim director, Mike Morrell.
Mike Morrell testified for that under oath. Mr.
Morrell, who gave you the idea to do it? Anthony Blinken. And what was his role? He was a foreign policy advisor working for the Biden campaign.
And why did you consent? Well, I wanted Donald Trump to

lose. I wanted to help.
And he got his wish. So they came in there and Trump said, you should read.
I went back and looked at that debate. It was really good.
That it's just, it's just full of stuff. There's things I can't even talk about.
Pictures, pictures, Mr. 10% big guy.
He was just raving. And Biden didn't look at him.

He turns to the crowd and the cameras.

He's lying.

51 esteemed intelligence have just refuted everything.

People polled in one poll.

It was taken by conservatives, but one poll suggested that that one change of fact influenced their voting.

And now Mr. Brennan is saying, why are you taking my clearance? You're saying it's Russian disinformation.
I didn't make that allegment. I said it was Russian information.
So, Mr. Brennan, you're saying the Russians offered all of this information that we know was a Steele dossier sources.

And it wasn't to disinform. offered all of this information that we know as the Steele dossier sources.

And it wasn't to disinform or it wasn't to obfuscate or it wasn't to use Christopher Steele.

It was just to give them accurate.

And what information was accurate then?

So what you're doing, Mr. Brennan, is when Russia tries to give stuff that's inexact or wrong or misleading to idiots like Steele, and that is disinformation, you're calling it information because you know you're lying and someday in the future somebody's going to catch you on it.
So you and Brennan and Panetta cooked up two things. Don't call it disinformation.
Call it information. And say all the hallmarks rather than it is.
But the public didn't know that. That people said, oh, wow.
All the hallmarks. Trump? Trump? I thought he was innocent with Robert Mueller.
He was with Russian collusion. But I guess I was wrong.
Now we understand that he was working with the Russians to cook up this laptop. I guess they took the laptop and they must have had a picture or something, what it looked like, and they replicated it in Moscow, and they must have known all the pictures and the sex stories.
And then they made it up, and then they probably gave it to an agent in a suitcase. And he flew over here.
And then he went to this repair guy's thing. And he handed it to him and said, I'm Hunter Biden.
Well, you have to be a total idiot to believe that. But that's what he said.
I'm kind of exaggerating, but that's what it was. So I'm glad he lost his national security.
Not that he needs it, because even if he had some expertise, it would be worthless because he's weaponized. He's not disinterested.
Clapper's weaponized. Leon Panetta's, all of them are weaponized.
I think we're all going to be leery of these CIA, FBI saying to us, it seems like it appears like it has all the hallmarks of in the future. We're just going to say either there is or it isn't.
And we don't want to hear your- We don't care whether you call it disinformation or information. Just say it.
Just say the Russians were dumping stuff. They weren't, but just say it.
And now don't go on CNN and MSNBC and make $250,000, $300,000 a year by winking and nodding and lying to us because we think that you have a security clearance and you're drawing on classified materials. Anyway.
Well, Victor, I've noticed you're looking at your watch and we are at a hard ending here so all right so we'll calm down I was very excited today we'll thank our audience for listening to us I had I met with um about 25 of my high school friends ah topic with a man as we've all shrunk we were all 6''1 or so, and now we're shrinking. But we're all 71.
They were a great bunch of people. Yeah.
Yeah. We're all shrinking after about 35, I think, maybe 40.
So beware anybody who's not 35 or 40. So thanks to the audience for joining us today and choosing to spend some time with us.
And thank you, Victor, for all of that insight into the government in particular and the lighthouse at Alexandria. All of you, if you're going to go see a 7-1 of the world, I think the only one that's there are the pyramids at Giza, which we're going to talk about next time.
Thank you, everybody, for listening. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for your loyalty.
We deeply appreciate it and try to do the best we can each week. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we are signing off.
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