The Vietnam War, More Trade Deals, and Hulk Hogan, RIP

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Speaker 3 Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. This is our Saturday edition where we do something a little bit different in the middle segment.

Speaker 3 And this week we're looking at the outbreak of the Vietnam War. So we look forward to that.
Before that, we'll do a a little bit of news.

Speaker 3 And we had Hulk Hogan died yesterday, I believe, or this morning early. And we're recording on Thursday at the age of 71.

Speaker 3 And so we'll take a moment to discuss him and then some information on Hillary from our Russian spies and the trade deal that Donald Trump struck with Japan.

Speaker 3 So stay with us for those news stories, and we'll be right back.

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Speaker 3 Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Speaker 3 Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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Speaker 3 So Victor, sad news, Hulk Hogan, who was a big supporter of President Trump, died

Speaker 3 today, this morning, I think, or in the early morning hours. At the age of 71, he was very very young, and as everybody knows better than I do, very famous for his wrestling career.

Speaker 3 And so, I was wondering if you had a very good idea.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he was very big, actually, in his 40s, in the 1980s. I don't know how he did it.

Speaker 2 It was pretty amazing that when he was in his late 30s and early 40s,

Speaker 2 30 years ago,

Speaker 2 He was, you know, at the end of the nine in the 90s, and his late 30s and the 80s and 90s he was beat up

Speaker 2 and he took a lot of punishment he had a lot of I think he had just had another neck surgery everybody thinks you know that pro wrestling is sort of performance art rather than just free-for-all like college wrestling but it takes an enormous toll on people's bodies they have those body slams any normal person they have to be trained how to do it it's very hard to do and he he took a lot of punishment and he kept going into his 50s and even 60s.

Speaker 2 I don't know how he did it. I guess he had a heart attack or he had problems after surgery.
I think when you get to be 70 and you have a surgery, you better be very, it takes a lot longer.

Speaker 2 And he had plenty of surgeries. And he came out, he was part of that weird Trump menagerie.

Speaker 2 I mentioned it before, of people like Joe Rogan, Dana White, Hulk Hulgan, Robert Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbert, Elon Musk for a while.

Speaker 2 He really represented all these different segments of middle-class appeal and even independents and Democrats. So

Speaker 2 anyway, it was sad.

Speaker 2 Everybody liked him.

Speaker 2 He was sort of like Ozzie Osborne just died, and Ozzie Osborne, for all of his drug use, philandering,

Speaker 2 rock lifestyle, it was very hard to find somebody who didn't like him. Same thing with Chris Christofferson, we've talked about.
He was kind of a hero of mine. I really liked him.

Speaker 2 He was a Renaissance man, but everybody liked him.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it sounded like that. I was listening to a lot of news about Hulk Hogan today, and he's all close family, from close family to friends to his

Speaker 3 colleagues and peers.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he just helped him out all the time. Yeah, he was a good person.
And,

Speaker 2 you know, he was at a point in his career where he could come out politically and endorse Trump.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I was listening to Tyrus, as you know, from from Greg Gutfeld, and he's obviously a wrestler too.

Speaker 3 And he said, he was basically talking about how that lifestyle or the work that a big-time wrestler does is very hard on the body and that they're not always as healthy as they should be with food and other things.

Speaker 2 And so the problem is they have to be bulky. They have to die at 71.
They have to be bulky. So they have to,

Speaker 2 because it's a performance arts sport, they have to be tanned, they have to be sculpted and you can do that in your 20s and 30s but you have to lift and some of them took steroids I don't know if he did or not but they have to lift weights all the time and once you get into your 50s or 40s even 30s late that's hard on your joints and

Speaker 2 you know

Speaker 2 last year the dog here knocked me down four flights of steps

Speaker 2 That was nothing compared to one slam. And I had the tailbone injured, you know, and and that took me like four months I just I was thinking of that how to

Speaker 2 when that when they throw somebody down they land flat on their back I don't know how they I just don't know how they have to be trained how to do that so he really did something for the sport and he legitimized it in a way that we really hadn't seen before when I was growing up there was always Pepper Gomez Flood De Belassi Ray Stevens I watched big we call it big time wrestling and here in the San Joaquin Valley it was called Luce Libre free-style fighting, you know.

Speaker 2 But it wasn't as, it wasn't, I think in one occasion, Hulk Culgan had the largest televised sporting event in the 80s.

Speaker 3 Yeah, even a pure novice like me knew his name.

Speaker 3 And it wasn't exactly my sport.

Speaker 2 That was his name. Yeah.
I forgot his last name, Terry something.

Speaker 3 Yeah, anyway.

Speaker 3 All right, so on to Hillary. And

Speaker 3 with Tulsi Gabbard and the records coming out, apparently the Russian spies had identified or reported back to Russia, the home country, that Hillary was on heavy tranquilizers and their words were psycho-emotional.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the problem with that is that the left always confuses the matter and says the right

Speaker 2 is trying to bring make a mountain out of a molehill, but it's just a taken that the Chinese and the Russians will will go online with this information. They'll try to hack things.
That's normal.

Speaker 2 And in this case, as we remember, when you're John Podesta and you write password for your password, they got into his and they got into Hillary's emails, and then we had WikiLeaks and all that.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 Trump was kidding one time in the 2000s. He says, maybe we can ask the Russians to help us with Hillary's email.
And then that just

Speaker 2 joke became a narrative. But there was never any,

Speaker 2 there was never any evidence that Donald Trump had anything to do with the Russians. There were people in his campaign and both campaigns.
And you've got to remember that from 2009,

Speaker 2 it was Hillary Clinton who pushed the jacuzzi button in Geneva and said, we're going to reset with Russia. It was Barack Obama in 2012 that said to Medeva,

Speaker 2 tell Vladimir that this is my last election. I'm almost quoting literally.
And

Speaker 2 if he's flexible and gives me space,

Speaker 2 I'll be flexible on missile defense. And what's forgotten about that hot and my conversation, they both kept their promise.
Putin did not invade for two years after.

Speaker 2 He waited till Obama was re-elected. And Obama did dismantle missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic.
But my point is, if you look at the 2016 election, there was no Russian collusion.

Speaker 2 There was just a Russian attack on Hillary's emails or somebody related perhaps to Russia. And that became a whole narrative.
The other problem with it is,

Speaker 2 as this latest trove came out,

Speaker 2 of the

Speaker 2 18 intelligence authorities, they can't find more than five who said that they would find Russian-Trump collusion. And when you look at the evidence of those five, there's no evidence.

Speaker 2 There's a steel dossier, there's an email.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 there was no reason for Clapper or Brennan or in the case of the FBI to tell Barack Obama there is signs of Russian collusion. So James Clapper gave the yesterday, and I'm speaking on a Thursday.

Speaker 2 He gave the game away.

Speaker 2 He gave a long time ago, they've been airing this old clip that he said. He was praising Barack Obama and said, you know,

Speaker 2 we would have never known about Russian collusion unless Barack Obama in that meeting, and he's referring to the December 9th meeting, unless he had insisted that we find it,

Speaker 2 meaning that the original intelligence synopsis presented him didn't find it at all. So Obama, this is after the election.

Speaker 2 And in that room,

Speaker 2 Clapper, Comey, Brennan, John Kerry, Susan Rice, Victoria Newland, and what followed, all of those people helped disseminate that false narrative.

Speaker 2 And so if you think about it, it is worse than Watergate because the President of the United States knew that he didn't have the intelligence

Speaker 2 to suggest that Donald Trump was a Russian asset, and he thought that would... He thought that narrative would have worked in the neglection.
It didn't.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump, I think surprise to himself, was elected. So here you have a lame duck president, and he's trying to destroy the incoming president.
He essentially did. There was 22 months.

Speaker 2 And as I said earlier, their other problem they have is they talk too much. Comey

Speaker 2 was on Twitter non-stop. Brennan was on Twitter non-stop.

Speaker 2 Brennan was. They were MSNBC and CNN authorities where they still had their clearances.
Almost every day they were saying that Trump was guilty of collusion. He was a puppet.
He was an asset.

Speaker 2 And they had all lied. They had one thing in common.
They had all lied under oath, along with Andrew McCabe. He had lied.
Brennan had lied twice to the Senate under oath. Clapper had lied under oath.

Speaker 2 Comey had feigned amnesia 245 times before the House.

Speaker 2 They all have a lot of vulnerabilities, exposure. So if this continues, they're going to have no popular...

Speaker 2 No one, they don't have a good reputation, is what I'm saying. They were political activists.

Speaker 2 And if you had said while they were in office you're weaponizing it, all they did is when they got out of office, they confirmed that because they went right to work attacking the president.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and they are also committed to the lie. That's what's extraordinary to me.
I mean, is that just the evidence that they are pure evil incarnate or something?

Speaker 3 Because how could you be so committed to that absolute lying?

Speaker 2 They know right now,

Speaker 2 they know along with Mike Morrell, Leon Panetta, and others,

Speaker 2 they know that Anthony Blinken was a political operative in the 2020 campaign. He was the foreign policy campaign guy for Biden.

Speaker 2 He called up the former interim head of the CIA, Mike Morrell, and said, Mike,

Speaker 2 Joe's coming up here for a debate. The laptop is killing us.
It's just been released.

Speaker 2 I don't know whether he said or not, but it was known to him that the FBI had it in their possession and they had authenticated it. So then what did he do?

Speaker 2 He said, can you round up the old guy, the old bunch? He got 51 people to sign an affidavit. If you look at that affidavit, it's very carefully worded so to avoid perjury.

Speaker 2 It says it has all the earmarks of a Russian information operation, but it meant the same thing.

Speaker 2 And then Joe Biden, if you look at the tape of that debate, went in there and Donald Trump said, well, you're all over the laptop. Mr.
10%, it's all there. And he said, that is a lie.

Speaker 2 How dare you say that? I've got 51 authorities. We have 51 authorities.
It just said that this is part of your work. You and Putin did this.

Speaker 2 And there was a poll taken by an all-bate conservative group, I think it was called Telemetrica, that said, had you known that this was

Speaker 2 a lie and that the 51 intelligence authorities, former intelligence authorities, which was also a lie, a number of of them were still secretly contractors for the CIA.

Speaker 2 But if they had known that, would it have affected and 70 over 70%, yeah, it would have affected my vote if I had known they were lying to me about the laptop and that everything was there.

Speaker 2 And then we had Hunter with that embarrassing, was it two or three hour rant interview with that Andrew Callahan and they asked him about it. I mean he said a lot of crazy things.

Speaker 2 He said cocaine was not as bad as alcohol. And he used the F-bomb word maybe every other word.
He also had that whiny little nasal voice. I had never really heard him at length.

Speaker 2 You know, it was kind of a whiny, wimpy little voice. But then he said, Yeah, laptop, laptop.
Anybody's laptop would be embarrassed. No, you can look at my laptop.

Speaker 2 I can guarantee you, Hunter, there is no F-words, there's no nudity, there's no secret drug dealing, there's no selfies.

Speaker 2 The only selfie you'll find is the text messages when I had long COVID and I sent to a doctor my tongue to see if it was still yellow. That's about as risque as I got.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I don't think anybody wants that computer, Victor.

Speaker 2 The point is, it would be most people that are listening to this,

Speaker 2 if somebody said, I'm going to go look at your computer, you might have said something about somebody that you would have in confidence, you know, you went to a party and you said, that guy's a jerk or something.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 he knows. So what I'm getting at is everybody knew it was authentic.
Everybody knew they were were covering up. Everybody knew they were lying.

Speaker 2 Everybody knew that Brennan and Clapper had already lied and apologized for lying.

Speaker 2 Everybody knew there was no consequences. They never were facing perjury charges.
Everybody knew Andrew McCabe had lied three to four times, according to the Inspector General.

Speaker 2 Everybody knew that Bill Barr did not prosecute Andrew McCabe. He should have.

Speaker 2 If Bill Barr had prosecuted Andrew McCabe and I think it was still within the statute of limitations, Clapper and Brennan, we wouldn't have had this problem right now.

Speaker 2 They would have put the fear of God into these administrative state people.

Speaker 2 And I like, I'm not one who hates Bill Barr. I think he tried to do his best, but he should have really prosecuted Andrew McCabe.

Speaker 3 And just so we get it in, Joe Rogan apparently said that after he watched the interview that Hunter did, he thought that he was a really bright guy and he might be a presidential candidate in the 2028 election.

Speaker 3 I don't know. I just read about it.
I didn't see him actually say that.

Speaker 2 I saw about an hour of it, and he was totally unhinged. And the guy that was interviewing him was kind of egging him on, but just thought, keep coming, keep coming.
This is great.

Speaker 2 And then he was talking about grifting and all the people that use their political relationships to make money. And I'm thinking, where is your art now?

Speaker 2 If you were an artist, what's the market for Hunter Biden blow paint on the canvas painting? Zero.

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Speaker 3 So, Victor, we're anxious to hear. We're on to Vietnam.
I think, as far as U.S.

Speaker 3 history goes, the only thing that has more lore and more interest to Americans than Vietnam is the Civil War, maybe World War II, but Vietnam's the World War II.

Speaker 2 It was a 20-year war. The first segment was 195

Speaker 2 was

Speaker 2 essentially 19

Speaker 2 it ended in 1975, it started in 1955, 54.

Speaker 2 And the French, since World War II, had been

Speaker 2 trying to c control their colonial possession. We mu talked about that last time.
It was a French colonial war. By 1954, Den Bin Pheu, they were done for.

Speaker 2 From 1955 to 61 or two for five years,

Speaker 2 the Diem government in South Vietnam was pretty much

Speaker 2 stable, and there was the 17th parallel, and there was a DMZ.

Speaker 2 Okay, so it was stable. But the problem with Vietnam, if you look at the geography, it's got China is right there.
So when China went communist in 47, 48, and the Soviet Union's not that far away,

Speaker 2 it was inevitable. And the China was on the northern side, of course, of Vietnam, the northern.
So it was infiltrating, supplying, and that broke out basically in 1961.

Speaker 2 The United States, once JFK had been elected, Eisenhower did not want to go there. And they used the same phrase they did

Speaker 2 of Korea in 1953 when Omar Bradley was asked, why didn't

Speaker 2 Matthew Ridgway, when he had destroyed all North Korean forces in the South, why didn't they go back into the North and take the entire peninsula as MacArthur had tried in 1950?

Speaker 2 And he said, this is the wrong place

Speaker 2 at the wrong time. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong people to fight.
And what he was saying, it's too far away. It's a type of fighting we don't do well.

Speaker 2 And these people have nuclear weapons in the case of Russia. And the main emphasis at that time was Europe.
So why in 1961 you had a new president elected, John F. Kennedy?

Speaker 2 Why did he send 400 or 500 advisors? And then before he was killed, he sent 16,000. And we started to have air bases there.

Speaker 2 And the answer was, he thought, the United States in 1962-03 had never lost a war. They had never lost an intervention.

Speaker 2 Every time they had intervened, and they had not intervened like the Europeans. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, Eisenhower forced the British, the Israelis, and the French to get out of Egypt.

Speaker 2 So there was this sense that it was a new frontier. We can do anything we want.

Speaker 2 He had run on the missile gap, which didn't exist. He said that Eisenhower had allowed us to let down our offenses.
So Kennedy came in, and before he was killed, there were 16,000 people. But

Speaker 2 worse,

Speaker 2 there was a coup, and they assassinated Diem, who had been there for a number of years and they thought he wasn't muscular enough. He was religious, he had ties with Buddhist Christians and

Speaker 2 we claimed we didn't know the coup would kill him. Madam Ngu was his brother and that was a mistake because we lost somebody who knew the country well moderate.

Speaker 2 So then Kennedy gets killed and

Speaker 2 it heats up and the South Vietnamese are dealing with what they call the Viet Cong. The Viet Cong were North Vietnamese operatives who were play acting or simulating that they were an indigenous

Speaker 2 South Vietnam opposition to the elected government.

Speaker 2 After Diem was assassinated, you had General Ki and then Tu,

Speaker 2 T-H-E-I-U.

Speaker 2 And so then the escalator was LBJ.

Speaker 2 And so he began 100,000, 150,000, 200,000, 300,000, 400,000. I think by

Speaker 2 the end of 1965, we had 550,000. And the Europeans were saying, what are you doing? You're putting all these people.
But again, the model was Korea.

Speaker 2 They said, you know, we did this in Korea and it worked. Well, Korea was a very different, it wasn't a jungle.

Speaker 2 It was very, it was cold, it was barren, and we were in a much better place in Korea vis-a-vis China and Russia than we were a decade later.

Speaker 2 And we weren't in the middle of a cultural revolution. By 1964, we had just had the beginning of the very beginning of Come to San Francisco, the cultural movement.
And by 1965, we had

Speaker 2 66, we had no strategy. It was

Speaker 2 Mark Moyer, who's written a three-volume history. He's on Volume 2.
It's a revisionist history. He tries to defend, maybe sometimes successfully, the search and destroy

Speaker 2 mission mission where Westmoreland and the people when I was in high school they were still calling him Wastemoreland.

Speaker 2 He was a good man but the idea was you take helicopter troops, you drop them down into a Viet Cong-held part of South Vietnam. The enemy sees it, sort of like the Mel Gibson moon when

Speaker 2 we were soldiers or young, when we were

Speaker 2 and then that draws out the North Vietnamese back Viet Cong, and then you have superior air power and you call in airstrikes at Napalm, and you keep doing that.

Speaker 2 It didn't work. And finally, the CIA came in with something called the Phoenix program.
That worked, but it was very controversial.

Speaker 2 They just simply got the names of all the Viet Cong leaders that were trying to overthrow the government in South Vietnam, and they took them out. They were targeted assassinations.

Speaker 2 And so then

Speaker 2 the Tet Offensive happened in 1968. The North Yeves came up with the idea that at the New Year's they were going to surprise the Americans and send 100,000 troops.

Speaker 2 The Viet Cong would rise up, and this time they would go into the American bases themselves, but especially they attacked the embassy at Saigon.

Speaker 2 And we had a base way up near the DMZ at Quezon, and they were going to attack Quezon.

Speaker 2 And of course,

Speaker 2 this was an election year, and John

Speaker 2 LBJ would shortly say in March of 68 he was not going to run because of Vietnam. And they were now negotiating in Paris, but the Viet Cong, on orders from the Chinese,

Speaker 2 the Viet Cong was synonymous with the North Vietnamese. They were not going to make a peace deal because they thought they could win.

Speaker 2 And the Russians and the Chinese liked this idea that we were tied down.

Speaker 2 So in this election year, they staged the Tet Offensive.

Speaker 2 That shook all of the the campuses because there was, you know,

Speaker 2 at the Battle of Wei, at the Battle of Khe Song, they had pictures of

Speaker 2 Viet Cong at the U.S. Embassy, and Marines are firing from the embassy ground.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so everybody in America thought, you can't win if the Viet Cong are right in the American Embassy in Saigon, or if they're attacking Wei.

Speaker 2 But the fact is, nobody really looked at the actual what was actually happening. What they did at Khe Song was a base up by, as I said, the DMZ, they made it into sectors.

Speaker 2 This is the first time they kind of made computer sectors, like a checkerboard. Then they brought in B-52s and they systematically obliterated every living thing in that sector.

Speaker 2 And they completely wiped out the North Vietnamese. We didn't know it at the time.
And then they gave it up.

Speaker 2 It was isolated. Everybody said it's like Diem Din Phu.
They're isolated. But the airstrikes destroyed everybody around them.

Speaker 2 They could have, and when they went in there, everybody said, okay, now we still have the base. And they said, no, we're going to pull out.
And that was just kind of,

Speaker 2 why did we do all that? And save this big, huge air base. And then we pulled out.
So there was not a consistent strategy. By after Tet,

Speaker 2 we had a change in tactics with Creighton Abrams. He'd been a very, very famous one-star, I think he was, or maybe he was a colonel in World War II

Speaker 2 as an armored commander. I think he was in the Third Army.
Anyway, he changed the tactics from search and destroy to hold. He would go in and hold areas.

Speaker 2 He was kind of the forerunner of the surge that we saw in Iraq. But by 1971,

Speaker 2 a couple of things had happened. Richard Nixon had been president for 69-70.
He had a new strategy called Vietnamization. In other words, he would say,

Speaker 2 we're going to turn over to the Vietnamese this sector, this sector, we're going to arm them. And then he did another smart thing.
He changed, I think it was in 71 or 72, he ended the draft.

Speaker 2 You got a lottery number. There was a draft, but you got a lottery number.
My number was 245 when I turned 18, but

Speaker 2 the war was over as far as Americans on the ground by 72. They went into Cambodia in 1973, but there were very few ground troops in Vietnam itself, and it was mostly an air campaign.

Speaker 2 You could make the argument, he had two air campaign Operation

Speaker 2 Linebacker and Rolling Thunder, and Mark Moyers argued that they were both

Speaker 2 successful, but they said bring the home the the left was saying bring the war home here, meaning attack us on the campus. They did.

Speaker 2 You know, there were fifty, sixty thousand people in the street almost every weekend. There was the Weatherman Underground, all these bombings.
It was crazy.

Speaker 2 But at first they used B-52s rather than just

Speaker 2 Phantom Jets or F-100s, and they were doing a lot of damage. But the second time around, what they called the Christmas bombing,

Speaker 2 that was very, very controversial, and that was first-generation laser bombing.

Speaker 2 And they had the names of the North Vietnamese generals and politicians that were ordering them, and they began taking them out systematically.

Speaker 2 And that finally brought them to Sirius Kissinger, and we had a peace accord,

Speaker 2 and they won the Nobel Prize for it.

Speaker 2 Leidak Tu Tao and Henry Kissinger Kissinger accepted it, the Vietnamese didn't. But the point I'm making is, at that point, we had Watergate.

Speaker 2 And so by 1974, January, February,

Speaker 2 we had the election of 1972. It was a big landslide.
But already, all during 73,

Speaker 2 it was Watergate, Watergate, Watergate. And Nixon's popularity went from 65% down to 25%.

Speaker 2 And by 1974, he was finished, and he would resign. And the problem was then on 17 occasions, 18, the U.S.
Senate cut off all aid to Vietnam.

Speaker 2 And it was tragic because we went through that whole decade from 65 to 75, and they finally had something like South Korea, and we cut off aid. And what won, the Viet Cong didn't win the war.

Speaker 2 It wasn't in the jungles. It wasn't an uprising.
The North Vietnamese with Soviet armor, they just plowed down Highway 1 right into Saigon because

Speaker 2 they had no armaments and they had no air support.

Speaker 2 You can argue, well, Victor, if we gave them stuff for 10 years and the Chinese gave their stuff for 10 years, why didn't they win? Well,

Speaker 2 that's another story. But the Chinese, we now know that the Russians were operating most of their air defenses.
There were Russian pilots, there were Chinese operatives. But when the whole thing ended

Speaker 2 in 1975,

Speaker 2 we had the oil embargo. where you couldn't buy gas in 1973, you had Watergate, you had still the demonstrations,

Speaker 2 the invasion of Cambodia, and then in 1974 it got worse, and then we just simply, Jerry Ford came into power, and Kissinger said to him, we've got to get aid to Vietnam, or they're going to lose, and he wouldn't do it because he knew there was no political support.

Speaker 2 And then we had something like Afghanistan, that 1975, all the Vietnamese went to

Speaker 2 all the officials, everybody was on the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, and they were flying people out to the carriers, and to make room, they were just pushing these

Speaker 2 planes, you know, not like today, $170, but $8 or $9 million planes just off the edge to make room for helicopters to bring people out. Then you had everybody at the United States.

Speaker 2 So I was at UC Santa Cruz. I was living in Greece in 1973 and 74, and when I got back, everybody that I knew who was insane,

Speaker 2 everybody I knew was insane on that campus, they were saying that this is wonderful, that you're going to have a democratic government. That's what the North Vietnamese,

Speaker 2 what did I know? But I just said, no, they're all commies. They're going to kill everybody.
Oh, no, no, no. And of course, they killed all of the South Vietnamese hierarchy.

Speaker 2 They put the rest in re-education camps. And they had about a million people flee Vietnam, and about a quarter million took the boat people.

Speaker 2 They just went out in little rafts or rowboats out in the middle of the ocean.

Speaker 2 And there were a number of cities that were designated refugee centers. Fresno was one.
We brought in 70,000 people,

Speaker 2 especially the Montagnards, Hmong,

Speaker 2 that had fought very heroically on the side of the United States. But that was a, after that, you would think

Speaker 2 that people would say,

Speaker 2 we're never going to do that again.

Speaker 2 And we didn't do it again. And then we had the 91 war, and we'll get into that.
But George H.W. Bush said, this gets rid of the

Speaker 2 Vietnam stigma. From 1975 to 91, for that 16 years, the United States felt that it couldn't intervene anywhere.

Speaker 2 And Reagan, as you remember, he had bombed Libya, and that was just, oh, it's not going to work. And Carter had had a rescue mission, had failed.
There was just a sense of doom and gloom after that.

Speaker 2 But that was not a military defeat. It was a political defeat.
The military made a lot of mistakes, but finally

Speaker 2 they had defeated the North Vietnamese and if we had supplied the South Vietnamese.

Speaker 3 Well, if I could take you back to LBJ

Speaker 3 and ask you. So he stepped down.
He was the incumbent for the Democrats, and yet he very quickly just said,

Speaker 3 what, I have no answer?

Speaker 2 Why did he

Speaker 2 run for primary protection? Well, he was not going to win the New Hampshire primary. He lost that.
Eugene McCarthy was running. Oh.
And he was a

Speaker 2 very handsome, idealistic man, about 55, and the youth vote. And once he won New Hampshire, the first primary, against an incumbent president, LBJ quickly got out.

Speaker 2 And then Bobby Kennedy kind of opportunistically said, ah, well, I have a better name, and I'm younger than McCarthy. So he came in to take away the McCarthy vote.
It was split. And then...

Speaker 2 Right in summer, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by Saran Saran.

Speaker 2 and so there was really no Democratic person. So George McGovern then came forward and said, I'm going to take the Kennedy vote.
But meanwhile, Hubert Humphrey was vice president.

Speaker 2 And he was in an impossible situation because if he criticized LBJ, who was about 30 percent, then he was disloyal and he was helping the Republicans.

Speaker 2 If he stood by LBJ, people said, It's not working. We don't want another LBJ.
So finally,

Speaker 2 in August,

Speaker 2 September, October of 1968,

Speaker 2 Humphrey then started to go more conservative than LBJ. And he said he was still an old-fashioned Minnesota farmer labor liberal, but he started to catch up to Richard Nixon.

Speaker 2 People were still calling Nixon tricky-dicky. You know, he'd lost the 62 governor race in California, can't win.

Speaker 2 And he only beat Humphrey by, it was one of the closest elections. The Democrats, sort of like Kamala Harris, they made the wrong decision after that.

Speaker 2 They said that Humphrey lost because he didn't separate himself. He had moved to the center.
He should have gone hard left and been anti-war.

Speaker 2 And that's why McGovern, three years later, took over the party and they had the third largest landslide loss in history against Richard Nixon, 1972.

Speaker 2 Did Humphrey? Nixon's the one.

Speaker 2 That was the thing. Nixon's the one.
They always had these posters on UC Santa Cruz and elsewhere of a pregnant woman pointing to her stomach and saying, Nixon's the one.

Speaker 3 Well, I was just thinking, did Humphrey win the primary then?

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 2 He took it away from the governor. He did Bobby Kennedy.
Eugene McCarthy faded. And Kennedy soared, but Kennedy, I wouldn't say he defeated.

Speaker 2 He was ahead of Kennedy, but we didn't know what was going to happen. But Kennedy was assassinated in the summer.

Speaker 3 Do you think that had anything to do with Kennedy?

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. I mean, it was Martin Luther King was assassinated.
Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. There were bombings almost every day.

Speaker 2 If I was in Salma in 1968, I would see bumper stickers

Speaker 2 about Vietnam. It would say

Speaker 2 USA, love it or leave it. And if I, when I, by the time I got to Santa Cruz three years later, it would say USC,

Speaker 2 it would say change it or lose it. But usually they had the F word, F it or lose it.
And when I got to Santa Cruz by September of 71,

Speaker 2 everybody

Speaker 2 was drafted, the big protests. And then when they announced the lottery, and they announced the lottery actually in 1971, I think,

Speaker 2 and they got numbers, there were still people who were, even though there were not going to be ground troops by that time. They were mostly gone.
But in 1972, I think they ended the draft.

Speaker 2 You know what happened?

Speaker 2 I could not believe it. There was a little protest about the Cambodian bombing and the invasion of Cambodia, but it was not like when I first got there.

Speaker 2 You got the impression that most of the student protests, Nixon was really cynical and sly. He knew that if you got rid of the draft, these people wouldn't care.
And then they got that narrative that

Speaker 2 I wrote a chapter in Carnage and Culture about the Tet Offensive.

Speaker 2 Queen's Clearwater wrote that song, Favorite Son, I think it was. It's about

Speaker 2 it was kind of a corrupt system where people that were wealthy got 2S deferments.

Speaker 2 They got into going to the National Guard.

Speaker 2 There was a myth that said that this was a white man's war and a black man's death.

Speaker 2 But when you actually looked at the deaths,

Speaker 2 you look at the participation in Vietnam, it was broken down. And when you looked at the death,

Speaker 2 I looked at the statistics when I wrote that chapter in Carnage and Culture. It's the same old story as Afghanistan and Iraq.

Speaker 2 The white, rural, non-college kids died at twice their numbers in the demographic. And we never quite that

Speaker 2 they don't understand that, that the people

Speaker 2 who were getting wiped out first by a globalization in the 1990s and then people especially at the millennium, were also the people who had been dying

Speaker 2 disproportionately in Vietnam. They'd been dying in Afghanistan later.
They'd been dying in Iraq.

Speaker 2 And finally, that Buchanan message that we're not going to have an empire where a bunch of poor people, their cities are going to be rust-belted out, and yet they're going to be asked to go over for some utopian nation-building dream in Vietnam.

Speaker 2 That really finally took hold with the Trump MAGA movement.

Speaker 3 All right, Victor, so let's go ahead and take a break, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit more about the news. Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Speaker 3 Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. You can find Victor on X.
His handle is at VD Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

Speaker 3 So please come join him there if those are your social media outlets. So, Victor, Trump is working his way through all the countries in the world and making trade deals.

Speaker 3 And this week, the big trade deal was made with Japan. I think he settled on 15% tariff.

Speaker 2 You thought it was being 25 and it wasn't.

Speaker 3 And what that meant, though, that was hard for the American automakers is that they were buying their partially made cars out of Mexico, but with a 25%

Speaker 3 tariff on it. And so they're worried that the Japanese

Speaker 3 automobile makers are going to have an advantage over them since it's aimed in part at Mexico.

Speaker 2 Trump wants all of everything made in the United States, and they don't want to get around tariffs by assembling. Mexico is running a $171 billion surplus.

Speaker 2 And it's going to be good for California farmers because the tariffs are going to go way down on American rice, which is really a good product. It's much easier.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's much easier to grow here at scale. It's cheaper.
It's just a reordering of the whole world order.

Speaker 2 And again, we get back to this thing I've mentioned, everybody was saying gloom, doom, gloom, doom, trade war, trade war, stock market collapse.

Speaker 2 We don't know what the Japanese were making with asymmetrical tariffs.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 Trump is betting that at some point around 10 to 15 percent, they will be willing to pay that and they'll still swallow that. They'll still make a profit and they won't raise their prices too much.

Speaker 2 And the economists, especially where I work, they think that's crazy. Even the Wall Street Journal today said,

Speaker 2 well,

Speaker 2 we were kind of wrong, but it will be right in the long term. I keep hammering on that.

Speaker 2 I don't want to be a broken record, but it's really astonishing that what the Wall Street Journal in February, March, not the op-ed, the news section, trade war, recession, tariffs, reduced GDP, either inflation or stagflation, drop in real income, disaster,

Speaker 2 nothing. Record high stock market.

Speaker 2 In May there were more revenues than there were expenditures.

Speaker 2 GDP is strong.

Speaker 2 Job growth is good. million less foreign jobs, two million more, I think last month, since Trump came in, two million more American job.

Speaker 2 So we'll see.

Speaker 2 This is very important because we get caught up in the Epstein files in Clapper and Brennan, but ultimately Donald Trump is either going to win the midterms or hold that tiny lead in the House on the basis of the economy.

Speaker 2 If he does not win that, they will impeach him in the first day. Not that they're going to convict him in the Senate, but that will eat up the second half of his last term in office.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so it seems like things are going well for Donald Trump right now, and there's a lot to praise him for.

Speaker 2 Very well, but

Speaker 2 he's got to keep his eye on the proverbial prize. The prize is not Epstein, the prize is not Brennan Clapper or indicting Obama.
The prize is $15 trillion in foreign investment, new energy.

Speaker 2 spectacular new energy development, deregulation, lower tax. It's the economy.
He's got to keep pounding that into people.

Speaker 3 Yes, and I and I'm sure he will. So we haven't really talked too much about the wars in Ukraine or in Israel.
And apparently the Russians are starting to use experimental bombs on civilian centers.

Speaker 3 They have a new glide bomb, which apparently is a refab of an older, but they have used it on civilian centers that are of no military

Speaker 3 there's no no military advantage to attacking those centers.

Speaker 3 Just recently, and such were the accusations in a publication I was reading that was called,

Speaker 3 oh, I forgot the name of it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they're using glide bombs, and it shows you that the idea that they were going to have a meat grinder and grind down the Ukrainians. 12 million Ukrainians have left the country.

Speaker 2 The average age in their military is about 33.

Speaker 2 And they were 70 70 or 80 miles westward from the Donbass and Crimea, and everybody thought the Ukrainians, especially the United States, was angry at them.

Speaker 2 But what's happened now is they're way above probably a million Russian dead, wounded, or missing. There's a lot of dissension.
Trump is threatening a secondary boycott. That would say that India,

Speaker 2 Iran, China, anybody who buys Germany, anybody who buys their oil is going to be subject to sanctions by us. I don't know how that would cause a huge worldwide disruption.

Speaker 2 The point I'm making is they've shifted tactics now. They took Iranian drones and they

Speaker 2 re-engineered them, and they have their huge, they're building thousands of them a month. And so their tactic now is to send glide bombs, drones, missiles.

Speaker 2 They really don't use air support like they use air strikes because they're vulnerable to

Speaker 2 SAM missiles. But the point I'm making is

Speaker 2 they're trying to create a terrorist. It's kind of like the V-1 and V-2

Speaker 2 bombings of London, which diverted attention from the British and American war effort. They went after the sites.

Speaker 2 Just like the Saddaddam Hussein used scuds to attack Israel, we stopped going after his troops for a couple of weeks and looked for scuds in the desert.

Speaker 2 So they're trying to do this and then to deflect troop deployments to the energy of the Ukrainians. Now the Ukrainians are starting to send drones deep into Russia.
I think they hit an oil refinery.

Speaker 2 And they have a different tactic. They're sending swarms of them,

Speaker 2 long-range drones, you know, hundreds of them, to go into refineries, petrochemical, and destroy them.

Speaker 2 So I think now that Trump is getting tough with Putin, they're going to have a deal within

Speaker 2 five or six months.

Speaker 3 We'll see. We'll see.
Yeah, that's very optimistic.

Speaker 3 A further thing in Europe was that a very strange thing happened in Spain where young Jewish children were on their way home from summer camp with their counselor, and they were on an airplane, apparently, and they were just singing a song in Hebrew, and they got expelled for, I think it meant from the plane, but anyways, expelled, and then a counselor was beaten because they had been singing.

Speaker 3 And so the point of the story, which was on a publication called Blacklisted, was this is the treatment that Jews get in Spain.

Speaker 3 And so I think it's the long history of the Ray Conquista and the Inquisition.

Speaker 2 Very ironic because Netanyahu, whose father wrote a history of the Jews and the Inquisition, a huge book. Yeah, they have a bad record with going after Jews during the Inquisition.

Speaker 2 That's where most of the Jews in the Mediterranean came from. Jews in Greece, Jews from in Alexandria, Jews in Turkey.
They fled from Spain. There was a lot of Jews before

Speaker 2 the Inquisition. Something's wrong with Spain.
It has this hard-left government,

Speaker 2 and it's destroying its electrical generation. They had that solar,

Speaker 2 I don't know what you call it, blackout, where they tried to...

Speaker 2 run an experiment to see if they could just kind of like Gavin Newsom here. It was a disaster.

Speaker 2 They have just announced they are not going to make the 5%.

Speaker 2 Basically, they said the blank with you. We're not even going to try.
They haven't made the 2%.

Speaker 2 They said they may or may not do that.

Speaker 3 To NATO. They're paying us to NATO.

Speaker 2 To NATO.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 they've gone on this left-wing trajectory at the same time that the right is gaining strength. Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Romania,

Speaker 2 Germany, maybe France. We see Neil Farage or Farage is

Speaker 2 doing well in Great Britain. So it's a problematic country, and it's very anti-American.
I was there last summer, and it's booming with tourists. It looks very affluent.
I first went to Spain in 1974,

Speaker 2 and it's just unrecognizable. It's so much more affluent.

Speaker 2 Long and the short of it is it's a hard left government, socialist government,

Speaker 2 and it's drifting away from the currents abroad. The currents are moving to the right, and Spain is moving to the left.

Speaker 2 And it's not working, I don't think.

Speaker 3 No, I don't think so.

Speaker 2 But the other thing is, I don't understand that. I did an interview with

Speaker 2 Piers Morgan yesterday. He was asking about genocide.

Speaker 1 People that commit

Speaker 2 genocide do not have rules of engagement where they don't, you know, they have to get permission to hit something and

Speaker 2 they back off from hospitals or mosques when they know that Hamas is underneath it. I know there's a big body count, but

Speaker 2 if Hamas would just leave the country, there would be no genocide. Genocide means you want to wipe out a race.
The Israelis do not want to wipe out Hamas. They're trying to get to,

Speaker 2 excuse me, the Gazans. They're trying to get to Hamas.

Speaker 2 So my point is that if you look at the world today,

Speaker 2 so Spain is going after these Jewish students because of Gaza, supposedly. I don't believe that.
I believe it's anti-Semitism. Why do I believe that?

Speaker 2 Because as we speak, Cyprus has been illegally occupied. It's under occupation by the Turks.
They killed thousands of Cypriots.

Speaker 2 I don't hear anybody on campus say, free northern Cyprus. It's been under occupation.
These are refugees. Help the Greek refugees.
They lost their homes in Belopais. I don't hear that.

Speaker 2 I don't hear anybody on campus say, help the Armenians, a quarter million of them had been living for 400 years in Aberbajan and

Speaker 2 Turkish-language areas of the old. So they've been ethnically cleansed.
They've all been forced out. They have no home.
Haven't heard any of that.

Speaker 2 I haven't heard anybody said, there's a slaughter in Rwanda and Congo. Please help these people.

Speaker 2 Haven't heard any of that. If you're talking about refugees, I haven't heard anybody said,

Speaker 2 there were five to six million Poles who were ethnically cleansed from what is now western Ukraine by the Soviet Union. They have no home.

Speaker 2 Where are the Volga Germans? Stalin put them in camps. They had never got their land back.

Speaker 2 How about the Germans that were, maybe they didn't like Hitler, but they walked back from East Prussia and Pomerania. So

Speaker 2 there were 13 million, 15 million Germans that were displaced from Prussia. Two million of them died.

Speaker 2 I don't hear anybody say, Oh, I'm wiggling the keys like Edward Saeed would always wiggle the keys of his home, he thought, in the West Bank that was lost, even though I used probably an Egyptian.

Speaker 2 But my point is that I don't see any today Germans wiggling the keys of my home in

Speaker 2 Danzig, that is now Gdansk, you know. So

Speaker 2 what I'm getting at, it's very selective.

Speaker 2 I get a little upset. I was walking across campus in October of

Speaker 2 2024, last October, and at Stanford, there were still protesters. The camps were gone.
They had been there for months after October 7th of 2023.

Speaker 2 But this young Palestinian looking, I mean they had the scarf on, was yelling about something.

Speaker 2 And I said, are you talking about displaced people? She said, yes,

Speaker 2 all the ethnically cleansed. I I said, you mean the million Jews that were ethnically cleansed after the 56, 67,

Speaker 2 73 wars from Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Oman. They had been living there for five, six years, and since the Inquisition, 500 years.

Speaker 2 What are you talking about? I said, you know that Israel accepted almost a million Jewish refugees, that the Arab world, once the Israel was created, just forcibly either killed or forced out. No.

Speaker 2 But my point is it's all selective. So if it's selective, you

Speaker 2 have to ask yourself why

Speaker 2 aren't people protesting against the Turkish government? The Turkish government's been killing Kurds for 50 years. The Turkish government is responsible for two Armenian genocides.

Speaker 2 Those were genocides. And the Turkish government fought a horrific war in 21-22 with Greece.
Turkey

Speaker 2 occupied Greece for nearly 400, from basically 1400 to 1821 for over 400 years.

Speaker 2 And as I said, it just displaced Greeks Cypriots. Why don't they protest against them? Well, Victor, that's nothing recent.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Erdean just said that the Athenians would wake up one morning and look in the skies and there'd be a rain of Turkish missiles killing them. He said the same thing about the Israelis.

Speaker 2 So it's selective, and it's selective because they're Jews.

Speaker 2 And it's selected because they're Westerners, and they think if we call them

Speaker 2 genocidal murderers, they'll listen to us. If you call

Speaker 2 Iran,

Speaker 2 why isn't there a protest on campus about the Iranians hanging homosexuals?

Speaker 2 I guess it's because they think that we're too close to Israel and they can affect it or something. I don't know.
But the person I was arguing with last October knew nothing about that.

Speaker 2 She had no idea. They don't know anything, these students.
I have have an apartment and to get to my office on campus I have to walk across the free speech area.

Speaker 2 So when they come up I usually talk to them very politely, quietly. I've come to the conclusion that Stanford students who are protesting are ignorant.
They know nothing about history or anything.

Speaker 2 They just mouth all these platitudes.

Speaker 3 So Victor, the Bidens are, or Joe Biden is trying to sell his memoirs, but apparently he's only getting 10 million million for them.

Speaker 3 The Obamas together got $60 million, and Clinton back in the day got $15 million. So not a lot of excitement about

Speaker 3 those Biden memoirs.

Speaker 2 There's not a lot of excitement because if Joe Biden really, I don't want to be cruel, but if he couldn't finish his sentence, they know he's not going to write it.

Speaker 2 He's already had a biography. You remember that what came up with Robert Hurr's investigation where his ghostwriter of his biography was given access to classified information and then

Speaker 2 destroyed the tapes. Robert Hurrs should have indicted him like he would have done any of our listeners.
Robert Hurst said, well,

Speaker 2 he said that he destroyed them because he was worried about hacking. That was a lie.
It was like he'll always email stuff like that that people get very angry about.

Speaker 2 So he's done, I don't know, two other biographies. What does anybody want to know about Joe Biden's presidency? I mean, there's nothing

Speaker 2 he didn't know what was going on for the most part. So it has no value.
And then when they compare it to Obama, Obama's memoirs have no, I mean, her memoirs sold a lot, more than his,

Speaker 2 but I don't know if he made back the 60 million. I don't think, maybe they both did, I don't know, but it was just they had star power from the left, and the left soured on Joe Biden.

Speaker 2 And I can tell you, with very few exceptions, in the New York publishing, I've written 26 books.

Speaker 2 I've dealt with Doubleday, Alfred Tanop, Simon Schuster, Basic, all of them. Basic is center,

Speaker 2 but all the rest of them are left-wing. So when the left-wing doesn't want to give a next left-wing president money, it's just because there's no market value there.
It's like Hunter.

Speaker 2 Hunter was making four or five million dollars a year selling his father's office to the Ukrainians, to the Chinese, to everybody, Romanians. And he was selling selling these drug-laden paintings.

Speaker 2 He wasn't paying taxes on it, so it was all clear. And

Speaker 2 I think he knows he has to pay income taxes on his meager income. What is Hunter's income now? He has no income.
Because they can't, that's what I'm trying to say.

Speaker 2 It was all predicated on what Joe Biden could do for people. Yeah, it sure was.
But he doesn't know where he is.

Speaker 3 No, he doesn't.

Speaker 3 But I think that's...

Speaker 2 The biggest mystery is how did he leave office and then in May announced that he had metastasized prostate cancer?

Speaker 3 Stage four, I think it is.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, he's President of the United States. That is

Speaker 2 Rahm Emmanuel's brother, who's a doctor, who's very left-wing, who's the architect of Obamacare. He said that it's impossible for him to have that advanced.

Speaker 2 So what that means is that when he went into office, he probably had prostate cancer, maybe a very high PSA.

Speaker 2 We didn't tell anybody, and then they watched it. You can't tell me that they didn't take a PSA when a man has that age and he's president.
They didn't take one every three months.

Speaker 2 So they must have known that that was progressing and they didn't want to treat it with radiation or chemo or hormonal therapy.

Speaker 2 And then he just announced that,

Speaker 2 I mean, it's in his bones now.

Speaker 2 It's really sad.

Speaker 2 If the President of the United States can't get adequate urology, who could?

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's for sure. I'm sure he had adequate urology.
I think they probably thought it was slow-growing, and therefore,

Speaker 3 right, when you're older and it's slow-growing, they just let it go.

Speaker 2 Yes, but they can monitor, not that the PSA is always accurate, but they could do, they could give him a PSA every month if he's president of the United States, very cheap to do that.

Speaker 3 All right, and then finally, our one of our rabbit hole subjects, Colbert, is assailing Trump for a very very small phallus, I guess you would say, but he used

Speaker 3 different words for that. And do you think Colbert will even survive the year? I don't understand this

Speaker 3 CBS I think he's on saying, okay, we're going to keep you on for another year, but then your show's dead after that.

Speaker 3 I don't think he's going to survive the year.

Speaker 2 They did that because they settled with Trump on the 60 Minutes. They had edited right before the election to make that Harris transcript, which was fraudulent.

Speaker 2 And they were worried about the exposure, so they settled for, what, $16 million?

Speaker 2 Not a lot for them. But Colbert had been criticizing them.
So they thought, you know what? If we fire him right now, it looks really bad. Like, we're just mad at him, punitive.

Speaker 2 I don't know, they fired Tucker, Fox did, after the Dominion suit, so it's no big deal. They do that.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 they wanted to act like it was not politics or Trump. But he ruined, you know, the Jay Leno,

Speaker 2 Dick Cabot, as I said earlier, Johnny Carson tradition. I don't know why he did it.
It was so stupid because those guys had 15, 20 million people listening.

Speaker 2 I know that the genre has changed with streaming and everything, but

Speaker 2 if you... It's like a podcast.
If you want to just say the F-word, unless you're Joe Rogan, you're going to offend a lot of people. That's not a good reason not to use it.

Speaker 2 You shouldn't use it because it's wrong. But we try to be honest and criticize Trump sometimes and conservatives.
But if you just go dad, out, dad, dad, dad, out, you're going to lose a lot of people.

Speaker 2 And so they lost half of America by all he did, he wasn't really a talk show host. He was just an organ of the Democratic Party.
And I only watched him a couple of times. He wasn't even funny.

Speaker 2 He was supposed to be making fun of a Bill O'Reilly kind of guy. He played in character, like he was right.
It was just stupid.

Speaker 2 And he was so,

Speaker 2 you know, it's, I don't know what to say. $20 million for him to lose.
They lost $40 $40 million a year and they gave him a budget of $100 million. That's hard to do.

Speaker 2 If somebody says, we're going to give you $100 million to get the best staff, the best bookers, the best guests,

Speaker 2 and we're going to pay you $20 million,

Speaker 2 how could you lose $40 million a year? So what he's basically saying is he's getting up on stage every night. and whining that I have a right to lose $40 million of other people's money.

Speaker 2 No, you don't.

Speaker 3 No, you don't. Economics don't work like that.

Speaker 2 It's very funny about the left. I mean, every time one of these stories

Speaker 2 emerges, we learn about Rachel Maddow making $20 million for coming in one day a week, you know, or Colbert making $20 million,

Speaker 2 or one of these actors making $30 million per picture, and they're all left-wing socialists.

Speaker 3 I know they are. And so in that sense, they shouldn't have been doing it.
But they must have at one point been worth it, or else the business, the company, CBS, wouldn't have calculated it in.

Speaker 3 But time has never been a matter of time.

Speaker 2 I don't think he ever made money. I don't think he ever made it.
I don't think he ever made money. He was on Jon Stewart, and Jon Stewart made money for a while.
He had a low budget in the Daily Show.

Speaker 2 And they put him on there, and he was a phenomenon. He was kind of neat for about a year.
And then they thought, you know what, this is just

Speaker 2 a write-off expenditure for the Democratic Party.

Speaker 2 They just eat certain things that don't make any sense.

Speaker 3 So you think they just did it at a loss the whole time with Colbert?

Speaker 2 Because they thought he was a cultural icon, and that was a place the Democratic Party could. And you know why I know that's true? Because when he was kicked off, who complained?

Speaker 2 Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren,

Speaker 2 the squad, AOC, and what they were basically saying is this is our show, we got to go on it. And what they're basically saying is,

Speaker 2 okay, Democrat, they were saying basically basically to the Democrats, CBS, we put your people on here, we give you all this free publicity, and we take a law, so we want favorable treatment from you under the Biden administration.

Speaker 2 It was an investment.

Speaker 3 And it's not working out that way anymore. All right, Victor, I know you have a hard break here and things to do, so we're calling it the end of the show.

Speaker 3 And we'd like to thank our viewers for coming to join us this weekend. We hope you enjoyed our historical moment and the news of the week and Victor's wisdom on all those things.
Thank you, Victor.

Speaker 2 Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Speaker 3 All right, this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.