The Treasonous John Brennan

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, owner of a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its address is victorhanson.com.

You should go there.

You should visit regularly.

Someday I'm going to pronounce that word right.

And you regularly, regularity.

And you should subscribe.

Now, today's show, a little odd.

We are recording on Thursday the 10th.

This episode will be out on the 15th, Tuesday, the 15th.

Victor's going to be away.

So this is a little mix of some current news that he and the great Sammy Wink did not get to when they recorded their podcasts.

And then I have some holdover listener questions from a few weeks back.

So Richter's going to give some opinion.

What are we going to talk about?

John Brennan facing an indictment, Biden's doctor, Kevin O'Connor, and a few listener questions.

So we'll get to all of this when we come back from these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Come on, Victor, look alive here now.

You know, I don't know if Victor's praying or if he's just thinking big thoughts there, but that's okay.

He's entitled.

I've had all it's one month yesterday, I had this operation and I've had some problems afterwards.

I had to go have a procedure and I haven't slept, so I was actually sleeping on the jaw for a second.

That's not because you're not.

It sounds like you're.

No, well, I think, Victor, I see you as three steps forward, two steps back, and that's got to be a painful process to get to the finish line.

Yeah, I get one good day, and then I kind of do stuff, and then the next thing I get this raw feeling, and it feels like I'm infected, but I'm not.

I've taken too many antibiotics, and I'm tired of it.

I've got to sleep.

It's the sleep.

If I could just sleep three nights in a row, I have to sit up.

It shouldn't be this long after a month, just to bore out.

But I did look at the video, and there's a huge scar where they broke the bone off.

It'll heal.

Sleep is the enemy, or lack of sleep is the enemy.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

let's just go

say it quickly.

John Brennan is facing an indictment.

I don't know why this ex-commie is still in the the public eye.

Remember he said he had to redefine jihadism for us.

It was a liberation and it wasn't violent at all.

And he recently said that he wanted Iran to have nuclear access to nuclear.

He is a scoundrel.

I mean that.

I don't mean it just gratuitously.

He was an assistant chief of staff during the Bush years.

to George Tennant.

And he was knee-deep in the Guantanamo detention center, waterboarding, I guess we called it enhanced interrogation.

Okay, so then Obama comes in and he changes his spots and he starts criticizing George Bush for the things that he did.

And then he tries to ingratiate himself as a liberal

I guess he was he was with a wink a nod saying he was familiar with Islam.

I think he said only that.

He did all of that so he can ingratiate himself with Obama's perceived affections for Muslims.

Whatever it was, he then weaseled his way in to the CIA.

They had trouble confirming him because

he was a pathological liar.

I mean, in 2011, he said

under oath that predators had not killed one innocent civilian along the Pakistani-Afghan corridor.

And it wasn't within a nanosecond

that people

started pointing out that there were at least 50 people, maybe

over 70 that had been killed accidentally.

He never really retracted it.

And then he came back in 2000, I'm reciting this by memory, 2014,

and he was hacking the Senate staffer computers.

Remember that?

And Diane, they got him up there, and Diane Feinstein was the head of the committee.

Have you ever, in a CI ever Why would I do that?

That's just inconceivable that I would ever do that.

So

he wasn't just a liar, he was an emphatic liar.

And then, of course, they presented the evidence.

Oh, this is terrible.

I had no, please, please don't fire me.

So then

his piece

of resistance was the Russian collusion, folks.

And

he was instrumental in getting that fake steel dossier content into into the Daily Intelligence briefing, along with Comey and Clapper, to Obama.

And he knew that Obama was reading a dossier that was unsubstantiated and had been paid by three

paywalls to hide Hillary's fingerprints.

We know that because he approached Harry Reed.

Remember who old Harry Reed?

He said, basically, Harry, you've got to get the FBI in on this.

You've got to get the FBI.

And that's what really introduced James Comey to Christopher Steele-Saussay, whom he then hired as a FBI contractor, I suppose.

So he was feeding Obama dossier materials, and then he was running with the Russian collusion hoax.

And then

he was one of the four or five architects.

Remember the 51 intelligence authorities, former authorities.

Some of them weren't former.

That that was a lie.

They were still working stealthily as contractors for the CIA.

But he helped with Clapper and Mike Morrow and Anthony Blinken cook up that.

And they had that little fishy-wishy state.

It has all the hallmarks of Russian information, i.e., when we find out they ever catch us for lying, we're going to say hallmarks, not certain.

And then we're going to say Russian information, not disinformation.

And then if you remember, Biden said, ah, you're a

in that last debate when Trump brought it up.

Nobody believed that.

Fifty former Italians

disinformation.

Only you and Rudy Giuliani believe that.

And then the FBI worked with Twitter and Facebook, remember, to suppress the New York Post and other menus.

What am I getting at, everybody?

If you look at the three great electoral scandals of the last 50 years, you could say one was the Russian collusion hoax that almost lost Trump the election and you could argue led to $40 million and 22 months of his lost administration.

Number two, you could make the argument, it's that technometrica, that conservative poller, that if they had told the truth, And if the public had known that all those pornographic pictures that were mentioned to Mr.

10%, the big guy, Tony Bobolinski, all of that stuff was true,

they said that people wouldn't have voted for Biden.

I think that poll was taken in 2022.

So he did his best to affect the last debate in October and arm and fortify Joe Biden.

He had a twofer.

One was to exempt the Biden family from any

truth that all that pornographic literature, drug use, Mr.

Big Guy corruption was all fake.

And so that's what they assured us.

And then they assured us that Donald Trump did it.

Donald Trump did it with Vladimir Putin.

That was the second best saying that affected, I think, the election, the 51 authorities, the Russian collusion.

And then he went on television, Jack, as an MSNBC analyst.

And remember, he said that Donald Trump was a Russian traitor.

He was treasonous.

He had gone to Helsinki, and he said he was a traitor.

I thought when I heard that, well, he killed the Wagner group.

They didn't invade during his tenure, unlike the Bush, George Bush and Obama and Biden.

He got out of that asymmetrical missile deal.

He told the Germans not to buy the gas on the Nord Stream II.

He sanctioned oligarchs.

He did everything.

How could he be a puppet?

So he's a very nasty person, and now he says, I have no idea why

they're investigating you.

Because you lie like 10,000 dogs, as my friend said.

You lie.

You lie.

I don't know what the statute of limitations is.

You have not told the truth, and you have monetized your security clearance to get on MMSC and lie.

I don't think St.

Peter.

He's not a Russian puppet.

Yeah.

I don't think St.

Peter has a statute of limitations for

John Brennan.

By the way, Victor, I don't know if I ever told you that before I went to the infamous Anthony Fauci College of Holy Cross.

for one year I went to Fordham University, freshman year.

And I have to admit, John Brennan is a graduate of Fordham University.

So

I just track some of these lovely, lovely Americans.

Kind of interested, Victor.

I don't know.

I'm going to have to reevaluate my friendship with you.

I'm intimate of Patrick Fitzgerald.

He was my high school classmate

for four years.

Patrick Fitzgerald.

Was James Comey there too?

No.

No.

No, but James was.

Comey was

Catholic.

Is he Catholic, Irene?

Oh, of course.

Oh, my gosh.

So you got Comey, you got Fitzgerald.

Yeah, Brennan.

You've got Fauci.

You've got Brennan.

Yeah.

Oh, my gosh.

Irene.

Your body associate.

You inoculate me.

Hey, Victor,

just a thought before we move on.

You know, the more you have talked about this over the last couple of years, I just, I wonder if, in a weird way, were we better off for Trump not having won in 2020 than we are

having?

I think it was better because,

first of all, everybody got to see what the Progressive Project did a lot of damage to

brilliant.

But more importantly, in the wilderness years,

Trump met

Put it this way: there is no Rex Tillertson.

There is no Alexander Vinman on the NSC.

There's no Almarosa.

There's no, I mean, I like, like, there's no Jim Mattis, defense secretary.

There's no John Bolton.

Everybody's on the same page.

And he's not addressing symptoms.

He's addressing causes now.

It's not just, oh, close the border, but why is the border open?

It's not just...

We've got anti-Semitism, we've got pro-

Why is that?

Oh, it's because the universities are indoctrinating people.

Let's take a look at them.

Oh, it's because the media print lies.

Let's sue them.

Oh, it's because PBS and NPR are not fair.

Let's take a look at them.

So he's looking at the causation of progressive power, and that's why they hate him.

I don't know if you and the great Sammy Wink discussed a

judge ruling that came out today about birthright.

Do you know about this?

No, I did not.

Let me spring it on you.

We did not discuss it.

Well, here's a headline.

I'm looking at Fox News.

Federal judge,

didn't we talk about last week how the Supreme Court reigned in these local, these, these local federal federal judge blocks Trump's birthright citizenship ban for all infants testing lower court powers.

This is a judge in New Hampshire,

Joseph, U.S.

District Judge Joseph LaPlante.

And he blocked Donald Trump's executive order banning birthright citizenship and granted nationwide class certification status to all infants impacted by the order on Thursday.

I see this as defiance of what the Supreme Court just said.

They're so arrogant.

I mean,

they tried to nullify a congressional act, you know, about defunding Planned Parenthood.

And they'd always said they were only going after executive orders.

These judges are really egomaniac, narcissistic people.

They think that they can run the country.

I don't know.

I think we're going to get to the point, though, where we're going to get some insurrectionary judges.

They're going to try to get Blue State.

I don't know how they would enforce it.

They're not federal law enforcement.

But we're getting to a point when you're shooting ICE agents and you have people egging them on, or you have Hykemb Jeffries posing with a bat,

or you have Democrats saying that our constituents want us to take a bullet.

and get violent.

Or you've got Jasmine Crocker every day spouting off off about white people.

I think you're getting to a point if we're not careful, it's going to be scary.

Yeah.

It is scary now.

Totally agree.

And big law is a part of this,

is central to all this.

Yeah.

They've gone after big law, not to good effect, but it's big law, big media, big academia, big K-12, big corporate boardroom, big professional sports,

popular culture.

Yeah.

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uh victor another topic that came up yesterday yeah yesterday being wednesday the 9th and again i know this this particular episode will be up on tuesday the 15th but victor's wisdom is timeless Dr.

Kevin O'Connor, the do we be looking?

I don't want to say anything, give a bad inference to like hotel desk clerks, who he did not look, did not inspire a medical confidence in seeing this guy, but he testified before, well, he didn't testify before Congress.

He took the fifth.

Oh, I would have loved to testify, but Donald Trump's DOJ is looking at me, so I can't be in double jeopardy, so I'm not going to testify.

If all the people who were being looked at by the DOJ who were asked to address Congress said that, we'd have no Congress inquiry or checks and balance.

He knows what he did.

He knows what he did.

I have a little bit of sympathy.

I think his defense is, yeah, I lied.

Of course I lied.

I said Joe Biden was,

you know, hail, but you must have lied too because it was so obvious that my lie was detectable.

You went along with it, half the country.

So,

you know, I had a lot of people in 2017 really reprimand me, because I said he was reptilian and he was obviously non-composment.

I got so many letters: your age, you're discriminatory.

Thing about Joe Biden, he came to clarity on occasion, but it was only when he was angry and hated Trump.

So, if he in a State of the Union or his fan rub the opera speech, remember that with that eerie set,

madden, snack fashion.

Then he was sane.

He was, for a while, he only hate drove him.

The picture of Dorian Gray, a reversal.

Yeah, that was the real him came out.

It was funny about him.

I saw those pictures when he was Joe Biden with the aviator glasses and the stingray, and he had that tan, you know, and he wore polo shirts.

I thought those were like 2000, but they were 2015.

He went, he just

reptilized very quickly.

Yeah, shed his skin.

Yeah,

with this Dr.

O'Connor,

with this Dr.

O'Connor and the 25th Amendment, I mean, there's got to be some, I don't know,

lack of privacy for this particular citizen of the United States, the president.

Do we not have the right to know?

And I think the case is there to make that we do.

That's what the White House doctor is supposed to report.

But, you know,

I don't want, I don't know everybody.

I'm not saying we should have a medical czar who has an autonomous office to adjudicate whether the president can continue or not, because that would be polluted and corrupt in two seconds.

Yeah, well, true enough.

Well, Victor, we have to...

We do think Fauci can do that.

From prison.

We have

a lot of questions that came in several weeks back from our listeners and viewers, And we are going to, I'm going to ask some of them to you.

First one,

I'm going to ask about Greece in World War II.

And we'll get to that when we come back from these important messages.

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We're back with Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm talking to Victor on the 10th of July, and this episode is up on the 15th.

Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus.

Do check it out.

Links galore to everything Victor writes, does, appearances.

And every week, there are three things you need, you can read or watch two articles and one video if you're a subscriber.

Subscription is, I think, is pretty darn cheap.

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So go to VictorHanson.com and find out.

Victor, you and Sammy, the great Sammy, Wink, had terrific discussions on World War II recently.

And I was curious about post-World War II.

Actually,

you had a special episode on post-World War II.

How close was Greece, a place you love?

How close was it to

becoming a communist state?

Was it that close at all?

Oh, yeah.

And when I lived there, my first year I lived there, 73 and 74,

the KKE and there were

two communist parties, an Albanian Chinese communist and a Soviet puppet communist.

The problem was that

during the the occupation, the guerrillas were either monarchists or reformers or communists.

And the communists were being supplied by the Soviet Union.

And

they tended to be operating up in the north, and they had close ties with Tito and that communist movement.

And the Royalists, they were the conservatives, and they were being supplied in most cases by the British.

And the problem was that

because of the Nazi retaliations, very quickly, if you blew up a car, a command car, or you blew up a bridge, the Nazis went to the nearest village and shot everybody.

So the conservative loyalist forces decided to pull back on that.

Well, the communists operated up in the hill, the Machi, and they continued to do that.

So then there was, and the Germans played on that.

The Italians were the occupiers, but they were considered too lax.

So the Germans came in and clamped down, and they wanted to get, of course, they sent all 150,000 Jews from Thessaloniki, Crete, to Kablinka, killed them, wipe them out.

It was Jude and Fride by the end of the war.

But my point is, there was a big dissension because the townspeople, the villagers, would say, if you blow up, these Germans are going to kill us, not you.

And the Communists went ahead.

And then at the Yalta and later at the Potsdam Treaty, it was never decided

the fate of Greece and Turkey.

And as I said with Sammy, there was an informal agreement that Churchill would not intervene in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia or the Baltic states.

And in exchange, Stalin would not intervene in Greece and Turkey.

And then Finland and Austria would be demilitarized.

Of course, he broke his word.

And before the war was over, Churchill went to Athens to make sure that the communist groups kept away from

loyalists.

He was almost blown up.

There was a communist plot to blow him up at the Grand Batana Hotel in Syntagma Square.

In any case, this thing then, after the war was over, there was a war for the future of Greece.

And the CIA and the Americans and the British backed the loyalists and the monarchists, and the Soviet Union and

its Eastern European surrogates backed the communists.

And it was kind of like the Spanish Civil War.

It was probably

200,000 or 300,000 soldiers killed, probably as many civilians.

And it went on from, well, right after the Germans left in 1945, all the way to 1949.

And when I was there, it had only been over, you know, 23 years, and there was so much bitterness on both sides about the terrorism that was used.

And

they were accusing the loyalists of being pro-German.

They were accusing KKK of being arms of the Soviet Union.

And they hated the Americans because the Americans backed the dictatorship of 1967, which the colonel said they had been too soft on.

So that schism of the Greek Civil War was very bloody.

There was kidnapping of children.

They took back to Yugoslavia.

Communists did.

They would go across the border and meet Yugoslavia.

Finally, they made the Yugoslavians close the border.

In Greece, it's regional.

It's kind of like red and blue state America.

So the islands are very liberal.

Mike Dukakis was from Les Voss, his family.

And then the farther up to the north is very, and of course, Athens is liberal in the center of Attica.

But rural Greece, Thessaly, Boeotia, especially the Peloponnese, is very conservative.

I once once went to Sparta in 1974 and there was a table there and there were eight men, about 75.

We were watching the Waltons that night.

Why not?

And they were all playing backgammon.

And all of them were from Detroit, Chicago, or New York.

And they had big fat Social Security checks, and they were living like kings in Greece.

And they were very anti-communist, very conservative.

I wonder if that was more of a Greek thing than it was for Italians or others to have come to America, worked, saved, and then go back home, you know, to that zone.

Did you ever see?

My kids stayed, but they went back home.

Every village,

every village,

I would meet somebody.

It was the weirdest thing in the world.

You would meet 20 people who didn't speak English

or you considered had never seen a foreigner and then you'd turn a corner in the middle of nowhere in Arcadia and there'd be some Greek shepherd say hi you

and they'd always say iste jermane kos

even 23 years after the war if you had i had believe it or not thick blonde hair and they thought that i was a german and they would say yermanos

and i said no no

ime americano they'd say oh well

Not bad.

Etsy kits.

But they hated the Germans and with good reasons what the Germans did to them.

It came out when the EU started to dissipate.

Remember 10 years ago when there would talk about Athens leaving?

And they sent some German inspectors and they found out that their Google map, Gilgal Earth maps, found 20,000 swimming pools in Attica and they were only reporting for taxation purposes, 2,000.

And then the Germans said, we're not going to lend you any more money.

You have the most Mercedes per capita of any city in Europe.

And then they all called them Hitler, and there was all these pictures in the Greek newspapers of Merkel with a stormtrooper and a mustache and everything.

We hear these stories of the Greek men

with their pitchforks while the Nazis are coming down and their paratroopers coming down.

That was the battle.

Oh, was that Crete?

Oh, okay.

Yeah, and they could have won that battle, unfortunately.

The British were very poor commanders.

The Greeks fought very valiantly.

They were very tough fighters.

Remember Oki Day when Italy invaded Greece after it conquered Albania, Mussini thought he was going to walk through.

Three Greek divisions stopped the entire Italian army.

They were ferocious warriors.

And the Megala Idea, and they went all the way almost to Constantinople after World War I, tried to reclaim ancient Ionia.

I think they would have done it, even though they were vastly outnumbered, because if the British and the French hadn't cut off their supplies.

But

they had a great dream of, it was called the Megala Idea, the great idea after World War I.

And

Eleutherus Penizelos, the prime minister, had promised the Greek people that he would unify Greek speakers everywhere in the world into a new Byzantine Empire.

So they thought they got the

Dodecanese islands were Italian.

I mean, they got Corfu, they got the islands, and they got from Bulgaria the northern Thracial, Thrace provinces.

Then they got Crete back.

And and the next step was the Ionian coast all the way from Bodrum up to Constantinople.

They thought they could take it.

They had over a million and a half Greeks living there, had been repatriated with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.

And they almost did it, and then they were all butchered.

Ethnically cleans every one of them.

I lived on Akrias, Mikross Osias Street, where all the refugees had settled in the 1920s.

And I talked to these people about what they suffered.

And

they even had an idea, you know, to make a lake.

Plato said the Mediterranean was like frogs along a pond.

And they had this idea that there's going to be a big Greek city of Alexandria, which was a Greek city.

And then you would have Halakanarsis, and then you'd have

a big capital of the whole thing.

Was it Smyrna?

Now it's Izmir, and then Constantinople.

And then you would have Thessaloniki, Athens, and then Hanya and Heraklia on it, and it would complete the circle.

And inside would be a Greek lake.

And they were going to do this with, what, 10 million people?

That was it?

Well, 300 Spartans.

Unfortunately, tragically so, Athens has, I think, the highest abortion rate in Europe, and

Greece in general is about 1.4%.

Not too bad.

It used to be, you know, six kids a family.

Before we move on to another question from a listener, Victor, it's been a a long time.

It's been over 35 years since I saw Eleni, the movie with Kate Nelligan and John Malkovich, which Ronald Reagan said was his favorite movie.

Did you ever

see that?

I did.

Yeah, that was based on a book and a true story.

Yeah, true story.

Yeah.

I've got to go watch it again.

Well, hey, Victor, here's a question from Bill.

Bill from New Jersey

calls himself a huge fan of Victor.

I listened to all this podcast and also his other appearances.

I would like a list of books or a single book

that

would best explain the military and political parts of the Civil War.

We've talked about that before.

James McPherson wrote a good book,

The Battle Cry of Freedom, yeah.

Shelby Steele,

Shelby Foote wrote a very readable biography without footnotes.

And

Alan Guelzo has written a lot about the moral imperative imperative of Lincoln in the Civil War.

One of my favorites here, it's out of date and it's trash.

Have you ever looked at Lee's Lieutenants by Douglas

Southall Freeman?

No, never heard of it even.

Yeah,

it's beautifully written.

It's written in the present tense.

And he's got a famous biography of Robert E.

Lee.

Alan Guelzo.

I reviewed Alan Guelzo's recent biography of Robert E.

Lee.

But anyway, it's got all of the

people like it's a comparative analyses of Stonewall Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, James Longstreet, who were the best generals, who not.

And I think he comes to the conclusion that where the South faltered was

at the supreme level.

There was nobody in the South with the talent of Ulysses S.

Grant, William DeCumse, Sherman, Howard,

especially George George Thomas, Rocco, Chickamauga, and, you know,

people like that.

But at the subordinate level, the one-star, two-star, the South was really good.

But they had ignorements like Braxton Bragg, you know, and

Hardy and people like that that were not good generals.

Longstreet was a great general.

He was always hated because he took a job in the North after the war as a postmaster, and they thought he was a sellout.

Well, and he became a Republican, yeah.

Yes, and there's that famous scene in literature

and the long movie Gettysburg, where Lee tells him, there's a weak spot up there.

And you take your division, and you'll go right through it.

And Longstreet

said, you know, if we just leave these people be and get behind, we're almost behind them now, and there's a downhill march, and there's nobody in Washington, D.C.

And we take this magnificent army, we don't get it bloody, we keep it intact, we ravage the countryside, we go in and sweep through and

take out Washington, they'll never catch us.

That would have been a good idea, but

he was at Klaus Witzel.

You have to hit him head-on.

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Hey, I have a bit of a long question here, but let's get to it.

This is from Mark, and he wrote in switching gears.

From the recent mayoral results in New York City and what looks like another city about to descend into chaos, that's New York City.

I haven't been to San Francisco for years.

I'm wondering if Victor would add some historical perspective to how cities die.

We've heard of the fall of civilizations and empires, but unless a student of history, we don't hear the causes and cascading of events, the gradually and then suddenly phase.

Mark says, as someone who cares for two parents as they went through the end stages of their lives, I was always cognizant of an underlying disease.

And then he writes, I see cities such as Seattle, Portland, etc., going through the end stages of life.

And I'm curious if Victor could cite, if such detail is recorded, exactly exactly how and what steps led to the final death of certain civilizations.

I know you wrote a book on that, Victor.

I have to imagine it becomes a case of declining revenue, which leads to a lack of quality of life and services and infrastructure crumble.

And the loop continues until it ends.

This wouldn't be to fearmonger.

This is why he's asking the question, not to fearmonger, but to educate and perhaps it wakes up the populace.

Say, do you see what is before your eyes moment?

So this is from Mark.

Any thoughts on that, Victor?

Yeah, I think there's two or three reasons.

One of them is the city can't offer security.

So Rome by 100 AD was a million people.

By the time Belisars, the Byzantine, came there to reclaim it in 530, it was probably no more than 50,000.

Constantinople under Justinian in the

540s was over a million people.

Probably the biggest city in the world.

And when it fell on Black Tuesday, May 29th, 1453, I don't think it had more than 50,000 people in it.

So, what happened?

The first thing is they can't,

the relative security of the state shifts, and life is not safe inside the walls, even.

And that happened within the case of Rome with people crossing the Danube and the Rhine and then sacking Rome.

Another thing is,

of course, he mentioned it, finance, that they have so much entitlements, you know, bread and circuses at Rome, that they can't afford it, and then people start to drift away as the money runs out or it's inflated to worthlessness.

The other is there's rival cities.

You could make the argument by the third 350 AD,

if you wanted to see a vibrant city where there were philosophers and scientists and

robust populations, you would be going to Alexandria,

Antioch, or

Ephesus, and not,

and maybe Novo, Carthago, New Carthage, but you wouldn't, and you wouldn't be going to Rome anymore.

But it's a wax and wane because most of these cities are selected because they had intrinsic advantages.

They're in a central location in the state, like Rome.

They're on a river.

They're near to a port.

They're near agricultural products.

So even as they waste away, they tend to be reborn.

So Athens, if we went to Athens around 1820, I don't think there was more than 100,000 people there.

It was not the capital of Greece.

When it was liberated, it was Noplion.

But, you know, by 2000, I bet Athens was 3.5 million people.

And the same thing as Rome now.

Rome's about 6 million.

But there have been periods in Roman history where there was almost nobody living there in the medieval period compared to other places.

So Oakland is going to have a rebirth, Victor, someday.

Oakland's in a bad place because whatever Oakland can do, San Francisco can do better.

And it was always a cheaper place to live and it was connected to San Francisco

and it had a lot of wealthy people up in the Piedmont Hills.

It's beautiful.

It's a little warmer up in those hills.

There's some advantages.

You have better access to the interior of the state.

Quickly, you can go right into Livermore.

But it's not safe, and there's too much

unfunded pensions and entitlement.

It's broke and it's dying.

It's simply dying.

As a general rule, fertility makes a difference.

I was looking at this the other day that if you look at the top 10 states as fertility, I think South Dakota is the highest,

two.

It used to be everybody was two

40 years ago, but

the top 10 fertility are all red states, and the bottom 10, the most infertile, are all blue states, and then there's some in between.

But generally speaking, a red state has about 1.8, and a blue state about 1.4.

That has enormous ramifications for congressional districts and vitality.

With this blue state model collapsing, you're going to have an elderly aging population, and you're going to need a lot of people to take care of them.

And the red states are just more robust.

The formula is there's not as much deregulation, taxes, entitlements.

So

blue state cities, Milwaukee's dying, Seattle's dying, Portland's dying, Los Angeles is dying, Chicago is dead, Washington, D.C., New York are dying.

Well, Mark thinks

there's possibly some come to Jesus moment that shakes people to their core, but I don't see that happening.

And even if it did shake people, what could they do?

They'd have to essentially form vigilante vigilante gangs to, you know, well, I'm worried about that.

I think people are going to,

when the state can't protect them, they're going to protect themselves.

You mentioned the reader, the questioner mentioned awareness.

I wrote something to today's ultra, Drive Through the Ruins, about

I'm not trying to be nostalgic for the past, but I tried to use data.

So to take one example, California had 21 million people in 1970 and 5 million cars.

Now it has 40 million people and 40 million cars.

Eight times the number of cars, double the population, but the infrastructure is exactly the same.

There's been no expansion really to speak of on I-5101.

Some parts of 99 have three lanes, but they did then too.

There's been no new reservoirs.

The refineries are leaving.

They haven't added oil refineries.

There's just still one aqueduct.

What What we try to do, it's very funny, we make fun of all these old white guys.

I mentioned that.

The engineers, the designers, the architects.

They built the aqueduct.

That was an amazing achievement.

They built it in five years.

And when you look at all the

Big Creek Hyde Electric Henry Huntington's project, it's just genius.

It's 1912.

And I try to calibrate things like, well, you've had nine operations.

Would you be alive today if you had been born not in 1953, but in 1900?

No.

But was life better for you

in 1970 than it is now?

Well, everybody was poor,

but I didn't, we didn't have a key.

We never found any.

My grandfather would come knock on the door once.

Boys,

I got a question for you.

I'm not saying anything.

I was out pruning the peach orchard.

You know what I found?

No, I don't, Grandpa.

I found a coarse beer.

I found a coarse beer.

Yes, I did.

I found a core's beer can in the valve.

Would you any of you know anything about it?

Can you imagine that on our property, somebody was drinking a coarse beer and left a can?

Not me.

So I went di on my walk today.

I was looking at all the things.

Di oh, a whole sack of dirty diapers, freezers, appliances, car seats,

food that looked like McDonald's leftovers from a year ago,

coyotes rummaging all through it.

And, you know, people,

in those days,

if you saw somebody walk on your plate, oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,

I'm just going over to my farm.

I cut just temporary.

Oh, don't let it happen again.

Now you see somebody.

Three nights ago, I was walking,

and the guy was walking on the property.

and I said, do I know you?

And he says, do I know you?

And I said, I hope you do.

I own this.

Oh, well, I'm just walking through it.

And he took off, you know, I'm walking through it.

So there's no such thing as property right.

Anyway,

you should all read it.

I think it's a pretty good essay.

It's in the ultra about driving through the ruins of California and what you see.

coupled with all of the disparagement.

I wouldn't mind it if they didn't disparage that generation and and say, ah, you know, Jasmine Crockett the other day, they only voted for Biden because he's an old white guy.

Well, I used to know a lot of old white guys when I was a kid, and they were very smart, and they built the state.

I'm not saying they alone built it, but

they were the people who dreamed of it.

And what are the young white guy, lefty white guys, doing?

They're trying to blow up the dams.

So they're not only not creating, but they're

the structure picture of

the would-be assassin

that was published that tried to kill the ICE agents.

Did you see their pictures?

No, I didn't.

No.

I think there were three trans and

they just looked

mental patients,

bewildered, mental patients, crazy.

Gosh, they looked like the Symbolese Liberation Army.

Okay.

Well, Victor, we have two more reader questions to get your take on, and we'll do that when we come back from these final important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I wonder, Victor, don't answer the question, but you're walking around that property.

I hope there's some protection on you, besides your dogs.

You know, I hope that's the thing.

Every time I'd ask my son to stay here,

when I went to, I was in bed in Iraq twice, and one, a Jewish group gave me a bulletproof vest.

Even though when I got over there, they had, you know, ceramic plate you had to wear.

But this was kind of easier to wear.

But I've noticed that when he stayed here, he always put on a bulletproof vest when he walked around the ranch at night.

Yeah,

I always think of that.

It's almost every night some guy was stalked by the side of the road.

About two weeks ago, I walked by the side of the road.

He's taking, I don't know what he was doing, he was just taking everything out of his car.

I mean, everything

tires, but trash, and I said, don't leave the trash here.

Oh,

you know, it's just

everything is a confrontation.

And you don't want to.

And then the other thing is, if you were to carry a handgun

and they

in California, if somebody tried to attack you and you defended yourself with a a gun, you'd be all through.

So I have no answer to it.

There is no security out here at all.

It's kind of scary.

It really is.

Well, I have a question here from Vivek, who has written this a long time ago.

He's a huge fan of the show.

And this is, I don't think it's that complicated, but let me read this.

It would be complicated for me to read.

just read.

I'm trying to think back

as to whether Victor has recently suggested historical analogies that might help us explain just how huge, huge a human rights atrocity and crime against humanity that a large open border really constitutes.

Victor often explains in very real terms how the border created so many problems for so many people, and that's obviously incredibly useful.

But it occurs to me that to really understand and to make sense of an open border and the horrible consequences of having one, you can only compare it to things like the Atlantic slave trade of 16 to 1800s.

Our border was an access route for what is effectively a 21st century slave trade.

The other examples I can think of is that our open border is a front for cartel incursions into the United States, much like Slavic Eastern Europe was an entry point that invading Mongols used to attack Central Europe.

If you understand an open border this way, i.e., with terms that harken back to the Enlightenment and even before then, the depths of evil become much clearer.

I would love to know what Victor thinks about this.

Remember, there was the great 60s and early 70s politicians Enoch Powell in Britain, and he was slated to be the conservative prime minister in the next election.

And he gave a speech called the Rivers of Blood speech, in which he quoted a line from Virgil's Aeneid.

Because this was happening in Rome, a tribal, all the tribes coming.

He said, all of them are coming like streams into the Tiber and they're not being mixed up and it's going to be a river of blood.

So that's what he quoted.

He was a very, he wasn't a racist.

He was just,

and he was through.

That was the end of his career.

He was a classicist.

He had been in

World War II in North Africa.

He wrote the lexicon to Herodotus' histories.

But he was all through after that.

Done.

Kaput.

And now I see that he's being quoted chapter and verse by mainstream politicians because

he said, essentially, if you let everybody have a right of return that's in the empire and you don't assimilate them, you're going to destroy Britain in 50 years.

And pretty much you could argue that a lot of that has happened.

Yeah, I saw something on that point, Victor, that there are, I think, 30 groups,

cultural groups, whatever you want.

with at least 100,000 people each.

And they form, that's essentially a city of some, you know, a group in Britain that's from Somalia or you know other places and it's a it will be half the population

it was the Labour Party that did that for the same reason the Democratic Party it's a self-loathing of your own culture it's a hatred of your own country it's look in the mirror and it disgusts you I suppose

but

people well I get really angry the Wall Street Journal had an article today and off saying that the closure of the border is going to cost us billions of dollars.

And I thought, I read in your own paper that it said there was a million less foreign workers.

However, there were two million more American workers after we deported

forcibly 100,000 criminals and self-deported 950,000.

Then you think of all the entitlements.

Does anybody ever say, well, when they go back home, there's no entitlements.

When a million people go back home, they're not sending,

I don't know, $200 or $300 a week home.

That's an enormous savings when you don't have all those remittances.

$63 billion, it's gone up by $5 to $10 billion every year.

So there's so many insidious ways.

Then you have, you know,

40% of the state is on Medi-Cal.

Medi-Cal was about 12% of the population.

In budget terms, it was about 10%.

It's about 50, almost 50% of the budget.

And 50% of all the births in California are on Medi-Cal.

So that's a lot of money.

And you're not, and that money is coming from bridges, highways, roads, et cetera.

So I don't see, I can see the advantage if you're a corporate person, you want cheap labor, but the problem there is that when you bring people from, say, Oaxaca, who are some of the hardest working people in the world, and they only have about a 20-year workspan.

And then

to be a kind and decent nation, you have to give them workers' compensation, you've got disability, the whole thing, because they're not going to make a wage that's going to allow them to buy a house or anything or become financially independent.

So,

I mean, the idea of farm work was always that it was periodic and it was a rite of passage.

That's what we were told.

We were all told that you don't start school after Labor Day.

All of you kids in school, fifth grade, eighth grade, high school.

Everybody I knew pitched watermelons or they worked with

mallets to club almond trees or they picked grapes or they picked up raisins.

That was the idea that was good for you.

It was never the idea that you're going to be a permanent agricultural worker because it would be too hard on your body, and you wouldn't make enough money.

But he's right that the cost, the downsides, I think,

vastly outweigh it.

It's not good for a country to have L.A.

Coliseum full of fans, and they are booing the American soccer team and rooting for the American national team.

It's not good to burn the American flag and wave the flag of the country you don't want to go back to.

It's not good to encourage people to shoot ICE agents.

So the whole thing,

cartels, remittances, trade imbalances, immigration.

And

it's not good.

And there's a lot of ignorance, a lot of ignorance.

I once had a student said, I'm not a part of the settler colonial project, Professor Hansen.

And I said, I think you are.

And she said, why?

I said, you speak Spanish.

You think the Spaniards were not colonial imperialists?

Oh, but I'm an indigenous person.

I said, well, then speak Nahuto, but you can't, can you?

So you're a direct product of the Spanish occupation.

And

when I started to explain to her, she got very happy.

That was very funny because she said, well, I understand that you're telling me that I'm a European.

I said, I guess you are.

Deal with it.

But it's all fraught with contradictions and minefields, even talking about it.

But

when so-called white people came to California, I think there were 6,000 Mexican nationals here.

And there was about somewhere between 500,000 and a million indigenous people.

And they had not been treated all that great by the Mexican government in California.

And the Mexican government stole it from the Spanish government.

The Spanish government stole it from the Indians.

The Indians stole it from each other.

Kind of like the Sioux Nation, you know, that everybody talks about, the Sioux nation, the Lakota Sioux, and that they were victims of imperial.

They were the most imperialistic tribe in North America.

I mean, they just butchered the crows, just drove them off their land and raped their women and killed them.

No one ever talks about that.

It's just a question: people are people.

They're not.

Right, right.

They're not.

There's no halos around certain.

Yeah, history's not melodrama when you go back and pick winners.

He's good, he's bad.

Right.

It's tragedy.

He's kind of bad, he's kind of good, but it's not so clear-cut.

The movie Black Robe about the French Jesuits and the

Mohawks were like sadists.

Not like sadists, they were sadists.

I have one more question, Victor, as we head into the home stretch here, and this is from Kathy, who writes, I sure wish VDH would speak about the importance of classical curriculum.

I'm

K-12 schools.

I'm part of a group working to bring classical charter, hopefully Hillsdale member school, to our community.

It has been a long and difficult road.

Greater public awareness of how different classical education is would be helpful not only to our effort, but those in other communities.

Richter, I assume you're a little aware of what Hillsdale and others are doing.

Any questions?

Hillsdale, I think there's a lot of them doing it, but I think Hillsdale, Larry Arndt's daughter, is, I think, the head of it.

And it's a very successful program.

It's got hundreds of adherent schools.

I take that in the broadest term.

I mean,

a centerpiece of classical K through 12 would be to know Latin, and that would give you a

mastery of English grammar and vocabulary and syntax and grammar.

I never really learned English grammar or syntax or even vocabulary until I learned Latin.

And

then you get these great literature.

So all literature in the West is based on Homer, Virgil, Horace, Thucydides, Herodotus.

And you can introduce some of those authors.

Some are very difficult at a very early age.

And that's good.

And then there's the whole

periphery of referent points points that an educated person classically

develops, and that is they know the difference between Ionic and Doric and Corinthian.

They know the difference between the Parthenon and what it represents in the Pantheon in Rome.

They understand the basic geography of the Mediterranean where civilization developed.

These people don't know.

I watch Jesse Waters sometimes when he interviews people.

Do you ever see him interview people on the beach?

He's a little girl in

Johnny.

Johnny, I like Johnny.

Yeah.

I don't know.

But he interviews young women in bikinis usually.

And the more attractive it seems he finds them, the less they know him.

When was the War of 1812?

You know, 1907?

What was the Cold War?

We were fighting Germany in the Cold War.

Who was the first president?

Bill Clinton.

I mean, it's just incredible how

they are.

As much as we complain about higher ed,

that's the real problem: that the ding-dong's coming into higher ed.

Why wouldn't it be when they're not what are they?

They're all learning DEI.

Don't judge anybody.

Be careful about your pronoun.

I am a hyphenated this or a hyphenated.

That's what they're teaching them, and they don't know anything.

It's just ignorance.

And

I said this once to a very well-known person.

I won't mention his name.

He's a writer.

And he said, Victor, Victor, Victor.

We have 300 at that time, 300 million people.

And he said, 250 don't know anything.

50 million?

50 million?

They're geniuses.

They run the country.

They're technicians.

They're architects.

They're the brilliant doctors.

50 million, that's the size of a whole country like France or, you know, Britain.

That's what the United States is.

Well, so.

Maybe there's some truth in that, but I'm not sure.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we've got a couple of comments

from Rumble and YouTube that I'd like to share.

Thanks, folks, who sent in the questions, by the way.

Here's from Tracy Durant, 1919.

I really enjoyed hearing why you decided to use your middle name.

How wonderful to honor your mother with adding Davis to your signature.

VDH is so much better.

So that's good, Victor.

You're such a good question.

And my mother said, it's not just that you inherited buck teeth from your Welsh grandfather.

You know.

Somebody on the Victor Davis Hansen fan club found a picture of your high school yearbook,

freshman year, and you were president, by the way, Victor, as you know, of your freshman class.

And you look, you look like, you do not, you look like a nice young man.

I'll just leave you with that.

I wasn't very nice young man.

I was very lawful, law-abiding.

But you're a good-looking young man, too.

So, you know, don't be afraid of that.

I had my share of girlfriends, but in those days, a girlfriend was

yes, that's what it was.

And

especially when you had parents when they said you went over to Melanie Donabedian's house, your girlfriend.

But when you left the house, what time was it?

I said, it was 9:45.

Were Mr.

and Mrs.

Donabedian asleep or were they awake?

I think that.

You think.

Okay, okay, when you went out to the car, did you shake their hand before you left?

No.

If it wasn't so late, you would go back in there and shake both of their hands and thank them for their hospitality.

I said, I think they think I'm crazy.

And they said, no, they would respect you.

And when I did it, they did respect me.

Oh, I thought you were.

I liked them.

That was my first real girlfriend.

I thought Mr.

Donabedian would be on the front porch with a shotgun.

No, he wasn't.

He was always arguing with me about, I had crazy ideas about, you know, for like six months, I read all these books on socialism.

Yeah, and I was arguing about, he was really a hard worker, man.

He sold cars.

He developed this brilliant dealership.

And I'd say to him, Mr.

Donnebude, you're working like 20 hours.

What if the state owned the thing and they allotted you like two cars a month to sell?

You could stay out by your pool.

And he'd say, I wouldn't have a pool.

That victor, if he lived in New York City, now would be voting for Malcolm Moody.

So he really instructed me, and I got out of that six-week phase pretty quickly.

I have three more quicks.

You had a beautiful daughter, though.

She was absolutely beautiful.

Of course.

Cactus heads girl.

She passed away tragically.

Very young, very sad.

All right.

Well, here's 10 laws to live by, right?

It's just the opportunity of my lifetime to be able to listen to a man like you.

I'm 85, missed out on an education due to family breakup.

So now I'm getting caught up on real history.

Thank you, Victor, and your lovely wife.

I don't know what he thinks is going on, but that's

his perception.

So then Cyclist68 writes, I've introduced Victor's show to my brother and three friends.

They have all come back to thank me, being so enamored with his work.

And then the last comment by ADN 1990, Victor, Victor, you should just call Trump and give him your advice.

I mean, he's awesome, but you know, everybody needs a little direction in communicating.

Also, my mama always taught me that two wrongs don't make a right, and I told her, I know that, but it sure the heck makes me feel better

to be mean.

You're my favorite next pet.

I'm going to name it Victor Davis.

Maybe nickname Davey.

So it's nice.

And Victor, people out there naming their pets after you.

Oh, good.

I have a, it doesn't work very well.

I had a, I'll have to be very careful.

There was a former student who was very conservative, a wonderful guy, Hispanic, and he named his son after me.

And I had tutored him.

I must have given him eight independent studies in Latin and Greek.

And I lobbied very hard and got him into Stanford.

He was very bright, but he went Stanford-eyes and got very, very left-wing.

And now he's stuck with this name that is a reminder of a Trump supporter.

So it's very embarrassing, I suppose.

He turned as far left as possible.

And

it's funny about that.

My, you know, I don't know.

I named my children after my parents.

I thought that.

Everybody said, William and Pauline, why'd you do that?

I said, that was my mom and dad's name.

Couldn't you got a Swedish?

My brother named his son Leif, Leif Hanson.

And all my siblings had unique names for their children, but I was very state.

My eldest son is named after his grandfather, James Thomas, but I added Henry Hyde on the birth certificate.

So my oldest son, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that was the last time I got to write,

fill in the birth certificate.

Anyway.

Victor, you've been terrific, and I hope you keep progressing there with the recovery.

Me too.

I think what happened to me today, I took, they allowed me to take Flonase finally, even though I have glaucoma, and I took that.

And what do you call it, Afrin,

and I took another one, and I'm

IOD on.

So I sound a little punchy.

That's on top of the like 30 supplements you take every day.

So, well, whatever.

Hey, thanks, folks, who write me about civil thoughts.

Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up, and you'll get my free weekly email newsletter every Friday.

I said free, and we don't sell your name, and it's 14 recommended readings.

I know you're going to like it.

Cybil Thoughts.com.

Victor, you've been terrific.

Thanks for everything, folks.

Check out Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus.

We will see you soon again with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.