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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is our weekend edition and where we do something a little different on our middle segment.

Today Victor will be talking about one of the seven wonders of the world, the Colossus at Rhodes.

We will then also do or start off with some of the current news.

And the first thing that I thought we should talk about is some of the leaking about Biden from his staff.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson show.

Victor's the Martin and Nilly Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski, Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com, and it's called The Blade of Perseus.

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So Victor, there's been a lot of news coming out.

I guess currently the knives are coming out, as the Daily Mail said it, about what was really going on in the White House while Joe Biden was there, and it appears that he

was not at the helm for a lot of the time.

Not at the helm?

Never heard of a euphemism like that.

Didn't one person say he is dead?

Yeah, yes.

I mean, if you're dead, you're not at the helm.

So, yes, it's coming out now.

And why, before we even go on, why is it coming out?

Because remember, we had this discussion earlier.

Sean Corinne, Jean-Pierre said it was a cheap fake.

Yes.

They're doctoring, but they're picking and choosing videos.

He's a sharp as a tack or fit as a fiddle, she said.

I don't know.

And Camilla Harris, do you remember right after the debate when he imploded on the stage with Donald Trump and went into those brain freezes and mute and wandering eyes and growling?

And by the way, he only was cognizant.

Only cognizant when he was angry.

Every other time he was incoherent, but you get him on Magna or Trump.

And he came to life because he was full of hatred.

And

right after that debate, Camilla Harris said,

he's dynamic.

I resent this.

And then right after the Robert Hurr report, She said, this is vicious.

This is unprofessional.

Remember that, Robert Hurr?

Robert Hurr said, I cannot indict this person, even though there's evidence he committed a felony, because he would come across as a sympathetic old man, confused, befuddled.

And they got angry at that.

They should have been saying, yes,

he committed so many felonies.

He took out these papers for 30 years.

He had them in unsecured locations.

He showed classified material to his ghost rider.

The ghost rider destroyed evidence.

They could throw the book at him.

If this was Donald Trump, he'd be in the can for 30 years.

But he got out because he was able to convince people of the truth that he's non-composment.

And yet they got mad at that.

So

everybody knew it.

I won't mention the show that I was on, but I said very early on in his confusion, he looked reptilian.

And the host reprimanded me.

And

I didn't go on very much after that.

There was a climate you don't, this was on the conservative outlet.

You don't make fun of.

It's not that you're making fun, but you don't tell the truth.

So that narrative, and all of us wrote about it, that mysteriously, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Budicik disappeared in that critical period from March to June of 2020 after Biden had lost the Iowa, Nevada, and New Hampshire caucuses and primaries, and

he was running way behind.

The Obamas said, you know,

we got to get, just like they did, he was created by the sword and he died by the sword.

They had a kind of a virtual coup and said, only Joe Biden from Scranton can provide a moderate facade.

Bernie, get out.

Here's what you're going to get.

You're going to get to run the agenda.

Pete, we'll give you transportation.

Elizabeth, we'll let you sound off and we'll get your, you know, whatever your causes are.

And the Obamas will coordinate with their plants inside.

And Jill and Biden get to play act as if they're first couple.

And that's what happened.

And it was going all right until finally they could no longer lie anymore because of that debate when he simply imploded on the stage.

You know, Donald Trump didn't have a great debate.

He had no debate.

He just every once in a while said,

Mr.

Trump, how would you like to reply?

What did he say?

I don't understand it.

You know, translate.

And that was kind of good that Trump was very good at that.

But

the point that I'm making, everybody knew that he could not fulfill the duties of president, and they all knew they were lying.

So then it begs a question, why are they telling us now?

Yes.

And the answer, and the Wall Street Journal, by the way, had the same type of article.

Oh, really?

Yes, it did.

It did.

I just read it, and it said...

that the aides had to baby him, they had to deny access to the cabinet.

In four years, I think he only had nine cabinet meetings, and Trump had three times that many or four times that many.

And he was incoherent.

He could only talk during the end of the day.

He was too out of it in the morning.

He didn't like to travel.

He got confused.

They looked at the Robert Hurr tapes and it was

incriminating.

They didn't want to release

the audios of those transcripts because

he didn't know when his son died.

And then they said, how dare

he mention Bo,

that prosecute.

No, Joe, you did.

You brought him up.

The prosecutor was surprised and noted that only because it was on your volition you wanted to demagogue the death of your son, which you have done so many times, giving us inaccurate information, claiming he died in a combat zone,

claiming he did not die of a brain tumor, but in theater, you've said on occasions, and or that he was polluted.

He died of pollution pollution in burn pits, fumes.

So you brought it up, and then Hurr only remarked in his report that since you brought it up, you didn't even realize the date that he died.

You'd forgotten it.

Anybody who's lost a child never forgets the date the child dies.

And so he was demagoguing Robert Hurr when he was culpable.

Yeah.

Do you think

Dr.

Jill was actually

president, kind of?

That was the thrust of the Wall Street Journal article that she was coordinating with Ron Kane, the chief of staff,

and then filtering the input from, and we knew who that was, it was Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer with occasional zeal from the squad group, the Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders squad people.

But I get the impression that it was the Obamas that cooked up this whole shenanigan of having the Bidens run for office.

I say Bidens, because he's not able to do anything on his own.

So the question then is, why did it come out now?

And I guess the simplistic reductionist answer is because

Joe Biden can neither hurt nor help anybody.

So the media thinks,

maybe I'll get an award, maybe

I'll get access to Joe Biden, maybe I'll be in the White House.

Nah, he's a lame dog, and he wouldn't know if I was there anyway.

Well, if I say anything about what's really going on, he might hurt me.

He might call up my boss and get me fired.

No,

nobody listens to him anymore.

Well, if he can't help me and he can't hurt me, I'll tell the truth.

But I'll do it in a cowardly way as I always do.

I'll leak.

And that's what they're doing.

Nobody comes on the record.

It was a devastating revelation.

What they basically said is the Obamas and the Clintons and all of that bunch like themselves and like power more than they do the American people.

There is a final irony.

Do we remember Donald Trump his first year

when ex-Obama Pentagon lawyer Rosa Brooks, 11 days after he was inaugurated, wrote in foreign policy?

We've got to get rid of Donald Trump.

We've got to get rid of him.

He's been in office 11 days.

And I think 60 House members introduced impeachment.

He's been there 11 days.

It's time to impeach him.

And what did she say that the remedies were?

A,

impeach.

That take too long.

B, 25th Amendment.

He's not all there.

Nah, you've got to get the cabinet, and it's kind of messy.

Ah, military coup.

Yes, we can get military officers not to follow orders.

That's what she wrote.

Yeah.

Scary.

Yes, and so what they did was almost immediately they created this meme that Donald Trump was crazy.

Remember he fed,

he told everybody to drink bleach.

He said that

people who died at Normandy were suckers.

There was one person who said that.

25 in the room denied.

He'd said that.

He fed too much fish, the koi fish, with the Japanese prime minister.

Oh, yeah, didn't he dump out the whole bag?

He followed what the Japanese.

Japanese ministers.

Yes, but only Donald Trump is.

And they did that.

And so they came to the conclusion.

Was her name?

Bandy Lee?

She was a pseudo-psychiatrist from Yale.

And they dragged her in and did congressional testimony.

And they said, yes, he's crazy.

You need a forcible intervention for you, you know.

And then she wrote a book.

I mean, she edited a book and they paraded around Capitol Hill for a day.

And then they said, he's crazy, crazy, crazy.

We got to know he's not there.

So then Ron Jackson, the doctor, said, We're giving the Monterey cognitive assessment.

Yeah.

And then Trump,

as Trump, only Trump can do, is,

yeah, it was hard.

Most people couldn't pass it.

Of course, I aced it.

I can recite numbers backwards and forwards, and I know the difference between a dromedary and a camel.

It's easy.

And they had little pictures.

He went through it.

It was really funny.

And of course, then people suggested that Joe Biden take that test later.

So they always project, everybody remember that.

Whatever they feel insecure or they are vulnerable, they project that

culpability, insecurity, whatever we exposure under their enemies.

So they knew that Joe Biden was non-composmentes.

And they knew that when they were thinking of running him against Trump, the last two years of Trump's

tenure.

So then they just said, well, we know that Joe's senile, but we'll say Trump's senile.

And that's what they did.

And now we know that they were all, How cruel to do that to the American people to say,

well, the guy that we gave the nuclear codes to, and the guy that was in charge of destroying

our deterrence abroad by giving $50 billion in Afghanistan,

and the guy who now is taking credit for a calmer Middle East after he tried to repress Israel, that guy they knew at the time

was incapable of handling the job of president.

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the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

So, Victor, I have a few things that I think are kind of a mosaic, and maybe you can make sense out of them.

The first thing is, and it's news, that the Congress hasn't yet passed their funding bill, and there's a lot of pressure because it's due on Friday.

And Trump is saying that the bill that they have has it's too much spending and policy extras so he's encouraging the Republicans not to pass it and the second thing in this mosaic is doge met for the first time and

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and then the third thing in this mosaic is Newsom standing up and claiming that California has been doing the work of doge before doge was even created which doge is remember intended to increase government efficiency.

So I thought all of those things are happening in the financial government finance at this moment, and they kind of,

I can't tell you what sense they make or what nonsense they make.

Well, the problem is that

we spent $7 trillion the last four years.

And we're exceeding the authorized budget.

So you have to get a continuing resolution to continue funding the government.

That means that's translated into borrow money because you don't have it.

And traditionally it works like this.

It happens a lot.

And traditionally

the Democrats then,

depending on who holds the House and how many rhinos there are on the Republican side, or there are no conservative Democrats anymore, but

the Democrats then say this,

okay,

we want

these many trillions, billions put in there.

And it's usually stuff for government employees

trying to bankrupt Social Security by extending it to people who otherwise in traditional terms wouldn't get it, like government employees who have their own federal pensions,

etc.

And they run it up, and then they say to the Republicans, hey,

if you don't improve this at the last moment, then

you're going to shut down the government.

Because that's the only way you can stop us.

If you shut down the government, we're going to say you're throwing people in wheelchairs and the elderly over a cliff and you're cutting Social Security, even though Social Security may be exempt.

So that's what they do.

And then the Republicans react in predictable ways.

The majority say, no, we're not going to be held up by you guys.

We know you so well.

So we are going to have just a simple continued resolution.

We're going to just authorize the existing budget.

We'll try to cut it a little bit and then we'll have this fight next year.

But there's always some, oh my God, I don't want to go back to my district and said that I cut people

dole off and I'm going to be, let's just give them what they want and we can go home for Christmas.

So unfortunately, Speaker Mike Johnson was vulnerable to that allurement and he de facto agreed.

Well you can't agree to that when you have Vivek and

Elon so prominently saying we've got to cut all these money.

You're telling to them,

you're telling both of them, we promise kind of sort of, we'll listen to you, kind of sort of cut a lot of billions in next year, but right now we're going to borrow a lot more billions.

And they're saying you don't have to.

Did you read the 1,500-page

pulp?

It's full of stuff that's not necessary.

And it's just the opposite of what you think, Speaker Johnson.

If you do, right now, show that you have a backbone, and you make the argument to the American people, the taxpayer, you don't have to pay for all this crap.

We're not going to add stuff on, lard it up.

Just stick with us, and we can get some concessions from the Democrats.

If you do that, we will have more clout next year.

Because they'll say, you know, they started from the very first opportunity they have.

But if you don't do that, And you cave and you approve all this stuff, they're going to throw it back in your face.

Hey, well, the Republicans voted for her.

They can't cut.

They just added 200 billion here, 400 billion there.

Now they want to cut.

They're hypocrites.

So they've got to stand firm and take the heat and cut.

And Johnson will lose his speakership.

They only have one or two seat margin.

Foolishly, they appointed too many people

from the House of Representatives to run agencies and cabinetic sees.

And then this mysterious California late vote, I don't know what happened.

California went 57% from Biden, but

after the deadline, mail-in ballots came in and they were up to 65%.

Wow.

Yeah, so, and that, the down ballots destroyed our Congress

people in our area.

Mike Garcia was a wonderful Congressman.

John Duarte was a wonderful, and they lost just by a hair's breadth, and we had lost in Orange County.

Very suspicious.

But the net result is that exuberance where they said they were going to have 223 seats or 12 vote margin.

Those two factors combine, and they have no margin of error.

They've got a lot of loose cannons that they have to

pacify.

They have to be like the Democrats.

They have to stick together, and they're not known to do that.

So we'll see.

Yeah, who will.

Well, what did you think about Newsom claiming that

his California government has been dodging even before dodging?

Let me think about that.

$76 billion annual deficit, probably $1 trillion in unfunded liabilities if we count all of the various pensions that are unfunded.

And he gave $500 million to illegal aliens during COVID.

And

he has threatened to borrow another $25 million to use lawsuits to resist the roundup that will include the roundup of

Felons

in California

Sanctuary City jurisdictions.

How about the

$15 billion

blown on high-speed rail?

What is the Medicaid budget, a Medi-Cal budget, I should say?

It's almost about over 30% of the budget.

So every time he says that we are a warm, caring people and we don't do this, then he raises taxes and the result is right now we have a 13.3 income tax rate at the high point.

And we're 76 trillion.

Aren't they talking about that?

76 billion.

And Ron DeSantis in Florida has no income tax and he's running a surplus.

Wow.

And you tell me how that's true.

And I drive on Florida, I've driven on Florida freeways compared to the 99 or 101.

They're paradise compared.

And aren't they thinking of raising the highest tax rate to 16.1 or something?

They're claiming they're going to do that.

If they do that, there's going to be max, mass exodus, because you've add that with the federal and the Obamacare and the payroll taxes.

You're getting up to 60%.

Yeah, nothing for it.

No, and then that's on top of the highest gas taxes.

The the Air Resources Board, just without any

public support, no vote, no legislative approval, just by fiat said we're going to have 62 cents more in gas taxes.

Because of our environmental blended requirements for fuel and the prior taxes, we're the most expensive place to drive in the nation.

Wouldn't the State Assembly claim that you don't have the right to do that and put some reason for the taxes?

They're not Democrats in California.

They're left-wing fanatics.

And they're all of the coastal jurisdictions and districts.

They have a supermajority in the Hou in the state Senate, the state assembly.

They don't have a.

We've had 12,

actually it will be 16 years of Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom.

These are very wealthy people.

That's the problem.

They're very, very wealthy Bay Area people.

And they're never subject to any of the consequences of their ideology.

Gavin Newsom said,

we're going to get, and he did, we want illegal aliens to come here.

We're the most welcoming, fair, high-minded, and everybody in Palo Alto and Menlo Park and Atherton and Malibu say, oh gosh, aren't we nice?

We're so wonderful.

However, if he had said, we're not going to burden Mendota, we're not going to burden San Joaquin, we're not going to burden Parlier, we're not going to burden Selma, they're already broke, we're not going to dump a bunch of people from the poorest regions of the world into their school districts, their health care facilities, we have a better idea.

We, being ultra-liberal in Malibu

have so many vacation homes, so many, and we're going to have a volunteer effort to put people in them.

And Stanford University, where I work, in the summer, I just walk by those dorms and there's a few programs, but most of them are empty.

Thousands of beautiful rooms that could be accommodating.

We let Hamas

supporters camp four months with tents.

If we can do that for many of them who are foreign students, why doesn't the Student Radical Council say, you know what?

Not in my name are we going to deport people.

So we declare Stanford University's free speech area a campground, just like we did last year.

Please camp out.

And why doesn't Gavin Newsom say, I just bought a $9 million mansion.

It's got a beautiful lawn, and I'm going to start a program.

that all government servants and former government servants with big lawns shall host illegal immigrants, which they welcome in.

So, Joe, your beach house, we could put about 20 families in front of your beach house.

And Barack, you have, I keep saying, a 2,000-gallon propane tank.

And you've got 20 acres.

Well, I think we could get 5,000 people in there.

Jerry Brown, you were for this.

You're up in Grass Valley and a pleasant retreat.

Why don't we send 10,000 illegal aliens to camp out on your Grass Valley estate?

Barbara Sprice and Scher, you've got those beautiful homes in LA, Malibu area, and unless you've sold them, you could put 200 there.

Well, they probably still have them.

They moved to England, so they should have.

They say they did.

Richard Gere, maybe, or one or two of them.

They're not going to do that.

They're going to say, I'm going to move, I'm going to move, I'm going to move, I'm going to move, I'm going to stay here.

That's what they do.

They always do that.

It's a performance art.

I love this Malibu Beach.

Yeah.

But where else are they going to live?

Just remember one thing about Malibu.

They passed a law the left did that said that every Californian had a right to go to a beach and have public access across private property.

That was a coastal commission.

So every certain hundred yards you have to have access.

That means a rich person has to scoot over a little bit and give the state access for people like us.

And when you go to Malibu, as I discovered when in my contemplation of my teaching I wanted to take a little break and drive across Malibu, I noticed something about those very nice, liberal, caring people.

They had bougainvillas, and they were kind of growing into those spaces, and they had spikes about three inches long.

And I thought, why would these actors want to deny the poor access to their beach?

They're just going to walk by their mansions.

And I thought, oh, when you go on the beach, you look at their mansions and they would have to see in front of their beautiful $50 million estates people from Guatemala.

They might urinate on the beach.

They might

inject drugs.

They might defecate.

They might fornicate like homeless people.

And you have to support that, but only in the abstract.

That's how the left thinks, everybody.

And that's why they lost this election, because finally the right

woke up and said, we're going to expose these people.

And when Ron DeSantis and Governor Abbott dreamed up that idea, why do we burden burden our own communities when the people who were behind this in Martha's Vineyard, Chicago, and New York get off with a free pass with no burden of accommodating 12 million people?

And they started bussing them at that point.

You know what happened in Chicago and New York?

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back to talk a little bit about the Colossus Roads.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

You can find Victor at X.

His handle is at BD Hansen and at Facebook on Hansen's Morning Cup.

So, Victor, I don't know much about the Colossus of the Rhodes, so I'm looking forward to your discussion of it.

You know, we've talked about these wars from antiquity to the present.

We went through in-depth World War II for six or seven episodes.

We've gone great literature of the West, but I thought we would do a different type of cultural exploration, and that would just be at certain times we'd explore certain themes, great cities of the world,

great men of the world.

And one of the things that great

things to see, and in the ancient world, in the Hellenistic period, that's period

from

Alexander the Great's

either 333 or 323, it's variously named, either from his conquest, his beginning, his invasion

of Persia or his death and the foundation of his successor's empire to the Battle of Actium

in

31 BC.

They were compilers.

So Philo of Byzantium, for example, I think it's excerpted in the historian Diodorus.

They talked about one of the best places in the world as the world opened up.

And Greeks, who were the most inquisitive and the most expressive and had the richest letters started to make lists, Hellenistic lists.

And one of them was,

what are the seven most impressive things in the world now that we have access to the world?

And they came up with seven.

They often did that in Greek.

They used iconic numbers, seven sages, seven

wonders of the world, etc.

Two of them then they decided were in Greece.

One was the Colossus, and we'll get to that in a second at Rhodes, and the other was the monumental statue of Zeus at Olympia, and that temple foundation is still there.

Two were

now then Asian Mayor and now what we call Turkey, the nation of Turkey.

That was the monumental tomb of Mausolis, when we get the word Mausalium at Bodrom, ancient Heliconarsis.

and the temple of Artemis, the huge temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

You can go to Ephesus today, you'll see the foundation.

And two were in Egypt.

The monumental, I'm keeping using that word monumental, the monumental pyramids at Giza under the Pharaohs, and the historic Ptolemaic lighthouse in the harbor of Alexandria.

And then there was one in Iraq at the hanging

gardens of Babylon.

Babylon is outside, I don't know, 30 miles.

I've been to Baghdad twice.

And it's outside of Baghdad.

And I went with a group and saw it during the war when I was in vetted.

Okay,

so I thought we could talk about that.

When I was a little kid,

a professor at Berkeley, who was a professor of my mother's, lived alone, and he was aged, and he asked my mom to help him with legal matters and things, and when he passed away, he gave all his books.

So as a kid, I had these

Bullfinch's mythology and all of these books about Greece.

That's what really sparked sparked my interest.

And I wanted to read about the seven wonders of the world.

And some days I thought, I'm going to go to all of them.

I was kind of like that character in Game of Thrones who crosses off all the dead people she wants.

For me, it was always these sites.

And at 20, I first went to Greece, and I decided I could knock off two or three of them.

I saw the Temple of Olympian Zeus.

I went to, actually, I did a lot.

I saw the Giza Pyramids.

I went to the site of the lighthouse 3.

I went to Ephesus 4.

I went to Rhodes 5.

And I didn't think I would ever, really, to tell you the truth, get to the mausoleum.

I did that when I was 35 in Bourdrom.

And then I finally,

at the age of

53, I went to Baghdad-Babylon.

But the Colossus of Rhodes was,

it was the island of Rhodes.

You can go there today, and there's a capital, there's a number of classical cities, Lindos, but the capital city of Rhodes has a beautiful natural harbor.

In antiquity, it was one of the wealthiest, most monumental, and impressive cities of the ancient world.

It's unfortunately on an earthquake fall.

And Demetrius, the besieger, in 304 BC, tried to destroy the city and take it.

It had revolted against his successor kingdom.

And he failed.

And it was kind of

an iconic event in ancient history that he spent all of this money, he made all of these huge siege machines, and he failed.

And the Rhodians then sold off, he abandoned all of his equipment, he fled in disgrace, and they melted down his armor, all of his abandonment, kind of like us in Afghanistan.

It would be as if the Afghans sold off their $50 billion in American equipment and then restored the statues at Bayem, which they blew up, by the way.

So they came into all this money and they decided to build a monumental thank offering to

the god Helios.

That was their patron city god.

And they cast a huge bronze statue, 100 feet, 104 feet high.

That's one-third the size of the Statue of Liberty.

That's exactly the size of, essentially the size of Jesus the Savior that you see above Rio de Janeiro, you know, with his hands out.

Yes.

I think that's one of the modern seven wonders of the world.

It was that big.

And they cast it, and around 280, they finished.

And for 54 years, it stood over, I think it was at the harbor, that's still disputed, this huge statue of the sun god.

And it's disputed.

Did he have a torch in one hand?

What was he doing?

His face is on coins, so we know what it looked like, the facial part.

And we have descriptions of how he cast it.

So he built steel supports,

we would call them girders.

I shouldn't say steel, probably iron, and then they implanted it in a monumental marble platform.

And then they put bronze cast plates around the girders and shaped them, cast them, and then they filled it with rocks and soil.

So it was solid.

And it was just stunning when you came into the harbor, you saw this.

There was a lot of 19th century, going back to the Renaissance, people argued over where it was.

And

there arose a myth that it

had one leg on one side of the entrance of the harbor and the other leg on the other.

And I think now modern scholars say that's romance, that it was probably somewhere overlooking the harbor.

It's kind of funny because it's really lived in the imagination of Westerners,

the idea.

I know when I was a kid, I thought Colossus of Rhodes.

And when you remember Game of Thrones,

also the Fellowship of the Rings, didn't they?

Yes.

In the Game of Thrones, it was this free city of Ravos.

Remember, and they had it as if it was striding.

The ship sailed under his legs.

I even think it made a horn.

I can't remember the episodes, but it made a sound as you came in.

That was based on the Colossus of Rhodes.

And then in the,

you never want to cite by memory or

without notes anything about the Lord of the Rings, because there are people who memorize it.

But when the last scene,

when they're going down the

Anduan River, they go through that narrow pass and that's Angoroth I think it's called in the book and there's two huge statues and each one of them holds a sword and I think one holds a cord for arrows in the movie as I remember they're Isildur and

they're Isildor and the first king of Gondor, I'll remember his name and it's not Elisa, that's the term they use for Aragorn.

But anyway, they guard and they have their hands out like

you know they're stopping somebody.

One of the hands.

And each of them has a hand and it says, you are now entering the realm of Gondor.

And in the movie, they change the music and it gets very somber and majestic.

Elindal.

Elindal and Isildor in the movie.

I don't think the book, I remember I was a kid, I read it twice.

It's Isldore and...

There's another person, and I forgot the name of him.

But in the movie,

they have the two first, the king and the son.

Yeah.

And it is a same type of statue.

This statue, as I said, lasted 54 years, and then they had an earthquake.

So it crumbled.

And it fell over, and it became as wondrous when it was on the ground because people could, tourists could walk up to it and look inside how it was built.

And we have a first, I think, a couple of first-hand, maybe plenty the,

I think it was plenty Elder, or Pliny the Younger, excuse me, described what it was like, and you could see the interior rocks that gave it bulk so that it wouldn't just fall over in the wind or something.

It was solid.

And people

from

it fell, as I said, 54 years after

280 B.C.

and then it just stayed there.

And sometime in the 7th century under the Islamic conquest when the Corsairs and people swept into the Aegean, they conquered Rhodes and then they reportedly, according to contemporary accounts, I think it was 900 camels that took to cart away all the bronze which they melted down for weaponry, but I think mostly coinage.

And so today they found some, 19th century they found some bits that they missed that were actually in the harbor, but

everything was taken away.

And so ever since that and in the continuance of curiosity during modern classical scholarship and archaeology, people have speculated.

So if you look at scholarly articles, there's so many renditions of what the statue was like, what type was he holding a torch, was Helios holding a torch, where was he?

Some people even said, well, we found a place on the Acropolis.

He wasn't even near the port.

But as I remember in the 19th century, they found a round podium right on a bluff overlooking the harbor as you came in.

That was where it was postulated the Colossus stood.

So it was

fascinating.

I've been to Rhodes and when I was there of course I went there twice, once with the American school people and when I was a student and we all posed where we thought the 19th century's location had been identified and you kind of posed that you were the Colossus.

But

it's wonderful to go there.

Rhodes is a beautiful place.

But of all the wonders of the world, that was the one that sort of captures a young kid's imagination the most because

the idea that somebody would build that.

And this is kind of funny.

I remember there was a, it was in antiquity, or there was, maybe it was in a Greek newspaper.

I try to read the Greek newspapers a lot.

But sometime about 10 years ago, some German scholars said that they were going to build a new colossus there.

And they even talked about putting one leg over an entrance to the harbor.

And they were not going to make it, I think, three, 100 feet.

They were going to make it three or four hundred feet, huge.

And then the EU meltdown came and priest was broke and they stopped it.

But

I think the things like that capture people's imaginations.

If you go and look at the list of the largest statues in the world, they're almost all non-Western.

They're mostly all from China and India, and they tend to be Buddhas or

Indic gods.

And they're massive, 400 or 500 feet.

Statue of liberty is 300,

but I think that's like 20th or something on the list of world statues in size and birth.

So I think, you know, that's what I really liked about Hillsdale's Cathedral.

It was kind of a 19th-century idea they built at Hillsdale College.

I think it was the largest religious building church for five years in a five-year period that was built within the United States.

It's massive and beautiful.

And, you know, we kind of, Marxists, when I was in college, all of my Marxist professors would say about the pyramids or things like the Parthenon.

Well, you know, these are just the elite insects that were poaching off the proletariat, and they made these vanity projects, and they took capital and labor away from the economy.

But

maybe not.

Maybe they served as inspirational, iconic figures that inspired people.

And of course, they grew tourists, which

kind of like

the Colossus was kind of like when I grew up the Seattle Space Needle or the Great Arch West, you know, go west young man in St.

Louis, the big stone arch, gateway to the west.

Elon, are you listening?

Why don't you, Elon, just take, oh, I don't know, $200 million

and try to make a Colossus of Rhodes.

I don't know if we want Trump as a Colossus.

He doesn't have to be a living person, but somebody that exemplifies the American spirit.

And maybe at a harbor, maybe in San Francisco, as part of your dreams are restoring that now

city in decline.

Can you imagine that?

If you came in by the Golden Gate, right next to the Golden Gate, you'd have a Colossus with its hands out.

Or if you want to stop foreign attack, you could have a Gondor-like king with his fist palm pointing out at you.

Stop, like a policeman.

Stop.

Beware.

You're entering the majestic city of San Francisco.

Behave yourself.

Yeah, I'm just just trying to think who that would be, like a George Patton or.

I don't know, somebody that we all know, maybe Elon can make a.

I said in one of our podcasts, I got a lot of letters about it, that I said he was a Renaissance figure.

I mean, after all, for all the criticism he's getting, they all said it was a stupid idea that he bought Twitter.

Twitter saved us.

It really did.

If Twitter had been in the hands of the left during this last election,

they would have kept censoring the news and warping the news and allowed people to be freely expressive.

It was a wonderful investment.

I think it will eventually pay off for Elon.

So, as I said before, he is kind of a colossus.

That line, do you remember in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar when they're talking about Caesar when he comes back and they said

he is a that's where we get a colossus word in modern English usage.

He is like a Colossus, and

he stands astride us, and we, poor mortals, are

nothing in comparison in our pathetic graves.

I can't remember.

I used to know it pretty well.

It comes from Julius Caesar Shakespeare's play.

Yeah.

And it compares Julius Caesar to the Colossus of Rhodes.

I might be very frightened if it were the left that were trying to decide who should be representing.

Karl Marx,

Eugene Debs, Bernie Sanders.

Scary.

Yeah, but you should have Elon Musk.

In one hand, he would hold a Tesla,

and in the other hand, he would hold a SpaceX

rocket.

How's that?

Yeah.

Striding across

the globe or something, or holding the globe in one hand.

So

if somebody's going to write me, Victor, do not feed these.

Elon's megalomania.

He is already well under the way of being

too powerful, too proud.

I don't think so.

I think we all owe him a great debt.

He saved NASA.

He's saved the car industry in a sense.

He's saved the social media industry.

And I hope he can save us from ourselves and our debt.

We'll see.

I hope so too.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about the left that is fumbling around trying to figure out whatever happened.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

We're back.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So Victor, we I know we've had a lot of discussion of the left wing trying to

make sense of the election.

And now we have some new

things that have been added to this picture here.

And that is that recently Brett Stevens, who was a never Trumper from long time ago,

nine years ago, as he admits, has written a column that

he is done with never Trump.

And it's a funny little column that claims that they weren't wrong about January 6th, but they didn't realize that the people didn't care.

that Donald Trump was tougher on diplomacy than they actually understood or represented him as, and that his rhetoric appealed to the average person, especially Hispanic and black males and the youth generation.

And he finishes this article with this, if the audience will bear with me, it's a very strange article where he kind of doesn't admit his own wrongs.

But he says, Let's enter the new year by wishing the new administration well, by giving some of Trump's cabinet pics the benefit of the doubt, by dropping the lurid historical comparisons to past dictators, by not sounding paranoid about the ever-looming end of democracy, by hoping for the best and knowing that we need to fight the wrongs that are real and not merely what we feel.

That whatever happens, this too shall pass.

What an ending.

So he tells us he voted in that op-ed for Camilla Harris.

Brett,

I know you're having a come to Jesus moment after Donald Trump won the popular and electoral vote, after he walked into Notre Dame and he caused the stampede of former Euroskeptics and Trump haters who wanted to worship him before he was even president.

I know he's in some polls pulling 54%, so I understand now why you've had this about face, but I wish you'd had it before the election.

If you've just written this before the election, can you imagine?

If you'd taken the courage to suggest that everything you saw was evident to you before the election.

It was.

You made a great cause.

You said that you had predicted that his tariffs would ruin the economy, and they didn't.

You said his swagger abroad and his berating of NATO's failure to comply and all that would ruin American foreign policy and cause wars.

His was the only administration in four that we didn't have a major war.

You said that all of his chaotic behavior would disunite the

country and compared to Joe Biden or the fur that he invoked, he was not a divider.

So you were wrong, but you were wrong in a way that you knew before the election.

So why are you doing this now?

There can only be two reasons, Brad.

Either you didn't have the courage of your convictions and you thought that the American, you didn't really think the American people would vote for him and therefore you did not want to be in the minority again,

or two,

you thought that if you vote this column before the election, it would help Donald Trump get elected, and they would blame you.

And now, after it's over, there's no culpability, no exposure possible.

So now you tell us,

what, in the ninth year of the Trump phenomenon, after nine years of saying that he was

satanic almost.

I mean, in fairness to you, you didn't go the full derangement syndrome.

I don't think you did.

I didn't read all of your columns, but to the same degree of Bill Kristol or David Flum or George Will or Jonah Goldberg.

But you're telling us now, he came on that escalator, as I remember, in 2015.

That's nine and a half years ago.

All of your sentiment, although it's tinged with little jabs, you know, that he's a liar, he's a braggart, he's this, this,

and I would say you'd compare to what?

Bernie Sanders?

So what I'm getting at, I wish you had done it earlier.

You would have had more credibility.

It would have, more people would have paid attention to it.

Now, I think it's just, it's admirable that you're no longer a deranged, obsessed, fanatic, never trumper, a dead end

whose ranks are now evaporating into nothingness.

But I wish you had done it earlier.

Yeah, so do I.

Well, the second one in this group of people who are re-examining the left is Ram Emmanuel.

And he had an interesting article discussing what went wrong with the left.

And was, what was interesting was this: that he covered two decades.

So he said, well, the people grew disenchanted with the establishment under George W.

Bush with the Iraq war and the financial crisis in 2008.

And then the Democrats became the establishment in 2020 when the COVID epidemic took over.

And that's where they gained the ire of the people.

And so

Democrats then went on

the road to

transgendered,

everybody's got to have the right bathroom.

And you were saying that who was the champion of this correct view?

Who was the champion of the no,

what he's saying is that

which one you mentioned

two people?

I'm just talking, Rom Emmanuel.

Yeah, I know.

But the only reason I asked that.

Yeah.

There was a brilliant column today by a person.

I don't know him, so I'm not trying to just praise somebody I know, but his name is David Samuels, and he wrote that in tablet.

Yeah.

It had a title about the Obamas.

But it was exactly that.

That they were wrong because they became the establishment and everybody hated the establishment.

And that's what did a manufacturer.

Yes, and he puts the blame.

He's talking about the technocracy and the perversion of the media and the creation of sound chambers, echo chambers.

Yeah.

But they were hypocritical, and they were wealthy, elite, powerful people.

Unfortunately, this

Obamas were emblematic of that.

And they ignored the problems of the people and the economy, the border, and the...

I read the Ram Emmanuel.

So I was thinking that while you were quoting Ram Emmanuel, I maybe had read that Samuel's article because it was similar.

But Ram Emmanuel,

as I recall reading the piece that you're referring to, it wasn't necessarily, I mean, it was kind of disingenuous.

It wasn't necessarily a

criticism of the Democrats.

It was just, we are so morally superior to everybody and we're so intellectually superior that we just didn't get that across because we talked to each other.

So it was a problem of messaging.

We've got to reach out to ordinary people and not live in a bubble.

It was not

The

messenger, we could have had any messenger.

We could have had

Camilla Harris sit there all day long on Joe Rogan and she still make a fool of herself and lose the election.

We could have had Joe Biden sharp as attack fit as a fiddle and he still would have lost the election given what he was promoting.

He was the person Ram Emmanuel met, remember what he said?

Never let a serious crisis go to waste.

He was referring to the aftermath of the 2008 meltdown,

in which he was basically saying, as he elaborated on that quote, that this is a time to get socialist practices in because people are terrified of capitalism.

And more importantly, that's the climate in which they pushed down this god-awful Obamacare,

which has made health care go way beyond the rate of inflation each year, as far as its cost.

But it's just one of these,

it's just, it's not like

I shouldn't mislead people.

They came to similar criticisms of elements of the democratic delusions, but Ram Emmanuel is not confronting the truth, that it's innate with them.

And what the Democratic Party became is the logical trajectory in which it was headed.

Samuel says it's worse than that.

It was a cultural revolution in which they suppressed free speech and they created artificial norms and vocabulary and reference and technology that you have for the first time Google changing the order of searches and Facebook and Twitter suppressing free expression and working with the FBI and creating this new gender chauvinism fanaticism and words like Latinx,

safe spaces.

It was a cultural revolution.

I've talked about that too.

And it was very dangerous and he believes it

was emblematic of the Obamas.

They were the ones that first tried to wreck the progress of the civil rights movement, which was on its way to

Martin Luther King's dream that race would be incidental

to who we are, the content of our character now.

He was the one that destroyed that, Obama.

He came up with these terms diversity

and,

you know, diversity, diversity, DEI, that all started with Obama.

And so Samuels faults him for what he did.

He staged a cultural revolution among elite people

who knew in their hearts that we were reaching a point of psychological, spiritual, and even material parity, where race was increasingly not important.

But he also knew that this rising elite black and diverse minority class could not give that up.

because they wanted an edge.

And their way of thinking, I should be anchor man.

I should be the special, special assistant to the president.

I should be, I don't want to be the president of Cal State Fresno.

I want to be this president of Harvard.

And the only way I can do that is to publish, work hard.

But why would human nature want me to do that when I can just yell racism, racism, racism, underrepresentation, underrepresentation, merit construct?

That all came in.

It didn't come in, but it was empowered by Obama.

And Samuels, I remember, had written an earlier essay,

Dave Garrell, I guess, the author of a biography of Obama that was devastating in its comprehensiveness.

The Obama fraud.

He was, remember, a constitutional lawyer and contract, was hired to teach contracts, never really did.

He was given a year to do nothing to write a book, and he didn't write a book.

Instead, he outsourced his memoir to

Bill Ayers.

I mean, everything about it.

And it wasn't even a memoir.

It was a fantasy novel, basically.

Yeah, at least that's what he said about the girl he dated.

And other things as well.

So he was a total fraud.

And one of the things that was

at the end of the Samuels article, and by the way, it's relevant because Ram Emmanuel was the architect of Obama.

Remember, he was chief of staff?

And he was sort of the tough guy that would say things other people wouldn't and get in fights and take on the right and a brawler.

Then he became mayor of Chicago and then all of a sudden he realized that

the black left-wing class were never going to accept him

as someone who wanted to make changes like rein in the teachers' union, balance the budget.

He couldn't do that.

So therefore he was, and they were anti-Semitic, the left-wing black elite, as we know, from

the home of the dear Reverend Wright and Jesse Jackson.

But

I I think his son also was mugged right near the

mayoral mansion in Chicago.

So he got a dose of reality.

His brother is a super agent, multi-multi-millionaire, but very successful agent in Hollywood.

The whole family was very talented, but they were, he was, Rama Manuel was kind of the

silencer, the hitman, the tough guy in the Clinton, and then they outsourced him to Obama.

But Obama never felt comfortable with him.

Obama never felt comfortable with Jewish liberals.

He never did.

He had a deep-seated resentment.

He often expressed that with his hatred of Israel, his famous thing, we have to have daylight between us and Israel.

And he did so much damage in the Middle East.

Maybe he got that from Reverend Wright, who didn't

really like Israel either.

You mean that Reverend Wright, his personal pastor who married them, and he said,

remember when Reverend Wright said, No, no, no, not God bless America, goddamn,

remember that?

Yes.

Chickens coming home to roost?

And then they asked Obama, I think it was a Chicago sometime.

I'm doing this if I remember, it was 20 years ago, not quite, but they said,

Senator Obama, did you go to Reverend Wright?

This was right before he said all this, and he wanted to cash in on the fact that he wasn't an atheist intellectual, but he wanted to appeal to the black middle class.

And remember, David Axelrod,

as Samuels points out, was hired.

He didn't want to work for Obama.

He was hired under duress because he had a reputation for

getting black

candidates elected to high positions in municipalities, mayor, Fanny Willis-type district attorneys.

And he did that not by getting out the black vote,

but by going to the upper, white and upper upper classes, the people with the money, and he would either guilt trip them, I know you're racist, but you have a chance to show everybody that you're not racist by voting for Barack Obama.

Or

show, lead to America, be our spiritual leaders, go ahead of the gang, get ahead of the crowd, you can do it, you can vote for a brilliant never

this candidate has these requisites and he has a record of physical sobriety, none of that, none of the issues.

It was all illusionary.

And he was the one that then recreated Barack Obama.

Samuels points that out that he was brilliant in the way he did it, although he was utterly cynical.

And he gave us Barack Obama.

Yeah,

sad to say.

Barack Obama.

There's a great line in this article today by Samuels, where,

I've read so many of this morning, I got up at four and read about five articles, but I think it's in Samuels, where he basically says Obama had been defeated as a House candidate and badly so.

And he really wanted to get into politics, but he was inauthentic.

So

he was reaching out to two people

to help him rebrand as a black candidate.

David Oxelrod, who had this genius for doing whatever it took to get white people to vote for blacks.

Remember, he was the one that leaked the Ryan divorce records that was the opponent to Barack Obama that were sealed.

And then somehow he called his friends up at at the court and

got them unsealed to Obama's benefit.

And the other person

that Obama was desperately wanted to meet was Jesse Jackson Jr.

Remember they were on TV today with Sr.

and they had a hot mic moment.

Didn't Jesse Jackson Sr.

say, I would like to cut his

and then it was a pejorative word or expletive for testicle Off.

He said that while it was pontificating.

Wow.

You better be careful.

Keep your what friends close and your enemy friends closer.

Yeah, we've survived.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I was when Brett Stevens, I I had two nightmarish experiences.

I watched on my laptop today Camela Harris's speech yesterday,

I guess it was yesterday, where she looked almost intoxicated.

And she was cackling and giggling the whole time.

And she was kind of trying to make fun of herself.

It was really sad, but she was almost woozy.

And then I read the Brett Stevens, Maya Culpo, Maya Culpo, Maya Mexima Culpa,

a bed.

And he says he voted for it.

And I thought, you voted for a candidate like that who's on series?

Do you realize what she would have done to the country had she been elected?

You've still got Trump derangement syndrome.

I mean, that is crazy, too.

Yeah, it is.

You had

the thing that was weird before she even came in the race, and I assume you would have voted for Biden.

And what was unique about the 2024 race, unlike 2016 and 2020,

you had initially two candidates, and they had one thing in common.

Donald Trump had four years of governance, right?

And in 2024, Joe Biden had four years of governance.

So when

Donald Trump was running against Joe Biden until July of this year, the voters had a very unique opportunity they rarely have ever, if ever, they've had.

They could say, do you want 2017 to 2021 or do you want 2021?

to 2020 25.

You've got four years in each case.

You've got Biden, and he's he's almost done with his tenure, and you have Trump who's done.

Now it's 2024.

Whom do you want?

And that was one of the reasons among many why Biden was way behind.

And I say way behind, I don't mean way behind necessarily 10 points.

That doesn't happen in a divided America anymore.

When you get 50% of the vote, that is a referendum.

And you carry the Electoral College with 312 votes.

And you have then the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and the the Supreme Court, and you have a 60% majority on most of the polls in favor of most of your issues - border, crime, energy, foreign policy, economy.

That's what Trump did.

Yes.

Victor, let's do one last thing.

There has been news that came out about the Fannie Willis case on election interference against Donald Trump.

Apparently,

I think it's the Appeals Court in Georgia has said that she needs to be removed from the case and has no authority to proceed.

And there's an appearance of impropriety.

Those are the two big charges here.

Does this have any impact on the other cases against Donald Trump?

Or what are your thoughts on in general?

Well,

there's only three left now.

There's the sentencing of Alvin Bragg's case.

And, excuse me, there's really only two left.

Eugene Carroll's civil suit is over with.

That's on appeal, that $80 million defamation sexual assault claim.

Funded, that suit, by the way, was funded by Reid Hoffman, the billionaire Silicon Valley trumpeter, who now said the other day, there's a 50%

chance that I could be an object of retribution if I don't.

Well, I don't know unless you're legally culpable, Reed, but you tried to destroy the man by cooking up this crazy suit, and then you funded it with these high-priced lawyers to bankrupt him.

And I wouldn't take that kindly.

I'm not saying he's going to warp the weapons, the legal system, but if there was something wrong, obviously you'd have to be accountable like anybody else, not saying there is.

But in any case, all we really, Letita James is up on appeal.

That was that huge.

That was the funniest of all, I think.

Overvaluing his house.

The Deutsche Bank comes in and says,

I don't think he overvalued Mor-Lago.

I think if you look at the price today, given what we knew, it was undervalued.

And by the way, we issued the multi-million dollar loan.

He paid it back on time.

We had a hefty interest profit, and we would sure do it again.

And she said,

You don't know how you were wrong.

And for the first time in the history of New York State, I'm going to say if the bank doesn't know that they're wrong, they're wrong still.

Because I'm a genius, Letita James, and I'm an expert in New York real estate.

And

they got a jury.

So the only one really left, Jack Smith folded his tent after the Supreme Court ruling and the change in the election.

So the only one that was really viable is we have Alvin Bragg, where Judge Mouchon is holding the sword of Damocles over Trump.

Oh, we're going to get you after four years and sentence you.

And then we have Fannie Willis.

Now she's taken off the case, but the judges and the appellate court did not remove the indictment.

But do you really think that the attorney, that the Fulton County prosecutor is going to say, hmm,

ah, Fanny Willis blew through millions of dollars in a wasted legal fee.

She gave this paramour phony Nathan Wade $700,000 in fees.

He was an utter incompetent.

And then the two of them caravanned around the world on our dime, and then they both went in and lied about their relationship under oath and the money and claimed that only blacks use cash and therefore they have no receipts that might condemn them.

It was really a racist argument.

Even got her ex-Black Panther father in there

to do it.

So I don't think anybody wants to get near there.

I just think that the district attorney's office or whoever in the decision process will say this is a lose-lose situation, especially when Georgia went pretty clearly for Trump.

And

especially when 25 or 30% of black males in Georgia voted for Trump.

So I think that's over.

I just make one last thing.

I was thinking, if you look at the judges, we've had five of them now, right?

So you look at the judge in the Eugene Carroll case.

That was Judge Cohen, as I remember.

And you look at his rulings.

They should have thrown that case out.

Every time there was an objection that they wanted to introduce

evidence, that she didn't know the year, that she'd said that she could cite the assault by the dress that she wore that was not even a designer dress, that wasn't even created yet.

The eerie parallels between the law and the order episode, we went through all of that.

He ruled against Trump almost every time.

And then he said himself,

Indiscriminately and offhandedly, he used the word rape, and somebody, as I remember, corrected him.

And he said, well, yes, they didn't technically convict him of rape.

No, it wasn't technically.

They were asked on judicial question number one, did he rape?

The jury was asked, did he rape?

And they said unequivocally, no, he didn't.

He's sexually assaulted.

I don't know what that might entail.

But

the judge did what, to a lesser degree, what George Stephanopoulos was, you know, ten times allegedly saying the word rape, rape, rape, rape, rape.

He didn't, I shouldn't say allegedly, he did.

And that's why ABC settled for $16 million.

But the judge gave that opening.

So he was a bad judge.

And the second judge was Aragon Ingeron.

Remember, he was the Likida James.

He was the guy who was always posing for the cameras.

He oversaw the penalty frame.

Remember, his initial penalty on that bogus case was $450 million.

They reduced it, I think, to $373, but that's still standing.

It's still on the point.

He was the most biased of the judges.

And then we go to Fannie Willis's McCaffrey.

Remember, he'd been over backwards.

When it was clear that they were purging themselves, they had conflict of interest.

He did not dismiss the case.

In fact, he said she could go on and represent the state of Georgia, Fulton County and by Association, Georgia, in going after Trump.

And it took an appellate court to throw that McCaffrey's McCaffrey's judgment out.

And then we had, I'm sorry, I made a mistake.

I suggested that Judge Engron was the worst.

He wasn't.

It was Judge Murshon, the Alvin Bridge judge.

He was the one that kept this.

He had conflicts of interest.

He'd given a little bit of money to the Biden campaign Democrats, and his daughter had become quite affluent by using her father's name to create a democratic-centered-orientated orientated consulting business.

He should have excused himself.

I think there's going to be a repeal of Letita James

settlement, a repeal maybe of

a re-examination of the amount that Cohen gave, or the jury and Cohen gave in the Eugene Carroll case.

I think the Fannie Willis things will die and we're just going to be ending up with Alvin Bragg's sentencing.

I think that will be unappealable at the term.

And then we're going to start to see something else.

I don't think Trump is going to go after everybody, but if there's clear exposure, and I don't think you really have to hunt very hard.

All you have to say is, we're not going to have a vendetta,

but if you broke the law and you know you broke the law, then you should know that we know you know you broke the law.

And you might want to worry about that.

Not that we're going to do what you did, but we're going to follow the law.

We're not going to be too punitive, weaponized, but we're not going to be too lax either.

And I think that's scared and terrified people.

So especially Liz Cheney, she came out today.

Just hear what she said, that this was horrible, and the idea that she'd done anything wrong.

And

she was, this is politicized, Liz, it doesn't really matter what you say, it doesn't matter what I say.

They will find a federal prosecutor and they will bring it to his attention.

And they will say,

did she not try to tamper and coach a witness without the attorney's knowledge?

And they will decide whether if that happens and it does,

is it worth prosecuting a person?

They have policies, they have precedents, and if they have policies that it's not, it's minor, they won't prosecute her.

If they find out that Congress women and men all the time are lax with evidence under subpoena,

if records are destroyed and it was inadvertent, or you can have it, then they're not going to.

She's fine.

But if it's not, she's in trouble.

And I don't think it will be special treatment.

No.

What she's asking for is

special treatment.

We're all subject to constant legal observance.

And so I think a lot of these people

will be very eager and have their names into who's ever running

the Biden administration right now.

You know how Trump is soliciting names for cabinet appointments?

Well, they have a parallel apparatus going on now in the waning days of the Biden administration, and it's who gets a pardon?

1,500 of them.

That's more people than Trump is already nominated.

They just let that communist Chinese national who was, what, caught downloading child porn, they gave a pardon to him.

Yeah, he gave a pardon.

Biden also gave a pardon to a judge who had sent kids to a detention center for bribes back or kickbacks from that detention center for sending kids.

One child killed himself.

Yeah, that was good old Joe Biden from Scranton.

Even Josh Shapiro, who was not nearly as moderate as everybody said he was, was outraged at that.

So, I don't know.

Joe Biden's legacy is going to be non-existent.

I don't think

it was existent.

Given his record of actual accomplishment, there was none.

It's not going to go down well on the president

right there with Buchanan, I think, from the 1840s.

Buchanan was 1856, he was the last

president before the Civil War, before Lincoln came in.

He's usually seen as the worst president so far, but maybe.

Yeah, I think so.

I think people have looked back at McKinley and Garfield and

Grant and reappraised them and thought they weren't that bad.

They were presidents, actually, actually in some ways.

Yeah.

But not you can.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show and I wanted to read a couple of comments from Apple Podcasts about your show.

The first one is for Jack Fowler.

Mr.

Jack Fowler, please don't be so hard on yourself.

You are not so shabby.

I enjoy the back and forth with you and Professor Hansen.

Always looking forward to the VDH wisdom every week.

And that was a very nice one.

And then another one, educate yourself.

I like this.

Victor Davis Hansen provides exceptional commentary on current events.

He provides meaningful insights on World War II and other historical developments.

He understands the working people in the United States.

Highly recommend it.

So, thank you for both of those.

We appreciate Jack's Queen's accent

and his down-to-earth.

I met Jack 22 years years ago when I started writing for National Review.

Anytime I had a question about a column or the direction of National Review and I just wanted insight and guidance in a dispassionate, analytical way, I heard that Queen's accent be

a source of information and reliability.

Yeah.

He is, and he's also a natural at the

talk show, I think.

He does.

He knows the entire conservative movement backwards and forwards.

He's met everybody.

Yeah, that's true, too.

He oversaw the mechanics, the nut-and-bolt operations, financial protocol, civic,

National View Magazine.

So we're obviously.

And he was devoted.

He was very devoted to William

Buckley while alive and his legacy after he died.

Well, we're fans of Jack, that's for sure.

So thanks to our audience as well for their joining us today.

We're so happy to have you.

Thank you, everybody, for listening, and we'll see you next time with another.

I don't know which one.

We'll be on with Jack on Tuesday.

Oh, we don't do the next 7-1

of the world.

Maybe we'll try to do some of the obscure ones first.

Everybody knows the pure.

I will do the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the Statue of Olympian Zeus, which was the model for that famous George Washington in the Capitol, who's standing with a road, sitting like he's a Greek god.

Any plans for Christmas?

I forgot to ask you, because this is our last one before you go to Christmas holiday.

Well,

I have my children are very busy.

My daughter lives 200 miles away now,

and she's back to the land.

So I think I'm going to drive up there the day after Christmas.

And I'll probably see my in-laws.

And I will see my son, I hope, a little bit.

I'm very close to my two children.

I have kind of a sad feeling because

from 1980

to 2000, for 20 years, there were four families.

My two brothers and my first cousin whose mother died, we kind of

helped raise.

And they lived on the ranch and there and then my other cousin, his sister, lived in Fresno.

So we had these parties often at my old dilapidated farmhouse and had not restored it yet.

So it was 12 children in the living room and all these adults and my parents and

uncles and it was wonderful.

And it was like a big family and now it's just totally quiet.

Yeah it is.

And

so

it's kind of ironic that when you have no money at all and you're flat broke and you're making $22,000 a year at Cal State.

You've got three children and you've got a branch that's in debt and losing

That's a recipe for happiness.

It is.

And then when you're doing pretty well, because I have a good salary now,

and I know more about finance, and I fix the house up entirely.

There's no one to enjoy it.

I mean, there's nobody to come.

They're all gone.

They all flew the nest.

I wish it was wired and plumbed and roofed and insulated and painted and new floors.

Everything was new when they were all there.

But maybe it was better.

Because they didn't worry.

You know, the kids would get together and they'd go to the rough house and I'd hear it

shattered a window.

And I'd say, oh,

that was nice, son.

That was nice, my nephew.

That was a 19th-century, you know, kind of warped hand

molded glass that's been here since 18th.

Don't worry.

I'll just go get a cheap and do it myself and fix it.

And I didn't care.

I didn't, you know, I was, because the house was so old and it was falling apart.

And it was full of people.

And I was way, and I felt the same way when we were young and we had an 800 square foot farmhouse.

And we had all these 19th century people.

I'll just leave everybody with a thought.

One of the great gifts of growing up rural, and I was born in 1953, but

That was the last generation where you could hear people talk

who were 19th century people that were born in the 19th century before really the age of electricity and electronic appurtenances and cars and planes

and indoor plumbing.

And they had a different accent.

That's one of the reasons Westerns don't work today, because people that they hired in Hollywood, it's very hard to find kind of a Robert Duvall accent, you know what I mean?

To make a good Western.

And that was what the accent was, because I can remember my grandmother and my grandfather and of course my Swedish grandfather, they all had that strange accent and vocabulary.

And they're, you know,

don't go out yonder, you'll catch cold.

I'm going to shake the dickens out of you.

And then it was this,

well,

when everybody was here, you know, for Christmas at this house sometimes, it was, now who's going to use the bathroom?

There was one little toilet and one little tiny bathtub for the entire house.

And when they'd have 12 or 15 people here, everybody would want to use it.

So they'd say, anybody want to use the bathroom?

You can go, you can go, you can go.

Put your name on the list.

Yeah, and then there was an outhouse.

So all of us went out to the outhouse out there by the barn, which finally I destroyed.

And I thought to myself, when I was a little boy at seven, if I ever have a chance, I'm going to bulldoze this thing over.

And I did.

You did.

I fulfilled all my childhood dreams.

I destroyed the outhouse and I went to the seven wonders of the world.

I'm a very lucky person.

You are a very lucky person.

Well, Victor Davis Hans.

I'm very lucky to have such a wonderful, loyal audience.

I get letters and calls, and I really appreciate it.

Yeah.

This is Sammy Link and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.