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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

You are here to listen to the star and namesake.

That's Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We are recording on Saturday, October 5th.

So much has happened, Victor, in the last few days.

I think you could say that about any day in America now.

So much consequential things have been happening as we, all of us, go headlong into the November 5th elections.

Victor, let's get the show started today with your thoughts on

Kamala Harris and her husband and his controversies.

He seems to like to use some women as punching bags.

and how newsworthy that has been or unnewsworthy to some of the liberal media.

We'll talk about that.

Border stuff, Liz Cheney, criminals, so much more when we come back from these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show.

Victor has a website, theblade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

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Victor, you've got a great series right now on the Second World War and the truths and the lies, distortions by some quote-unquote historians.

I want to recommend our listeners check that out.

So, Victor, Kamala Harris.

Whatever you want to say about her, but this story about her husband that the Daily Mail has reported with a lot of strong background

information that he,

about only a decade ago, pre-marriage to Kamala Harris, clocked his girlfriend severely

in France at some festival.

And

what are your thoughts about that, about King Victor, and about the reaction to that by the media?

Here's my thoughts.

Brett Kavanaugh is up to be a Supreme Court justice.

Susan Blassey Ford has gone back 30 years and said all of these things that had no corroboration at all.

And Kamala Harris was, as you remember, Jack, one of the persecutors of him, not just a prosecutor.

And

now we learn an accusation, the Daily Mail, and it's just completely smothered by our media, that

Kamala Harris's husband, as you said, whacked, slapped a girlfriend that he falsely accused of flirting when she was trying to negotiate an Uber fair.

And three other women, allegedly, allegedly, purportedly, supposedly, have corroborated that.

Well,

in my view, I don't know if it happened until all three of them come forward, identify themselves, and make an affidavit.

That hasn't happened.

But according to the rules of Me Too, that doesn't have to happen.

You just have to say something and your career is destroyed.

But

think about it.

This was much more recent than was the accusations of Kavanaugh and much more corroborated by witnesses and much more violent that he actually swung and hit a woman.

And then

it dovetails on even a more recent

than Kavanaugh's accusation when he, you know, two or three years before he married Kamala Harris, he impregnated his young nanny, who was watching their child while she was in his house.

And then he arranged either a financial settlement, a property settlement.

She's now ensconced on the East Coast somewhere.

And no one knows what happened.

Did she deliver the child?

Did she have a miscarriage?

Did she have a coerced abortion?

No one knows.

And the media does not want to talk about it.

Now, that would be a news story in itself, given the rules of Me Too.

But when you juxtapose that, that he had just given a large interview with a Jin Saki, and he was being used along with this buffoon Tim Waltz to redefine a new empathetic masculinity.

In other words, the real man, Jack, the real man is soft-spoken, he's considerate of women, he partners with women, he doesn't use abusive language toward women, he doesn't try to use them sexually, He doesn't try to use coercive violence with a subtext as, well, that's what conservatives like Kavanaugh did, and that's what other Me Too people have done.

And

it's just a joke.

So Me Too, remember,

died when Joe Biden in 2016 was on the campaign

was on the campaign trail.

And it really died in summer of 2019 when he declared his candidacy and people came forward.

Remember about seven women?

And they said allegedly he had violated their space.

He blew on their hair.

He blew in their ear.

He hugged them too long.

He pressed his body against them during embraces.

He stared them in the eye.

They wanted a kiss on the cheek.

He kissed them on the mouth.

He blew the hair of little girls.

He called out young preteens while he was speaking.

And he apologized.

He said, Oh, I'm from a different generation, Jack.

That was normative behavior.

I just got to keep up with the time.

Oh, that's fine, Joe.

No problem.

Then we had.

No, we did it in Scranton.

Yes.

And then we had Tara Reed come forward, and she had about the same time frame as Susan Belassey-Ford, a little bit more recent.

And Joe Biden was not 18 years old, as was Kavanaugh, or 17 or 18,

but he was a U.S.

senator, and

she said that he had cornered her and then

digitally, I'm trying to be polite for our audience, digitally penetrated her, raped her.

And if you think that is just a wild charge,

her mother was on a talk show.

at about the same time and asked Larry King.

Larry King, he said, what should I do?

A prominent politician has sexually coerced my daughter.

And that was her mother.

So there was a lot more corroboration.

But of course, they said, no, that's the way.

No, no, no.

These women are crazy.

Tara Reed is crazy.

They destroyed her.

Look at her.

She's a mess.

She doesn't look, she's overweight.

She's homely.

She would never do that.

He would never do that.

Joe, good old Joe from Scranton.

And they dropped all of the accusations against him by women and by Tara Reed in particular.

And that was the end of me too.

Because after that, no one could be credibly destroyed because they had let the future president of the United States get away with that.

So then it's just

in the meantime, we had a lot of good journalists.

Not, I didn't agree with them, but they were completely destroyed.

Matt Taibbi wrote a memoir from his exile days in Moscow.

And they had attacked me, so I have no personal...

reason to defend him.

I mean,

his partner had attacked me and threatened to burn my vineyard because he said I was a neocon warmonger.

And

this was about a decade prior, right?

Yes, yes.

And law enforcement came to my home to tell me after my entire, the side of the road next to my vineyard went up in flames.

I'm not saying there was any connection, but the so-called war nerd

who was

Taibbi's friend.

So I have no

reason to defend him, but he is a very good journalist.

And I think when he was in Moscow, he was out of control, according to him.

And he wrote things in his memoirs that he thinks he said were exaggerated, but they took literally.

Whatever the actual thing, they destroyed him.

They canceled his book tour.

He was persona non-grada.

And this was after

the peak of Me Too.

I have no reason to defend Garrison Keillor.

He called George Bush, I think, a brown shirt.

And they went out and he was a little handsy or something.

There was accusation that he

pressed people.

He'd been married a couple of times.

He's not really, he doesn't cut a very romantic figure.

He was

elderly, a little heavy, but he was a national icon.

Right.

They destroyed him.

They took his books off the shelf.

They ostracized him.

They just, that was the end.

Mark Halburn, I didn't agree with him politically.

He was a man of the left.

I always thought he was a pretty smart guy.

I would listen to his analysis, even though when I disagreed with him, because he was factual and incisive and analytical.

And they said that he had pressed his hand on a breast, that he had tried to kiss a woman, maybe three or four.

He was done, gone,

done.

Not even going to get into Matt Lauer or

the others.

So they were done, destroyed.

By that rule, Doug Immahoff is done.

He's gone.

Zero.

He's out.

He's out.

He's no empathetic

new masculinity.

He is a sexual predator who uses women for sexual gratification, then casts them aside and doesn't care about them.

So impregnates them and says, get abortion.

Here's some money.

Get out of here.

And nobody takes these people seriously anymore.

So, yeah, that's what he did.

He impregnated a woman and then allegedly, and I don't know because these women haven't written affidavits.

They corroborated the woman who was slapped.

And he slapped and hit a woman.

I've had a lot of arguments when I was a kid.

I can think with women,

you know, everybody does if you're male.

I don't think I have ever, ever, ever, ever even imagined putting,

hitting a woman or grabbing her or squeezing her arm to the point of pain.

Who would ever do that?

And

maybe Doug Semhoff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the only time I've gotten near a situation like that, I think I mentioned I was farming on a tractor and I saw a guy trying to beat the heck out of his girlfriend in an orchard next to me.

And I jumped off the tractor and tried to intervene.

And then the woman started attacking me.

yelling and swearing at me in Spanish.

Self-defense is permissible.

Please, please, Mr.

Gringo,

let my boyfriend beat the hell out of me.

Why are you trying to stop him?

It's none of your business.

He may be on your property, but

we can come on trespass on your property and we come out here so he can beat me up and nobody can hear me.

And how dare you try to stop him and protect me?

Who do you think you are?

A knight or something?

Get out of here, you gringo.

She called me a gringo.

Oh my gosh.

Illegal ethics.

Yes.

So that was a long time ago, but I remember it very clearly.

Something else, can I say, Victor?

I swear I saw a video clip of Megan Kelly the last day or two.

It wasn't her.

I don't know.

I think it was her, but about M.

Hoff and the nanny.

Yes.

And that there was some police activity related to them back in the day, whenever that was 2010, 12, where the cops had to come at a certain, I guess, in L.A., level three.

I don't know if I have that right.

You know, sirens blaring because there was some physicality going on.

So

did M.

Hoff have a drunken one-off in France?

I think there's more to him and his violence and his masculinity than I do too.

I mean, it wasn't, we're talking

in the case of Kavanaugh, was it the 1980s?

I think it was.

Yes.

And we're talking 2012, which is 12 years ago when he was an adult and he was on the in the dating circle is apparently and

uh

anyway it's it's this is the new masculinity if they as they're talking to that they're talking about they're they're

just just to finish this topic they are so desperate i mean we they're draining the petroleum reserve yesterday we can talk about this later but biden attacked netanyahu and said we have nobody's done more for israel

If you think nobody's done more for Israel than you, then with enemies like you, who needs friends?

Given what you did with the Houthis and Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran and created this mess by giving them $100 billion to destroy Israel.

And then

draining the strategic petroleum reserve, lowering the Fed interest rate by half point as if we have to do that in 44 days when they did it before the election.

And then then Jack Smith just

creating this long, long new, new, new

salacious indictment.

And then Judge Tuchin, contrary to judicial procedure, just not even letting the defense have an opportunity to reply to it before releasing it and then releases them.

And so they are going, and then we, you know,

They're going to do anything to win this

election.

You know what I'm really worried about?

Just before we finish, I'm really worried.

I think that Donald Trump is going to win the Electoral College.

I really do.

And I think that Joe Biden, if you saw him the last 72 hours, I mean, he just stared.

He cannot answer a question.

He confuses

a military strike with a longshoreman strike.

He confuses,

he says he doesn't know which storm you're talking about.

He doesn't even know the story.

He doesn't know where he is.

He only comes animated and momentarily clear when he's attacking MAGA people.

Then he gets crystal clear and his eyes get beady and he starts frothing at the mouth and he uses all of his energy for a microsecond.

And

I'm tired.

I got to go to bed.

That's what he does.

And

I don't think he's going to be able to really...

Well, he's not now able to function as a president.

and you can see that by the reaction to

Hurricane Helene but I don't think he's going to be able to go all the way till January 21st and if she's the incumbent vice president and she loses the election and she wins the popular vote there will be another

lot of protest and then if he steps down and she is president and Jack Smith

tries to jail Donald Trump, which I think he will do, and I think he will try to put him in jail with a sympathetic jury,

then you're going to see a situation where

I don't know who's in trouble.

I don't know is

a President Harris, a president-elect Trump in jail, J.D.

Vance, elected vice president.

I don't know what's going to happen.

It's going to be a mess.

Well,

let's get your thoughts a little more on that, Victor, about maybe Biden and Jill Biden and spite.

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Victor,

what you just said about Joe Biden, you know, off his, well, of course, he's where he's been for the last three years out of it.

But he seemed to be in it a little bit, in the zone a little bit yesterday, Friday, when he spoke to the White House press corps and

put a millstone, I think, around Kamala Harris's neck.

You know,

everything that we've done, she's been a partner in.

I can't see that being helpful.

I wonder if it was spiteful because

that's the second time.

Yeah, he's done that twice.

Yeah, so will the spiteful people, given the scenario you just, you know, the fearful, correct that, you know, what's going to happen in November, December, January?

But I can't imagine Jill Biden, Mrs.

Wilson, allowing

her husband not to write it out to the end.

Any other thoughts on that?

She's very angry.

And

don't don't take it from me.

Take it from the 2020 debates and the first debate when remember Camala Harris called Joe Biden a racist.

I was that little girl when

you were

afraid of busing.

And I was a victim.

And she got really angry, Jill Biden, and she was supposedly, reportedly,

dead set against Kamala Harris

six months later being on the ticket because of that accusation.

So Jill never liked Camilla and she sees Camilla as the agent behind, that was working with the Obamas and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to have that coup and remove him.

And part of she not that she's not culpable.

She knew from the very beginning when he announces Canassey that he was cognitively impaired, but she thought that was her dream to kind of tell Michelle and Brock, you know, we're not the second couple.

I'm Dr.

Jill, and I should have been preeminent and now I am.

And how do you like that?

But she's out of power now.

She's a lame duck and

they're very bitter.

So one of the ways that they can

very subtly, Jack, it's like a double-edged stiletto.

It's sort of like, she can be president?

Of course she can.

She's perfectly qualified.

All those wonderful things we did, she was a partner.

She was the last woman in the room.

That great thing we did in Afghanistan, Joe talked to her last.

And so

what's she supposed to say?

There was a terrible record and Joe Biden should, I'm the change person.

She's kind of saying that, but she can't say it overtly.

So she's in a quandary when he, when they do that, and they're doing it to be malicious.

And again, this, this, if you want to define this campaign, now we've got 31 days.

It's just simply, can they run out the clock?

And that means, how many of those softball interviews do they have to do with OPA, the Association of Black Journalists, or two NBA people or Dana Bash?

Maybe one or two more at most to satisfy the media.

And then they're going to be softballs.

And then are they going to, how are they going to use the two to one?

I mean, they've got about $800 million and Trump's only got about $400 million something.

So

to what degree are they going to run better commercials?

The ones that I saw were in Michigan when when I was at Hillsdale.

The Trump commercials were fewer, but much better.

But if they saturate those markets, how are they going to do the 70% non-election day voting?

Can the Republicans match that or make sure there's no irregularities?

But they're not going to let her speak.

Her teleprompter went out.

Yeah.

The other day when she was gushing about, cackling, actually, Joe,

if you know you know that Jack she was cackling about magic Magic Johnson and then it just went out so she just

so there's 32 and she's like a numbers person all like Nostradamus

left

the campaign

and then uh oh no more words and and it's gonna be a hard campaign it's 32 and he's 32 and there's 32 days left come on get the count get the teleponter back on

it's 32

Can you imagine that?

32 days and his number was 32.

Get the teleprompter back on.

Yeah, sometimes just three or four seconds matters, right?

When George Bush looked at his watch that time at the end of a debate, but when that teleprompter went out with her and like Joe Biden looked at his way at his watch during that solemn occasion when

the bodies of the people from Afghanistan were flown home.

Yeah,

just she just drilled down on the fact of her inability to

do something.

But the difference between the media is,

I think between 2020 and 2016,

they knew they were biased.

They did their best.

And then when you swatted them and did it, they kind of fake it like they weren't.

They don't fake it now.

They just

man, they just keep, they, they just look at you in the face and say, Waltz won that debate.

He was so charismatic.

I can't say that Donald Trump won that debate with

Kamala Harris.

I believe that afterwards, when people played all the clips, he had much better clips than she did.

And people, in retrospect, as they digested

the debate to the degree they knew about it, the people who did not listen to the debate or saw sound clips were such that they matched the people who actually watched it.

And he came out even within two weeks, dead even.

But I don't think that he won that debate.

I think that she baited him and baited him and baited him, and then he was debating three people.

But

these partisans are just shameless.

They just say that Waltz was, I think

Rachel Maddow said, well, Biden,

Vance was the better debater, and he lost.

He was more skilled, and he lost.

So

and then you think that after what they saw with the CNN debate and what they saw with the ABC debate, that pathetic duo of Brennan and what's her name, O'Donnell, that you would think they'd say, oh my God, everybody's looking at us.

We cannot end up like Candy Crawley.

We've got to at least go through the motions, no fact-checking, treat both people the same, get questions that play to the strength or weakness equally of the candidate.

And they didn't do it.

They doubled down.

They said, you know what, we don't really care about our reputations, could care less.

All we want to do is make sure that Donald Trump loses.

And we're going to do anything we can to hurt Vance and

win this debate for Harris Walt.

Well,

I think, Victor, we are going to be in, since we have now 31 days, I guess with 30, we still have some things that are going to shock us between now and Election Day.

The difference will be, though, is

so far the October surprises have been natural for the Republican.

The Middle East blows up.

They didn't cook that up.

And

the reaction to the Hurricane Helene.

But on the other side, the October surprises, whether they've been the Fed cut or draining more oil or Jack Smith's indictment,

they've manufactured those.

So if we have October surprises,

and by the way, I think Zelensky was an late September, October surprise, and they always project.

So when they asked Biden the other day, do you think that Netanyahu is trying to interfere with the election by maybe going after Iran?

You know, 20,000 rockets from the surrogates, 500 now in total from Iran, and you go after somebody when you want to reply to all that.

But

it's not like...

It's not like they flew Netanyahu, as I said earlier, with Sammy.

They didn't fly him into Pennsylvania and then only have Republicans swarm around Netanyahu, who was he visited, say, a Patriot battery.

And then he gave an interview with, say, National Review or American Greatness and said,

Waltz and

Harris doesn't know what she's talking about.

She's ignorant.

And Waltz is a radical and he's dangerous.

If they had done that, they would have been...

Netanyahu would never do.

That's exactly what Zelensky did.

And then he was forced to to meet with Trump when the outrage was so much.

So they project on that and say, well, we did it, therefore they did it.

Well, let's, Victor, you mentioned the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, and let's talk a little more about that and get your thoughts on that when we come back from these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

We're recording on Saturday, the 5th of October.

You know, Victor, Donald Trump, it's hard to think that a presidential candidate,

the major party candidate, that anything he does is not somehow related to the election.

But Donald Trump was in Georgia again this week, just I think yesterday, and

asked about politics.

And he said, I'm here for these, we're not talking about politics.

I'm here for the hurricane victims.

And he had a very good meeting, I guess, or at least a patching up of things with the Governor Kemp.

And I can't imagine a Democrat not

asked such a question,

not exploiting it strictly for politics.

But you wouldn't be able to ask Kamala Harris such a question if she went to Georgia, because I don't think she's been to Georgia.

I don't think she's really.

And actually, there was a story that she was,

while people are suffering.

I can't believe the misery.

I mean, we've all seen it.

The people who listen to the show, they've seen, some of them probably have experienced it.

But this is shocking.

This is one of the great disasters in the history of this country.

And she's recording some podcast, some sex podcast.

What the frick is the name of this show?

Call Her Daddy.

I guess it's some popular podcast, but is this what the leader of the Democrat Party is doing while Americans are suffering?

Well, Joe Biden said no one is suffering.

They got all they need, Jack.

They got all they need.

They have everything they need.

Well, what are the two storm zones?

What storm zone are you talking about?

Oh, in a storm zone.

Yeah, they got everything they need.

Get off my grass.

That's how he reacts to everything.

So

in simple, the simplified, they are, as I've said with Sammy, they are an East Palestine constituent, East Palestine, Ohio constituency.

Let's face it.

I mean, let's be honest, everybody.

If this thing had hit Malibu,

and fires have hit near Malibu,

Everybody got

involved.

If this had hit Martha's Vineyard, everybody wouldn't go.

If this had hit the inner city, everybody.

But this particular constituency is the deplorable, irredeemable, clinger, dregs,

crazies, hobbits.

I'm using their vocabulary.

And they're not going to, they're not, yeah, they're not chumps, another good epithet from Biden.

They're not worried about them.

In fact, if anything, they think, you know what?

Crap happens.

I guess they're not going to be able to vote.

And these swings, this swing North Carolina and northern Georgia,

you know, so early voting is going to start.

And Elon, you know,

says that it's not that they're neutral.

They're stopping shipments of Starlink.

And then they lie.

They always lie.

In other words, story comes out that Mallorca says they're going to run out of money.

And we couldn't help it.

We don't have any money.

so then everybody gets furious and says well you have money for 12 million illegal aliens 150 plus hotels in New York and you saw that article about the was that a Boston apartment one of the illegals

up in Maine Maine oh my god Brunswick Maine yeah I've stayed beautiful

I've never stayed in when I was a student

and recently married, I never, ever stayed in an apartment of that quality.

Furnished

all electricity electricity into the...

Do the Biden administration think that's good for a person that you come here illegally and then you hand them a beautiful apartment?

Is that going to make a person want to work hard and feel a sense of accomplishment and achievement by being able to come to a country, work very hard?

No, it's not.

It's going to create the following.

Well, why isn't it bigger?

I only have two bedroom.

That guy down the street's got, that's the kind of envy, the Hesiotic envy that it incurs.

And,

you know, they're not going to get anything.

They're going to get $750.

We're supposed to feel magnanimous because she increased it $50 over the last time they were

not there in Hawaii when we had the fire.

They don't care.

They don't care.

This had been George Bush.

Remember George Bush?

Katrina ruined his second term.

He flew over and there was a picture, some stupid White House photographer took a picture of him looking out the window.

And the headlines were, Bush looks out the window.

So then he landed, he got his waiters, he went out there.

Remember, he said to that guy named Brown, Brownie, you're doing a great job.

Well, he wasn't.

And then, but he tried.

He waded around.

He did everything.

He gave all this money.

And I went there about six, oh, four or five months later to give a talk at the World War II Museum.

And then maybe nine months later to Houston.

And everybody was telling me that the people who had been displaced got huge amounts of money and they were going on shopping binges in Houston.

In other words, there was cash floating everywhere from the government.

Not like this, not like this.

I haven't seen anything like this.

For five days, nobody cared.

Then there's that iconic picture of her on the plane.

She's kind of got her head at an angle and she's on the phone, but I guess she's on the phone.

She's kind of looking at writing or something, and all the pages are blank.

The pages are all blank.

And then

the headset's not connected.

Yeah.

Did you see the other video, Victor?

The woman,

she was at an airport with some FEMA workers

and

they're just revealing the total ineptitude

of

FEMA efforts.

Five days in, six days in,

not knowing what to do, preventing them.

On top of that, we have Budige

declaring that drones can't be used to help find.

Then they went after the poor guy that was at his own expense.

All these private ex-military people that had access to helicopters were trying to fly and they were being demonized.

And then Buttigieg wrote that little snark to Elon, call me.

And Elon said, give me your number.

I'll call you.

I need your number.

He's so

sanctimonious and snarky.

Yeah.

Well, we've got a new also,

you've talked about this many times, but that whole concept of intersectionality, it's so clear.

But, you know, Victor, who rates and who doesn't?

You know,

it's destroying the country.

It's destroying the country.

It's just a financial.

Go ahead.

I'm sorry.

No, it just, it is.

This idea, you destroy merit and you destroy equality, and then you have repertory and you say, you, you, you, we don't care how much money you have.

We don't care how you're doing.

If you are not white, you are a victim of a victimizing class and you are eligible for repertory

consideration.

You know,

not all disasters are natural.

The financial disaster almost caused by, you know, Sam Bankman Freed.

But Our government makes decisions to help out people willfully.

No one was going to lose a penny from that, right?

Right.

But if you're caught up in this horrific natural disaster,

you're screwed.

750 bucks.

Check out where to go.

Well, I don't have an internet.

There's no power.

There's no electricity.

My car is dead, et cetera.

It's just shocking how...

Picking favorites is the goal of this administration and of the left.

Victor, enough of my ranting.

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Victor,

one of your favorite conservative Republicans.

She's so noble.

Liz Cheney

went to Texas and talked.

You want to talk about this?

Yes, I do want to talk about that.

And

what I don't understand is

what I don't understand with David from and George Will

and Dick Cheney and

in some ways the bushes that I guess are going to be neutral about it.

And what I mean, Jack, is that it's one thing to say that the messenger of the conservative message is so flawed that I cannot vote for him and I'm going to sit out, which of course is a vote for Kamala Harris and the liberal agenda, but that's bad enough.

But when you endorse this agenda, which is completely open borders, Soros DAs

on record of opposing energy development like fracking, the Afghanistan pullout, which he brags still about, the betrayal, I think, of Israel and pressuring it and the moral equivalency that they have placed Israel on vis-a-vis Hamas, restoring the money to Iran for its oil, in other words, dropping the sanctions.

I can go on, the economics, spending $6 trillion,

all of it.

And you think of that big,

the hardest left agenda that makes Obama look like a piker.

And then you come out and you endorse that,

you endorse that agenda,

then what do you say?

I mean, she's just, what she said translated, the reason I'm pausing, it's so baffling.

And translated, it's something like this.

Do not believe anything I've said for the last 45 years.

I didn't mean it.

I know all of you people voted for me in Montana, excuse me, Wyoming, and I know that I was the third highest ranking House member and I was on the trajectory to be Speaker of the House and maybe president someday, nurtured by my father and mother.

But don't believe anything that we ever believed in and that you fought for and you protected us.

I wrote a lot of columns saying it was really unfair to call Dick Cheney a Nazi like Darth Vader.

Remember that?

Remember that that accidental shooting?

They said he was basically tried to kill somebody and they don't, he had all that heart problems and he was, he hadn't got a heart trans, I thought it was horrible the way they treated him.

And yet

now you just over what?

Over our hero.

What happened?

What happened was she

in a calculated, and then as Tom Cotton pointed out, I think it was Tom Cotton said, wait a minute, in 2020, she endorsed him.

Remember?

In summer of 2019, when he was up for re-election, she was, she, Dick Cheney said he was voting for Trump.

So then after January 6th, they see this as insurrection and, okay.

And then

they nullify everything, okay.

But they endorse this other agenda.

So what they're basically saying is, well, the Trump agenda was what I always was for.

So that's why I endorsed him.

But after January 6th, he put his fingerprints on that agenda, and I don't want it anymore.

So I'm not going to just reject him.

I'm going to reject everything about that agenda.

Now, all you people

in East Palestine, all you people in the Carolinas, all you deplorables that have been screwed over by, all you inner city people who have not had access to the type of food or health care because of this rampant inflation and illegal immigration.

All you people in the Rio Glan Valley, we don't care about you.

It's about our reputations, pick, self-interest, honor, and shame.

And we have been shamed by this crazy Donald Trump.

And he destroyed my daughter.

He destroyed her career.

She's not going to ever be a House member again.

She'll never be elected again from Wyoming.

She'll never be elected in Virginia.

She'll never have a high post.

She's done, zero.

And that was because of Donald Trump.

And the whole Cheney family, like the Bushes, have been completely ostracized only because of him, because of him,

because of him.

And I just don't think,

you know, when she endorsed him, but I'm underestimating.

I'm being kind.

because she went to Texas, as you point out, and

she endorsed Ted Cruz's opponent and hates Ted Cruz.

Why does she hate Ted Cruz for?

And

she was a really hardcore and, you know, hardcore,

conservative,

tough,

kind of a neoconservative, bipartisan foreign policy, but man.

And then when she said that

they've said Donald Trump is soft on Russia,

my God, I thought, wow,

Donald Trump is soft on Russia.

I guess he killed the Wagner people because he was soft on Russia.

I guess he sold javelins to Ukraine because he was soft on Russia.

I guess he got out of that missile deal that Putin exploded over because he was soft on Russia.

I guess he flooded oil at a cheap price.

It bankrupt Russia almost because he was soft on it.

Sanctioned oligarchs.

I guess he really loved Putin so much, he told the Germans, do not have that Nord Stream pipeline to do not do it.

So there was no evidence of that.

Who was soft on Russia, of course, is the people that

Lynn Cheney is endorsing, because as we know,

Reset was act weak and talk loudly to Putin.

Right.

Right.

Well,

that they, we've discussed this before, Victor, that nevertheless, she and at least 99 others, most of the 99 others that have signed this infamous document, I'm conservative Republicans who endorse.

I don't know how you could be a conservative Republican.

I can't see a single thing in the Harris-Walls-Biden agenda that anyone could call conservative.

How you can endorse something that's

anathema to what you believe and that would destroy Western civilization in the process is kind of.

She's voting for, what, 10 to 12 million people?

Oh, I don't know what I can't make sense of it.

She doesn't care about what they've done to the country, the hyperinflation.

That doesn't even have, that doesn't register just because of her own pick, just because of her own anger about what happened to her career.

And it's the same thing with all those pundits.

They've all destroyed their own career.

Nobody destroyed their career.

They did.

All she had to do was say that Donald Trump, all she had to do was act exactly like Governor Kemp.

Kemp took a lot more heat from Trump than she did.

But Kemp understood one thing,

that his constituents were going to vote for Trump, not because they liked Trump, but because he was a marked difference from the left.

And he was going to vote for Trump.

He said that, even when Trump attacked him.

And you know what?

He's a very viable candidate now.

He's got a very viable political trajectory.

He has done absolutely what he needed to do.

He expressed his anger at Donald Trump, kind of surprised.

Why are you attacking me?

I only tried to fulfill my duties.

But you know what?

When it comes down to push to shove, we're going to have a truce and make up because the people of Georgia are more important than our differences.

And you will be much better than Harris for my people in Georgia.

What was so hard about her doing that in Montana?

Yeah,

or Wyoming.

So

she's saying the enemy of the honesty.

Yeah, I keep saying Montana, but I don't want to confuse them.

They're very different states.

But

I've been so obsessed with this tester, Sheehi, Montana, Montana, because he's a great candidate and he's been on the show.

But what was so hard about doing that for the people of Wyoming?

I didn't understand that.

Why couldn't she do that?

She lost by almost 40 points, I think.

That was incredible.

She got completely wiped out, a historic defeat.

People repudiated what she did.

It wasn't just you or I talking.

It was the consensus of most people.

Well, and let's not forget, prior to Donald Trump coming into any political equation for her, she tried to knock off the incumbent Republican senator

and she was, I thought, pretty humiliated by that alone.

Like, now it's Enzi, Senator Enzi,

who, by the way, is just one of the nice guys yeah he was you know i uh

i spoke once and uh in wyoming and i happened to go to uh the why uh i think it was casper airport or maybe it was laramie i can't remember but he happened to be there and i you know he didn't have any reason to be nice to me and he just walked over to me and he said we're going to sit in this lounge.

Would you like to sit with us?

And I did.

I spent a great time with him.

He's a wonderful person.

Yeah.

And that was something that Al Simpson did very,

I thought he, and I like Al Simpson, but he did something that was very good during that race when he was a very close friend of the Cheneys.

He tried to talk her out of that race, remember?

Right.

He did.

He said, Enzy's been a very good sinner.

There's no reason for you to try to primary him and et cetera, et cetera.

I thought it was really good what Al did.

But I don't know.

This is a learning experience.

I am still baffled.

It really affected me in a very profound way, the George Wills and the Bill Crystals and the David Frums

and the Cheneys.

And to a lesser extent, the Bushes and

all the Bulwark people, lesser extent, the Dispatches, because all these people that I had vaguely known or come in contact with.

I'd written defenses of them.

I believed in the conservative message, and

they were even more hyper-conservative than I was.

And then to see them all just either fade away or then be unable to vote for a conservative message, did they really think after what they've said their whole lives that if Donald Trump gets a judicial appointment,

he will appoint somebody analogous to what Joe Biden appointed?

or who Kamala Harris will appoint?

Don't they understand that?

Or had they just completely gone left-wing?

Maybe, or were they always left-wing?

Or were they always apolitical?

And they were just swamp creatures that they didn't really care what the politics were.

It was always about their prestige, money, career, corporate, political, nexus.

I don't know, but it's baffling.

Well, Victor, Ecclesiastes teaches us that, you know, to every season, and the seasons changed, and they can't accept it.

You know,

it's not 2008 anymore, it's in 2012.

And I think their fury at that

is

part of the motivation.

Anger is quite corrosive.

Hey, Victor, we have some other things to get your wisdom on, including a new Inspector General's report on what's happening and has happened.

at the border with the influx of more than half a million, nearly three-quarters of a million criminals and bums and misfits.

And we're going to get your thoughts on that.

And

maybe I'll ask you to define a new verb when we come back from these important messages.

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Victor,

we talked at length last time, you and I did speak about these

13,000 murderers and convicted criminals and then others

who have been charged with crimes that are part of this monstrous 10 million to 20 million group of illegals who have invaded our country

with Joe Biden's blessing.

But there's a new Inspector General's report that comes on the heels of that information about the number of criminals.

Victor, you have some thoughts on that.

It was shocking because inspector generals are

legal people and they tend to be left of center.

And it's one of the most

negative

condemnations I've ever looked at of an agency.

And it basically said

that during this influx of criminals was directly attributable to the fact that they it wasn't that they were over manned they didn't even make it an attempt they didn't even want to follow these people they didn't even care that people were being released that had records it was shocking I mean if a private citizen did anything like that that was all in con contravening the law These people have been breaking the law systematically,

this administration, at the higher levels.

That's why those Border Patrol people are so furious that they're trying to enforce the law and they're put in danger while their administrators are taking orders from Mr.

Mayorkas, who takes orders from Harris and Biden.

And they're destroying the country.

And I don't, you know,

what are the reasons they're doing it?

You can come up, is it to grow that the entitlement states?

So we get 12 San Francisco's or I don't know, 12 San Jose's and all over the country of indigenous people, and maybe there's 600,000 of them.

That's the size of Fresno, that are criminals.

So you bring in a whole Fresno and it has nobody in it, Jack, but rapists, assault,

offenders, and murderers.

And what do you do with them?

And what are they going to do?

And why did you do that?

Is it because you want to give more welfare to people?

And then you need to get higher taxes.

And then you can say there's more poverty.

We're on port, 12 million million impoverished people so the poverty level stays very high and we can say America is a racist country because most of the new poverty people are not white.

Is that it?

Or does it you think, well, you know what?

Those stupid Republicans, the more that we call them racist and xenophobes and nativists, the more they back off.

And they don't realize that we have been

registering people who are undocumented.

We have been mailing out ballots to them in different names.

And we have turned California from Reagan, Duke Mason, Pete Wilson, Schwarzlager to completely not even blue, but ultra-blue.

And we have done the same thing with Nevada, and we have done the same thing with New Mexico.

We're about to do it with Arizona and Georgia and Texas.

And this is

the more, all we have to do is keep calling them racist, great replacement theory, slaves slaves to the Tucker Carlson

narrative, forget about new democratic majority or demography as destiny that we talk about.

Is that what they're trying to do?

Or is it just nihilism?

They're thinking, you know, I don't like this country.

I don't like borders.

I'm just going to let a bunch of murderers and cutthroats and rapists come in and just run wild in New York and see how those people feel.

Ha ha, I have the money.

I have the zip code.

I have the credentials, security, neighborhoods.

I can,

my kids go to prep school.

They're all going to be in the Ivy League.

I'm, my, I got security system.

I live in Malibu.

I live in, I don't know, Beverly Hills.

I live in Piedmont.

I live in Cambridge.

I live

in Palm Beach or whatever.

Whatever.

I'm insulated from it.

It's the deplorables who have to deal with it and they deserve it.

Or is it just pure racism?

As long as we don't have anybody from Europe or Australia, bring them in because we do not like the non-DEI demographic.

I don't know what it is, but it's going to take decades.

I think their attitude, Jack, is when they leave, they're going to say, well,

now you can try to build your wall.

Yeah, you've got a lot to do in that wall, don't you?

And you know what we're going to do?

We've got a lot of people in the administrative state, all through the Pentagon, Homeland Security, Department of Interior, they're going to stop you.

We're going to have a bunch of anonymous planted.

Ben Rhodes and his team and all that transitional people who were finagling to get, you know, what they, I guess they thought they were moles.

We got them everywhere.

And we, and if that doesn't work, we have a whole team of lawyers with Silicon Malik, money, corporate money, and they're going to sue you.

And we're going to just stop all your efforts to control the border for the next four years.

Yeah.

And we're going to,

this is chaos.

They're like the joker, you know that?

They're like a left.

The Democratic Party is like the Joker of the new Joker that you see in these movies and

comic books.

It's just chaos, just to cause chaos and mayhem and nihilism, because that's what this border has become.

Well, it's what Joe Biden is, his whole career is

a lot of chaos.

You know how they got on Reagan because he said that welfare Cadillac, remember he said that people are driving Cadillacs?

Welfare Queen.

Yeah, and I used to go into the store and people had those bulky, remember food stamps?

They looked like coupons.

And it was hard to disguise that.

But, you know,

I always taught, I go.

and do a lot of the shopping at a place that's in a very poor area.

And when I see people with these credit cards that are EBT cards, you know, and they bring out two or three or four of them, and then I have to wait while they have two or three carts, and some of them have alcohol, and some of them have other stuff that is not eligible for a WIC, you know, women, infant, child card or an electric banking transfer card.

So then, as I go out sometimes, I just notice I don't follow them out.

I don't say anything.

The cars, and they're like club cab, crew cab, brand new Ford pickups,

Teslas, BMWs.

I'm thinking, wow.

And then I'm starting to think, well, maybe

if you have free food and free housing and you just came here and you're working for the cartels or you're working in the cash economy and you're paying new taxes, maybe you can lease one of those.

I don't know how it's possible.

And then I always feel guilty.

I say, Victor, there you're going into the welfare Cadillac stereotype.

But it's true.

It's true.

I have gone there with other people and I said, this is one of the poorest areas in the United States.

80% of the commerce in this store is public welfare.

Can you look at this parking lot and tell me?

And they're just amazed, amazed at the cars.

It's a very different, what I'm trying to say to everybody, it's a very different type of poverty from the 60s and 70s, when people who were poor and in dire need had poor cars and inadequate, it's not that way.

That apartment in Maine or the cars that I see, it's a very different level of poverty.

Yeah, the way you're excessively overweight on top of it.

You know, nobody's starving to death

in these food deserts.

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Hey, Victor, if we can go back to

politics for a second,

I have to get this up here on my phone.

Our friend,

I don't know if you talked about this with Sammy, but it was because I didn't catch the last podcast you recorded with her, the great Sammy Wink, if I may say.

There's a headline in a recent politico article

about Tim Walls.

I misspoke.

I'm misspeaking.

He's using misspeaking as.

That word is a very funny vocabulary, isn't it?

Misspoke.

Misremembered is another one.

He says this the day after the debate with J.D.

Vance, where he clearly

knew he

had screwed up.

He says, yeah, look, I had my dates wrong, Walls told reporters in Harrisburg.

I was in Hong Kong and China in 1989.

I speak like everybody else speaks.

I need to be clearer.

Victor, I don't know.

I think quote unquote, everybody else speaks is not a term that should be synonymous with lying.

Hey, Jack, I was,

you know, everybody, I saw Jack in New York last week.

Oh, sorry, Jack.

I was in New York a year ago.

Sorry, I misremembered.

But, you know, I was in New York sometime.

So why not last week?

Or, you you know, 9-11, Jack, I never told you.

9-11, I was in the airplane.

They called back.

But then somehow we made it and I landed in 9-11 and I was right at ground zero.

Yeah.

Oh, you know what?

The truth was I was in the airplane at turned back, but

it was the same idea is what I'm saying.

I'm kind of a knucklehead sometime.

That's what he does with everything.

He lied about the in vitro fertilization of his wife.

He lied about his rank.

He lied about why he retired.

He lied about the people he appointed and their politics in Minnesota.

He tried to softpedal the fact that his daughter went on Twitter and warned all the rioters that her father was basically not going to call in the National Guard that night.

His wife, remember, lowered the window and said she had to smell the smell of burning Minneapolis.

This is a creepy family.

It really is.

And

J.D.

Vance.

Yeah.

They got really an

as soon as I saw that debate, I thought it was 70-30 and I was being charitable.

But the more I looked at his face,

it was a deer in the headlights face.

And then he was kind of nodding.

One of the Trump boys said, At the end of the night, it looked like Waltz was going to vote for Trump.

That was a good observation because he just nodded at everything that JD said.

And then he looked so frightened.

And then

he said, knucklehead, I'm a knucklehead.

And I thought, you know, you just destroyed yourself because that soundbite, I'm a knucklehead, is going to play all over the nation.

And those pictures of you nodding and then frightened and terrified.

And the point I'm making is a lot of people said JD could have finished him off and should have brought in all the stuff that you and I were talking about.

But it was, he really took them by surprise.

He said, I don't blame you and I agree with you.

He was so pleasant and magnanimous and he really was addressing the independent voter, the woman voter, and said, do not listen to all those lies about me.

I am what I am.

And they liked him.

And he still won the debate and he became much more likable.

He was always likable, but they had demonized him such that some people bought into the propaganda.

But it was a very multifaceted win by him.

it really helped him and it looked magnet and the nicer he became to waltz the more waltz sort of said i'm melting

you know help me i'm melting there's something else about walz you know this whole thing about okay military you know he served in he lied about his service but he did serve and he lied about how much of a football coach he was but he did do football coaching but

and this premise when he was first picked oh, he's like your uncle, you know, that kind of thing.

Well, it kind of implies

a manliness.

And then when you take the lies, and then also Victor, when he, I can't get this out of my mind, when he walks on a stage

at the convention when he he kind of put his hands like he was praying as if he was in China, you know, it was kind of a caricature of a Chinese or an Asian Buddhist

prayer, kowtow, and then he he pointed at people like, hey, I know you.

And then he was just...

And how he waves his hand.

He waves like he's doing signing.

I thought he was walking out to a big-time wrestling, World Wrestling Federation match or something, you know, and he was just hyper-kinetic.

And then he had kind of a...

He's a little chubby, and he had kind of a young man's high-water ankle suit, you know, and your sleeves.

He looked like he was trying to be natty.

And I felt, I thought, wow, this guy is a buffoon.

And I felt bad for him.

And then I read all of, I hadn't really been following him.

You and I have talked about the good writers at Powerline, but I'd always followed Scott Johnson's description of him.

And I thought, my God,

Scott's a very sober and judicious guy.

And this guy is awful, this waltz.

especially during the riots.

But I had not really followed him.

But when I saw that, I thought, wow,

this is going to be an iconic moment because if she loses that election and I think she will there's going to be everybody in her party who are going to say two things

you could have won had you not picked him as vice president and two

we could hide Joe Biden

And he was almost even when we got rid of him.

It wasn't that we got rid of him because he was eight points down.

It was the trajectory where he was bleeding.

And we thought you would be better, but you blew it.

You had a good lead when we got rid of Joe.

We should have never got rid of Joe.

We should have kept him because he might have, because you know what?

He could have, we could have got rid of you and the convention.

And then when he failed in January or February of 2000, we could have got somebody else.

But you blew it.

That's what's going to happen.

That's going to go down as a momentous decision.

Everybody thinks it

saved the Democrats and they're going to win the election and they had to get rid of Joe Biden and their coup before the 2020 coup when they got rid of everybody but Biden made him drop out was brilliant and getting rid of him was brilliant.

I'm not so sure.

And I know I am sure that he brings nothing but

minuses to the ticket.

Yeah, well,

I'm not, I'm fine with that

unless they win.

And I'm not.

Hey, Victor, one last thing.

Just we can conclude with a little smorgasbord here of some just political notes.

Today is October 5th.

I just want to note that in the Senate race in Pennsylvania, McCormick versus Casey, the incumbent, and actually Casey, I went to, he was in my class at Holy Cross, not that I knew him.

I saw him around a number of times, but I just find him a bit of an

empty suit as a senator for for the last,

I think, 18 years even, maybe now at this point.

That's tied.

I saw some poll out today

about North Carolina and on the presidential level that Trump is up

by four among likely voters.

And I can't imagine the administration's horrific response to

the hurricane

is going to do anything but make those numbers wider for Trump.

And the last thing is the

Firefighters Union,

which has historically been so strongly Democratic.

It's really always been troubling that

these guys, you think the firemen are

like cops, patriotic.

And I think that normal

run-of-the-mill fireman, of course, is.

But the union leadership has always been so damn democratic.

And the firefighters union, like the Teamsters, has decided to sit out

the election by not endorsing.

That's probably like the Teamsters, Victor, because their membership.

Yeah, you know, what I don't understand is this.

Okay.

So

we hear these stories every day, and they follow, as you say, the longshoremen, the majority are not going to follow their leadership.

And

the auto workers are not either, and the firemen.

Some endorse, some don't, but it's clear that every one of them is terrified of their leadership.

Most of the hacks that run these unions are in with the Uniparty, and

they go left-wing.

But the rank and file of hardworking people are for Trump, but more so than ever.

Because this, as you point out, has not happened in 2016 and 2020.

And then you see that I've never seen African Americans so visibly angry at a Democratic candidate.

Right.

I have never seen Latinos so visibly angry, and the polls reflect that anger.

I have never seen young people that were

ambiguous about it, and the polls reflect that.

I've never seen the never Trumpers as scattered.

And

I know we talked about Cheney, but compared to 2016 and 2020,

they're almost non-existent.

You know what I mean?

They're not a point.

The Lincoln Project, I mean, they'll run those hit ads, but they're just

zilch.

So my point is, with all these constituencies in motion, and why

is he

I guess what I'm trying to say is, is this explain why in the national polls, he's two points split down and he was three and a half in 2016 and six in 2020?

Is that it?

Or he's closer.

He polls in the aggregate of the seven swing states.

He's ahead of Hilley by a tenth of a point because of these moving constituencies.

But what I'm getting at is why don't why all of these anecdotal news of these dramatic changes have not resulted in sizable polls?

Or

are the pollsters looking at this and they say, oh my God,

It's bad.

And if we point, if we print these polls and it's this bad, go get another sampling because man,

if we release this poll that Trump's three or four points ahead nationally, that's momentum that we can't tolerate.

So go back.

Are they that cynical and rigged?

I don't know.

Maybe it's their,

is this turning up in the internal polls for Trump?

But it seems to me that it should translate into a stronger polling.

You see what I'm saying?

Yeah.

Well,

this hope here, I mean, I don't have any evidence, but today I'm real clear right now when we're talking on Saturday, the 5th of October, that is

their poll average has Harris up 2.2,

but

the same date

in 2020, Biden was up eight and a half.

And so I don't know.

Biden won by seven or six

nationally in 2020.

I mean, that poll was over, that was too generous is what I'm saying.

Yeah, yes, yes.

So, well,

I go by the premise that our people

are

not responding to pollsters, and so much of this is.

I think that's a lot of it.

Yeah.

I think that's a lot of it.

Well,

we'll know on November 5th or 6th, maybe when some

downtown New York is burning.

And again, I'm just doing it by memory.

I think that the polls had

Biden up by seven to eight, and I think he won by four and a half or five,

maybe five.

So they were underestimating by three is what you're saying.

And so if he is down by two,

according to the 2020 polling errors, he would be up by one in the national, the actual national poll.

Right.

An accurate poll, because you'd have to take away five from whatever he was up.

And I think the 2020 was even more egregious than 2016.

I think he was down four

in the national pay.

Yeah.

Or in the final poll in 2016, he was down by four and he lost by the popular vote by two or something.

Yeah.

But

it's one or two points.

So it's, I think that's what these Republicans are saying when it's dead even,

that if she's up by two,

then

Trump, because of the polling errors, is really dead even.

But my view is that because of mail-in balloting and early balloting and the impossibility of authenticating the votes in a fashion that they were cast on election day, he's got to be up by two.

He's not quite there yet on the popular vote.

Well,

I can't see her doing anything to help herself unless she stays in a basement somewhere.

No, she can't do anything except the October surprises.

Remember, he probably lost the election on the laptop.

They dumped that 51 intelligence authorities swearing it had the hallmarks of Russian right before the last debate.

And he got up there and lied.

lied, lied, lied.

He said, Donald Trump, I got 31

intelligence authorities, and they say that

this is a product of Russian disinformation, so you're lying again.

And how dare you make plan of honor and line of family?

And it worked.

It worked.

In 2016, they dumped the dossier right before that election.

They had BuzzFeed and they were feeding it to, remember that?

Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed and Newsweek.

And it was all leaking out about Donald Trump urinated on prostitutes

in a bed in Moscow just because Barack Obama had slept there.

Yeah, it's insane.

It's sickening.

Sickening.

They're going to do that again.

And everybody's got to be prepared for it.

And they're doing it already, as I said, with the interest rates and Jack Smith and Zelensky's trip, and they'll do more of it.

They may do that.

I hate to say this, but the more body bags that come out of these

crushed areas that have been ignored by

what they're doing.

yeah they should they should have had a whole army division there they could have had a big logistics camp they should have just taken a base or an airport and just brought in thousands of helicopters and tent cities and then sent in a whole crew of bulldozers and get those roads open sewage those people have no sewage they have no water no sewage no water

you're treating them like animal you can send a 300 million dollar busted mulberry to Gaza.

There's a lot you can do.

They can't do anything.

They can't do anything.

They can't do anything.

They're incompetent, but they're also

nihilistic and mean.

Well, yeah, then stay out of the way of the people that want to, you know, civil society and the voluntary association.

We got to stop this depressive talk.

We have to be upbeat.

Okay, let me be upbeat here.

Finish off with an upbeat thought.

Let me end it with this.

First of all, I just want to thank people that

sign up for the thing I do.

I write Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society.

You could go to civilthoughts.com and sign up.

And every Friday in your inbox will appear my newsletter, which has 14 recommended readings of great articles I've come across the previous week.

So thanks for those who write me.

And I know people are enjoying it.

CivilThoughts.com.

Lots of people listen to the show, Victor, and they rate it.

They go to Apple, zero to five stars.

Practically everyone gives you five stars.

Great admiration for the wisdom you share.

Some people

leave comments.

We read them.

We also read the comments that people leave on your website.

Let me read two comments.

Let me read one that someone has left on

the Blade of Perseus.

This is from Terry S., who wrote about,

in response to your essay, how to blow up the Middle East War in Five Easy Steps?

And Terry wrote: Excellent analysis, as always.

Always,

most of our current leaders, academics, and elites fundamentally misunderstand the actual mindset of the Iranian leadership.

VDH often points out: human nature does not change.

As VDH says, quote, our enemies view our magnanimity with contempt, end quote.

Unless our decision makers grasp these two points, peace will be elusive and chaos will reign.

And then on Apple,

we have a comment that's titled Reading List.

I love your show.

I'm a commissioned officer in the U.S.

Coast Guard, and I'm sure others and myself would like to learn more about politics, history, and the general climate of our country.

Do you have a recommendation of books to read to learn more about World War I?

World War I or World War II?

World War II I.

Yes, I do.

Andrew, Andrew,

Go ahead.

The two best

are John Keegan.

Of all the books that John Keegan wrote, the book on World War I, the First World War, remember that's the term that the English used, the First World War,

was his best.

It was much better than the book on World War II and the Civil War.

But it was a wonderful, it's beautifully written.

Hugh Streiken wrote a two-volume.

He was kind of the authority on World War I, and it's a masterful

former Oxford Don.

It's a wonderful book.

Martin Gilbert wrote a book on World War II and World War I, and he's kind of a chronicler.

So if you want to know exactly the sequence of events, he'll take a date and tell you everything that happened on that date without a lot of analysis, but it's very valuable.

So I would start with John Keegan, then you Stryken, and then

Martin Gilbert.

If you want to just get a short one, there's a guy named, he died, tragically, but Stokesbury.

He wrote a thing called A Short History of World War II, and he did later a short history of World War I.

And you can read the whole thing in 250 pages, as did the greatest military history historian of his age, the Regis Professor of Military History, Michael Howard.

And he wrote, I met him at Yale once.

He was a very sweet person, actually, for someone who was so well-known, very modest.

And he wrote a history of World War I.

If you want to read

a memoir, I would read the famous one, Eric Maria Remark,

All Quiet on the Western Front from the German side.

We forget just how the entire German army was decimated.

And then from the Allied side, Robert Graves wrote a really weird, moving, brilliant

memoir called Goodbye to All That.

They called him old Gravey.

He was like 21.

He gets shot in the lung, and he was severely...

He was a classicist, general polymath, but he wrote that when he was younger.

And it was a brilliant memoir.

And then my colleague at

the Hoover Institution, Neil Ferguson's thesis, was written on World War I.

And if you want to get a revisionist history, then you could

do no worse.

It's called the pity,

and I think the pity of war and the subtitle is Explaining World War I.

And he takes the position that it was a total catastrophe.

Everybody was 17 million for nothing.

And there was ways that the Allies could have massaged German aggression and ambition

and

blunted it without that aggression and Austria ending in a war that was suicidal for Europe and it never recovered.

And it's a good book.

It's very well written.

It's a little different.

Can I just add, Victor, when people look up Hugh Straken,

his name is spelt H-E-W.

That's Hugh, as opposed to.

And Straken is S-T-R-A-C-H-A-N.

And his book is

The First World War.

Simple enough.

Oxford.

Yeah, it was.

He's

I met him, and he was at the University of Edinburgh.

Yeah.

And

when I had the company with Al Philip, the military history tour group, we did that for 20 years and took tours.

And we did one of Scotland, and we had him speak about World War I.

And he was a professor at that time at the University of Edinburgh.

I think he's about 75 years old now.

Yeah,

he's a very good guy, and he was very polite, professional, and completely knowledgeable about World War I.

And he wrote a great history.

I think he was one of Andrew Roberts' thesis advisors

at Oxford.

I'm going to go out and buy that.

That is

authoritative.

But if you want just a brief introduction, read Michael Howard or Stokesbury.

If you want a big book that's just beautifully written, read John Keegan.

If you want a chronicle, maybe Martin Gilbert.

And if you want to read about what it was like, I would read Robert Graves.

Goodbye to all that.

Yeah, goodbye to all that.

Well, Andrew, Common Sense, you asked that question.

You got the answer.

Thanks for asking it.

Victor, thanks for answering it.

And thanks for all the other wisdom you shared today.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Yeah, we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Bye.