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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host.

You're here to hear from the man of wisdom, Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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

I'll tell you later in this podcast why I believe you should be going there regularly and subscribing.

Today is Sunday, August 4th, and this particular episode will be out on Tuesday, August 6th.

As ever, Victor, there's no days off in America anymore.

No quiet days, no passive days,

not big news days.

We've We've got a lot of things to talk about.

Donald Trump was in Georgia yesterday at a big rally saying a lot of this and a lot of that and a lot of old Trump coming out.

And

I don't know about a lot of new Trump on that.

We have Kamala Harris's husband, news about him having an affair in his first marriage.

Jimmy Carter from his hospice deathbed is supposedly making political statements and get some bad economic news.

Yeah, we have Maduro.

You remember the left?

Is that Jeremy Raskin?

The left is saying Maduro, the people,

more evidence of right-wing attacks on democracy.

Yeah.

They're claiming Maduro is a right-wing.

We can talk about that too.

Sure, sure.

Well, that, and

if we had three hours for this podcast, we could talk about a lot more.

But anyway, we'll get to all of that because Venezuela is damn important too.

I will get to all that right after these important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So, I think, Victor, we should maybe talk about the

second dude and Jimmy Carter, and then we'll probably take a break and then we'll go into the Trump rally and some related things to that.

I know you want to talk about some

international

arms,

terrorist arms

news.

So let's begin with, let's begin with Jimmy Carter.

Okay.

He's 99.

He'll be 100 in October.

Daily Mail has a story that

his grandson says his dad,

who is with Jimmy in the hospice, where he's been for quite a long time, said,

I just want to make it to

election day so I can vote for Kamala Harris.

I'm sorry, maybe it actually happened, but I think it's BS.

And I kind of think most things we hear out of the Democrats are BS.

Victor, I could be wrong, and I may need to go to confession for these things.

Your thoughts?

You know, I don't know.

I don't know if this is the same grandson.

You remember that right before the 2000

election, he taped a Mitt Romney, snuck in and

Mitt Romney said, I can't, I can, you can never win 48% of the vote or something because they're all on government handouts.

And that kind of really cost him.

So he is what the Greeks called a polypragmon, a busybody,

Jimmy Carter's grandson.

But Carter's had a brain tumor, and they pronounced him terminal.

And then they gave him some, I don't know if it was a particular type of new.

cancer chemotherapy that seemed to ossify the tumor.

I'm happy that he's alive.

He's a decent person.

But, you know,

he's not really saying, if this is true, he's not really saying he's waiting.

Nobody who ever waits to vote for Kamala Harris.

I'm sorry.

Even the most die-hard leftist does not want to vote for Kamala Harris.

What he's really saying is, I want to vote against Donald Trump.

Why do I say that?

Because remember, he was one of the first out of the starting blocks to tell us in 2017, along with Hillary Clinton and Hycomb Jeffries, that Donald Trump was illegitimately elected.

He was chosen by the Russians.

People forget that.

He's an upright guy, but he was one of the most forceful election denialists and bought into the entire Russian collusion hoax, the steel dossier.

And more important, he spread it.

And he has never gotten over the crushing defeat that Ronald Reagan

inflicted on him.

And we've got to remember something this is very important because it has relevance for this uh election

jimmy carter according to a gallup poll about taken about eight days before the election maybe it was two weeks was ahead of ronald reagin by up to six points yeah i remember right and if you don't believe that last poll and i'm skeptical of it you go back until july and other polls he was dead even or leading and then reagin crushed him and how did he crush him he ran the bear commercial.

The Russian bear is on the lose.

He hit him on Afghanistan.

He hit him on the hostages.

One thing he did not do is say that Jimmy Carter is a sanctimonious, pious, judgmental, small-town peanut farmer.

Which would all have been accurate.

All of it would have been accurate, but he didn't go into ad home.

And I've said this before.

Then, fast

forward

to 1988, George H.W.

left the August convention, as I said in a prior podcast,

behind Michael Dukakis, a fine, upstanding person, a nice guy.

I had affinities.

I had lived in Greece almost three years.

He was from the island of Lesbos, a fine person.

But he was disingenuous.

He was telling everybody, just like Carter was telling everybody that he was for energy development, tough on the Russians.

He was a stealth candidate.

He said that he was a technocrat.

He had nothing to do with ideology.

And then they unleashed Leotwater.

And from August 1st till early November,

the same 90-day period Trump is looking at, they demolished, they completely demolished

Dukakis by reminding people he was a Massachusetts.

liberal and the state was a mess.

They compared him to Jimmy Carter.

There was that end.

I remember you.

Yeah, I remember you.

I remember the floating junk in the Boston harbor.

I remember that revolving steel kind of fairway door going around with Willie Horton.

I remember the bobblehead tank commercial, on and on.

And what they did not do, they did not say that he was.

They didn't get into his wife drink bleach and all that stuff.

That was reported, but they didn't go ad hominem.

They went on his record.

Mean, tough, but not ad hominem.

If you go back further in 72, George McGovern was in that, but he was trying at the last moment to act as if he was, remember that America, come home, come home to our values.

He was going to run.

He was a B-24 pilot, very courageous in World War II.

They played that up, and you would have thought that he was a liberal.

He picked finally Sergeant Shriver after Eagleton dropped out, and they went after him.

Free welfare for everybody, guaranteed income, cut the carrier

aircraft carriers down from 12 to 6 carrier groups.

They just went after what he said.

Abortion, amnesty, abortion, everything.

And when they got...

Acid.

Yeah, acid.

So I hope Donald Trump will listen when all of us tell him, you've got a George McGovern, you've got a Michael Dekakis, and you've got a Jimmy Carter.

All hard leftists,

just like Kamala Harris, all denying they are, and at the last 11th 11th hour, trying to flip over and say they're moderates.

And you know what they all have in common?

Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W.

Bush did not go after them

in an ad hominem.

They didn't make say shorty Mike Dekakis and crazy,

you know, mentally ill George McGovern.

They didn't say peanut head Jimmy Carter.

Okay.

And they won.

They didn't just win.

They won by a landslide.

So what I'm suggesting to Donald Trump is this.

He redefines Camilla Harris.

That's the wrong word, Jack.

I'm sorry.

He exposes Camilla Harris.

He doesn't get into a cul-de-sac about Governor Kemp.

He doesn't say she's mentally

incompetent.

He doesn't say he...

doesn't say she's not black.

That's just all irrelevant, but it's just not a sin of commission.

It wastes time.

These guys only had 90 days to redefine.

And these candidates had been out in the public eye for a year, Carter, five years.

But Trump's only had 90 days.

So

he has to stick on message about what she did.

Can I give one implied example to Donald Trump?

Do your show.

You can do whatever you want.

Mr.

Trump, if you or any of your staff are listening, when you are debating her, say, I'll give you a couple ideas.

Camela,

Vice President Harris, you bragged in several venues that you were the, quote,

last person in the room with Joe Biden when he made that decision to flee in disgrace and humiliation from Afghanistan.

You remember that?

And what is she going to say?

She bragged about it.

So let's say he doesn't stop.

He says, you told the American people

that you were going to force them to sell back to the government

their so-called assault rifles.

Okay.

If you want to buy back Americans'

assault weapons, take their private property, violate the Second Amendment, then why in the world would you be the last person in the room that approved a policy that gave 360,000 assault weapons to the Taliban?

And if she starts to just just say, but I'm not done.

You had to top that off with 65,000 machine guns.

And then if she was sputtering, I said, and you know what?

Given your hyperinflation,

the American people love their pickup trucks.

But when you took office, they were $20,000 cheaper.

And now they're $20,000.

You can buy a pickup truck for $80,000.

But you know what you did, Vice President Harris?

You gave 42,000 brand new trucks and SUVs and you left them and gave them to the Taliban.

If that's not enough,

you gave them 22,000 Humvees.

If that's not enough, we have people on farms all over America.

They have used trucks.

You gave 8,000 heavy-duty trucks.

We have forest service people that are short helicopters.

Vice President Harris, do you know that I was at a Pennsylvania rally and the FBI and the Secret Service said they couldn't give adequate protection because they didn't have enough equipment?

You gave over 100 of our most sophisticated UH60s Blackhawks.

You gave MDs.

You gave MIs.

Every type of helicopter, over 100 of them, you gave to the Taliban.

Maybe I would have been safer in a personnel carrier.

You gave 170 to the Taliban.

You know what, Vice President Harris?

The Secret Service could not communicate with local law enforcement because they didn't have a sophisticated radio.

You gave 162,000 of the most sophisticated radios we have in our arsenal to the Taliban.

So don't.

I think that would be a good thing to say, Jack.

I really do.

And

I wouldn't mention anything about her race or her cackle rhea, anything.

Nothing.

Cackle Rhea.

So

that's what I would do.

That's what I would do.

I never heard that.

Yeah.

Well, I never heard you call cacoria.

That's pretty funny.

Rhea is a Greek word for flow.

You like diarrhea, flow through.

Well, cacorrhea or the flow out of cackles.

Anyway,

but why doesn't she, why doesn't he do that and just stop all this stuff?

Yeah.

We don't want to hear about it.

Today he says something, she was mentally incompetent.

Duh.

And a final little rant.

Joe Joe Biden is not president.

Excuse me.

Joe Biden is not a presidential candidate.

He's not president either, but he's.

He's not president either.

Right.

I think Conrad Brack, as I said earlier, called him a wax works or something.

A waxen effigy, something to that effect.

But the point is.

As long as that guy had that office and he wouldn't budge, everybody was getting very angry when he went up the wrong steps, when he tripped, when he started having brain freezes, when he'd speak and everybody go, what the hell did he say?

He slurred every word.

And then he did all this, not as your nice grandpa.

I might have a but it was snagelpush.

It was mad.

It was off-putting.

So they didn't like him.

They didn't like him to the 35% approval level.

Okay.

And he had a bad debate.

Worst debate I've ever ever seen.

Okay.

And I think he had one of the worst, if not the worst, presidency in the last 50 years.

Since Jimmy Carter.

Since Jimmy Carter.

I think it was worse than Jimmy Carter.

It's worse than James Buchanan's age.

It's probably the worst ever.

Okay, but he's not there.

So why is Donald Trump saying he was a disaster?

He was horrible.

He just keeps hammering butt.

Biden.

He's doing that at the same time,

the Orwellian narrative machine on the left is saying,

remember prior to June 13th, they said,

excuse me, prior to the June 13th debate, they said, oh, no, that's a cheap fake to suggest he's in capacity.

Oh, no.

But then, then

they went after him with a savagery.

He's selfish.

He's egocentric.

He won't step down.

Now?

He's George Washington.

It was like the farewell address when he stepped down.

He's so noble.

He's selfless.

We've never seen a president.

The real truth is we've never seen a selfish president who stuck to his job while his operator said, you're fit to be president, but not fit to represent us in the election.

That's what happened.

But no matter, my point is, they have now recreated Uncle Joe from Scranton as a nice guy.

So what does Trump do?

He comes along and he trashes and trashes him.

He's not running against him.

It's permissible and advisable to go after her record as vice president.

But why would you say, Joe was a disaster?

He had a disaster.

Did you hear?

He's not there, Mr.

President.

He's gone.

He's getting sympathy now.

People say, oh, look at that poor guy.

I mean, not sympathy enough to look at that poor guy.

I'd like to have him again.

It's like, look at that poor guy.

I'm so relieved he's not going to be here after January.

But don't do that.

Don't, Mr.

President, do not waste one of your 90 days going after Joe Biden's mental incapacity or his horrible debate.

It's ancient history.

Do not go after Camilla Harris's

advantageous.

Yeah, her racial heritage, her weird relationship with Willie Brown.

Go after endorsing George Gascon, the Sorrels prosecutor who destroyed San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Go after what she did at the border.

Go after her record and what she will do in the future.

But don't the what, in other words, look at the campaign like this.

You got 90

days left.

All along that campaign trail, there is a left-wing IED.

And it's about race, race, race, race, gender, gender, gender.

And they planted them all each day.

Don't step in them.

Just go straight through the mind-free path about their record.

They do not want you to talk about that record.

They will do anything in the world not to talk about that record.

And he has to do that.

He does that and he wins bigly.

He doesn't do it and he will ensure that Camilla Harris will do to all you people listening who do not live in California what she did to us in California.

Victor, I think we should talk a little more about the off-target aspect of Trump.

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And we thank the good people at Solair for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor,

there's a lot more I think we should go back after the next break and revisit what you that those potential questions you you suggested Trump ask Kamala about what the the stockpiles in Afghanistan.

But first, Donald Trump was at a rally yesterday in

Georgia.

And one of the takeaways, you know, for me and friends of mine are saying, I can't believe he's going doing this again, was to go after

little Brian Kemp, bad guy.

That's the very popular Republican governor.

of Georgia and the Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, and re-litigating the 2020 election, why you guys didn't say it was stolen, et cetera, et cetera.

I just think this is not what people want to hear, Victor.

And again,

as you just said, here's an opportunity to make the case against Kamala Harris's record, and we're going down this rabbit hole again.

Your thoughts?

I don't understand it.

I do not understand it.

Mr.

President, on January 5th of 2021,

About 700,000 people

who voted for Perdue in the November election, in which you lost, according to the official statistics, let's not get into what happened.

You lost that state.

Those people who gave Purdue a narrow victory, but not enough to win the 51% required majority, he ran again in January.

And you had said it was rig, rig, rig, and 700,000 Republicans did not show up to vote.

And he lost.

And they elected two in that special election.

So Kelly Lawford.

They lost two seats to not Democrats, but to socialists.

So the message of that is do not replay the past.

Do not talk about the elections.

Don't talk about anything.

Brian

Kemp.

He's endorsed Trump.

Why would you want to go after him?

He's endorsed Trump.

He said, I'm going to support the nominee, as I recall.

Don't do after.

He had this woman.

Remember the one that he hugged in Chick-fil-A, Makaya.

The Chick-fil-A, yeah.

Yeah, I think her name was Michaela Montgomery, that black woman.

She was really well spoken.

They had her at the rally.

She let off.

She was wonderful.

That's what they need to do.

But don't get up there.

Just stick, just stick to the teleprompter or go off on, you know, but just have little indent.

You can go off here, but do not go after A, fellow Republicans, B, make fun of an ossified, dehydrated, irrelevant Joe Biden for this election, and do not go after Camilla Harris's personal

details, her race, or gender.

Just don't do that, and you will win.

You will win, as I said,

in the way that

In the way that Richard Nixon destroyed

McGovern, in the way that George H.W.

destroyed Michael Dekakis, and in the way that Reagan destroyed Carter.

And they were all behind in the polls, at least the last two were.

And they all not only pulled even, they won in landslides.

You can win in a landslide, Mr.

President.

But if you do this and you continue to do this, all you're doing, just envision that there is a bunch of hungry wolves and

you're in a campfire and you're keeping them away.

Those are the media, right?

And as long as you keep on the issues, you've got a big, big stick with fire and you're pointing it in their eyes and they're reeling back.

They don't know what to do.

But when you go into all of these cul-de-sacs, it's like you're taking a big fat ribeye steak and throwing it to them.

And they will devour you because

they have the money and they have the power.

And they don't know what to do with you when you talk about the border and the 10 million illegal aliens or the 200,000 vehicles we gave to terrorists.

They don't know what to do with it.

The 20% inflation.

They don't know what to do with it.

Please, please don't do that because you have a responsibility to all of us that we can't endure another four years, but we'll give you a four years.

Oh my God, I can't.

I'm already weeping at the prospect of this.

Well, anyway, Victor, hey, I know we're not supposed to.

We've just talked about not talking about some of these side issues, but there's one that's in the news today, and that involves the second dude.

And let's get your thoughts on this news story, and then we'll get on to some other things right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

So, Victor headlined today.

Kamala Harris's husband, Doug Amhoff, admits to extramarital affair that led to the breakup of his first marriage.

This is his second marriage to Kamala Harris.

I think this is her first marriage.

He has a child

from his first wife, who's the stepdaughter of Kamala Harris.

And I think, if I read the story right,

he had an affair with a nanny.

I think she had an abortion, and it's come out and he's admitted it.

Anyway, Victor, it's scurrless, unpleasant.

Does it matter?

Well, it only matters in one sense.

And one sense is this.

To the degree they keep bringing up stormy, stormy, stormy, stormy, stormy, stormy, adultery, adultery, adultery, then all you have to say is,

well,

you knew that your vice

president.

presidential candidate's husband paid off his nanny that he impregnated.

At least Stormy Daniels was an adult, I mean, you know, adult.

This woman was in the, in your home.

That's what really hurt.

I'm saying that because that's what really hurt Schwarzenegger,

because his wife at the time was pregnant, as I remember, with one of their last children.

And he was having relations with the nanny in the home.

where his wife wasn't there.

He doesn't need to bring it up, but if they start going on Stormy and his character,

that would be a legitimate target because they have used that in the past.

The other thing is, and I don't know to what degree

we have any

information, but this seems like a very nice woman.

She was a teacher and she obviously didn't have a lot of money.

And she

moonlighted as a governess or babysitter.

So fast forward, she's still doing that, as I think.

How did she afford a big, beautiful home in the Hamptons, right?

I think it was $600 or $700,000 she bought a few years ago.

So people should ask themselves: was there, just ask,

not Trump, not Trump, a journalist if they have a chance.

Were there any financial considerations made?

Was there a payoff to her?

And see what they say.

That's all.

Because

they said, remember, they impeached, they went after, excuse me, not impeached, they went after Alvin Bragg went after Donald Trump for having a payment to Stormy Daniels.

And they're going to try to put him in jail.

And all he has to say is, Camilla, did your husband give a payment to hush up a woman that he had a relationship with

in his own home where she was babysitting his child?

Yes or no?

And if that's yes, then please don't talk to us about Donald Trump's character.

That's the only value I see about it.

Okay.

Well, Victor,

you mentioned earlier these enormous

figures of the kind and the kind of

military hardware and weaponry and vehicles, helicopters left behind in Afghanistan.

And,

you know,

I know we've used the figure, you know, billions of dollars worth of equipment, but

this is just a staggering amount of money to put in the hand, a staggering amount of hardware to put in the hands of terrorists.

And I'm curious, like, why would there be that much there in the first place?

Why wouldn't they?

Because they had trained 300,000 Afghans.

And you remember in July?

I think it was General Milley.

It might have been General McKinsey, he was the commanding officer in the grounds.

Told us that they were a viable force.

They melted in 24 hours.

But we were going to equip them as if they were an American army.

So we had turned over.

We were turning over as each unit became trained.

We were equipping them.

And we had this big yard of all these things.

They said, you know what?

When you're ready to handle, you're going to get a brand new pickup trucks.

You're going to get brand new rhinos.

You're going to get brand new Humvees, brand new two and a half ton three hundred three ton big trucks you're going to get brand new assault weapons and machine pistols machine guns 70 000 machine guns i think and yeah

wow and that's that that's i mean it was everything it was night vision goggles it was everything and uh i think we gave them over 170 heavy artillery pieces which we say that were short i mean i guess you'd like to give them the ukrainians but uh they're gone now they're on the terrorist market there's there have been reports they've turned up in the Middle East.

But the other thing was

the U.S.

government announced last week, I think, that they had sent the Taliban $240 million, million, million dollars, not since we got into Afghanistan, but since they took over and ran us out and blew up 13 Marines.

and killed contractors and killed our allies.

The State Department gave them $240 million.

And you know what they said?

Inadvertently, we thought we were giving it to good people in Afghanistan that were,

you know, they were just foundations.

They were things like the Foundation for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

Maybe we were giving it to the gender studies program at the University of Kabul.

or the gay pride factory that made the gay pride factory.

But whatever it was,

$240 million

to terrorists.

And I think that would be a good thing to bring up in the debate.

You were the last person in the room.

Not only have we given all of this deadly weaponry to killers that kill Americans, but you guys gave them $240 million in cash.

And if you add that to the hundreds of millions you've given Hamas,

and what was our little, I don't know what the cost of that Mulberry 2.0 or that whatever you might call it.

$200 million, $300 million.

$300 million for a piece of junk.

And then we should say, and you want to raise taxes.

No wonder you want to raise taxes.

You give everything away to free health care to illegal aliens, you want to do.

You want to give free health care to government.

You want to ban private health care.

Of course, we don't have to raise taxes because you spend it all when you let 10 million people come in.

And

I don't know.

I mean,

along the same lines, Victor, I saw a report earlier this week that since October 7th,

America has given

Hamas, Palestinians, close to a billion dollars, above and beyond the stupid-ass mulberry.

I believe that.

That's an issue.

That's an issue.

While they have our hostage, America's hostage.

All we have to say is, Mr.

Pre,

Miss Ms.

Vice President,

Vice President,

they have shot 7,000 rockets, 7,000 rockets into Israel.

Hamas has, since October 7.

How much do we pay for them?

Because don't tell me we didn't pay for them because you gave them almost a billion dollars to people on the West Bank and Hamas.

And they divert that money, as we know.

So why are we subsidizing people's munitions that are trying to destroy Israel?

Just tell me that.

And, you know,

what gets me about this whole thing is

Donald Trump had an excellent record.

Biden-Harris had a disaster.

Biden-Harris is to the left of Biden, always has been as senator, Attorney General of California, San Francisco.

She's a Bay Area leftist.

We in America do not elect Bay Area leftists.

We don't elect them, especially in the states that are going to count called Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

People there

are, a lot of them have, at least into Georgia or especially Nevada and Arizona, they flee the Bay Area.

They flee Camilla Harris.

So they're not wanting to vote for her.

So all you have to do, Mr.

President, keep your cool.

Don't mention any of these extraneous things and say, this is who these people are.

This is what she's done.

This is what she's doing.

This is what she will do.

This is what I did.

This is what I am doing.

This is what I, and you will win by a landslide.

They don't want to vote for her.

But you keep saying that she's mentally ill

or Governor Kemp is a little blah, blah, blah.

Or

you can't figure out what race she is.

She says this and this.

You know.

It's like them going after J.D.

Vance about he had sex with a couch.

You think that that helped them?

I don't.

I think that really hurt them, especially when a guy, I think there's no way in the world they would ever, if they were ever going to put that Fritzer guy on the ticket from Illinois, that awful guy.

Oh my gosh.

But when he said that J.D.

Vance has a problem with couches, he eliminated himself from any consideration.

That was disgraceful.

He should apologize, but that stuff doesn't work.

It really doesn't.

Yeah.

Hey, I just wanted, before we go on,

these figures that you talked about,

weaponry in Afghanistan and control of the Taliban, you can go to Instapundit and the other day they put up a

tweet, a post from a Max Abrams, and it is staggering, like over 100 helicopters and over 50 planes, 358,000 assault rifles.

162,000 radios, 126,000 pistols.

There's no question this stuff is going to to be used to kill Americans and probably has already killed Americans already.

Yeah.

So they need to mention that.

And they need to mention it with the idea that they're more interested in forcing people to give up an AR-15, confiscating it, than they are giving 160,000 of them to terrorists.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm kind of upset because I had that pickup that was at lemon, and then I had to go buy a new one, and they gave me some credit.

But from 2021 to 2023,

that same type of pickup went almost up $15,000.

And they gave away over 40,000 of them, new pickup to the Taliban.

And I don't know whether, it's just as if they have absolute contempt for the American taxpayer, for the American people.

The military is so lax.

How could they ever do that?

How can they hang their, how can they not apologize to us after doing all that?

Who do they think they are doing that?

Nobody even mentions the 13 Marines who were killed.

And there were, there were

nobody else killed them.

And there are reports if they didn't, if they had different rules of engagement, a sniper could have got the guy before.

So

these are dangerous people that are running the country.

And

I just hope that it's a 72 or an 88 or a 1980 blowout.

And it can easily be.

yeah, well, the candidate has to help in that regard.

Hey, Victor, excuse me.

I'm just getting over COVID myself.

I'm not comparing it because my gosh, you've had like four cases of it and long term is insane.

This is your second, right?

It's my second.

But like, if you just think that our tax dollars paid for this crap, it's and it'll be with us till the end of time.

I get angry every day.

I get angry.

I know that only one one in 10 people get long COVID, and every, almost all of them

have an immune.

I have an autoimmune problem.

I've had it for 30 years

with inability to handle serum tryptase.

And that gives me, you know, when I get, when I, I had mono when I was, I don't know, 33, it took me.

Did you have it for three years or something?

Yeah,

yeah, it was hard.

I got a really bad case of mono, and I didn't take any time off after I tested negative, but I just fell out of it.

And then

I've had three cases of COVID.

I had one when I had long COVID two years ago, and it was weird.

I felt bad for a day.

I tested positive.

And then three days later, I was negative.

But

it gives you about a year and a half.

They say six months to two years, you get immunity.

So I'm hoping if I can get over this, I will have two more years.

And then I'll probably.

But if you have one thing I've really changed my

attitude to, I had people say to me,

I don't get on, I talked to a very well-known person

on the conservative side, public intellectual.

I asked him if he ever had COVID.

He said, never.

And I said, how did you do that?

He said, I don't get on a plane.

I do not fly into big crowds.

I don't shake hands with 300 people.

Well, you know,

prior to me getting the 2020, I think I must have shaken 5,000 hands over the prior two months with, I don't know, 15 out-of-state flights, jet lagged.

Very hard.

People say, well, I fly, yeah, but if you go fly from rural California and you drive up to Fresno, which is not an efficient airport,

and when you miss a flight, you don't have a lot of options and you only have, you get stuck places.

And, you know, what can be a routine flight to the Midwest or the

East Coast sometimes costs me a day or two.

So I'm not going to.

The point is that I really changed my attitude about going.

I have to

meet my commitments that I made before I got this, but after December 1st, I'm going to cut back on it.

When you shake hands or you hug people and you have 300 or 400 after a lecture, and you're just asking for it if you have an autoimmune problem, and I do.

But

I think...

Most people, I was just reading the other day, nine out of ten people do not get long COVID.

So the odds are, and that people, apparently they get vaccination.

I got two vaccinations.

I wish I didn't, but I did.

But they say if you have at least two, you have a better chance of not getting it.

Yeah.

I don't know anything, but to your point that

the Chinese did this, it defies all logic.

Remember when Fauci and everybody told us, well, you're going to get Omicron will be a milder one.

And each time a virus mutates, it gets milder and milder and milder and more infectious.

until it becomes the common cold.

This hasn't, for a lot of people, become the common cold.

Well, the common cold sucks, you know.

Yeah,

I hate the common cold.

I do aspire to, but for me, a common cold was always three days of kind of fatigue,

achiness, and then just a messy thing.

But this stuff, I thought Omicron, I had Delta.

I thought Omicron was just as bad.

It gave me long COVID.

Delta didn't.

And then this latest flirt that I got

in early June, it was worse than the Omicron as far as the acute phase.

I was sick as a dog for five days.

And then this long COVID is just about the same as I had for nine months with the other stuff.

So I get, yes, the answer is I think about that if I can't sleep all night or I'm just...

My head feels like it's a balloon or I feel

pressures behind your eye or dizzy or you get up and you're out of breath.

I think, or your body aches after a little walk, you think,

you know, and then people come up.

You look fine.

Are you sure you're okay?

No, I feel like I'm.

Excuse me.

I don't, I got to apologize to my audience, but I feel like.

That's what you feel like.

That's what you feel.

Yes.

I feel like crap.

I really do.

And

I think, who did this?

How did they do this?

How did they get away with it?

Who in America helped them with the expertise?

How many scientists went over to that lab?

Who sent machinery and instrumentation of it?

Who sent money?

What was Peter Dossick thinking?

Didn't they know it was against the law in the United States to conduct gain in function research?

Why didn't we ever hold them responsible?

Are they still doing it?

That's what gets you angry.

And I get letters like once a week from somebody.

And I mean, I'm fortunate.

I can walk and do stuff.

But they'll say,

I got COVID in 2021.

I can't even get out of bed.

I've got rashes.

I've got

low blood.

I can't do anything.

I lost my job.

I'm poor.

I've spent $40,000.

I've tried everything.

And then they list everything.

Hyperbachia oxygen.

I had to pay $20,000.

I didn't do anything.

I went and had ganglia and neck block.

I tried that.

I tried this new chemotherapy drug, cancer drug.

I tried stem cell.

They're doing everything.

And then you look at the medical response to it.

And it's really frustrating because there's two issues that they publicize.

Do not take alternate treatments that are not approved, but pace,

pace.

Rest.

Yeah, that's obvious, pace and rest.

But don't tell them not to try something when you don't have anything to offer after four years.

Zilch.

So if you had this stuff, and I've had it now in a, for not, I've had it for over a a year and a half, probably total.

You want to try anything, you know what I mean?

It's like Russian roulette.

You're willing to try it if you can just get rid of this crap.

And for them to let, the other thing they do is, you know what?

If you search long COVID and hit news, you know what half the stories are?

Long COVID is disparate on communities of color.

Long COVID treatment is not equitable.

This is a sexism plagues that it's all DEI.

They're spending millions of dollars doing studies how it impacts different groups.

You ask any person who's in a minority group or in a female group, would you like to have a $100 million study studying about whether you are getting the exact same treatment as Mark Zuckerberg?

Or would you like to have that money spent to get a monoclonal antibody or something that will stop it?

And it's just frustrating because it's, again, a reminder how DEI plagues all of us as commission and omission.

All that capital and time and labor as in a commissariat.

Yeah, just auditing and not producing anything.

No new drugs, no new research.

Why don't they, they say creatine helps.

Okay, let's have another study.

They say antihistamine.

Let's have a long study.

They say metaformin.

Let's have a long study.

Let's combine them together.

Let's see if carnitine works.

Let's see if quercetin works.

All these things they tell you.

and you know what they don't do it and so people get frustrated and so i get these emails can you please tell people that something something and berry sanders must have a relative because he said he wanted to have a moonshot project to cure it the other day maybe he has it that tim cane that senator that ran for vice president with him we have it right

he has it or a long long covet yeah he's had it yeah it's like

well share had long mono about 30 years ago.

Well, a country suffering with some political version of long COVID is Venezuela.

And Victor, let's get your thoughts about what's going on there when we come back from these final important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Hey, Victor,

before we talk about

Venezuela,

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So, Victor, not all that long ago, Venezuela was one of the vibrant countries, maybe even the most vibrant country in one sense in South America.

Its economy booming.

I think it at one point had the largest

oil reserves up to that point, a country rich in oil reserves and a country that's been decimated by socialism and not the Norwegian, Swedish kind of socialism, but kind of crypto communism, Castro kind of socialism.

Victor, they had elections the other day.

I'm just looking at an article that, you know, even our government says Maduro, who's the strongman over there, has lost.

But I have a feeling a year from now, Maduro will still be the president of Venezuela.

I could be wrong.

I don't know what's happened in the last 24 hours.

But anyway, Victor, any thoughts from you about what's gone on there and actually the consequences of having this rat ass leftist country in our proximity?

Well, you got to remember, even Hillary supported left-wing governments.

So they had no problem with Chavez and Maduro until they got to be embarrassments.

And the embarrassment now is they have lectured the country on free and fair elections.

This election was completely rigged, and Maduro almost certainly lost.

So now they've belatedly come out, but I think it was that Representative Raskin, who always says things that are intemperate and incoherent.

He was saying that Maduro was another

example of these right-wing tyrants and

the enemies of democracy.

Ah, wink, nod.

This is Donald Trumpism.

No, no,

if there's any

political commentary to be made, it's another example of a left-wing thug in the fashion of Nicaragua or Cuba or China or the old Soviet, hijacking a constitutional system and destroying it.

And

if the left always does that, if you look at most of the presidential assassins, they're either completely crazy or left-wing, or the people go after.

And they always say they, remember they tried to turn communist, pro-Castroite,

anti-American Lee Harvey Oswald into some right-wing Southerner?

Sure.

Yeah, that was after.

And they said the same thing with a crazy Bernie Sanders staffer, former staffer who shot Steven Scalise, tried to murder a bunch of Republicans playing baseball, that he was unhinged or he was an extreme.

No, no, he was a hardcore leftist, political.

And this is another example of, I don't know, but

they begged, I remember before the 2018

midterms, when gas was just soaring, they begged Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela to pump more oil.

And that's at the same time they were draining our Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

I guess the message was, oil is sticky, gooey, pollutant, dirty.

We hate it.

So you countries pump it for us so we can consume it.

I never understood that.

Did they really think that in Saudi Arabia or in Russia they are more environmentally friendly when they extract oil than we are?

or that we don't live on the same planet as those places?

So why in the world would you repress the place that extracts oil in the most environmentally safe

methodology possible, but you would encourage other people to continue their reckless polluting habits so you can consume that oil.

California pays $25 billion a year to import oil.

We're about number four or five of the 50 states and known gas and oil reserves.

Did you see what?

You must have seen what happened the other day.

Chevron getting out of California, heading to Texas.

They're up and moving there.

They just can't stand dealing there.

Working there anymore.

I guess they said,

we are moving from san francisco to houston because there's a much better weather and view in houston than san francisco oh my gosh houston is a nightmare of weather i know so i guess they're saying

they had purgatory and they made it into paradise and we had paradise and we made it in purgatory we'd never live in a purgatory paradise than purgatory purgatory that's what they did they took heaven on earth and ruined it and they're going to do it for the whole country if Kamala Harris is elected, because she'll bring a whole California mafia with her.

And already the Obama people, if you start to look at leaks from the White House and third and fourth page stories in the liberal print and liberal media, already

it's like

Biden reminds me of

an aged water buffalo crossing an African river.

Remember remember when those leopards

and

lions, the leopards or lions, cheetahs, I don't know whatever.

The cheetahs, they just sit there and they watch all of the water buffalo.

But then when that old decrepit one goes across, they jump.

Well, now that he is completely becoming irrelevant and decrepit, the Obama people are those cheetahs and lions and they are just devouring him.

Their people are slowly taking over the last six months.

They are open about it.

I think they took the Obama, David Poof, or whatever his name was.

They got him out of retirement.

He's running the Kamala Harris campaign now, or he's going to.

The whole Obama team is transitioning to Harris.

It's just that.

So I think Biden just must stare at the wall now.

Say to himself,

live by the coup.

Die by the coup.

In March, I was going nowhere.

I couldn't finish a sentence.

I had lost Iowa.

I had lost New Hampshire.

I was heading for defeat in Nevada.

And they resurrected me and bought off or did something and got Warren and Kobuchar and Bernie Sanders, who had more delegates than I did, to magically evaporate.

And then I got, I won.

And now those same people who created me have destroyed me.

Another coup, they said, Joe, you were very useful.

You were a useful idiot, but

you couldn't have a presentable idiot role anymore.

You were too idiotic.

So we can't use you anymore.

We have an agenda.

You were very good in hiding it and allowing us to run the country as a third term, but we find you

no longer useful.

So as of today,

We're not going to say cheap fakes and how dare you, how dare you, to quote Kamala Harris, how dare you say that Joe Biden is mentally unfit.

Not going going to do that anymore.

We're going to say you're selfish.

You're going to lose the House and Senate, and you have to step down.

And if you don't do it, we're going to get our people to invoke the 25th Amendment.

You're going to lose your influence.

Now that's, and Joe must look and say,

well,

I was created by the coup and I was destroyed by the coup because that's what happened.

By the way, Victor, a couple of things.

One, it's not to correct you, but it's David Ploof.

I'm sure there are poofs on the campaign, but this is David Ploof.

Ploof.

And then...

I know it's not spelled P-O-O-F.

No, correct.

It's

P-L-O-U-F-F-E, something like that.

And I did want to make the case, you mentioned Snagglepuss before, and he was actually kind of one of those nice Santa Barbera.

He was kind of a Snagglepuss was kind of an endearing character.

In fact,

I got an email from a guy who he said, please don't make fun of my Snaggle Puss.

And he wrote something like, Snaggy was one of my favorite characters.

Wasn't he kind of an aristocrat, Snaggle Puss.

He had that thing like, exits, stage right.

Yeah, I mean, had that funny voice.

I meant snarl.

I should have said snarl puss.

Yeah, that's okay.

Anyway, anyway, I'm sorry to all you people that I defame snaggle puts because that's okay.

I went back and looked at it.

I remember Snaggle Puss now.

Yeah, he was kind of a pompous idiot, but he was still,

he was.

Yeah, I think he had cuffs.

I think he had cufflinks on his arm.

I know.

He was a little bit more coherent than Joe Biden.

Yeah, a lot.

Well, we got one more thing to talk about, but

I just wanted to keep my promise at the beginning of the podcast.

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Victor,

talking about DEI, the great Heather McDonald, who you've had on this show, you interviewed her, I think, about a year ago, nine months ago.

She's terrific.

And folks, she writes for City Journal, which is...

could be the best magazine in America.

Of course, they have a website also.

She has a piece in the new

issue, and it's called Girling the Boy Scouts.

Let me just read the beginning of this because we're talking about DEI stuff.

But there's nothing.

There's nothing that happens anymore that doesn't involve DEI.

The Boy Scouts of America has a chief diversity officer and vice president of diversity and inclusion.

The organization requires all Eagle Scouts to earn a badge in diversity, equity, and inclusion.

It admitted girls to its program for 11 to 17 year old boys in 2019 and changed the name of that program from the Boy Scouts to Scouts BSA.

The word quote-unquote boy has been routed from the organization's promotional materials and replaced with youth, as in for more than 100 years, scouting programs have instilled in youth the values found in the Scout Oath.

Victor, there's no more Boy Scouts anymore.

This is a great piece.

Any thoughts on the piece or the broader issues it addresses?

You know, about once so every three weeks, somebody who's pretty well off will write me an email or a call and will say, hey, Victor,

I want to give a lot of money because I've done very well.

And can you, what are three or four of the charities that you trust?

And I always don't impose myself.

I don't think I have that wisdom.

Although I have a vested interest, obviously, in the Hoover Institution, Hillsdale College, Pepperdine University that I've been affiliated with.

But I usually want to hear what they say.

And you know what I've noticed the last three or four years?

They were big, all these people have been big donors of the Boy Scouts.

You know why they all had wonderful memories of being an Eagle Scout or

going up in the Sierra.

Yeah, and they had scout masters that, I mean, one guy called me and told me he learned how to light a fire without a match with Flint.

And another person

told me that how to, if he was lost, he always now knows how to get out.

Looking at the navigate by the stars and the rising of the sun.

They had all these wonderful stories, and they don't want to give anymore.

So I was curious, and I looked at that.

The giving has gone way down to the Boys and Girl Scouts because of this transgender, blending of the sexes, DEI agenda.

They just can't leave it alone.

I keep saying they have the unmitas touch, the left.

They turn everything to dross, everything they touch, the border,

Olympic sports, boxing,

United States swimmers,

they touch everything and it goes to Dross

because they are utopian authoritarians and we are their lab rats and they want to experiment on us with the qualifier that they're never going to experience the bad side of their ideology.

But they won't quit because

they have a contempt for the rest of America.

They have a view that they're credentialed, they're smarter, they're morally superior, and they deserve certain exemptions

so that they can experiment.

And then when they think, oh, that was a bad idea to ban cheap gas, natural gas stove, sorry about that.

Hmm.

I thought you truckers could charge your big semis every thousand miles with mandatory.

No, I guess I was wrong about that.

Oh, sorry about that border.

You know, I was thinking maybe we're at a point where we don't believe in borders.

We're all one people.

Sorry about that, you people in the Rio Grande Valley.

Sorry about you people in inner Chicago that I, oh,

I was for George Gascon and Soros.

I thought the more people we let out of prison, the more we had no bail.

People would react to that magnanimity and say, you know what, the country's really nice.

I took somebody's wallet.

I hit somebody over the head.

But they let me out, so I won't won't do that anymore.

Oh, sorry about that.

You guys that were murdered, raped, assaulted.

I didn't really mean that to happen.

That's how they think.

And they're very dangerous people.

Yeah, they're not just dangerous and bullies, Victor.

This is an ideology.

And

Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag wrote about a chess club in the Soviet Union at the time.

And these guys thought, because they were playing chess, that of this, none of Stalin's madness would infect them.

Why would Marxism have anything to do with chess?

Well, it did.

There's nothing, there's nothing that the idea, the Marxist ideology of

Harris, Biden, Sanders, others doesn't want to unfold.

I was a visiting professor in 91 and 92 as a classics professor at Stanford University, and this had just started.

Remember the, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.

Jesse Jackson demonstrated at Stanford.

Bill Bennett was on the air and had a, he debated, I think, he was really good on that, defending Western Civ.

I think it was on McNeil Lear or something.

But that was that first wave.

And I remember a person from

It's either from Selma or Kingsburg had a wife that was very ill getting cancer treatment at Stanford.

And he used to stop by and see me.

And and he was kind of freaked out you know Stanford campus from a small valley town and

I said to him I can remember we were talking about some bad areas Selma was very very safe but in the 90s it started to get dangerous in certain places still it very dangerous now if you go to the wrong place at the wrong time So I said, I want to tell you something.

These people you see around here, and I pointed to professors and everything, they are more dangerous to you than the worst areas where we live.

Because at least you know, when you go in those neighborhoods what to expect.

These people, you don't know what they're going to do, but they have a lot more power and influence to change your life and hurt you than the people there.

And

there's no hiding from them.

There's not, you know.

Well, I mean, they can take a million acres of irrigated water and just snap their fingers and say, you people are greedy almond growers.

Right.

And you can't.

I thought, wow, greedy almond growers, $1.58 a pound, losing $4,000 an acre growing almonds.

You're really greedy, paying 10 times what you used to for California Water Project Water.

Just cut it off.

Or they can just say to a developer, don't put any more natural gas ovens in your new homes.

Just don't do it.

Or, you know, they can tell

a young woman who's a wrestler or a boxer, you're going to have to wrestle somebody with twice your body strength.

who has testosterone and a different chromosome.

And

he's had a muscular skeletal frame much bigger than yours.

And he's going to hurt you, but you know what?

You're collateral damage.

So don't worry about it.

And that's how they think.

And they're very, very dangerous people.

Well, Victor, my experience, they've been very dangerous.

Yeah.

You've talked about, you know, land on this, I think,

the monastery of the mind.

Some people want to have that.

And

there's no monasteries anymore.

They'll get into your monastery.

No, it's like, I tell you what,

we're like the remnants of Roman civilization in North Africa circa about 440 A.D.

And we think you can go out to a fortified compound

out beyond New Carthage or you're Augustine and Hippo out in the countryside.

You can't.

The vandals will find you and they'll break into it.

They'll take your guns that you think

will protect you.

They'll tell your

daughter that she's got to compete against a boy.

You'll tell your other daughter she's got to dress with somebody that has testicles and a phallus in a dressing room.

They will tell you that if you

buy a particular type of car, it has to have this on it and this on it, and some of them are just superfluous.

You know, it's funny, I just said that.

I had a

2006 Toyota Tundra V8, you know.

Right.

And that thing never broke down once.

It had a, it, it was a first generation, a second generation V8.

Right.

And when my sophisticated, computerized Echo Diesel, it had so many things on it, you know what I mean?

Right.

And it, it just pooped out.

My son drove alongside, and it was very hard to take a 7,000-pound boat uphill and disconnect it from one truck without it rolling off the cliff and putting it on another truck.

But we did it.

And that,

I guess it was 15 years old, 16 years old.

He took that thing and he just floored it and went zoom right up 7,000 feet.

Didn't even get, didn't even get to the middle of the hot and cool.

Why you want a truck, right?

Yeah.

And I was always wondering why I would be in Selma.

And usually some guy would come up to me and say, hey, you want that truck?

I'll buy it from you.

And they'd have a new truck and I'd say, well, you have a new truck?

I like that truck.

Well, he didn't like the way it looked necessarily.

He knew that that was a very good engine.

So

I know that these new engines are more efficient.

They don't pollute.

Don't tell me that they're easier to maintain or they have a better safety record as far as service goes.

Because one of the most dangerous things in the world is driving one of those things uphill and having it cut out with 7,000 pounds pulling you backwards with cars all around.

So

I just think they experiment with all these things and then they don't really know what the consequences of the spirit.

All they had to do with the vaccination to get off topic before we leave, but just say this is an mRNA vaccination.

It is not quite a vaccination.

It is a little bit of gen.

genetic engineering in the sense that we're going to have your cells produce spike proteins, which will make your immune system go up.

But we don't know exactly how long these spike proteins will be produced by individual people and whether they'll end up in the brain or this.

So

we think it will protect you from dying, especially people who are vulnerable, that are overweight or older.

But take them with a word of caution.

And the idea was...

If we do that, they won't take them.

So we're going to tell them we had this test and there was nothing.

And after everybody gets vaccinated, they they say you know what we found out for young men they have myocarditis at a rate that's not explicable otherwise except for the vaccination hmm i wonder how that happened for some young women are getting cyst in their reproductive organ breast ovaries i wonder how that happened And they don't tell you because they think that you wouldn't know what to do with the knowledge, and they do know what to do with the knowledge.

I'm Anthony Fauci, and I think it was in your interest for me to break the law and circulate money in a roundabout way to my Chinese counterparts in Wuhan because they were doing gain of function research.

And I think I needed to be aware of that, what they were doing.

But I can't tell you that.

In fact, I have to lie, a noble lie.

I'm a platonic, noble, Straussian lie.

I have to because you can't deal with the truth.

So I'm lying.

I had no knowledge, no participation in routing U.S.

dollars to circumvent U.S.

law.

That's how they think.

Yeah.

Same thing with James Comey.

I'm the director of the FBI, and I had a private conversation with Donald Trump, and he asked me some questions.

So I had to mislead him and lie to the president and say, you know what, you're not a subject of an FBI investigation.

And then I thought, you know what?

He may find out I was lying and he

might fire me.

So I'm going to go out in my car, get my little FBI tablet, record this situation that my private, I think it was classified, he says confidential.

And I'm going to go leak it, I'll get my friends to leak it to the New York Times.

I had to do it, though, for the good of the nation.

That's how they all feel.

And they're scary people.

That's why we, the one thing Donald Trump represents is a person who will be more likely, I'm not saying he will, more likely to reduce the administrative state and to cut the

power back and the number of them.

Yeah.

1832,

Tocqueville said these people are very dangerous.

They're the catalyst for soft depotism.

No.

Well, the state, when the state grows, it comes at the expense of civil society and

individual liberty.

There's just no question about that.

Hey, Victor,

we have lots of people who rate the show, which they can do at Apple.

That's zero to five stars.

And practically everyone gives you five stars and deservedly so.

Some people take the time

to leave comments, and we appreciate that.

We read them, comments on

Apple, the comments on your website.

But here's one from Apple.

It's titled True Insight and Perspective.

I miss the great history, current events, lectures, and debates I had in college.

Victor takes me back to that time, the 70s and 80s, when I was trying to make sense of what I read in the paper and what came before I was around.

His weaving of what we see today today with a deep historical perspective is timely and truly stimulating so much that I signed up for a free Hillsdale class.

Dante's Inferno to the current Middle East mess.

He's a truly unique world historian and lecturer listening.

You'll definitely be smarter afterward.

And this is signed by The Dude Is Real.

And thanks, Dude, for that.

As for me, I just mentioned civil society.

What about me?

Oh, yeah, I write Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter from the Center for Civil Society, which in which I give 14 recommended readings.

Here are great pieces I've come across the previous week.

For example, like the

Hather McDonald piece on the girling of the Boy Scouts.

That's the kind of stuff I find and I share.

So sign up.

Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.

It's totally free, not selling your name,

nothing transactional about that.

Again, Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com, do check that out.

Victor, you've been terrific as ever.

It's great to talk to you.

Great to hear your wisdom.

And folks, we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

See you next time.