Looking Ahead: Gaza War and UK Elections

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

You're here to listen to Victor Davis-Hansen, 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 and the best-selling author of The End of Everything.

You've had many other best-selling books, Victor, but you may be, were you a little surprised that this one was so quickly a bestseller?

I was because unfortunately, it came out and I had scheduled two years ago my last tour. So

Basic Books at Heroically, and my assistant, Megan Ring, had set up a lot of interviews. And I had just gotten into the first week, and then I had to leave.

So I was gone two weeks without, you know, out of the country with no information at all to offer or to encourage interest in the book. And then when I returned, I had one good day and I got COVID.

And now I'm now on day eight and I've canceled all of the except these podcasts.

And so I thought that it would just die. But it actually went right to the New York Times bestseller list.
It's been there for five weeks. So that's the longest of any book that I've written.

And it was number one on Amazon for three days. I think a lot of that was due to Mark Levin.
He did a really,

he was very courteous and had me on for 15 minutes just about the book. Yeah.

That's just that helped.

I was a little worried because I think I told you, I don't want to be COVID obsessed, but I wrote the book when I had long code, really ill. Two years ago, I came back from Israel really ill with it.

And then I had to teach at Pepperdine, and I just didn't think my mind was clear. But, you know, it's 110,000-word book, so it wasn't short.

But

yeah, I was surprised. I didn't think that, you know, four case studies in the past about annihilation.
But, you know what? There was one other item that I think has created a lot of interest.

The book came out on May 7th, and it was in the context of two or three existential things that are going on.

Of course, Ukraine and Putin's serial threats to use nuclear weapons. He's got, you know, naval craft off the coast of Florida now.

And then there was the October 7th worst day as far as killing Jews since the Holocaust, and then the elimination rhetoric of all these crazy people on campus.

And then we had all of the continued threats

against Taiwan. So I think it became interested in the sense, is there a paradigm? Is there anything we can learn from the past to make sense of what's going on?

And one of the themes of the book is denial and that countries, nations, empires feel they're not as vulnerable as they really are. They're living on the fumes of past glory.

So they have a kind of it can't happen here.

Allies are on the horizon, not us. Alexander can be dealt with.
Scipio is a reasonable man. Cortez

wouldn't dare do this.

Mehmet is only 21. That kind of denial, you know.
Putin doesn't mean it. Come on.
Kim Jong-yoon's an idiot. He would never do anything stupid.

Chi knows that he would ruin, ruin world trade if he went into Taiwan. Erdogan just to blow hard, that kind of stuff.

Wow. Congrats, though, Victor.
It's a terrific book. And long legs,

long legs, long tail, whatever's long. It's got it.

Victor, we got a number of things to talk about on this episode. We're recording on Saturday, the 15th of June, a day before Father's Day.

This will come out on the 18th, which is a couple days after Father's Day. So, again, in our late, happy Father's Day, wishes to our listeners to whom that applies.

Victor, one of the issues, I can't believe we're going to talk about

Joe Biden and his dogs, but you know what? It exposes this demented character's dementia and meanness.

And let's get your thoughts on this and a couple of other issues when we return from these important messages.

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We're back with Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor, once before we

talked about Commander,

one of

two Biden dogs since since he's been in the White House. The first dog, whose name I forget, was packed away and sent off because it had a taste for the arms and legs of the Secret Service agents.

And so does this other dog, Commander. The report came out, I think it was Tom Fitten's group, Institute for Justice.

I think they did an FOI search and found like 38 maybe incidents of this dog attacking and biting people, a number of them, while the president just sat there. And as

plain old human beings, Victor,

you have dogs, I have dogs. I mean,

we can't sit there and tolerate our dogs being vicious to other people. But obviously this weirdo who's in the White House can, your thoughts.
Well, it wasn't a

Dotson. I mean, and it wasn't a Pekinese and it wasn't.
a Chihuahua. It was a German Shepherd.

And, you know, I live out here on the farm and I walk at night and and I see different breeds of dogs. I don't want to, um,

I don't want to

suggest anything negative about our German friends, but it does seem ironic. And I mentioned that once to a German shepherd owner who happened to be of German ancestry who didn't appreciate it.

But I said, why is it that the German breeds, dachshunds,

snappers,

Weimaroners, fierce, German shepherds, deadly, dobermans,

no comment.

Why are they so bred to be so vicious?

That was just an aside. But it is true that I think sometimes dogs emulate the environment of their master.

And if their master is indifferent to when they bite or is even amused by it, I'm not saying Joe Biden is amused by it, but I think they do.

They do emulate that a little bit. But more importantly is

these people who protect the president of the United States swear their lives. I mean, they will all jump in front of a bullet.
And they're very rare people.

And so why in the world when you see that they're obviously anxious that when you're around this dog and they have to get close to the president, that's their job.

And yet the dog seems to feel there's some kind of invisible circumference around the president that anybody who enters his physical space is a target. And then they bite.

And you saw some of the pictures of the clothing jacket.

These dogs have huge teeth.

They can inflict a lot of damage. And then, you know, you know,

some of them can give you infections and stuff if they break the skin. So, why wouldn't they not just stop it immediately?

And it gets back to the idea: if you were the vice president of the United States and you're swimming and you get out of the pool naked and you're nude and you prance around, and there's female

Secret

Service personnel there, and they're obviously

uncomfortable. Why would you do that? There's something, again,

because you can, and we're getting back to this Biden, why would anybody take a laptop?

I have taken maybe in my entire life, 10

selfies, and usually they were something to send somebody to ask about, you know, a bad cut or when I had

a bad bike accident.

A bike accident, right? Yeah, to see what could be done. But this idea that you take selfies of yourself naked

and in provocative poses and you send them to people, whether you're Hunter Biden or Frank Biden, completely naked, or, you know, you write very intimate things in

a diary about showering with your father.

All of this stuff then finally builds up to

a narrative. And the narrative is there's something wrong with this Biden family.
They're indifferent to other people around them.

They don't care about, I mean, they talk about good old Joel from Scranton, but he doesn't have any empathy for working people or people around him or the effect that he has on people.

And in that regard, you remember there was just yesterday a TikTok vote where we exploded at a reporter. One of the reporters, he said, I can throw this phone farther than you or at you.

And then another one, he said, you broke the rules. And he snaps.
He's not a nice guy. He never was a nice guy.

And he's always been

a proverbial idiot. And that was apparent to the voters in 1988.
They knew he was a liar and a cheat and a blowhard. And he yelled at them when they caught him on the Neil Koenig.
plagiarism.

And then on the 2008, he was going nowhere. And

he said that Barack Obama was the first black presidential candidate that could talk basically eloquently or fluently, or he was clean, whatever that meant. So they didn't like him.

But there was a special set of circumstances that re-booted him back into the presidency. And that was

the dearth of credible candidates,

and then the entire COVID lockdown, the George Floyd, that whole riots, and then the hatred of the Trump administration. All of that conspired to do the unthinkable.

And the unthinkable was getting this guy at his age into the presidency, which the people had been clearly

not favorable for the last 30 years.

Well, Victor, I want to, you know, I'd like to get your thoughts about what has just transpired with Biden over in Europe.

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And we thank Real Life Network for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor Joe Biden wrapped up his

G7

summit participation with the usual wanderings off,

just strange actions, freezing out.

It was not a good good scene, but

par for the course. Any thoughts on that before we go? Well, you know,

when I was in my late 20s, I had, well, my early 20s, mid-20s, I was 25. I'd finished my PhD.
I came home for the farm for summer.

My wife stayed in the Bay Area where we were living, and I took care of my grandmother. who was 90 years old and had Alzheimer's.

And I did that because my mother was busy and my father, and they called me and said, you know, your brother needs needs help on the ranch.

And the people who were taking care of her have quit. So I came and my gosh, Jack, I had never been around somebody with Alzheimer's.

But what I'm getting at is one of the things that I noticed and I can still remember was the wandering off.

In other words, I would take her outside to talk to her and I just for a second start to read and she would wander off. Or there'd be people come over to see her,

you know, her generation, and she'd just wander into the living room. Right.
And that's what, and I've just been struck by, that's what Joe Biden does so often.

He looks around, and then he just sort of goes off somewhere. I don't know what the brain calculus is,

but I was really shocked about, it's kind of Orwellian what the administration did. So everybody saw it.

Then they had a spokesman that said, well, the right deliberately framed the photo and they cut out the parachutists who Joe Biden had a natural curiosity. Oh, yes.

So all of the G7 leaders then have no more curiosity and parachuting than Joe Biden. And so none of them went over and drifted off in that general direction.

Why?

And so the point is, why was he the only one that drifted off, whatever the reason was? And then we had in reaction to people who were stunned, and then there was the rumors, of course, of other

G7 leaders and staff, They'd never seen him so debilitated at a time, you know, when Russia, Ukraine, China, Israel, Gaza, et cetera. And they were worried.

And then Jill Biden, did you see that lecture that Jill, Dr. Jill, gave

the nation? No.

She said,

Joe Biden's the best president we've ever had. Not despite his age, but because of his age.
He's sharp. He's got energy.
He's just...

And

it was just such a propaganda.

It would remind me of what they said about Stalin being the great engineer who engineered projects or Hitler's innate genius that had figured out how to conquer Russia in 12 days.

It's more like Kim Al Jong, one of those North Korean leaders.

He plays golf and he hits a hole in one every time, or he can ride horses better than anybody, et cetera. That kind of level of crazy.
It's the same thing.

It's Putin, Putin without his shirt on and all of that. And they, you know, when even any Republican leader, when Joe, George Bush, they were going after him and after him and after him and after him.

And they said he couldn't speak and they couldn't talk. And then he would say things like, I actually read books and take notes.

But at least there was a dialogue.

This is just

complete denial. And they know what they've done.
And I think

All of our listeners should just envision what they do at night. They all get in a circle metaphorically and they say, what the blank are we going to do? This Rus is up.

He can't even be a facade anymore. He's not a puppet anymore.
It doesn't work.

I know, you know, we were terrified of Budigig and Spartacus and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie and Julian and all those crazy candidates. And I know that we brought him up as

a veneer for the Obamas and Susan Rice and Eric Holder and all of the old Omamaites are running the country. It doesn't work anymore.
What are we going to do?

And we can't get Kamala because and we can't get rid of her because she's a black woman and she was hired by Joe Biden explicitly for that purpose. He announced it to the nation.

And yet we can't get rid of her and we can't have her as president and we can't have her as vice president.

Because by some miracle, if he makes it through the convention, he will not make it through the first year. And then we've inaugurated this dunce.
So what are we going to do?

So

from that point of view, I think they're going to keep him.

I think their idea was that we're going to put him out more and show that he's in control on that, you know, go to D-Day and then come home and go to the G7. And they just said he can't do that.

So I think they're going to keep him under wraps, give him one last chance, pump him up with stimulants, see if he can do a credible debate against Trump, and then go from there.

But I don't, if Trump will just not interrupt and smile and just say things like, Joe, would you like to tell the nation that you misled them on the laptop, that it really was your son's laptop, and you wound it up in conspiratorial fashion, 51 authorities, your Secretary of State, remember everybody, Anthony Blinken did this.

Would you like, here's a good occasion to apologize to us. Just things like that.
And that will rattle him. And

otherwise, I don't know how they get out of this. I really don't.

Well, Victor,

I'd like to follow up on something about Kamala Harris, and then we should be talking about this great series you're writing for your website, The Blade of Perseus.

And we'll get to this right after these important messages.

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

Victor, on your point about Kamala Harris, I just want to read this quickly. This is from Town Hall

website. I don't know who wrote it, but it has to do with a Politico morning consult poll.

Found that Harris has a net disapproval rating of 5242, with the majority doubting that she would even have a chance to win the presidency if she were the Democrat nominee.

Just three in five Democrat voters said they would vote for the vice president, with only 25% of independent voters saying they would cast a ballot for her.

Final thing here: 51% of the voters believe Harris would

make for a lousy president and believe she should be replaced as Biden's right hand. Only 39%

said she should not be replaced as vice president. So, yeah, she's a stinker, Victor.

Any thoughts before we move on?

That says it all.

What? I think that says it all. What are we going to do? Okay.
What are we going to do?

Yeah. Suffer or laugh at the cackling.
Hey, Victor, before... Well, I mean,

I don't mean to cut you short, but I mean

she knows she's not supposed to cackle, right?

And she knows she's not supposed to spin these word salads. And then they put her out there.
And what does she do? She cackles, cackles, cackles.

And she takes her 500-word vocabulary and then washes, rinse, and spins it again and again. We all love school buses.
School buses are lovely. We all love them.
This kind of stuff.

And then they assign her a task that they hype up: Waters are, space are.

And she cackles and she gets some Hollywood

second-rate

obsequious person to do a little act, get some child actors and get her around and film it like she's deep into Socratic thought with these kids about space stations or something. It's pathetic.

It gets back to everybody

is a captive of their history.

She was always, the more that she alleges that she was a little girl and a victim of racism, the more she lies. She was the child of two PhDs, one on the Stanford campus, one on the Berkeley campus.

She was a child of privilege. She was a child of affirmative action and special set-asides.
Everything that this country can do to help someone who was a black woman, they did for her.

And she had had an added incentive

because she didn't need it. She had the economic and cultural and social privilege that most poor people do not have, most middle-class people do not have.

How many people in the United States' parents are both PhDs at the two top campuses in California? Nobody.

And then she eased right into both

I guess Hastings Law School, and then she hooked up with a man, what, 30 years older, older, who was married, Willie Brown, and he

introduced her to his,

you know, Getty, Newsome, Pelosi, Feinstein, Barbara Boxter circle, Jerry Brown circle of friends. They gave her city attorney, county, all of that.

And then when she was ready to launch her own political career, she got clear. She got rid of Willie Brown.
He was 80 or something.

And that's who she was.

And every time she's tried to say something on her own at any length, she's almost caused a riot. I mean, that's seriously.

When she said right after the June 2020, you know, the effort to storm the White House when she was on the ascendancy and she was soon to be nominated as vice president, she said, these riots are not going to stop.

They're going to go on. They shouldn't stop.
They're going to go on all the way, Jack, all the way to Election Day. Election interference?

She was bragging that the riots were going to go on to Election Day, and she had helped bail out people convicted of serious felonies. So anytime she tries to do an initiative on her own,

it doesn't work. Her staffers leave in droves.

I'm not trying to pick on her, but she's just a disaster and everybody knows it. And she's hard to work with, apparently.

What do you do with her?

It's funny because the left was hyper-critical. You remember? They told us that Dan Quayle was unqualified.
Dan Quayle, again, looks like Einstein compared to her.

And then we were told that Sarah Palin was nutty.

Sarah Palin seems like a professor of philology compared to

Kamala.

She was cool, too. We talked about it before.

She entertained us at her governor's mansion back in

2007.

She couldn't have been nicer and more real.

She had a natural warmth about her. She was very attractive, very dynamic.
She gave us drill, baby, drill.

Everybody laughed at her. And then she was sabotaged.
One of the, what was her, the woman who's on, is it MSNBC,

the Bush communications director?

Oh, Nicole Wallace. Nicole Wallace was her personal, what, handler? Handler.
And we know now that she leaked stuff all during that McCain campaign.

She and her staff, or at least somebody and her staff did, about she didn't have any money. She had terrible

choices in clothing. She was in Alaska.

And it was just awful the way that that campaign treated her.

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Pretty cool.

Yeah, I'm going to know, you know, I think I mentioned to Sammy, or maybe it was to you, that I was so interested in when you read that and I want to be a participant that I ordered one.

I didn't want a discount either. And I was all ready to take it up to the mountains and start grilling when I got COVID.
So it came very quickly. I ordered it, free delivery.

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And then I'm going to give you a commentary on it. It's an infrared version, so I'm really excited about it.
Maybe infrared can cure COVID.

I'll put my head in and see.

All right, Victor,

everyone who goes to your website, theblade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com, and those in particular who subscribe, that's 50 bucks a year,

$5 a month. And they do that so they can read the exclusive pieces, the ultra pieces that you write for that website.
And part of your ongoing series, it's part three today. It may be completed.

You may have another chapter or two, not sure, but it's an ultra series.

titled Israel is not losing the war. And here's just one little thing you wrote, Victor.
Hamas is not just losing its war, but its very existence.

When Israel is done in Gaza, the population may hate Israel, but as it walks the rubble and cratered surface above is a multi-billion dollar, but now collapsed city beneath.

Its wrath will turn on the idea of Hamas as well. Victor, this is a great series you have written, are writing.
Anything you'd like to do?

I think if I could take credit for it, I think it was accurate. It was written a few days ago, and we're learning now from polls that Hamas is losing some of its appeal.

It's very popular in the West Bank where people can virtue signal their support and solidarity with Hamas without the actual damage that they bring onto their own, as they have in Gaza.

And Sammy and I have talked about the complete distortions about the Israeli hostage raid. It was a very courageous raid, and there was not 270 civilians civilians killed.

There was probably 100 people that lost their life, but they were either outright shooting at the Israelis with RPGs and automatic weapons, or they were civilians like the people who were holding them, a doctor and his journalist's son.

And I don't think those were civilians when they were actively engaged in hostage taking.

Omov said the other day, or at least one of its exiled grandees said that they didn't know how many hostages were still alive. I don't think you can negotiate with them.

Blinken is a complete bull or a dunce that he thinks he keeps talking about Hamas as a partner and as an interlocutor. You can't deal with

people like that. They're just terrorist

killers, and you have to defeat them.

And if we had let Israel go defeat them, and if Joe Biden had said, we're going to let the people who were attacked in a medieval fashion on October 7th defend themselves, and that defense entails destroying these killers and they're going to do the world a great deal of good including the people of Gaza it would be over by now but he couldn't do that because he's Joe Biden yeah and so yeah I think that

they're going to

I don't know if you

I don't think anybody in Gaza one thing I want to ask you Jack I was told they were starving

but I noticed that when the hostages were released, they said that I don't think the food was necessarily nutritious, but they said they hadn't lost weight. And they had pictures of the captors.

They didn't see, nobody seems to be, and then I looked at the pictures of the market. Nobody seems to be in defer-like starvation status.

And so I don't believe anything Hamas says, put it that way. I know that propaganda is.
The Associated Press does, but you don't have to.

Yeah, I don't have to believe anything they said other than I do believe them when they said they wanted to kill every Jew they met and they were planning to stay there longer and longer.

Victor, there's one other great little political point you made in

the third part of this series. And again, folks, that's

an ultra article on the Blade of Perseus. VictorHanson.com is the web address.
You wrote, the slithering.

Excuse me, the slithering Joe Biden will likely inherit the worst of both worlds, turning off thousands of Michigan voters who may stay home while alienating even more Jewish voters by his disconnect from the reality that Israel was attacked at peace by medieval killers.

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

You didn't write that. I said that.

It couldn't. And

I get really upset about this.

You know, I have a, I think all of us should have a special consideration or attention or focus on certain peoples that have an illustrious history, but they're in very rough neighborhoods and they don't quite fit.

And I'm talking about the Kurds, for example, that are scattered around Iraq and Iran and Syria,

et cetera, and Turkey, of course, their largest population. And yet they're persecuted by the Turks, always have been.
Then there's little two to three million person.

Armenia, the only Christian outpost, the oldest Christian nation in some sense in Asia. And they're out there in the middle of nowhere.

And Russia was their communist protector, and now Putin is supposed to be their author. He's not doing anything for them, and Erdean threatens them existentially.

Then we have the little million-person Cypriots, the only one of only two democracies in the Middle East, along with Israel.

And they are wonderful people. And they've got, what, 45,000 Turkish occupation troops who have ethnically cleansed them

years ago, years ago,

1974,

and they put 200,000 Cypriots into exile. And I had been to northern Cyprus.
It was one of the most beautiful places and prosperous places in the world,

that part of the island, which they took. No one says a word, not a word.
And then, of course, we get to the 10 million plus Israelis.

And they are surrounded by 500 million Muslims who want to destroy them if they can. So all of those people deserve U.S.
attention and support. And they all have one thing in common.

Maybe not the Kurds so much, but they were very valuable in the Iraq war. They emulate American ideas.

And they have a long history of immigration and contact with the American people.

And

they're victims of radical Islam and Turkish Ottomanism and etc. And I think we should really support them.
And that's why

it's just really galling to see these people in New York go after Jews in subway cars or go after them on the street or say the things they do when there's so many things going on in the world.

There's,

you know, in the Sudan, they're besieged a million person city. They want to wipe it out.
No one's saying a word. No one says a word about what China is doing to a million Uyghurs.

No one said a word to Putin when he leopled Grozny and just wiped out about 10,000 Muslims in the Second Chechny War.

Nobody cares about refugees.

If they did care about refugees, there's 200,000 of them on Cyprus. Are they refugees?

At the same time the Palestinians

left Israel or were forced to leave or

however you want to interpret it, there was 13 million Germans that were in East Prussia. Right.
in areas of eastern Germany since the 12th century. They walked home.
Two million of them died.

No one talks about them. Nobody talks about the Volga German.
They lived for centuries on the Volga River. Stalin just ethnically cleansed them.
Nobody says anything about the Poles.

The Poles until 1939 occupied Western Ukraine. They were Catholic.
They were Polish-speaking. They were Western.

And then suddenly Stalin ethnically cleansed them when he partnered with Hitler and invaded the country. And then after the war, Stalin said, no, there is no Poland in Ukraine.
It's ours.

If you want land, take it from Germany.

No one in Poland says, oh, I'm a refugee. So

I don't get this.

And especially the thing that is really galling is there was one million Jews that had lived in ancestral homes in Damascus, in Cairo, in Beirut,

in Baghdad,

in Amman, all over the Middle East.

And as soon as the 47-48 war and 56 and 67, by 67, they had all been ethnically cleansed from all of North Africa, Tunis, you name it, Algiers, Morocco, all of them out.

And no one says, well, where are they? Are they shaking the keys to their ancient homes? Is that what they're doing? No. They had to go somewhere.
Most of them went to Europe or Israel, United States.

No one cared about them. So this Palestinian thing is different.
And there has to be a reason why it's different.

And I think the reason why it's different is involves Jews in general and Israel in particular. Right.
And that's the only thing that I can see that makes a difference.

And that and the fact that it came into the world's attention during the embargo of 1973, the oil embargo, and there was a fear that the patrons of the Palestinians were going to destroy the West economically.

But you know what? We don't need their oil. All we need is Donald Trump to come back in office and drill baby drill, and

we will be be energy sufficient if not independent on our way to energy complete energy dominance right and exporting yeah exactly

well we don't need to we don't need to do this we don't need and we you know what we don't need to have 250 000 middle eastern students in the united states just there's no need they all come from illiberal regimes they're anti-semitic they don't like us

They break the law. And there's no reason for them or a third of a million Chinese foreign students.
There's no reason at all.

It's only there, but they're only here for one reason, and that is that this university system is so bankrupt and so inefficiently run that they have to get foreign exchange by charging full tuition room and board of foreign students to subsidize

their operating losses.

Which is to subsidize the massive hiring of administrators. DEI, yes.

Yes, that's one of the reasons DEI. And many of the DEI people are surrogates for radical Islam.

So I don't know. I wrote this series.
I think you all might enjoy it in the ultra. I try to do

when we started,

Sammy started it, and she

emphasized we were going to have new content three days a week, the days that I don't have a new column on. So on

Monday and Thursday, I have my Monday, I have my large American Greatness column. On Thursday is a syndicated column.
And then on

Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Friday, there's usually six to eight hundred words that's new.

And I've never missed one of those dates. This was kind of hard because I had COVID this week.
So

I'm a little, this week it's going to appear, I have a two-parter on

be careful about democratic projectionism.

Whenever they

cover a new conspiracy, collusion, disinformation, you name it,

a bad cause of COVID, there's usually another cause there. And whatever they are doing, they project onto other people.

And then I have something I wrote when I had 101 temperature with COVID, and it's called Feverish COVID Dreams and how it makes you go crazy.

You might like it. It's because

when you got COVID and you're sitting there and you look at your email and you've got, why aren't you here? And you're supposed to be here and you've got this to do. And you can hardly lift your head.

You try to formulate or you try to postulate that all the mistakes in your life have led to where you are at this moment.

So then you go back and say, Did I really have to go to Libya when I had a dull ache and get a ruptured appendix?

Did I really have to get a and you blame yourself for every bad thing that's happened because they inevitably lead to where you are and expand.

And then

I don't know if I should have,

I don't know if I should post it because it's kind of pathetic, but it's this the point is that when you get fevers, you're getting nutty. And we'll see how people react to it.

Yes, well, I did not have a fever and I did not have COVID. And I had a dream about you last week.
Oh, no. Wait, wait, wait.
Yeah. Say it ain't true.
Well, we were both clothed, so it's okay.

But I said, go away, you have COVID, you got to rest. So I was dreaming about your COVID.

Oh, well,

COVID is a.

I I finished my Paxlavid. I'll never take it again.
I'm not trying to disparage Pfizer's drug. It did lower the temperature, but I stopped

48 hours ago and I immediately got a bad head cold. So there is such a thing as a rebound effect.
Even Dr. Fauci, give him credit.

He said, you got to take Macrolight nectar. And then he got it.
He quit. He did his five days or 30 pills and then he got a rebound.
So did Joe Biden.

And I guess I'm supposed to think, well, you're completely wiped out now. You had intestinal problems.
Your mouth tasted like aluminum, but for the first two days, it brought down your temperature.

If that's what it's advertised for, it does a good job. It does.
If it's advertised to get you over COVID completely, no. Is it advertised you won't have a rebound? No.

Well, when we close out the show, we have a reader comment from a doctor who we will talk about some things medicinal related to COVID.

But before that, Victor,

let's talk about Nigel Farage, and we'll do that when we come back from these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show.

Victor, I've been a fan of Nigel Farage for a long time. When I was at National Review, didn't he go on one of your cruises? No, no, I wanted to.

He couldn't make it. I invited him.

Dan Hannon, Daniel Hannon. Yes, that's who I met.
Yeah, I met Daniel Hannon.

Yeah. And Dan, there was a yin-yang to them in style,

but they were both essential to the Brexit cause and both came from the same area in

southern England. Both served in

the EU, the parliament.

No one from England is there anymore because England Brexited.

So Farage

went his way.

He became a television personality.

And a couple of weeks ago, I think two weeks ago, he announced he was going to, he's throwing his hat in the ring with what used to be called UKIP, is now the Reform Party.

As listeners may know, I think the 4th of July, there are going to be elections. In England, it looks like the Labour Party is going to stomp and romp the Conservatives who are...

and one thing I'd like to get, Victor, of course, your view on the Tories as a party. But

Nigel has thrown his hat in the ring here. And now his reform

movement is outpolling the Conservatives. I think the figures from yesterday or the day before are Labor, mid-30s, reform 19,

Conservatives 18. So this shows just how pathetic pathetic the quote-unquote conservatives of the United Kingdom are.
Just a disastrous couple of years of

leadership. Anyway, Victor, if you have any thoughts about the dynamics of politics in the UK, please share them.
And any thoughts about Nigel Farage himself?

I wonder if you've even met him.

I have. I've been on his

podcast. TV show? Okay.
Or TV podcast show. Yeah.

Yeah,

he's a, I admire him that he's a, I don't admire it, but I mean, he seems to be a chronic cigarette smoker, and he doesn't seem to have any ill effects. Right.

And he's like a lot of Brits that I know like that. I'm thinking.
And a boozer.

Yeah, Christopher Hitchens was the same way.

But

the

only problem I have is I don't know enough about the Reform Party and what its,

it, is its relationship to the Conservative Party what MAGA is to Paul Ryan? Is that what it is?

I would think that would be a loosely fair comparison.

People disgusted with promises made but broken by the Conservatives, particularly, say, on immigration into

England,

which we're not going to allow, we're not going to allow, we're going to limit, limit, limit, and within about 10 years, they have 4.3 million refugees in England, which I think may dwarf what's happened to America

on a ratio. And then, of course, spending has been atrocious, and they went through maybe even a more difficult COVID lockdown than

we did, minus the free speech. Yeah, they had this guy, I don't know if you saw that, Ian Gibbon, is that his name? Gribbon, I'm sorry.
And he said something I thought that was kind of stupid.

He said something to the effect that, you know, the UK would be in a lot better state today

had it taken Hitler up on its offer of neutrality. And what he was referring to is

after

June 23rd to June 26th with the fall of France, remember Churchill had come in on June 10th.

excuse me, May 10th of 1940, the first day of the invasion of the Low Countries and France. And then

over the next six weeks, Hitler had had these brilliant victories. There was the Dunkirk evacuation, and there was a reality there.

It was kind of like a gun battle, a duel, when people have fired their weapons and they have still ammunitions and their cartridges, and you're just staring at each other.

And one person has a bigger gun with more bullets. So what does a person staring do? And by that, I mean Churchill was looking at the world.

The United States was not going to come in the war, and it would not for almost a year and a half later, only by accident because of the Pearl Harbor attack.

The Soviet Union was firmly in Hitler's camp and providing fuel and weapons for the

blitz that was just going to start against Britain. And all the major capitals of Europe, if you think about it, were all either neutral.
but pro-German or under German control.

Everyone, Berlin, Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Athens,

Amsterdam, you name it, Brussels, Oslo,

Stockholm, every one of them, Copenhagen. So there was this Tory idea.
I don't know if Halifax would have gone along with it or not.

They could go out and reach out to Mussolini and then cut a deal that if Hitler

would leave the British Empire intact, i.e. the Suez, the Mediterranean, India, Burma, etc.,

and keep its Anglo-allies out, i.e., Canada would not then continue on the British side to fight Hitler, and the United States would not enter the war, and New Zealand, Australia, etc., etc.,

then Hitler would be

fine to allow the British Empire to stand as an equal to the German Empire. And Mr.
Gribbon apparently thought that was a good idea.

Somebody in the party corrected him, and I should say that the official person corrected him and said, well, he didn't do anything wrong.

He just meant that we would have avoided all this death and destruction. I don't think they would have avoided the death and destruction.

Hitler said that when Chamberlain went over to Munich and gave him everything he wanted, he ceded him the entire Skoda arms works and all of what was this nascient country of Czechoslovakia.

Hitler said,

I hated that guy. I saw that worm at Munich.
I wanted to jump on him and break him in a stupid little umbrella. That's what he said.

And he was mad because he lost a year, he thought, in getting into Poland. So I don't think anything Hitler said would have ever been trustworthy.

He would have just tried to get nuclear weapons or four-engine bombers or whatever, and he would have lulled England to sleep. So there was no, I don't understand that at all.
And

give credit to the British in World War II.

Of the major six combatants, they were the only ones to fight on

September 1st of 1939 and September 2nd of 1945. They went through the entire war.
They were the only country that went to war of the major belligerents that either was not attacked

or attacked another country. They didn't attack anybody, and they weren't attacked.

They did it on the principle of defending the territorial integrity of Poland, as they had promised to do, as they thought wrongly it would be a deterrent. And number three,

they lost the fewest combatants of any major of the six powers. There were about 410,000 deaths.
That's a lot. But compared, the United States had about 475.

They didn't lose 12 million like the Russians or maybe 20 million like the Chinese or 3.5 million like the Japanese or six or seven like the Germans.

So they fought very efficiently. And

they had a wonderful record in World War II.

So I don't know if that they're going to have to iron that out is what I'm saying. Yeah.

Because it's kind of like the NATO issue with the extreme MAGA and stuff. But Britain helped save Western civilization from barbarism.
World War II.

And for a while, they were the only thing, the only country that was left.

The Scandinavian countries were gone. The Iberian countries were collaborating.
Italy had flipped from World War II. It was an ally.
The Soviets had betrayed everybody. Russia was an ally.

The indomitable French army that never had broken at Verdun had broken. There was no France anymore.
There was no

European colonial powers in the Pacific, the Dutch East Indies, Indochina. They were all up for grab.
There was just Britain, and it was spread thin, and it was trying to save

it was trying to save North Africa from the Italians and Germans, and it was very overstretched.

Well,

I would

to conclude back on Farage, I think he would be one person who would

praise all that as you just have and not be embarrassed about it and do it while he's smoking a cigarette and

drinking a pint of beer. He's been very good.
He's been very good, especially about the anti-Semitism of

Jeremy Corbyn, you know. Right.
And

he's.

Well, anyway, we'll keep posted because those elections are in a couple of weeks, and there may be some interesting drama there that parallels what has gone on in the rest of Europe as people, the deplorables, the basket of deplorables on the continent

have had their belly full of the elitists. Victor, we're going to talk about that reader,

listener comment, but first I just want to take a moment for our sponsor, Factor. Factor's fresh, never frozen meals, our dietitian approved and ready to eat in just two minutes.

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Victor, to conclude, as we head down the home stretch here, and the people who cannot stand my voice are just going to have to suffer a little more because here is what John Beeman, a doctor, wrote on your

Lady Perseus commenting on the June 12th podcast where you talked about that

you had come down with COVID again. And he writes,

he's a physician. Victor, there are medications for

the specific maladies for which the data has to be massaged to get FDA approval. As a physician who has treated over 2,000 COVID cases with ivermectin, I can say it is a near miracle.

Must be started early and taken with food, but normally gives relief of symptoms in 24 to 48 hours. Dr.

Beeman also writes that zinc is also helpful, as is vitamin D, though if you wait until you have COVID before starting it, you're too late.

Vitamin D levels in the blood build very slowly, and then he gives some number level where they should be at.

Anyway, he and some other people, of course, commented on

your situation, But

if I had had it, I would,

because one of the things I got very angry, I'm not getting into the efficacy of iver medicine,

but I am going to get into the demonization of that drug.

The person who invented it, I think he was a Japanese researcher,

won a Nobel Prize. It saved hundreds of millions of lives over its usefulness, its life as a drug in stopping parasitical diseases.
And

it has a wonderful record of safety if it's used according to the proper dosage.

So when people in Australia and other places in the Pacific and Asia found some utility as an anti-inflammatory, like a lot of these anti-parasitical drugs are in general, it went against the official narrative.

of Anthony Fauci. The narrative, remember, was that we're going to entrust our future to Pfizer and Moderna and all these drug companies that were going to come up with very sophisticated antivirals.

Many of them have liver and kidney consequences. And then we were going to put our faith in the Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccinations, which we were told

ensure all of us 96%

immunity from either being infected or to infect others. And that narrative collapsed.
I got my shot in March of 2021 and I got COVID in August of 2020. So that narrative collapsed quickly.

Not that they didn't add some protection and mitigate the effects, but I have no problem with people using off-label drugs if there is scientific utility about both their efficacy and their safety.

I take zinc and vitamin D, and maybe that's why for two years, for someone who traveled, Gosh, I think I've probably been to 30 states the last two years.

And typically, you know, Jack, and you've been there when, I think we were in Philadelphia together two years ago when I had long COVID. When you're there, it's not just that you speak.

Most of the venues have you go in the early afternoon. You do a VIP reception, you do a meet-and-greet where there's photo ops.
Sometimes I know in Texas, there's about 200 people,

and then you

have the regular, you do a book signing, and then you do the regular reception, and then you do the dinner, and then you do your talk. And then often they ask you for a post-pampfrandial reception.

So you can be there six or seven hours and talk, talk, hug.

My favorite line in those years was always:

oh, don't worry, I've been vaccinated.

And

that wasn't so reassuring that you've been vaccinated. But nevertheless,

don't some of your lady fans want to give you a little peck on the cheek? Yes.

My lady fans are usually,

I'm 70, and they are usually 70 or 80 or 90. I'm very popular with 90 year olds.
I'm not saying that. I'm proud of that fact.

I think that's why my wife lets me go on all these trips because my fan club seems to be octogenarians.

And

if you see a young blonde girl that comes up, it's usually with her grandmother, you know what I mean?

But

on the prompt of her grandmother, but the point I'm making is that

I think the doctor is probably right. And

I don't know what the I know that the double-blind studies on the efficacy of ivermedicin seem to be split from Eurocentric and American

research projects versus those in Latin America, Africa, Asia, where the drug is well known.

There's been a theory, and this is just a theory, that some of the people in these areas that take ivermedicines as a prophylactic against the types of disease they pick up in their water have had a lower incidence as they have from hydroxychloroquine for malarial purposes.

I don't know if that's true or not. That was a rumor.
But I have tried ivermets and I had long COVID. I tried it, but it was well after I was into the syndrome.

And I don't think it was because of an active infection. It was an autoimmune response.

Just commenting on also on the doctor, you know,

there's two or three things we know about COVID and long COVID. And I don't mean know the ideology, but we know what it does to the body.

It does seem in many people to make microclots, little strands of blood. So anything that thins the blood, aspirin, vitamin E, you name it,

that tends to have some efficacy. And

we know it causes inflammation. So things that are anti-inflammatory, antioxidants seem to have efficacy.
But one of the things is interesting, what they found.

And when you're sitting there with a temperature and nothing, you know, you can't write, you just read. And I've been reading a lot about COVID in the last week.

there's an amino acid shack that we know are at very low levels from people that have COVID and long COVID one is taurine that's the stuff they put in energy drinks these kids drank you know what I mean it's an amino acid the other is serine

and we know that both of them can get very low and we know that serotonin which is essential to be balanced for mood and sleep, can get very, very low.

And in response to that, there have been people just recently saying why don't you take a serine amino acid supplement or a taurine supplement among your other stack if you have supplements or why don't you take things that enhance the blood level of serotonin and that would be things like that uh sami

natural antidepressant or you could take i suppose people are taking

5-HTP, that's a tryptophan version, tryptophan,

And that would enhance serotonin. But those are scientifically proven things.
And when I got ill, I got a lot of people that wrote me and said, Victor, do you know about this? Do you know about this?

Do you know about this? And so I am taking some of these. And

I'll see if they help. And,

you know, I get kind of angry, but I am 70 and I did have long COVID. But when I got COVID two years ago, I was not taking any of these things.
Right. And I was this time.
So I have a lot of vitamin.

So I think that that's one reason that I'm doing this right now.

This is the exact seven. It was this time exactly seven days ago that I got, my wife and I got infected.
So

and I tested today negative for the first time. I'm really wiped out.
I feel like I'm positive, but I tested negative. So I'm a big believer in these correcting imbalances.
And

one of the good things is when I did get long COVID, I did the comprehensive lipid, metabol, all of those blood tests from my GP. And there was a lot that were off,

kind of semi-low platelets, low album,

but especially serum protein and things like that. And with these supplements,

I was surprised when she wrote me a little note saying, all of your blood work. This was just a month before I got COVID, are now in perfect, I mean, they're normal.

And I did a lot of, I had the annual checkups. I hadn't gone to the cardiologist, urology.
I did all of that, and they were all in one.

And I don't think that's because suddenly

I got younger. I think it had a lot to do with not excessive dosage, but I always take a less dose than recommended, but a lot of, you know, 10, 15, 20 supplements that I take.
You take a lot, right?

Yeah. Yeah, I don't.
I just got to think the wear and tear. Yeah, I don't.
Yeah. I think there's another thing that

is curious.

I just got a note from a very distinguished

college president, a good friend of mine. I won't mention his name,

public figure, and he just got back from a European trip, the long, long flight, and he got COVID.

There's another philanthropist I know, a very distinguished philanthropist, and he was remarking that he got ill from a long trip.

And I was exposed in Europe during that 14 days with all sorts of people.

And I did not get sick even from, but coming back home, it seems there's something about that jet lag. I don't know whether you get on a plane with these jumbo jets.

There's 14, I mean, excuse me, there's three or 400 people on the plane. If you have COVID and you're in Spain or Europe, what do you do?

You probably just don't tell anybody and get in the plane, get home.

I'm not condoning that, but I don't know what they do. And then you go to the, use the,

you know, you wait in line to use the restroom and the, all kinds of germs can flare out of the toilet. Who knows?

But my point is, when you're weakened by jet lag coming back, especially, it seems like there's a high incidence of people's immune systems breaking down and getting COVID. That's happened to me.

It happened to a lot of people. Yeah.
Well, I just, I have to believe you. When you got on a plane, you were already exhausted, most likely.

So,

hey, Victor, we're going to wrap it up.

One other comment I'd like to read, and this is from someone who posted on Apple. And our listeners, no matter what platform you do listen to the Victor Davis Hanson show on, thank you.

If you listen on Apple, you can rate the show zero to five stars and you can leave a comment. We do read them, all of them, including the ones that talk about the babbling.

bumbling host but uh this one talks about the star of the show and it's titled brilliant interesting honest, humorous. VDH is a national treasure.
So knowledgeable and straightforward.

New listener here, excited to catch up on all the past episodes. And it's signed DC786.
We do thank you, DC786, for taking the time to do that.

Thanks to the folks who check out Victor's website and those who do subscribe. And again, that's

victorhanson.com. Let's see what else else people can follow Victor on X,

Twitter. At VD Hansen is his handle.
On Facebook, there's the Victor Davis Hansen fan club, about 60,000 people who are just, of course, big fans of Victor.

And it's a great place to find links and commentary. And also on Facebook, Victor, you have the VDH's Morning Cup.
So there you go, folks. Plethora of things to involve yourself in.

Jack Fowler, write Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society. You can sign up for it at civilthoughts.com.
Thanks, Victor, for all the great wisdom you shared.

Late, happy Father's Day to all fathers out there. Folks,

we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Bye-bye.
Thank you, everybody, for listening. Till next time.