Putin Interview, Biden Defense, and Free Speech

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler.

You are here to listen to the star and the namesake.

That is Victor Davis-Hanson.

He 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.

We are recording on Friday the 9th.

I tell you this date because it's essential to know what just happened.

And this particular episode will be

up on the World Wide Web on, I don't know, Victor, I think the 13th of Mardi Gras.

But lots of stuff has happened.

yesterday and the day prior.

So just giving a little context.

I know everybody wants context in the world now, Victor.

What are we going to talk about in this episode?

Well,

Tucker Carlson's interview of Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden's press conference, and your reaction to that.

You've written about that today on Twitter.

And we have a very infamous trial that just

ended yesterday in Washington between Mark Stein, the columnist, the conservative columnist, columnist, and Michael Mann, the

revered leftist ideologue climate scientist.

We'll get your thoughts on all these things and maybe even a little more, Victor, right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Say, Victor, before we get into any of these matters,

here we sit in, I sit, in Connecticut, and see these videos of the rains and the floods affecting California.

And I'm curious, two things.

Is any of that

hitting the Central Valley?

And what about about your uh

your place up in the hills that bodia have 20 20 feet of snow last year what's what's happening up there with the oh well you know we had a drought jack and it was looking very bleak and then we started to get these um southern storms usually they come off alaska and

uh they didn't rain much and it was kind of warm unseasonably so.

So here we were at the first of the year.

And usually if you don't get snow by the first of the year, it looks bleak.

And then suddenly, just like last year these

huge two two huge storms came in and I think here in the San Joaquin Valley they they they rain five or six inches and up in the Sierra where I have this house it's uh six seven feet

so I've got to go up there and clean it up

but uh it was windy and I have

six seven feet of snow you've had yeah yeah yeah okay so it's going to be a normal year if it even if it doesn't if it doesn't snow anymore, because that's at 7,000 feet.

But at the, you know, the real watershed up at 10 to 11, it's probably 15 feet.

But it was very windy, and I was looking out the window one day, and I had this, my great-great-grandmother built this barn with eucalyptus poles.

And it was, nobody had any money.

They lived there while they built their house inside the barn.

And I grew up there, and I, you know, as I'm attached, and I broadcast for, I do my Fox things inside it.

And all of a sudden, the thing started to sway.

And I had kind of fixed it up 10 years ago haphazardly.

So

I knew

this guy, Integrity Wolfing, Chad Covington, he's a brilliant guy, and he's got brilliant people.

And they came in.

I thought, well, it'll just be a little trusses.

And they said, you know, you can't even get on the roof.

So for the last week, they've been putting scissor trusses across it.

You know, the reason it's worth keeping, it's all redwood.

Like my house is all made of redwood,

everything, the two by sixes, the one by 12 boards that served in those days as drywall and the siding and

everything.

So they've been working on it for a week.

And now if they get done, I don't run out of money.

I mean, it looks...

It looks stronger than a modern building.

It's just overbuilt.

They did so many trusses on the inside, and then they put

5-8 of an inch plywood over the entire entire old one by fours that had

shingles.

And then they had this rusted old metal roof that my grandfather got, a more surplus.

And then now they're putting on that presidential 60-year roof.

And then they're going to get all new siding.

We've never had fascia on it.

It looks like it's going to look beautiful.

And maybe.

Maybe someone will want to use it, I hope.

Is this the final major project on the

i have done fortress hansen i have i did the the old water house the water tower that was decapitated when they took the tower out the windmill

storeroom and then i did the old packing shed we used to pack fruit it's all

and then i did the old cold storage took out the all the units and just have it for storage and then i did the two garages And then I did the annex, and then I did the studio.

And they have all been over the last three years rebuilt.

They look exactly like they did when they were originally built.

I haven't changed the look of them, but I put on all new wiring, all new plumbing,

all new siding, all new paint, all new roofs.

And there's eight buildings around the old two-story.

And the whole,

again, people drive by and go, are you crazy?

What are you doing?

Right.

That know me because, you know,

they said to me, you know, the water doesn't come out well, and, you know, we have this tiny septic.

Why don't we just do it?

I said, you have no idea what do it means.

And she said, yes, I do.

It means brand new septic, brand new leech line, brand new foundation work, brand new heating, brand new cooling, brand new ducting, brand new

roof.

And you've never had plywood, all new wiring, all new plumbing, all new paint, all new gutters.

all new.

We have a well.

$100,000 later?

Oh, my God.

I don't even want to talk about it.

But the well is 440 feet.

That was overkill.

It's never going to go dry.

And it's an eight-inch casing.

Usually there's six for domestic.

And I put a big three-horse on it.

And we landscape the entire house.

So it looks beautiful.

And there are just two of us.

And I keep wondering,

son and daughter want to come, but they don't seem to want to my daughter has a beautiful new home near Auburn

I mean you know

we're all in debt to get it but she has a disabled daughter that loves it up there because she can run around and yell and the neighbors won't come and say you know what's happening to her and

so so I'm trying to get one of my two to take up the seventh generation and see if they want to do it but i haven't had any takers yet

well victor i i want you to just say yes because this is a setup.

But I bet, Victor, this property is lovely to have a barbecue at, correct?

Yes.

Yes, it is.

And I think you've actually been here when I barbecued food for you.

You did indeed.

Yeah.

Well, barbecue.

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Victor, speaking of grilling, I don't know how infrared it was.

Tucker Carlson interviewed Vladimir Putin.

What you watched it.

What are your thoughts about the interview itself and any other reaction that you might want to comment on well

uh i watched the whole thing it was it's over two hours and it's free it's up there there's no there's no paywall and i

before i read it i read all of the commentary

so and i read the left-wing commentary which was just you know

terrible that

Tucker Carlson's an idiot.

He's a pro-Putin.

He's pro-Russian.

I read read some of our old friends on the conservative, who are not conservative.

Morna Charon, she's got a big article about Tucker, the useful idiots, getting people killed, and such.

So I just wanted to watch it with a disinterested approach.

And he wasn't just a patsy.

They said he didn't say a word.

He was just stunned.

He asked the questions.

Of course, when you're sitting across a dictator with Putin's record, you're not going to have, and you're in his country and in his palace.

You don't want to fall out of a window.

there was, I mean, I'm thinking of, I think it was 1933 or 434, William Scheier gave an interview with

Adolf Hitler.

And inside the Third Reich, that author,

he was one of Merle's boys, you know, the great

CBS radio reporters.

And he stayed there all the way until really we got into the war.

And he interviewed Goering and Goebbels and everybody.

And he, you know, they didn't like him and he didn't like them.

And it was, so this idea that you can't,

you can't interview a killer, we do it all the time in history.

G, right?

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, as bad as Putin has, he doesn't have any of the history of Mao.

Mao kills 70 million people.

And so, or Castro, he probably shot 30 or 40,000.

And yet, and we have people go, you know, that went down and interviewed Chavez.

He probably killed dozens of people, dozens of hundreds of people.

So I didn't quite get that.

So I wanted to see what Putin said.

And he kind of went on harangue.

So he started off, you know, you don't know, you people don't know anything about Kiev.

And he made some good points.

Of course, that this was part of Mother Russia, that it was an administrative boundary only during the Soviet Union, that they gave it semi-autonomy.

All that was true.

Crimea had declared its independence.

It was anti-Russian, Ukraine, anti-Russian, anti-Ukrainian kind of independent, and then Ukraine seized it.

That's true, too.

So then it had no choice to come in.

The subtext was it's sort of like if we went in, you guys in Castro's Cuba, you declared the Caribbean your sphere of influence and the Soviets kind of came in there and tried to make a communist government and arm it.

And you went explosive and almost

to DEF CON 5.

And so this is a very touchy subject, but mostly then, Jackie got into NATO.

And he kept,

he didn't mention

Robert Kagan and Victoria Newland, but that's what he was talking about, that the American neoconservatives and the bipartisan establishment were trying to put Ukraine and push it, push it to be a completely Western country within NATO, and that's intolerable.

He's not going to allow that.

And then it was Putin, the peacemaker,

that he just wants, you know, just can't everybody get along?

And if it wasn't in NATO, it was a neutral country, the natural affinities of Mother Russia would kind of absorb it culturally, but it would respect its autonomy.

He has no desire to go into Poland.

He has no desire to go into Latvia.

He has no desire to take any Baltic country.

So it was that.

And then Tucker, he mentioned, is it Gershkovich?

He mentioned Gershkovich, the Wall Street at the end, and he said, why don't you just let him come home with me?

That's not somebody who's timid to tell a dictator,

this guy hasn't done anything wrong.

And so why don't you let him go?

And he can come home with me when I go home.

That was pretty good.

And that wasn't mentioned by anybody.

And then Putin, of course, said, well, you know, he will be released at some point, but we're going to get somebody in return for him.

And da, da, da, da.

And they talked about the Nordstrom pipeline.

And,

you know, he just said, we know who did it.

And Tucker had been on record that it was either American or American intelligence officers giving the wherewithal to Ukrainians.

But either way, our side blew it up.

I believe that's true.

It wouldn't be in the Russians.

Not that the Russians aren't capable, but why would they blow up a multi-billion dollar conduit of foreign exchange into Russia?

When the war ends, they'll sell natural gas again to Germany.

So it was back and forth.

And

the thing that I think is important is that

Putin,

even though he's ill and he's aging, he does know a lot about the history of Russia.

It's a slanted view from his point of view, propagandistic.

The way to refute him is to argue matters of history and context and not just say, ah, he's a Hitler, I'm not going to talk to him.

Because I think

we don't, you have to understand the mentality of an enemy and

how they interpret things.

And I think

going way back to,

and Tucker pointed out, why did you go into Georgia?

Why did you go into Ukraine and Crimea in 2014?

And you know what he said, that he was trying to denazify Ukraine.

And

that was about 30 minutes of the two-hour interview was to define denazification.

So, what does he mean by that?

Tucker said, Well, you know, there's not Hitler around.

There's not Nazis today.

And he said, You don't think so?

And then he pointed to an incident in Canada where a Ukrainian

who had been accused of atrocities was given a standing ovation.

But what he means by Nazification is he goes back to the June 22nd, 1941 Nazi invasion of Ukraine, in which the Ukrainians welcomed, as you remember, and why not?

They were being slaughtered during the Great Famine by Stalin in the 20s, and they had officers that were liquidated in the show trials and the military purges.

In any case, he was saying that Ukraine In the past, there had been a lot of right-wing Ukrainians, and he's right about Babayar and all of that stuff.

The people who really went after the Jews, and that was the great killing ground of Jewry in World War II, was along with Poland, but mostly Ukraine.

And he was saying

that Ukrainians were helping the Nazis, and that type of Ukrainian mindset still exists.

And he's helping humanity by going in and trying to stop these Nazis.

And of course, that was disingenuous, but

that's what it was about.

I think it would be good for everybody to watch it to see we're not dealing with a stupid person, a simplistic, we're dealing with a very crafty,

cunning folk.

Are you talking about Joe Biden?

No.

Talking about Vladimir Putin.

And

he had nice things to say about

W.

Bush.

He had nice things to say about Bill Clinton.

He said he got along with Trump.

He didn't want to talk about Biden too much.

But

his basic, just to finish, his basic theme was this.

You Americans think you still run the world because after the fall of the Soviet Union, you were the monopower.

But every society waxes and wanes.

And when we in Russia and people look at you and we see your crime, your $35 trillion debt, your racial animosities,

your homeless, your woke,

rabbit ideologies, we get scared, we being the world, as embodied by Vladimir Putin, the spokesman for the world.

And you don't know how to handle the Chinese.

They're very pacifistic people.

They're not aggressive.

They just sort of don't tread on me, don't screw with me, and I won't screw with you.

But you keep provoking them.

You keep provoking us.

Your culture dominates the world.

And a lot of us, you know, basically, we don't like your message.

And Tucker, of course, was eager to hear that because he's made the argument that the new American imperialism is forcing transgenderism and wokeness down everybody's throat worldwide.

But what he was trying to say then is that I am in your interest.

You do not want to sanction my people.

and erode confidence in the dollar.

You're using the universal currency as a weapon against anybody that you don't like.

And that means that pretty soon the dollar, and it's already happening, is not going to be the global currency.

You keep slapping tariffs and sanctions.

Pretty soon you're going to see that your effort to be autonomous or autarchaic is going to be counterproductive.

It's going to hurt your lifestyle.

And you keep sounding off, but you made us, this was funny, Jackie said, you kind of made us do hypersonic missiles.

And now, of course, Russia is the leader.

We're faster than anybody in the world.

We can do anything.

But we didn't want to.

You forced us to.

That was the theme.

And why don't we all get along?

And

I can discuss Ukraine.

There are certain things we cannot give back.

And we have no problem with having them a neutral.

We have no problem if they want to have self-deform, but they're not going to be part of the Western NATO bloc.

And that was kind of

so.

I got the impression that

he has lost a lot of people in

Ukraine.

He's a little bit happier now that the spring offensive by Zelensky failed utterly.

He feels that in the long run that Russia is grinding down Ukraine because of the larger territory, GDP, and

manpower.

He feels that the West is getting tired and will get more tired.

And yet he paid a terrible price for going in there, but he had to, which is false.

And And therefore, he desperately wants some kind of negotiated settlement.

That's what I got out of it.

Victor, you touched on this a little, but

a little more, if you don't mind, on how Tucker himself,

your thoughts, carried himself as a journalist at a time when journalism is

much less about finding out the news as opposed to

promoting an ideology.

You know, they hate Tucker, but

that's what people did in the 20s and 30s and 40s.

They went all over the world and they interviewed anybody.

And if you read inside the Third Reich or you read any of,

I don't mean inside the Third Reich, but the rise and fall of, you know,

Germany,

rise and fall of the Third Reich.

and you read any of those by William Scheier, I think he had three volumes, you can see that Berlin circa 1933 to all the way

to the outbreak of the war, but even weirder or more eerily, because I went back and looked and I read some passages after listening to Tucker.

And that weird period when they had invaded and conquered Poland, and then they had

started the blitz at Britain, and France had fallen earlier.

So I'm talking about September 1st, 1939, all the way to December 7th, 1941, and then December 11th when we went to war.

They

declared war on us, and then we declared war on them back.

I don't think we would have otherwise, but my point is this.

For four months of 39, for 12 months of 40,

and for nearly 12 months of 41,

the world was at war, but the United States was not at war.

And they knew well what Hitler was doing to people, slaughtering them in Poland.

And yet, we had a whole coterie of reporters.

And as I said earlier, they were interviewing all of them.

They knew them personally.

And they were broadcasting and warning people.

And they had to be very careful what they said.

Because if they said, you know, Hitler's rounding up Jews, and they would be killed, or that they wouldn't get the story.

And so it's not easy to interview a dictator in his home lair, and Tecker did.

And I think he did a service, because I think at the end, it was very wise just to tell Putin,

you know, let Gershkovich go and we will, I'll take him home with me on my plane and we'll, on the plane, and we'll be.

And, you know, he thought that might work.

So

anyway, that's what it was.

And I didn't get the impression.

I read five or six long essays just full of vitriol and a hatred of Tucker, and he's a useful idiot.

He's a pro-Putin.

It came through that he's very critical of the Biden administration.

He's very critical of neoconservatism.

He's very critical of American popular culture.

He's very

MAGA,

but he's very patriotic.

And his view is just different than a lot of people's.

He just believes that if America takes its resources and works on all of our problems, we'll be more powerful and we'll have more deterrence.

and our enemies will not like it.

But when we spread ourselves thin and intervene everywhere and then neglect existential problems at home, then we're going to be steadily in decline.

And that came through.

And of course, Putin lapped that up.

And of course, somebody's going to say, well, Victor, if you think Tucker did as well as anybody could,

why did they grant Tucker an interview?

Duh.

How many journalists in America have said

that the United States blew up that pipeline?

How many journalists, and I don't know whether they did or not, but how many journalists have criticized the United States and said that the Ukraine war was avoidable and we shouldn't be silly.

And how many people...

Tucker really hates Zelensky.

He just despises him.

And that's why he was picked to do the interview.

I don't despise Zelensky.

I think he's...

I don't know, I think he's like all Ukrainian people that we've going back to the, you know, the Barisma people, they're all compromised.

They've got now billions of dollars flowing into a smaller 40 million person country, and it's corrupt as hell.

Being corrupt doesn't mean that I think it has the moral right.

I just don't think they can win, is what I'm trying to say.

I think they were heroically

to be admitted.

They were heroic, and they should be praised for saving their country.

And I think they did save it.

But I don't think they have the wherewithal to get back the Crimea or the Donbass.

I think there's historical reasons why Putin has as legitimate a claim as they do.

I don't think he should have taken it by force, but they were majority-speaking Russian areas.

They had been long part of the Soviet Union.

To the degree that they were independent or autonomous during the Soviet Union, that was just boundary technicalities of Soviet provinces.

And

Ukraine made a bold move like all the other former Soviet republics, and they decided and there was no problem and then unlike you know Kazakhstan or Ubekistan or Belarus it decided that its future was better equipped because it was the most European of all the Soviet provinces

and I guess it thought that it it was going to go Western and then a lot of people who

wanted to gain gain some leverage over Putin encouraged that and he went into the whole thing about the coup in

2000 and I guess 11 or 12.

Then he went into

the American involvement, etc.

So

I think it was on the, it was good to hear, hear somebody talk about it.

And I don't think, and Tucker didn't interrupt him.

Tucker didn't, he probably, if you look at the video or the audio, I should say I bet 80%

of the

vocabulary was Putin's, 20 was Tucker, but he asked the questions.

And every time that Putin tried to rant more than 10 minutes, he said, Well, I got to ask you this question.

And he said this repeatedly.

He called him Mr.

Tucker.

Mr.

Tucker, I'm not done with this question.

Let me answer this question and let me answer the prior question.

Then I'll get to your next question.

And he just wanted to go on to this one-sided rant.

And of course, Tucker,

you don't tell a killer, you know, a dictator.

All right.

Well, you know, Victor,

we've got some other things to talk about, but I must say, I don't know the dynamics of how this came about.

And as opposed, you know, to being picked

to interview me from Putin's perspective, maybe it was just

Tucker may have just sought it as opposed to other journalists who maybe none of

American journalists have been trying to get an interview with Putin.

Exactly, exactly.

You're absolutely right.

And put it this way: 24, 48 hours ago, we did not know whether Putin would even discuss a deal.

And we did not know whether the Wall Street Journal reporter Gershev,

that they would ever let him go because he's going to go on trial again.

And now 48 hours later, we know two things.

It's pretty clear from that interview that Russia has suffered a lot of damage.

And for all of his talk, it was pretty decipherable that he wants a deal.

And Tucker asked him specifically, how would you envision a deal?

And he, from his point of view, outlines something that people in the West, in Europe, and the United States have talked about.

Some of my colleagues at the Hoover Institution who are Russians have talked about it.

And that is some type of acknowledgement that Ukraine will not be a formal member of NATO,

and some type of acknowledgement by Putin that

we will arm, we can arm Ukraine to be able to defend itself and some type of acknowledgement that the Donbass and Crimea are special areas, that he shouldn't have grabbed them, but they were majority Russia and they had historical ties.

And if you could get him back

to the 2022 February, and that's the date that Tucker kept mentioning, if you could get him back to where he was when he invaded, and he could go back to the Russian people and say, I invaded to institutionalize and formalize what we took in 2014, which, by the way, there was no way in hell, I don't care what anybody says, there was no way in hell that Ukraine had the wherewithal, Europe had the spine, or we had the munitions and money for them to invade Crimea and invade the Donbass and get it all back.

It was not going to happen.

The only way you could get that back was to conduct

very deep raids into Mother Russia itself.

And that was very dangerous.

So what I'm getting at is, I think from Putin's perspective and our perspective, there's areas for a deal.

And Tucker, I think, helped that along.

And I think he helped the release.

for the Wall Street Journal reporter, Mr.

Gershakovich.

So I think it was a positive.

It really was.

And I don't care.

I don't think that Putin came off as, oh, wow, Tucker gave him a platform.

No, he didn't.

He's not on network news.

He's not on Fox.

He's not on cable.

He's on Tucker's Twitter feed.

It's very popular, but

there are people who looked at Putin and understood.

I think it was good for Tucker, too.

I think Tucker came away thinking, at least I,

that resonated in his voice and his manner and his, what he said is that this guy is really smart.

He's really crafty.

I don't quite believe much of what he says, but I don't want to go to war with him, and I have no intrinsic dislike of the Russian people.

And why in the world are we at odds with a hundred and fifty million Russians?

It makes no sense.

Yeah, with

China.

With a doddering head of state.

Well, Victor, we'll get on to the dodderer, but first, from the New York Times best-selling author, Eric Metaxas, comes a riveting new film, Letter to the American Church.

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Well, it started streaming February 8th.

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Visit Letter to the Church, excuse me, to theamericanchurch.com again lettertotheamericanchurch.com for more information letter to the american church is a film that is not yet rated we thank uh letter to the american church for sponsoring the victor davis hansen show and by the way

at epoch times or epoch times you know people say both potato potato they're a client of where i work at an field they're great people uh i like to say epoch but uh I think most people say epic.

So who cares?

Anyway, Victor, before we get your thoughts, I know you spoke, I haven't been able to listen to it yet, but I know you had a discussion with Sammy in part about Joe Biden's the last few days where Special Prosecutor came out with the findings about the classified documents held in the garage and other areas of the Biden House and that he was too old and feeble, et cetera, to be prosecuted.

Then there was an already infamous, crazy press conference that Biden had that is well worth your commentary.

And you've written about that on Twitter.

I do want to have a tiny little

side thing on Biden.

I picked this up off a tweet by RNX, whatever you want to call it, by Mary Catherine Hamm.

And she did a simple note, Mr.

President, please stop saying this.

And she had a recording of Biden on the phone with one of the families of one of the three soldiers who was killed a few weeks ago in Jordan in that attack.

And he just can't help himself.

We've talked about this before, but he kind of came close to calling his son Bo

killed in action.

He did.

Well, he didn't say that, but he came up with that.

No, you're absolutely right.

He did that.

He did it in Japan, and he did it last June and May.

He's done it five or six times.

And he always says this, we lost him.

We lost him in Iraq.

And that implies, you know, that he just didn't die of a brain tumor in Iraq.

He died,

as everybody remembers, he died at 46 in Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C.

from a glioblastoma.

tragedy.

He'd had some health issues before with a stroke.

He was far too young.

It was a terrible blow.

But he was in the JAG Corps.

So he was a lawyer in the Delaware National Guard.

It was deployed for six months, I think,

in a tour of Iraq.

And he conducted himself well.

General O'Dierno, as I remember, Jack, gave him the Bronze Star.

And he came home and he was the Attorney General of Delaware, and he was out of the service.

So he was, I guess,

2009.

So

I think he died.

Did he die in 2015?

And I'll have to remember.

But my point is, he was, he, when he died, he was out of the military and he was long gone from Iraq.

And he keeps saying this.

And the reason this is important

is in this infamous press conference where he smeared the special counsel.

And Robert Hurr is a big boy and he did a lot of things that I didn't like.

I don't think that you can say that this man willfully removed documents that were classified and in 2017 he admitted he did so and then not charge him because you think it might not convince a jury.

If a prosecutor didn't bring a case because he had doubts about whether he convinced a jury, then we wouldn't have any jurisprudence because

often prosecutors don't think they can win a case and they try to win a case.

That's my point.

And I don't think it's his duty to psychoanalyze the reaction of a jury given that he's not a county prosecutor with a limited budget that has to pick and choose only sure-winning cases.

He's got the biggest budget in the world and the most important case in our history.

And surely if he believes that Joe Biden willfully, that's his words, not mine, took out files that were classified as a senator and as a vice president with no prerogative, no putative ability to do so like Crump did as president, and he stored them in four locations in a sloppy fashion.

And he didn't tell anybody, Jack,

for at least 14 years.

He was senator.

He didn't, he left the Senate on January 15th, 2009, when he became vice president.

And

all of those papers could have been taken out even earlier, but that was 14 years ago.

And then he was vice president.

And what I'm getting at is this.

I want to talk about the prosecutor and Joe Biden.

Joe Biden's press flak today said, unlike Donald Trump,

he came forward willingly and he cooperated.

And then that's what Joe Biden said.

And that's what the

special ⁇ that is a damn lie.

He did not come forward willingly.

He kept for 14 years classified documents that we still don't know why he took out, although there has been some speculation that Hunter and he wanted to have foreign policy expertise and somehow market that.

But be that as it may, he did not tell anybody as a senator that he had broken the law.

He did not tell anybody for eight years as vice president that he had broken the law.

He did not tell anybody for two years as president of the United States that he was currently breaking the law.

And more importantly, he said to his ghostwriter in 2017 on tape that the special, when I read the special counsel's report, my jaw dropped.

He said, oh my God, I found I had some classified files.

Well, if he's such an altruistic, civic-minded public servant, as he

claims he is, as in contrast to Trump, why didn't they call up?

Why didn't they say, you know what?

I found I had classified documents.

I must have taken them out as vice president.

Maybe he was a senator.

My attorneys, go talk to the archivists immediately.

Go talk to the Trump administrator.

I broke the law.

I'm breaking the law.

It's a felony.

He didn't do any of that, Jack.

You know what he did do?

He waited to November 2nd of 2022.

And magically, Joe Biden got up one morning and he said, oh, my God.

I have classified documents.

I've had them for

14 years.

Oh, my attorneys know.

We've talked about it.

I think I better call the government.

So why did he suddenly become a civic-minded public servant?

Because two weeks later,

Merrick Garland appointed who?

Jack Smith.

And he did what?

He was investigating Donald Trump.

Why?

Because in August, three months earlier,

he had raided Mar-Lago.

Put it together.

So here is Joe Biden thinking, aha ha ha, rubbing his hands.

We raided raided Mar-Lago, we did a performance humiliation of Trump, and now I've got a special, Garlands told me they're going to appoint in about two weeks a special counsel.

And then somebody must have said to him, or he thought, well, if we have a special counsel and they're investigating an ex-president and my likely political rival in 2024, I better make sure that they don't turn around and say, how about you, E2, Brute?

Do you have anything?

Oh my God, I do.

So I'll preempt on November 2nd, just two weeks before the appointment.

I will be civic-minded.

And that's what the story was.

And that really bothered me about the press conference.

You know what else bothered me?

And we got back to it.

And

at one point, the question was asked.

And

the special counsel said that you were an old man, you didn't have memory, you didn't remember the year you were vice president, which is pretty damning.

You didn't remember a lot, you didn't remember the date of your son's death.

And so he was asked about that.

And he said, how dare you do that?

How dare you bring that up?

And he went on to Rosary.

Of course, he forgot all of that stuff.

And I thought, you are so self-demaintenous.

You would have had a good point.

Nobody should talk about the death of a child except you do all the time.

And you milk it and you milk it.

So how dare you, Mr.

Biden, accuse a special prosecutor that used that only for evidence to bolster his case, to show you that his dementia was such that his cherished son's death he had forgotten.

It wasn't to be mean.

You're mean.

Because you serially, one, two, three, four, five times, every time when people are talking about bringing bodies home from Iraq or families that have lost a child, you break in and you say,

we lost Bo in Iraq.

And you lie.

You lie about the death of your child.

And luckily, everybody, I'm speaking with Mr.

Fowler today because in 2019, as I remember, correct me, Jack, you wrote a great little National Review essay.

And it was about this propensity of then Joe Biden, putative

presidential candidate, to do what?

To

a Mr.

Dunn, who, at no fault of his own, tried to avoid Mrs.

Biden and their three children.

And she probably, it's not proven, but it's likely because there was a report that she probably pulled out in an intersection.

I think he was going downhill, and he tried to avoid her.

And

he hit her.

She died.

The daughter died.

And Bo and Hunter were injured.

Okay.

And then for the next 20 years, 1972, I guess it was, oh my gosh, you wrote that in 2019.

It was.

He actually, he started that act a decade earlier.

So he went for a long time with the truth.

The truth didn't mention.

Well,

Victor, it's how, look,

you've lost a child, right?

How could anyone,

how could you out-empathize just the bare fact of

the tragedy?

How would you,

what mind would exploit that, that fact?

And he started

talking about his

wife was killed by a drunk driver.

He lied about the guy wasn't a drunk driver.

Remember, he said that

he drank his lunch.

Liquid lunch.

He had liquid lunch.

And then

he said something to the effect, as I remember your article, he said something to the effect.

And

he was drunk.

And he was drinking, I think he said.

And then the family begged him, as you pointed out, for a decade, and he didn't relent.

And then the poor guy died.

And then only when he died, they said he was stressed his whole life by being unfairly...

smeared and slandered as a drunk driver when he tried to avoid.

Yeah, well, he was

the driver was just the fact that he was involved in the accident of something that crushed him

for his life.

And then you remember you referenced, I think you, and I read that article after I read your article.

The reason I remember your article, you and I talked about it in a podcast.

And I'm going to write about it again because I'm going to write about this.

But I remember you quoted the 2010

Mark Bowden essay and the Atlantic.

Right.

You remember that essay?

You wrote about it, and it was a damning at the end.

And Mark Bowden is a man of the left,

very good journalist.

And he wrote a paragraph and said, This, Joe Biden keeps making this up and keeps lying.

And he said, Why would he do that?

Why does he have to do that?

And so, my point is, this thing about Bo,

getting mad about Bo

and how dare you in this self-righteous sanctimoniousness is really hypocritical because he uses Bo.

He does.

Not me, not Jack, not you listening, Joe Biden.

And he lies about it.

And he lies about his wife.

And he does it to get perceived empathy in a political context as a politician.

And so I got really angry about that.

And then he lied and lied and lied at that press conference.

He said there was no, you know, there was no that red mark and that Afghanistan.

It It was top secret.

Some of those files in the Afghan portfolio that he was lying about that, they were top secret.

And I think even there, they had a guy on there today I was listening to.

He was a

typical,

just, I don't know what the word is, flack or what, but he just was a sophist.

And he went in and he kept talking about how he was so different than Trump, that Biden had been so civic-minded.

And it was just a lie, you know, about he came forward, Trump didn't,

and Trump, you know, Mar-Lago was this, but Joe had him in these secure places, and it was just a lie.

And that's what he's paid to do.

And they, you know, what he was, they don't let Karen, Corinne, Jean-Pierre, anywhere near this.

Have you noticed that?

Because

they just, she can't handle it.

She just.

I mean, who, honestly, to give the devil her due.

How can you, how can anyone constantly have to

defend this sort of stuff, explain it away, or

not in this particular case?

I don't know, Jack.

To have to have to translate what Joe Biden said, have to lie, give the lie translation.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I'm just baffled because I went on Laura last night.

And then I was going on Seablock, and then all of a sudden they called and said, you could do the monologue.

And I went back and then

I said some stuff.

And they called me back and said, get back out in your barn and we're going to do another one.

And the reason that was is that we started thinking.

And I thought at first that the prosecutor was timid and scared and under no circumstances, like Comey, it was the Comey defense.

Well, Hillary did break the law, but no jury would convict her because she's running for president.

That kind of stuff.

And there was a lot of that.

He did use the Comey defense.

But

he also, and I didn't like the idea that he was giving, you know, when you commit a felony,

the act is what speaks.

And the judge and the jury can determine the

mental status of the perpetrator.

But the prosecutor traditionally wants to punish the act, the act.

especially in terms of national security.

And so I thought, you're just using all this stuff about his debility to get him off because you don't want to be the prosecutor to take the heat by indicting a sitting president, but you have no problem that Jack Smith is doing.

I still stand by that, but there's another ring to it.

The more that I read that, and I said this last night on Fox, I don't know if it was valid or not,

he kind of gave a brilliant lose-lose situation for the White House.

If you think about it, it's, okay, Mr.

White House, you have a choice.

You can either say that Joe Biden is severely debilitated, as I said, and therefore he has no criminal liability, or he's not.

He's fully cognizant, and therefore he knew exactly what he was doing.

He mentioned it in 2017.

He willfully, as I had said in my report, removed something that he shouldn't.

It was unlawful to remove it.

It was unlawful to possess it for 14 years, and therefore he's guilty and should be indicted.

Take your pick.

Is he demented or is he a crook?

Or is he both?

It's up to you.

I just made the and made a can't they can't figure out.

I watched that fool today on TV, that press flack for Biden, and the more that he said this was horrible.

I watched Kamala Harris.

I was amazed.

They have no business doing this, smearing his family.

And I thought, keep going, keep going, keep going.

He's not debilitated.

He's perfectly okay.

So therefore, he's culpable and he should be indicted, right?

And they don't get it.

It's a lose-lose situation.

There's no way out.

He's either criminally liable or he's demented.

And I guess they would prefer that he's criminally liable and got off and warped the law than he's non-compos mentas.

Well,

Victor, I have a thought or two I want to share with you to get your reactions related to

the non-compass mentis angle and also the prosecution of,

let's just call it the elderly.

And we'll get your thoughts on that and more right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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Victor, on the

let me start with the

prosecuting of the elderly.

And this is a little gamey.

I don't even say I'm embarrassed to do this, but the Justice Department does

prosecute the elderly and has for years through

that Office of Special Investigations, which finds the old

Nazi death camp guards, et cetera, that

one as recent as, I think, two years ago, was prosecuted.

Now, nobody who's being prosecuted

in 2024 is going to be anything but 95 to 100 years old, or maybe even older, those who are left, and they should be prosecuted.

And then after they're prosecuted and convicted, they're kicked out of the country and sent back to Germany,

wherever the hell

they came from.

But

there's no hesitation

for the Department of Justice to prosecute

the elders in this case.

So as a rule, it's not a rule of thumb.

Anyway, I offer that up.

Do you have any thoughts on that?

You mean on

whether it's a billion senality or age as a

correct?

Yeah,

if you're 95, there have been

prosecuted old death cases.

They don't care that they're they know.

No, they don't.

Typically, what happens, I'm only speaking because I grew up with My mother was a superior, first, you know,

second superior court judge.

She was a juvenile court judge, superior court, and right before, and she died of brain tumor.

Like that's why I can speak with some authority on it because I spent two years researching every possible cure for cancerous meningiomas, which are pretty rare.

And my point is that I remember, and she would

talk to me all the time because I was getting a PhD at Stanford in classics with a zero job market, especially for white males.

And she would call me and say, why don't you just walk over to the law school and be a lawyer and then come home and I'll retire from my judgeship and we'll have a little practice.

And I thought, oh, man, I'd better die than be a lawyer.

But I don't believe I mean I probably should have done it.

But my point is this, that I would talk to her all the time about why people brought cases, because she knew all the DAs.

in Fresno County and why they didn't.

Well, when you're in counties with limited resources, obviously prosecutors make judgments about the, not the guilt or innocence of the perpetrator

only, but they calibrate what is the chance of me using scarce, limited resources to get this guy convicted when I might

get him, I might not convict him, and then I wouldn't have enough time or money or staff to do another one that I would.

So it's, you know, it's pick and choose.

That's not true with a special counsel.

They have an unlimited budget.

Ken Starr had an unlimited budget.

All of them did.

They all have an unlimited budget, and they pick historic, iconic cases.

So in this case, his

physical abilities, his cognitive

abilities, his psych, his age, it doesn't matter.

What matters is,

did he commit a crime?

If he committed a crime, I'm going to indict him for it to protect the people's interest.

And I'm going to bring forward evidence that he knew he was doing it.

Because there are statutes that say that the person is completely, you know,

doesn't know where he is, then you can't really get him on the stand.

But that's very rare.

That's not the case of Joe Biden.

He knows enough where you could get him.

And then let the judge

adjudicate the cross-examinations if they're too mean or that you can't answer or, you know, declare a mistrial or let the jury hear testimonies of psychiatrists, psychologists, all of that, MDs.

But that's not the role of a prosecutor in this type of case.

And you're right.

They don't.

You get a Nazi that comes in 1948 from Lithuania and he's some retired janitor in Ohio and somebody says, I recognize that guy.

He came from Auschwitz.

They put him on the thing and then the usual guy is half dead and saliva dripping out of his lip.

And they say they either deport him or they put him in jail.

And they should.

Yeah.

And they don't should.

They don't do that.

And I mean, they don't play games like the prosecutor did.

I got so angry when I read it because it was so reminiscent of James Comey.

Yes.

And I said to myself when I read it, I said,

Mr.

Hur, you're a nice guy and you're obviously very talented.

I listened to some of the commentary of a colleague at Hoover that I really respect, John Yu,

who was, I think, trying to enlighten us about what the views of the prosecutor, where he was coming from.

I'm sorry, what did John say?

I love John.

What did he say?

He was basically, you know, trying to explain that

Mr.

Hur was not in a position to indict the President of the United States, but

in a way, by explaining why he didn't indict him, he did more damage

to Joe Biden than he would if he had indicted him.

So basically he was saying

he's not, he's not, he is an honest prosecutor, but he knew that this case

was impossible given he's the president of the United States.

And he knew that given Trump of the question of equal application of laws, it was a lose-lose situation.

And he knew he was cognitively impaired.

So he focused on that aspect of it, to

square the circle or cut the Gordian knob with the other issues.

And he did.

And he didn't please anybody.

But I can see what John was saying.

And

so after it was over, I don't know if he had a Cheshire grin on him, Mr.

Hurr, but it was very funny how these deer in the headlights apologists for Biden couldn't quite figure out whether they were going to say he's sharp as attack and he knew what he was doing, or poor guy had no idea what he was doing and therefore he shouldn't be president.

You know, that's the other thing that victor the reaction from many on the right or some senators, we need the 25th Amendment

invoked or et cetera, he needs to step down.

I,

you know, on the non-compass mentis front,

many elderly,

it's gradual, right?

It's not all of a sudden overnight, you don't know your name or anything.

I kind of have a feeling Joe Biden knows his situation and is unbothered by it because

he's a destructive person.

His whole career has been about nastiness and...

disruption.

Look what happened in Afghanistan.

Look,

go back 40 years or more when he was leading the Judiciary Committee and how he tormented America, how he played such a heavy role in America's partisan divisions through the Supreme Court nomination

hearing.

He was a smartass.

You remember?

Look at that tape where he talks about raising his kids in the initial jungle.

Remember that one?

Yeah, that came out.

Somebody just wrote about that today, I think, also.

So anyway,

this is his modus.

This is what he does.

He destroys things.

And using his

dotage

or screw-ups is

I wrote an article on this somewhere in

American Greatness, maybe 2021 summer.

And I basically said

that this tag of dementia is a great asset for him because he can say any crazy thing in the world.

And, you know, it's kind of like Trump's tweets.

Trump can tweet anything because people are acculturated to it.

They don't care.

Oh, Trump said he called Nikki Haley bird brain.

So what?

Trump says that.

And don't

Biden can say everything.

They said, well, maybe he was senile.

He didn't mean it.

And that's what he did.

I think it's been, in some ways, in a weird, I know it's a distraction and it's a detriment to his reputation and maybe his polls, but there are some upsides that he just sort of just, we don't hold him to account.

Right.

Other people had said, if Donald Trump tomorrow, I mean, they went after him when he confused Pelosi and Nikki Haley.

But if Donald Trump tomorrow said that he had talked recently to Helmut Cole,

who I think died in 2017

and Meteron in 1996,

if he had said he had talked to them,

that would be it.

They just say he's dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

And,

you know, one thing people haven't recognized is

there's this irony that what we're watching is a slow motion, radical transformation

into these prosecutions and

indictments.

I talked to Sammy, but I was thinking about today,

they're all falling apart or their absurdities are such that even when they're successful, like the E.

Jean Carroll, they're so egregious that it ends up helping Trump.

And now,

when you see how they bent backwards and said that

basically for Trump, it was a win-win because Trump has been saying

that Biden was culpable.

If he was culpable, Biden didn't have the prerogative to declassify him.

He had them for a greater duration of time.

He had them in more locations.

They were less secure.

And basically, when you read

the writ from the special counsel, he's right.

But then he gets the added boon that they didn't do anything about it, not just because they're corrupt, and that's true too, but because he's demented.

And Trump's been saying that too.

So Trump's now saying, well, he's demented and he's a crook.

And the deep state is giving him a break that they won't give me.

And so

that's going to help him in a trifecta fashion.

And wanted to give his son a break this federal federal prosecution one judge his son was one honest judge away from walking away from millions of dollars of unreported tax and i don't know why i can tell you everybody who is listening if you are in a business and somebody writes you a check for four hundred thousand dollars

an associate even a family member, maybe it's not even a business, maybe a family, maybe your brother wants, your sister wants to give you 400,000.

And they write on the bottom of that check, loan repayment, and the IRS audits you, that means nothing, nothing.

The first thing that a low-ranking IRS auditor will do is say, I want to see this income here.

Now, you deposited this check.

It says loan repayment.

So I want to know exactly when you took the loan out, what was the interest you paid paid on it, and

when did it, where are the formal arrangements?

And

I don't need you to tell me that.

I need an agreement in writing, not post-dated.

I needed to know that when you took out the $400,000 loan,

or he did, maybe you lent to your brother, where was the documentation?

And, or maybe it didn't exist, or maybe he's just giving you

$400,000.

But that doesn't work in the IRS.

It does not work.

Anybody who's listening to this, who knows anything about the IRS, and that's a lot of people,

know that they would never try that trick.

I've talked to people, farmers, and I've talked to business people over the last 50 years.

And every once in a while, somebody says to me, well, you know.

I got my brother doing this, and I'm just going to give him a couple hundred thousand dollars so he doesn't go broke.

And I said, i've always said the same thing make sure you document it make sure you say it's a loan maybe you can forgive it and maybe that who knows but you have to have a written loan because you're only allowed so much depending on the year to give for gift tax or i've said things like you and your wife can each give and today i think it's 18 000 each and you can help a child by

you know, giving the each of you giving two to one child and two to the husband or spouse.

There's ways to do it legally, but you should document it.

Or if you don't have to document it, if you don't exceed, but if you exceed or do anything, don't try loan me payment.

You're just going to get in trouble.

Somebody's going to say, well, Victor, that's fine and dandy, but where have you been?

And Amber, that's the old system.

10% of the California economy is off the books.

It's no sales tax, no income, tax only.

I've listened to your your damn podcast, Victor.

You've talked about having people come out that drives you nuts when they won't wire, they won't plumb, or they won't do anything unless you pay them in cash.

And that means

the state of California and the federal government are losing out on taxes.

And that's right.

It's true.

It drives me crazy.

And when somebody comes out and I said, hey, can you put this in?

Or can you, yes, I can do it.

But we're booked up for six months.

I said, oh, okay come back no i can do it on the weekend on my own i'll freelance but you got to pay me cash cash i always say well they don't pay me cash

why would i why would i pay cash so you get double the amount you want fifty dollars an hour well i have to make a hundred dollars an hour to pay you right 50 and then you make a hundred dollars tax because the 50 is tax-free you're just making the same as i am

but you know i'm supposedly getting twice what you are but I'm not because I pay half in tax and you pay no taxes.

You sound, you know, you sound like an accountant on top of everything else that you are, my friend.

Well, you know,

I did farm for.

You did run a business.

Yeah.

I did, but my job was sort of

every day I would get up and I would walk around the 180 acres and I'd say, my little brain would go,

$12,000, probated today's liability insurance, $1,700, probated taxes to da-da-da-da, chemical, ammonium nitrate coming in, $700,

Roundup and Paraquat coming in, $4,000, sulfur bags, and then Perkins engine going out on the Massey Ferguson, got to have it rebuilt.

And then I would say, stop!

Okay, plum car,

maybe just maybe 600 boxes an acre coming in at maybe $5.

Maybe reserve payment on Ravens and Tony, of $140 a ton from the revolving fund coming in.

So I looked at the, every single day I got up, it was how much is going in and how much is going out.

And unfortunately, farmers know that

the expenses that go out are absolute and concrete, and they have to be paid.

And what they are told they're going to get is fluid and flexible, and they don't have to receive.

And that's the way farming is a tragedy.

We're going not on this podcast.

Hopefully the next one, we're going to talk about some big farming issues.

But

before

we've kind of gone long, but we still have to go a little longer, Victor, because we have,

since we're talking about jurisprudence, we should talk about the verdict that came out yesterday in Washington, D.C., the Superior Court, which held that Rand Simberg, who worked for the wrote for the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Mark Stein, the

conservative commentator who at the time was writing for National Review

lost a case,

a major First Amendment case, to Michael Mann, the then Penn State climatologist.

And Victor, we're going to get your thoughts on

this really important matter right after these final messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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And I had, my wife had a factor meal yesterday.

Delicious, delicious, folks.

So yes, yesterday,

again, we're recording on Saturday, excuse me, Friday the 9th.

Thursday the 8th was not a good day for the First Amendment in America.

This

case, which has started in 2012.

And I will say, kind of

select the venue was selected because

Bringing up a case about climate science and defamation, et cetera, if you're a liberal, liberal, I think, Victor, it's fair to say it's going to go over a lot better in a Washington, D.C.

jury trial or in a New York City jury trial than it would in a Montana jury trial.

This case has cost

national review, and I was the publisher of National Review for when this happened and spent a lot of my time on this case.

And Mark Stein and Rand Simberg and Competitive Enterprise Institute, millions and millions and millions of dollars.

The jury,

long story short here,

to Rand Simberg, penalty, $1,

punitive, $1,000.

To Mark Stein, who acted as his own counsel during this three-week trial.

And by the way, he did it

often from a wheelchair.

He's had three heart attacks in the last year.

He's pretty beaten down health-wise.

Anyway, $1,

you know, a fine, but punitive $1 million.

So,

Victor, this is, I think,

I still believe it's the premier First Amendment case in America.

But the First Amendment is

hurting, and it's in the crosshairs of lawfare, just as so many other things are.

It is.

Now, I don't want to keep bringing up my childhood beat, but every once in a while, when I was in college, my mom had to go to a

reception or party.

And if I was back home from university, I would drive her there.

Sometimes I went with my dad.

He didn't want to go all that much.

And it was always, the reason I mentioned it, Jack, it was always there'd be some lawyer that came up and was angry that she reduced the punitive damages.

You know what I mean?

Because about 50%,

that's just a wild guess on my part, 40%

of punitive damages are reversed by judges, at least in California they were.

And the lawyers go crazy about it.

And they go, and when they see socially judges, they yell at them.

But the idea of a punitive, as I remember, versus compensatory damages,

the idea is that in this case, to take Mark, for example, so they found out that he really didn't do any damage, right?

Yes, but Michael Mann was not hurt at all.

Not hurt at all.

Yeah, correct.

However,

they,

and I'm not saying Mark did this because I don't think he did, but the theory behind punitive damages when the compensatory damages, compensatory damages are small, is, well,

people will commit crimes because they pencil it out and the penalty is so small that they'll just go do it again.

And that's part of the bottom line.

So Mark Stein

kept, is going, he called him Jerry Sandisky or he retweeted something like that because he knew that it's very hard to

prove actual compensatory damages.

So then the law comes in and says, well, we have another remedy.

to create deterrence.

It's called punitive damages.

And that means two things.

We're going to punish

the

defendant if he's found, we're going to punish him.

So even though

he didn't damage the person he supposedly wrote something about,

that person is going to get punitive damages so he never tries it again with anybody else.

And B,

so we set a precedent that you don't have First Amendment rights, really.

That's what we're talking about.

That's Victor Dixon.

Not just Mark Stein.

Everyone listening.

Exactly.

That the jury is sending a message that if you get in a dispute and you say somebody is like Jerry Sandusky or something, you're mean, then you're going to pay punitive damage.

So punitive damages are in theory serve as deterrence, depending on what the purpose of the judge or the jury is.

And believe me, you know, I used to go watch cases because I was fascinated by it.

And when I would watch, my mom was a judge and I would watch these brilliant attorneys.

And when they had these civil cases and they would address juries, they said that openly.

They said, you know,

he's suffered so much.

And just because we can't quantify that suffering,

That means that this man is going to keep doing it and doing it and doing it to other innocent young people.

And you've got to stop it now.

So we need punitive damages, a deterrent.

And then they would even, the more imaginative say, then society itself is going to benefit because

we're going to establish standards that just because you deliberately violate a statute, because you have decided in a cost-to-benefit analysis, it's more profitable to break the law than to follow it, and you can't prove anybody was damaged know,

concretely, we're going to show you that you did a lot of damage to us, the society.

And that's how they do it.

And Mark,

what this was about was, hey, Mark Stein,

you made fun of this guy, and you may be a satirist, but you're not going to do it to anybody else.

And that's what the attorneys no doubt tried to tell the jury, and they bought that.

And more importantly,

they told the jury, this is a cruel country, and we've just abused the First Amendment.

It's time to bring decency back.

That's what they did.

I have no doubt, Jack.

I don't know the statute in that particular jurisdiction.

Is Washington, D.C.?

Yes.

Yes, I don't know what a federal statute is, but I have a feeling that a judge will reduce that.

Well,

they may,

by the way, folks, anyone who's interested in getting the details of this,

it's widely reported.

National Review today on the 9th has an excellent editorial on the matter.

It's,

to my mind, I can't tell you what Mark Stein is going to do or not do.

I think possibly competitive enterprise institute and Ransomberg might say, you know what, I'm going to pay this and we're out of this.

But because this is a First Amendment case, a national review institutionally will be drawn back in.

And I think the tenor of, I'm assuming the tenor will be, we're not, we're fighting this the whole way.

The whole way will be to the Supreme Court.

It will cost many millions of dollars to prevail.

And who knows who might die in the meanwhile?

Where is Michael Mann's money coming from?

We don't know.

That's what's sad about the whole thing.

That was like E.

Gene Carroll we talked about.

Reid Hoffman, remember him?

Mr.

LinkedIn or whatever his name, the company is?

He had billions of dollars.

And he just said, go out and get Donald Trump.

We don't care if you lie about it.

And I mean, I'm not saying that he said that, but basically, I will fund you to get Donald Trump.

But by that, I mean, if E.

Jean Carroll had accused, if she had been Tara Reed, and she went to Reid Hoffman and said, 30 years ago, I was assaulted by now President Joe Biden, and he...

digitally raped me and he confronted me and I told my mother about it and she called into Larry King and mentioned that a a high-ranking official had sexually assaulted.

So there is some document.

He would say, get out of my office.

That's 30 years ago.

You can't prove it.

I'm just suggesting that he would say that, but what I'm suggesting is that the political nature of that suit, and it happens on, you know, Elon Musk is helping somebody,

what's her name, Carol, the woman

who's suing Disney right now, that was fired for nothing.

She's Chris.

Yes, Carol Fontaine.

Carano.

Carano.

Sammy and I talk about it, but she's being funded by Elon Musk.

I don't know

that billionaires fund particular lawsuits.

Peter Thiel did that and took down Gawker over the Hulk Hogan suit.

Yeah, he did that.

But that's that kind of payback for

you sniped at me.

Victor I this is your show and I'll shut up after this

we've got a we've got a

world we're running and well they that's okay but

this case involves everyone in this country because the point of this trial is to shut people up it is from from from talking about that's what the punitive damage

but see the jury the jury bought that That's what they were told.

That's why they gave a million dollars to destroy Mark.

If there's anybody who had real damages, I remember Mark Stein before this, he taught at Hillsdale College.

Mark was a vibrant, healthy,

he was so prolific.

He wrote non-stop, not that he doesn't now, but for 10 years, this has hung over his head, that at any moment he might lose.

a considerable amount of money.

This hurt his career.

It really did, this defamation suit.

And it was used to destroy his career.

And he's not healthy now.

I have to believe that some of that is the stress that he had to go through with this crazy suit.

And yet somehow we're thinking that this Mr.

Mann who's benefited from all these grants and

his narratives about his bio and his resume were inaccurate.

And he is the victim.

And a guy in a wheelchair who is not that old is the perpetrator.

And I just don't see it.

I wish it never happened because Mark Stein was a

treasured essayist.

He still is, but you can see that he's not got the same level of energies that he used to.

And he was everywhere.

He was ubiquitous.

He was one of the when he substituted for Rush.

For Rush.

He substituted for Fox News.

He was one of the funniest people in the United States.

Yeah.

He was Tucker's main replacement.

He was hilarious.

He's kind of like Dennis Miller.

He was a comic genius.

And I don't see him enjoying that role to the same degree after this suit.

I hope he sues for damages.

If we're going to.

Yeah, well,

it may be resolved 10 years from now.

Well, anyway, Victor, thanks for all the wisdom you shared today.

I do want to encourage folks.

to visit civilthoughts.com, sign up for Civil Thoughts, which is the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society, where we are trying desperately to strengthen civil society.

I shouldn't say desperately, I should say consequentially.

Lots of folks leave, rate this show and leave comments at iTunes and Apple, and we appreciate that.

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And

some people leave comments.

And here's one, short and sweet, from SullyNY55, who just writes VDH is excellent enjoy the two co-hosts love the presentation usually several topics touched upon serious fact-based points thank you Sully NY55 by the way Victor that reminds me of a friend Sully who listens to this

show

and he had a backlog of them and he listens to them at 1.5 you know he doubled like he increases the speed and he says Victor you're just as smart at 1.5 speed as you are at normal speed.

So

maybe even smarter.

I come off dumber.

Thanks, Victor.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

Thank you, everybody.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.