Israel and Cultural Nihilism

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the man lucky enough to be the host and get to ask questions of our star and namesake, Victor Davis-Hansen.

He's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

If you're new to this podcast and you love Victor because you've seen him on Fox or some other,

in some other place, heard him on Megan Kelly's podcast, want more, I want more, go to his website, The Blade of Perseus.

He web addresses victorhanson.com.

We'll talk a little more about that later in this episode, which we are recording, by the way, Victor, on Saturday,

what is it, the 16th of December.

So

Christmas is just over the horizon.

We have a number of topics we're going to get Victor's wisdom on today.

Joe Biden's slamming, I think slamming of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Humanitarianism.

What does it mean?

What does it mean in Gaza versus, does it have any meaning?

in the Ukraine.

Kamala Harris seems to be sticking it to Joe Biden, that is.

And maybe we'll have time for another topic or two.

And we'll start out with

Israel.

And we'll get Victor's thoughts right after these important messages.

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

So, Victor,

indulge me, my friend, and the listeners will indulge me a little also, because here's a story that is out this morning on the Daily Mail.

The headline is Republican support 51st State Israel in lockstep, as Biden turns on Netanyahu, saying his approach is quote unquote losing support and change is needed to protect citizens.

So Victor, it seems like

our esteemed leader, our president was at a campaign fundraising event.

I think it was on Tuesday, earlier this week.

And at that, he said,

he says, during a campaign reception on Tuesday, Biden said Israel is losing support due to its quote indiscriminate bombing campaign, end quote.

That's not unimportant, calling our allies' efforts indiscriminate bombing, that's one, and claimed its current government does not want a two-state solution.

That's two things, two-state solution.

Three, Biden speculated that Israel must,

quote, strengthen and change its government in order to maintain Jesus Christ across the world.

Yeah, well, he was more after

the ugly American stereotype that interferes in the internal affairs of foreign nations.

In this case,

one of our closest, if not our closest ally.

But of course, remember that Clinton did the same thing.

You know, they've all everybody on the left is in a quandary because

they married into the DEI

Palestinian movement, and they never quite wanted to handle the fact or confront the fact that it was utterly anti-Semitic as well as anti-Israel.

And now they can't avoid it.

So they want to square that circle.

How do I remain a leftist with people?

like these Palestinian students or the squad or Bernie's.

How do I do it?

Ah, I know how I do it.

I will trash Benjamin Netanyahu and say, he did it.

He's the right-wing guy.

He's the guy you hate.

You take Netanyahu out and you put liberal people, they'll like you.

No, they didn't.

The kibbutzes that were the target of the attack on October 7th, they were the most left-wing people in Israel.

They were peace fanatics.

They had done everything in their power to oppose the Netanyahu government and have a new phase, a new period of conciliation, And they were murdered in their beds.

So that is a complete farce.

The second thing is they all say, well, Netanyahu's through.

He's not through.

We don't know what his fate is.

It looks bad now.

But if he destroys Hamas and he keeps at it, then

he will be like George W.

Bush, who got rid of the Taliban right after, you know, October 7th, or FDR, who dealt with the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, et cetera, et cetera.

If he doesn't, and Biden is able to coerce him and he stops and Hamas re-emerges, then yeah, he's done and Hezbollah will jump in.

The other thing about Biden is

he's in a doom loop,

Jack.

He has

the mental degeneration decline at a geometric rate.

It's almost he cannot function.

He is confronting Hunter's indictment.

The whole family is on the cusp of falling apart as people now come out of government, probably from the left, and are starting to present documents.

Then his poll is 33%.

New York Post, another poll.

I mean, that is lower than George W.

Bush during the surge.

My God.

And then on top of that, none of his agenda appeal,

none of it is 50% approval.

So in this

vacuum,

50% of the people don't believe that he should or will run for re-election.

Now, how that's going to be finessed, nobody knows.

Maybe it'll be at the convention so they can select rather than elect his successor.

But there's also a chance that at the present rate that he's going, Camela Harris could step up.

And he's, as I said, he's one fall, one fall, one bad COVID bout from oblivion.

She could be president in six months and enter 2024 as an incumbent, and that would be impossible to remove her.

And so what I'm getting at is in that doom loop,

foreign and domestic enemies of Biden see

areas to operate.

At home, Camilla Harris now is leaking that she is she's thinking of her own career, the new Democratic Party.

Remember, this is a woman who told us in June 2020 that the riots that had just burned down the St.

John's Church, police precinct,

federal courthouse, you know, $2 billion in damage, $35.

They will not end.

They should not end.

And they're going to go, whether you like it or not, all the way to election.

And then I think you pointed out in an early broadcast, she organized or helped bail out people in Minnesota, you know, charged with basically terrorist activities.

So she's carving out in this vacuum.

She sees Biden, she says, you know, I'm going to pressure him on Hamas, and I'm going to leak to the press that I am really the one who is pro-Hamas.

And that's where these new Democrats that I represent are.

And you're starting to see the staffers attack Biden, and he doesn't know what to do.

People come to him every day and said, you know, you're going to lose Michigan, or you're losing the youth vote, or the black vote.

And he's losing it for a variety of reasons, but they're telling him he's losing it because he's not left-wing enough, which I don't think is accurate.

So now he's going to be, and this has nothing to do really his non-composment state.

He was this way all of his life,

a complete fickle and dishonest and untruthful politician.

And now he's that way again.

Whatever I said about Netanyahu on Monday, it's corrected on Tuesday and expect it'll be different on Wednesday or back to normal on Thursday.

So they're all freelancing.

Abroad, they are doing the same thing, Jack.

We don't have

a Red Sea anymore in the sense of international

transportation and deliverance of product.

Ships will not go into the Red Sea.

Any other president, literally, even Bill Clinton, even probably even Barack Obama, would send six or seven guided missile frigates right through the Red Sea, and they'd have a carrier based at the you know, the southern Mediterranean or

down below the Red Sea, and they would a chart of all of the sites where the missiles, and then one day we would wake up and they would be obliterated, and nobody would say a word.

Everybody'd be happy.

Now, if Biden's polls get below 30, he may wag the dog on that.

He may think, well, I can be a wartime commander-in-chief.

But so far,

He's just given up the Red Sea.

He's given up the protection of Americans, 125 attacks on American installations in Syria and Iraq.

He hasn't done much of anything.

And so Iran sees this vacuum, Kamala Harris sees this vacuum, and they're all freelancing.

And one of the fatalities of this is our relationship with Israel.

Indiscriminate.

What does he think 7,500 rockets are?

So what he should say is the Palestinians, as a matter of policy and habit and protocol, rely on indiscriminate rocketing of Israeli civilian centers.

But because they're incompetent and they can't get through Irondome,

their wish, their intent, their desire to kill Jews in their beds is not working as well as the Israelis targeted bombing, who drop leaflets and text people to get out of the way as they try to hit tunnel.

that are masked by civilian infrastructure.

And that's that he has no ability to calibrate that because it's a religion hating Jews.

It's a cult, and that's what these people on the left are.

They don't have any reason.

You can't talk to them.

And I gave a talk on Zoom.

I won't give the circumstances to give it away with the people involved.

But one person said he was really worried about the IDF.

Yes, there was anti-Semitism, but what the IDF has done.

And I said, could you tell me the period of October 7th until about 10 days later, the IDF went into Gaza?

And he said, what do you mean?

I said, just describe the attitude on the campus.

According to your theory, the campuses were quiet.

Nobody said a word.

It was only when the IDF went into Gaza that we started seeing Jews harassed.

And he said, well,

no, no, they were attacked.

I said, yes.

The very news that Jews were decapitated, maimed, mutilated, tortured, necrophilia, mass rape, that was enough to incite all of the liberals.

The Cornell professor that said he was exhilarated, the Stanford professor who separated Jews from the other, the students all over who were harassed.

It had nothing to do with the idea of response.

And so

Israel is going to be 75% of their weapons depend on us, and they have to survive until

January 21st,

2000.

Let's be honest, 2025, 25.

They've got about

13 months before they're going to be helped.

And that's only if we can get a Republican president, House, and Senate.

Then they're okay.

But they've got to survive until then.

I hope they're stockpiling weapons or something because these people

are not only incompetent, but they're malicious.

And

they wouldn't mind Israel being attacked perpetually by Hamas.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, two things about Biden.

One, you mentioned counterattacking.

Okay, he's vice president.

Wasn't he the only person in the room to say no against with the opportunity?

Yes, yes, on bin Laden, yeah, on bin Laden.

Yeah.

And that's why Robert Gates, you know, that oft-quoted aphorism that

he's been wrong on every major foreign policy decision of the last 30 years.

He was wrong on the, remember the surge?

He said it wouldn't work and he he had a better plan that he was going to trisect Iraq and make a Kurdish nation and then a Shia nation and then a Sunni nation.

And basically, what he was saying, we're going to hand over a third of Iraq to Iran, and we're going to get the other third, the Kurds, to Iran, and then we're going to have a Sunni radical ISIS nation.

That's what would have happened.

And

so he's been wrong on everything.

And

he's been mean-spirited.

He's been arrogant.

He's, I couldn't believe the other day, just off Mitt Romney was saying that he might have to vote for Biden.

Wasn't Joe Biden the one that said Mitt Romney was going to put blacks in chains?

Yeah.

Put you all in chains.

Yeah.

And that was an address.

That was an address to very sophisticated, professional black

government executives who were there in the audience with advanced degrees,

as if they were, you know, poor slaves that that depended on Joe Biden's largesse to survive, put you all back in chains.

Yeah.

Nothing about him, I just,

nothing about him is any good.

He has no character.

He's a plagiarist.

He's a liar.

He's a sexual harasser.

He cannot be put around any woman under the age of 12.

He's not in control of his appetites.

He'll blow on their hair.

He'll nibble their neck.

He'll call them out out and talk about their eyes or their ears.

He'll embarrass them.

He'll do almost anything.

He can't be around a secret service when he was younger because he would prance around naked.

His brother takes selfies of him and they end up on gay porn sites.

His son takes selfies of him and there's no need.

His daughter takes a shower.

The whole family is dysfunctional in a very sick way.

And he's a mean SOB.

He's mean spirited.

He really is.

He's a racist.

Yeah, I think, Victor, he thrills also.

He's all these things you say and more, but what always got me about him is he thrills to destruction.

Destruction.

It's one thing just to be an asshole and be mean and petty, but you're back on Israel a little bit.

Well, look at our country.

The cultural destruction

and the partisan destruction has his fingerprints all over it from when he was the Judiciary Committee Chairman.

Yeah.

Yes.

And he's in.

I just wrote an article called Nihilism.

It's not enough for him to oppose something.

So if you want an open border,

then you go to the Congress and say, let's change federal immigration law.

Or you go to the courts.

He didn't.

He just destroyed it.

He just destroyed the border.

And we have 8 million illegal entries.

If you want to discuss climate change, you bring it.

He just said, he just unleashed this EV mandate.

If you're going to to discuss student loans, you go to Congress.

No, he just did a fiat right before the midterm and to try to cancel.

That would have destroyed the whole idea that you have any obligations to pay your debts.

He just destroyed

the strategic petroleum reserve.

And now he's paranoid that he's going to lose.

So guess what?

They're upping oil and gas production to levels that are Trump-like.

And the gas has gone down.

And he's doing this while the other freelancing arm of his administration is telling us that, you know, we have to have these increased carbon rules and all this.

He's just,

I don't, I think he's the worst president we've ever had.

He's far worse than Obama.

Yeah.

I think James Buchanan is happy somebody has taken his place

as the worst.

I can't believe it.

Every once in a while, I go and look at the bulwark or I look, I just want to see what people are saying.

I cannot believe these these former conservatives are praising him for his sober and judicious conduct and his

level-headed governance and things are so much better.

I can't believe they can write that stuff.

Well, they've they

guess they have to given their patrons.

Yeah, well, given their patrons and

they've sold their conscience.

I mean, I must say, one or two of them, I will always be friends with some of these people.

I've friends for years,

but

it's hard to stomach and hard to see.

Hey, Prector, I'd like to talk a little more with you about that

nihilism piece that you wrote, but just let me, I want to inform our good listeners of

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That was a very, yeah, that's a Jesse Owens Olympics.

That was a very strange thing with Hitler spent billions of marks on the sports plots and all these ideas to rig up this idea of a utopian

Olympics.

And then

he removed all references to Jew hatred for about a summer.

And

he did remove Jews, too.

But it was the idea that...

it was a normal country.

And coming out of the Depression, you know, we had that other depression, 38 on the horizon.

And if you look back at that, this movie is probably going to be pretty good because

I hope it captures that.

I think it will because everybody, I don't mean everybody, but there were some embarrassing things people said that Mussolini and Hitler had handled the Great Depression far better than we had because they had Keynesian economics and they did all these public works and they unified the country and there was, and this was supposed to be the showcase.

And we have a very different view about this famous rowing crew and Jesse Owens.

But at the time, people thought Hitler pulled it off.

They really did.

They were just wowed by it.

There were Americans who came back and said, you should see this city.

And so

it was kind of a nightmarish time.

Let's skip.

I'll get back to the nihilism piece in a second, but I just want to pick up on what we're talking about, the 36, we're talking about the Olympics, talking about Israel.

And my wife, Sharon, my beloved wife, was saying the other day, of course, we're talking about the madness of what's happening.

And she says, you know, one of the most important things that happened to me, and she was, I guess, 11 at the time, I was 12.

The same thing applies to me,

was the Munich Olympics and seeing the

Middle East scumbags murder the Israeli

athletes.

It was

really powerful.

And my wife said, I'm with these guys.

And, you know, that cemented her as

a friend of Israel and an enemy of these Palestinian and other terrorists.

And that was a profoundly important moment for so many Americans, but one unknown or forgotten by many people now.

Do you have any thoughts about that?

Yeah, I mean, it was, I can, I watched the whole thing and it was kind of I was upset though.

You remember the Steven Spielberg Munich movie about the efforts of the Mossad to go after?

I never saw it.

No.

Yeah.

I was really disappointed in it because

some of them get killed.

And there's almost a sense that tit-for-tat never works, or

maybe they had to go after the killers of the athletes, but they got into a cycle of violence.

You know what I'm saying?

It was all contextualized

rather than just a pure moral,

an easy moral judgment to make.

These people were cold-blooded killers.

The thing about it was the Germans were really strange in there.

The snipers were incompetent.

They didn't really value the Israeli lives foremost.

And they were really, the way they handled that was very poor.

And

I think it reminds me too, I think everybody who's younger, who's listening, should remember that we've been doing this for over 50 years.

Arafat was sneaking into Israel in the early 60s with the terrorist groups.

And people should ask what they've achieved.

I don't think they've achieved anything, but death and destruction.

And the idea that these young people can't see that, or they're saying river to the sea, when they have no idea what the river is, what the sea is.

They don't know who Arafat is.

They don't know who Abbas is.

They don't know anything.

But we've all lived with it and everybody's sick of it.

I think they're,

I guess what I'm saying, Jack, is I I think there's a change in the country after October 7th.

And I think the clauding gay testimony and Liz McGill and Cornbooth, the MIT, I think it really affected people.

And

it seems to me that people are saying, you know,

it doesn't work anymore.

It doesn't work being quiet about the left.

It doesn't work just.

you know, go your own way.

They hunt you down.

They'll hunt you down on the books you read.

They will hunt you down.

You know,

they've just taken over.

Did you see that clip today where a young Senate staffer has a thong on and he's being sodomized in the Senate chamber and they're filming it?

I could not believe that.

But what I'm saying, the general coursing of the culture is going to go on.

They don't care and they're going to go on until they're stopped.

And I think people are saying that they have to be stopped.

And I think people are getting very, very angry at these Middle Eastern students who come over here on these rich oil-fed scholarships, and they think it's their country, and they can decide that you can't have a menorah on Hanukkah.

You just can't do it.

And you have these weak, invertebrate college administrators that go along with it.

America's waiting for one John Silver, one SI Hiawakawa, one administrator that stands up and says, you know what?

We're going to have a menorah out here.

And the first SOB that tries to destroy it, we're going to expel and deport if they're on a student visa.

And we have the Widener Library.

They rushed it the other day.

Dan Sullivan, the Alaskan Sullivan, he wrote an article about it.

He was in there arguing with him.

And the president, and this is after she said that she was going to do all this in her apology.

There were two students, Victor.

It's not unimportant.

Dan Sullivan, senator from Alaska, he was an undergrad at Harvard in the 80s, and he was back to see the Army-Navy game.

He writes about this in today's The Weekend Wall Street Journal, and he's confronted by, within the library

at Harvard, by two students.

And Victor, just on your point, they're not from America.

No, one was from Saudi Arabia, and I think the other was from Egypt

or the West Bank.

And they start yelling and screaming at him and calling him names in his own country, a U.S.

senator.

If you went over to Saudi Arabia, if you're an American student and you saw a member of the royal family and you were in a major Saudi Arabian university and the member, a crown prince came in there and you got it on his face and started screaming, they'd kill you.

And

this asymmetry has gone way too far.

And I think, you know, it gets,

I was thinking about the DAI, you know, there's all these news stories that Wisconsin and North, South Carolina, and all these,

I think North Carolina too, all these state legislatures are saying, you want funding from us, you freeze DEI.

But a lot of people are coming to the conclusion, liberals too, that remember liberal faculty always hate administrators because they say they don't teach and they don't do anything.

This is before DEI.

But now when we've hired thousands of these people, they not only don't do anything and they not only don't, they not only take away scarce resources from courses courses that need to be taught, but they hamper things because they get in people's business.

They look at their syllabus, they accuse them of tough grading, they help compile a list that says this professor is too punctual, or this professor doesn't like absentee.

They're like Soviet commissars, and that really raises the question: you know,

1936-38, you had commissars in the Red Army.

And a commissar had, unlike

the German commissars in 43, I think Borman, he had a Nazi ideologue.

You saw that, remember Das Boot,

Jack, where the Nazi ideologue is on a submarine to monitor everybody's ideology, and they make fun of him because he's totally worthless.

He's kind of a propagandist journalist.

Well,

in the Soviet Army, it was even worse because they had equal rank with a commanding unit officer.

And

after 1941, and the largest encirclements outside of Kiev and outside of Moscow, there was over almost a million point three people were encircled, captured, most have died in captivity.

And then we forget, in 1942,

the Army Groove South Push.

They had another large encirclement, and then, you know, they destroyed Sevastopol.

They planted a nazi flag on mount erebus in the caucus they were only 40 miles away from the caspian oil the richest of the caspian oil fields and you know what stalin did by august he disbanded the commissars right stalin did of all people in other words he said we these people are superfluous they're just monitoring and they're getting in the way and then the same thing

in the cultural evolution mao

remember when he unleashed the red guard the red guards are the dei DEI people.

That's who they are.

The Red Guards swept through everything.

They went after, remember old Ping, the general?

They went after him.

They destroyed his career.

They went after everybody.

They went after people with glasses.

They made people wear dunce caps.

They made them wear signs.

They dressed them up in rags.

They humiliated them.

And they chanted.

They would swarm people, just like these Palestinians.

And the person would go walk down the street.

If he was an official they felt was counter-revolutionary, they swarmed him.

And then one day, there were no more Red Guards.

Maul thought, oh, man, this is getting out of hand.

These people have to be fed.

They have to be paid.

They don't do anything but cause trouble and impede an economic.

And I'm going to stop it.

And I think we're getting to the point of the Comissar Red Guard termination, because I think a lot of people say, you know what?

These people are not nice people.

They're racist.

They go get in people's business.

They look at your courses.

They want you to inflate the grades.

They want you to water down the content.

They want you to have DEI statements in your syllabus.

When you're applying for a job, you have to have a DEI manifesto like it's a loyalty oath of the 50s.

We just can't.

We can't afford it.

It's not that we can't put up with it because the left will make us put up with anything, but you cannot afford it.

And these university budgets, and wait till

we get the full ripples of October 7th and these people and all these protests because this year, Harvard applications were down 20%.

And

when you're deliberately excluding Jews, and they are under the rubric that they're white, and when Stanford's only taking 20% of white students,

you talk to people, and they'll say, my kid's not even going to apply there, not because he can't get in, but because I don't want him to be brainwashed and harassed and in danger.

And these people will not stop them.

You know, when Gay says, I'm going to go to

Hanukkah or something to show my fee days with the Jewish community, and then people swarm the Harvard Library and disrupt things, and she won't do a thing.

She's totally bankrupt.

She's a plagiarist.

She should resign yesterday.

But my point is that I think they have overshot and people are getting really sick of them.

And

they have the ability, as I said, with Sammy, they have the ability in about two or three years to take three centuries of stature and turn it into Bud Light or Target.

And they're on their way.

There's a lot of people you talk to and say, you know, I don't want to pay the money.

I don't want my kid brainwashed.

I don't want the incompetence.

My kid came home from the second semester at Yale or after a year at Stanford.

I looked at the coursework.

It's a joke.

It is a joke.

And they're looking for alternatives if college at all.

Trade school enrollments are booming.

And we have a demographic dip, so there's not enough students to fill the capacity of these liberal arts colleges.

And

it's,

to use that phrase again, it's a doom loop.

And these stupid college presents can't see it because they're insulated with this D E I cocoon.

And people don't, they can't get away from the central truth.

They're racist.

Right.

They're segregationist.

And like when we were talking with Sammy,

I was talking with Sammy about the mayor of Boston, Wu.

She can't get over the idea she sounds just like George Wallace.

There is no such thing as good racism, as Kendi says, to stop bad race.

It's racism.

It's like good murder or bad murder.

It's murder.

And they don't understand that, that people are really getting sick of it.

And this is one reason I think that Trump's polls have gone so high.

Not that Haley and DeSantis are not against it.

They are.

And they have blueprints to stop it, probably.

They do.

But Trump represents unleashed fur.

You know what I mean?

That

he's in there.

It's like,

you know, it's sort of like the American people say, well, we will vote for a person with a scalpel who will very carefully take out this tumor, or we want a guy a blowtorch and just burn it out.

And they want the,

apparently they want the blowtorch now.

They just, they don't care anymore.

Just get rid of it.

It's destroying it.

I think part of the anger, too, not only at our paid for enemies in these positions at various institutions, but also,

well, those of us citizens who seem to enjoy being humiliated over the last few years.

Remember those women?

I think they were mostly women that would pay to have these dinners to be told?

What was it called?

Yeah, those two women were really sounding off about a Hamas, too.

And a lot of those women were Jewish, and they've all dropped out.

That thing has imploded.

It was, you pay me.

It was like, you know, it was exactly analogous to the court gesture where, say, in the 11th century, a king in France or Britain would hire these guys in pinstripes and funny little show, you know, bells, and they would come in and put their fingers in their mouth and make contortions and laugh at the king.

And they had impunity.

And that's what these people, they are.

You go in, you pay your money, and these people say, you're a racist, you're an idiot, you're stupid.

Oh, yeah, let me think about that.

I hadn't thought about that before.

I am systemically.

Yes, you are.

You are.

And just yell at you and make fun of you.

And then you pay the money for the pleasure of being humiliated.

But I say you.

It's only a particular type of affluent, self-hating person that would allow that.

I don't think that people understand that this whole DEI and this new racism and segregation is all predicated on white guilt and white self-loathing.

And what people don't understand,

the white community is very diverse.

They think it's all racist or redneck or it's all postmodern.

No, it's just most people are not conscious of their skin color.

They don't really.

They don't really tie themselves to other white people.

But you keep pushing and pushing and pushing and call all white people, regardless of their political affiliations or ideology, just white supremacy, white supremacy, white rage, white rage, white privilege.

And what you're going to do is you're going to create an artificial tribalism on their part.

And you don't want to do that.

And I think,

as I said before, in a small town of mine that is probably 5% so-called white, if I go to a Walmart or a big supermarket before 7 in the morning,

I see a vestigial white population and they all say, hi, how are you?

How are you?

I said that before with Sammy.

And it's like,

why are you waving at me?

Well, the reason they're waving at me is because they think we have some bond, which I don't think we do.

And so

we just want to be Americans, you know, I don't want to be a white American.

I don't want to be a white American.

I just want to be American.

I want everybody.

But every single day, you know, they push it.

So LeBron James goes to a game and sits down during the Spar-Spangled Banner.

And, you know, he can't even

rise up to a flag or a song of a country that allowed him to be a multi-billionaire.

And we're supposed to think that he's what, a deep thinker or something.

And it's just, it's every day.

It's some kind of assault.

And people.

I just think the left should just take a deep breath and have some idea.

I know they're censoring the news on the border.

I know that they don't talk about the Sorrels crime.

They don't show pictures of mass looting, smash and grab, but they can't suppress all of the truth.

And in their little cocoon, they don't realize that there's a lot of people who think the country is falling apart and it's disintegrating at a geometric pace and they don't want it to happen.

And they sum up their attitude is,

At this late stage, if you think that I'm going to dismantle this country that my parents and my grandparents and my great-grandparents made great, great to the extent that you came here, you Palestinian student, you wanted to come here.

We didn't invite you.

You came here for a reason.

But if you think we're going to take all of that achievement, all of the infrastructure, all of the constitutional protections, all of the economic vibrancy, and we're just going to destroy it?

because you say we're going to destroy it no we're not going to do that i'm sorry and i think when people stand up and say that,

these people are hollow men and women.

They'll just dissipate.

They don't have a majority support in the country.

They don't have an intellectual ability to defend their positions that are rational or analytical.

And they, they, so I guess what I'm saying is they're the ones that are angry.

They're the ones that shout you down.

They're the ones that take over the library.

They're the ones, Antifa, BLM, that scream and yell.

They're the ones that shut.

Do you see these pictures in LA where they shut down the freeways yeah you see the first time people went up there and they just said blank

and most of the people who said that were black in chicano that said you know what

yeah they were they were sick of it they were tired of

I got places to go.

I got things to go.

What if there's a fire, you know, and

put an ambulance behind?

That's crazy.

Well, you shut down 10,000 people and the odds are somebody's got a ruptured appendix on the way to the hospital or somebody's trying to pick up a prescription before the drugstore ends, or somebody has a kid who's sitting out at a daycare without a parent to pick him up.

And they know that, and they don't care.

And so I think it's changing.

I think we're going to see some very strange things unless people get a grip.

I really do.

Well, let's,

we may need to get a little more into this, Victor.

I mentioned before we should talk a little about that

economy wrote, but let's do that right after

these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So Victor,

your most recent syndicated column, Civilization versus the New Nihilists.

If you, let me just read here the very end of the piece.

You wrote, in some, we're witnessing an epidemic of leftist nihilism, similar to the 16th century European mad wave of iconoclastic destruction of religious art?

Or is the better parallel the suicidal insanity that Mao Zedong unleashed during his cultural revolution of the 1960s?

The old politics of right versus left and Republican opposed to Democrat have now given way to a new existential struggle.

Americans must choose between civilization or its destroyers.

Victor, in this piece, you also wrote about

anarchy.

So I don't know that technically nihilism and anarchy are the same thing, but they sure as hell are, maybe twins or first cousins.

Anyway, you want to sum this section up about

this

recent syndicated column of yours?

Yeah,

I don't think the issues are any more about

we're going to to have 200,000 legal immigrants and maybe 100,000 illegals will sneak through and we'll have these hearings and the left will want more laxity, the right will want more restrictiveness and adherence to the law.

There's no discussion now.

It's

Alejandro Mayorcas or Corinne Jean-Pierre will lie to you and say the border is secure while they deliberately

and with full intent are destroying it because they want 8 million people to come here who are poor, in dire need of federal assistance, who will be constituents of the nanny state and will justify an expansion of government services and higher taxes.

That's what they want.

And they will do anything necessary.

They will destroy.

They don't care that people are sleeping in sub-zero temperatures in Chicago and New York.

They don't care about Mexican-American small towns along the Texas border that are just inundated.

They don't care about out here, even out here here where I live, 300 miles from the border, I can see an uptick in just trash everywhere.

When you bring so many people here and they're living in traders all throughout southwest southern Fresno County, and so I was driving yesterday, I see a new refrigerator, I see a new dishwasher, I see new mattresses, I see trash.

And what am I seeing?

I'm seeing people who just go around in a truck and collect trash from people who are off the grid, so to speak, the municipal grid of services, and they just throw them out.

And it's like, it reminds me of what I saw in Greece in 1970 or in Mexico today.

And

it affects every, and these people don't care.

It's just nihilism.

And the same thing, if you walk down San Francisco, it's not a debate about whether we should build more mental hospitals or we should find

humane tent cities, say, outside the city, and have each person have a small shelter with medical facilities.

No, it's not that.

It's if you don't allow us to inject, fornicate,

urinate, defecate on the street, and like a medieval city, every morning wash that crap into the storm drain, out into our pristine bay where we get mad at anybody who's a corporation that might, you know, have a discharge that doesn't meet EPA standards.

It's just chaos.

It's just chaos.

And that's how the same thing with about balloting.

We're going to change balloting from 30%

absentee ballot to 70%.

And we're going to do it in one year.

And we're going to have automatic mail-out ballots.

And we're going to change the rejection rate probably in most states from 4% to 5% down to 2% or 0.2% or 0.3%.

We're just going to do that.

And that's the way it's going to be.

We're going to destroy the whole integrity of the voting system.

And if you object, you're a racist.

That's how they look at everything.

And

I don't know how you stop it.

These people are, their idea is: we want to destroy America as it exists, and then we're going to rebuild it on socialist brotherhood principles and DEI principles and socialist principles, communist principles.

That's what they want to do.

And they want to destroy.

And sometimes it's the mundane.

They just want to destroy statues at night, preferably.

They want to change the names.

They want to say that you can't mention Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Jefferson.

They want to rewrite your textbooks.

They want to change the foundational date of the United States to 1619, which is totally bogus.

And sometimes it's existential.

And when it's existential, it's sort of, oh, well, they're attacking Americans overseas 175 times, but, you know, that's their problem.

We shouldn't have been over there in the first place.

And that's their attitude.

It's destroying.

And when you look at what they're doing in the military, and we can talk about that, Jack, it's a disaster.

Victor,

we should talk about that.

But before we do, before we do,

as Senator,

a little hat tip here to one of our sponsors, as Senator Rand Paul recently pointed out, United Healthcare pays AARP roughly $800 million every year, year.

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So, Victor, as you mentioned,

no surprise, but the news has just come out

today or yesterday, the last 24 hours.

of, of course, the U.S.

military has not hit its goals for recruitment.

And is anyone,

I didn't delve into the article, Victor.

I know this was the same case last year, except I thought for the Marines, but I'm wondering, is that even, has it,

are now the Marines even?

The Marines are down, yes, they're short, but not to the extent that the Army is.

The Army is the most egregious, but they're all short.

And

the numbers raise aggregate 25 to 40,000

short.

And that's after they've reduced their requirements, they're reduced the numbers they say they need.

Our military has been downsized.

And when you talk to people in the military, are you right?

And you get feedback, it's just amazing this edifice of denial.

They'll say, people are too heavy.

They're fat.

These kids today just want to play video games.

Or, you know, we have 3% unemployment, 3.5% unemployment.

So

the corporations, the small businesses are taking all our recruits.

Or, you know, drug use is so rampant.

Or, and this is the one I like.

I've read this twice now.

All of these right-wing demagogues have scared everybody into thinking that there's a woke culture that discriminates against whites.

And it's just that scarifying tactic has reduced rather than the reality of it has reduced.

But when you actually look at the composition of the military and which demographic has fallen the most radically off to the extent that it explains most of the problem, then you get to the truth, which is in denial.

Because if you have the chairman of the joint chiefs and the secretary of defense, and they have said

white rage, white privilege, white supremacy is what they're going to be looking at, and you couple that with a promotion, retention, advancement policy based on DEI, i.e., if you're an artillery officer and your unit hits the bullseye all the time, 20 miles away, is that more important than you promoted a more diverse company or battalion?

No, it's the DEI.

And everybody knows that.

And so when you couple all of that with the humiliation of Afghanistan, with the abandonment of $50 billion equipment, with the abandonment of contractors and allies in Afghanistan, with the Ukrainian mess, with the humiliation of our troops overseas with not replying to attacks, with the Chinese balloon, etc.

There's a lot of parents that will say, you know what?

If I send my kid over there, he may die for nothing.

in some place where they won't protect him or

they will be flying a pride flag or painting a George Floyd mural when they should be protecting my son, or they will say,

wow, if I send my son over there, he's never going to get promoted.

He's always going to be under suspicion.

And they just say no.

And this will be very interesting because DEI says that the more inclusive and the more you have kind of repertory representation,

the more you'll be combat effective.

We'll see, because we're in a great experiment because I keep saying when you look at our dead,

going back to Vietnam, by the way,

everybody had this myth that

minorities were unduly sacrificed in Vietnam.

Go back and look at the demographics of the country in 1970, for example, and then look at the demographics of the U.S.

military, and then you look at the demographics of those who died.

And it's pretty much representational

equal along all aspects.

Something that changed radically, Jack, in our own era in recent fighting, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, where white males, for some unknown reason, were either directed into or volunteered and wanted to be in frontline combat units where they died at well over 70% of the population or double their 35 or 33 percent representation in the general public.

And that rubric is the one that has

fallen off the most precipitously.

And that will have an effect on our combat efficacy, given that particular demographic is the one that likes to go into combat.

If I could use the word likes, nobody likes it, but that's the one that's willing to do it in numbers well beyond their demographics.

Well, Victor, speaking of, you know, going into combat, and this is a topic I mentioned at the beginning, I hope we can get to when

we have a little time left, and it applies to Israel, applies to the criticism of Israel from Biden and others: we need to be more humanitarian.

Israel needs to be more humanitarian as it fights to protect itself from these people that want to wipe it off the face of the earth.

But the concept of military humanitarianism, if it's applicable to Gaza, it doesn't seem applicable to Ukraine, which is

I believe they're now

approaching 600,000 casualties.

I don't think anybody knows, but I think the total on both sides is well over a million casualties.

It's an utter bloodbath.

And I, as I've said again and again, I support giving Ukraine the wherewithal to defend themselves with the proviso that they're not going to have the ability to recapture the Donbass or the Crimea.

And they may be able, because of their stout and heroic defense, to negotiate some type of settlement where Putin will go back to where he was before

February 24th of 2022.

And in exchange for that, they will formally recognize that they'd lost during the Obama administration the Donbass

and Crimea, which was never the policy to recapture it of the Biden, Trump, or Obama presidencies.

And then we will arm them, but we will not put them in NATO.

I think there's an ingredience there of some agreement that will stop the bloodbath, but you can't talk sense to people.

It's, we're going to win this war because they're going to give them another 200 billion.

They're going to be, it's not going to happen.

Their problem right now is not.

Abrams tanks or F-15.

Everybody says, well, we didn't give them enough weapons.

No, we've given them enough weapons.

We've given

billions of dollars.

The problem is manpower.

One-fourth to one-third of the country is not there anymore.

Of the 40 million, it's about 12 million have left.

They're in Poland.

They're in surrounding countries.

They're in Germany.

They've left.

And the country has largely got vast swaths uninhabited.

And then you can't recruit people.

They've had scandals in recruitment.

They're going along the street.

They're just walking along the street, recruitment officers, and they see an able-bodied male between 20 and 50, and they grab him.

And they need bodies.

And then they had this insane idea that while they were re-equipping and the Russians were building this enormous tank trap with almost every conceivable

barrier, that they were going to blast through it.

They thought they were George Patton or Erwin Rommel or Hans Guderian.

They were just going to go, boom, on to Moscow.

And I heard that from people.

It was going to be impossible.

They don't have the manpower.

They're just 25% of Russian manpower.

They're just 10% of Russian GDP.

They're 1/30th the size of the Russian territory.

And so we have to help them stay sovereign.

But the idea that you're going to equip them and then have a Verdun or a Somme for four or five, six years in this unicorn search for all of the Donbass and all of the Crimea back, it's not going to happen.

And when you say it's disproportionate, it is

because

we are attacking NetYahu for all sorts of supposed overreach, but he's an elected prime minister president, and he has a coalition government, and he has not initiated martial law, and he has not suspended elections in the way that Zelensky has.

And he's trying,

he tries to send leaflets, and they try to drop

text message communications into buildings, and they text people.

We don't say to Zelensky, when you hit that bridge, or you take out that freeway, or you have to hit that oil depot on the border, before you do it, just make sure there's no civilians there.

Just warn them, please.

We don't do that.

And we don't say,

okay,

Russia tried to take Kiev and they lost

5,000 men.

Now we've given you the weapons,

without which you couldn't function, but we only want you to kill about 5,000 Russians.

Don't be disproportionate.

We tell them the opposite.

We're trying to find a magical formula of Abrams or Leopard or Chieftain tanks or F-16s or Mirage jets or High Mars or special rockets so they can be disproportionate, so they can inflict far more damage on the Russians than the Russians can them, regardless, to win the war.

That's what we're trying to do, but not with Israel.

And then it begs the question, okay, Mr.

Biden, so Ukraine is a longstanding ally of the United States

and Israel's not.

As I remember in 2016, I may have amnesia, the Ukrainian ambassador wrote an op-ed,

I think in the Washington Post, urging Americans that was not his country to vote for Hillary Clinton.

As I remember, there were Ukrainians in her campaign that were trying to help her.

As I remember, the Ukrainian government was buying leverage from the Biden family by paying Hunter $80,000 thousand dollars a year, a month.

As I remember, they fired Victor Slocum because he was looking too closely into the Biden skullduggery.

As I remember, U.S.

citizen but expatriate Andrew Binman cooked up the entire impeachment on the idea that he could leak a classified presidential call that he heard with others to Zelensky from Trump.

And he, in his infinite wisdom, decided that that was too hard on his native country by suspending but not canceling offensive weapons, which Biden had and Obama had not approved.

So he called up Eric Saramella, purportedly, who was never on the call, had no first knowledge, and then spilled the whole beans.

And the three of them, along with Adam Schiff, cooked up the impeachment.

And then if I juxtapose that to World War II,

And you look at what went on with Army Group South,

and I'm sorry, but the Einsatzgruppen, Einsatzgruppen, these were Ukrainian volunteers that once the Wehrmacht went in there and they said, you know what, we have to kill all these Jews.

Who of you hates Jews as much as we do?

Thousands of people volunteered.

So it's a little strange for me to

again, I want Ukraine to defend itself, but this idea that it's some noble, historically pure country and it's got a democracy democracy, and

it's without corrupt.

It's not.

It's better than Putin.

And then we also have to be.

This is very strange.

We're just talking about the disproportionality of the way we treat Israel and

Ukraine.

But we don't apply to Hamas what we apply to Russia because Russia, in the left's mind, has been completely demonized.

And this is ironic because they were the ones that told us George Bush was too hard on the Russians in 2009 when Hillary hit that little jacuzzi button in Geneva.

Remember the reset?

And they said, George Bush,

you know,

he slapped on sanctions on Putin and Geneva,

after Georgia and Ossatia, and we're going to have reset.

And then we had reset.

And Biden interpreted that.

magnuminity as weakness.

And so he began taking things.

And then suddenly, they just flipped 180 degrees and said, you know what?

The poor noble Putin that we had to have reset with because the evil George Bush is too hard on him, he's an evil man now.

He's a Trump collaborator.

He collaborated with Donald Trump.

And then

you can't watch a movie without the villain being a Russian, usually with a bald head, missing teeth, and some kind of Orthodox cross tattooed to his neck.

Every single evil guy.

And they've, you know, Russian collusion, Russian laptop disinformation, all that stuff.

So, my point is,

compared to Hamas is sanctified on our campus, and then Russia is demonized.

And that is another thing that's disproportionate.

Hamas is just as bad as Russia, if not worse.

It really is.

They're like-minded, dictatorial, aggressive, bloodthirsty,

militant efforts on both sides.

But suddenly, Israel is not as noble as Ukraine and Hamas is not as bad as Russia.

And that's absurd.

That's just silly.

And your World War II analogy of a different sort, can you imagine Churchill coming to America and accusing those who were not supportive of being unpatriotic or evil or whatever the hell?

I mean, Zelensky, I just find

is

a hard point to swallow for Americans.

Of course, I have to be honest.

In the campaign of 1944,

FDR, who was ailing, said, we didn't go fight Nazism over there to bring it back here.

That was his slander against

the Republicans.

Tom Dewey?

Tom Dewey, yeah.

He was a

Nazi.

Yeah, he was a Nazi.

So the left has a propensity of doing that.

But yeah, we don't apply the same rules.

And, you know, as I said said earlier, when I walk around the Stanford faculty housing and I look at the homes that they had, this home doesn't tolerate racism, you know, anti-Trump, all those signs.

Now they have Ukraine flags.

Although I've noticed that they're waning.

They're waning.

And we're going to have another conference in March, and it's going to talk about proxy wars.

And we're going to have some of the Ukrainian people who came a year ago who turned out to be Nostradamuses when they told us

basically, hey, you Americans, hey you people, don't get too excited.

We like you supporting Ukraine, but we don't have the manpower to fulfill the objectives which your weapon supplies might suggest we could.

Our problem will not be weapons, but the number of people who use the weapons, because we are losing too many people at a fantastic and unsustainable rate.

And therefore, they had real doubts about the spring and summer offensives.

And they were proven absolutely right.

And if you say any of that,

people call you, you know, an appeaser or a pro-Putin stooge or something like that.

Again, it has nothing to do with the reality of giving them the wherewithal to save Ukraine from Russia.

Everybody supports that, but not to just end an endless war over the Donbass and Crimea that are never going back to Ukraine.

And if you look at the checkered history of territorial boundary disputes,

it's pretty complicated.

Both Western Ukraine and the Donbass and Crimea, they have switched sovereignties numerous times, and not just in the last thousand years.

I'm talking about the last hundred years.

Well, Victor, we're going to close out by thanking one of our sponsors, Hillsdale College.

I know you're familiar with that place.

Yes, I am.

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If they're not, they should know that Victor is one of the professors in three of over 40 free online courses at Hillsdale College.

I said that, free online courses.

That's correct.

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That's based on Victor's book by the same name.

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Also, want to,

as I stated at the beginning, I was going to say something quickly towards the end about the Blade of Perseus, and that is Victor's official website.

And folks, go there if you're a fan of Victor.

Links to all his articles, to the archives of this podcast, to his books, to his appearances on other podcasts, radio shows, and the like.

There are ultra articles.

You see a little black box with the word ultra in it.

You'll click on it.

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That looks really interesting.

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I give you, I think, 14 or so recommended readings, great articles I've come across in the previous week.

I hope we'll talk about one of them on the next podcast.

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Victor, I got one more thing.

Let me just read this and as we'll close out, we read our comment, the comments that folks leave at your website, Victor, or those who rate the show at iTunes and Apple.

And some that zero, you can leave zero to five stars.

Your average, Victor, is over 4.9,

of course.

A couple of people are cranks, but that's there, right?

Some people leave comments.

Anyway, this is a comment that was left on your website.

Dear Professor Hansen,

your mother was a gem.

She should be cloned and her DNA spliced to incorporate into every judge in the country.

Most lawyers would give up things valuable to have a human judge with your mother's characteristics.

There are far too many who lack your mother's qualities of spirit.

That's from Bob Windholz.

And that's that's awfully nice in your

recently.

It's a practice of my generation when life didn't work out for us the way that we thought we deserved.

That had not happened before.

I guess it was the Freudian Marxist, I don't know what it was,

binary, but we all started blaming our parents.

Remember their period.

And for anything, it didn't work out.

I was born into the world.

I was very lovely.

I'm not saying that my parents were the

best, but everybody thinks, I think, who's normal their parents are, and at least most people.

And I was really gifted.

I had really wonderful parents.

I had this big Swedish father who was just a wonderful guy, great athlete.

He farmed.

He worked his way back with the GI Bill.

He got a BA.

He got a master's.

He was a junior college administrator while he was farming.

And then I had this wonderful mother who,

you know,

graduated at 17 and just out in the middle of nowhere from this house, her father was a wonderful guy and mortgaged the ranch and sent

her and her sisters to Stanford University.

And she got an advanced degree.

This was in the 40s.

And then she was a mom, a normal mom.

And anything that I did in my life, I owe to them because they were so supportive.

And I would get, you know, I got, I was 25, I had a PhD and there were no jobs for white males.

I had to come back and farm.

I was on the tractor every day.

And I was thinking, wow,

i'm making six thousand a year and i talked to my mom or dad don't worry don't give up you've got talent don't you have talent just keep going don't get depressed things change

look for an opening that was just always encouragement and you know it yeah that was very important so

you know i miss they died very young i think 65 and 74 or so but um i think

people see you on fox victor over your shoulder.

There's a picture of your daughter, Suzanne's there, and that's a picture of your mom also.

Yeah, I said when I made that studio, that was an apartment that I had built for my daughter.

And people said, well, we want you to have this banner from Hoover.

I said, no, I'll just, I'll use it, but I'll just leave it exactly the way it was.

So I didn't add those.

It was just always there.

Yeah.

And

so I had very wonderful parents.

I was very fortunate.

And

I had a big, extended family.

I had wonderful paternal grandfather and maternal grandparents and cousins and aunts.

And we were all in this farm.

It was kind of like a cocoon.

It was really wonderful.

Anyway, enough of that.

Well, that was nice of Bob to write that.

Victor, you've been terrific today as ever.

Thanks for listening, folks.

Thanks for those who have taken the time to leave comments.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody.