Ripples of War Everywhere

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the host, lucky man, Victor Davis-Hanson.

He's the star and the namesake.

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.

He has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Web address is victorhanson.com.

We'll talk about that towards the end of the show.

I should be subscribing as ever, Victor.

The madness of our current times is always something pretty dang important to talk about.

I guess it would be good to begin the show

by getting your thoughts on what I found, and I think you find to be a very important

piece published on Powerline that shows why

Israel

was kind of

eyeless, so blinded

about the forthcoming, then forthcoming terrorist attacks.

And the United States policies have much to do with that.

So let's get your thoughts on that, Victor, and we'll do that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show.

So, Victor, I know Powerline is

we talked about on the last podcast we recorded, and it's the website you turn to first thing in the morning to see what's going on, get the analyses of various folks.

And Scott Johnson, I love Scott, just one of the sweetest men

on the planet.

He has put up a piece.

It's called Eylus in Gaza.

And it's from

Tony Abadran, who's a research fellow for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Great institution, by the way.

And

the long story or the short is that U.S.

policy from, I think, the Bush administration and throughout put an emphasis into Lebanon and

trying to restore Lebanese civil society somehow.

I think these things proved to be a pipe dream when we try to do these efforts abroad.

But part of the ramifications of these efforts were to expose

intelligence networks.

to Hamas and Hezbollah and other enemies of, of course, the United States, but particularly of Israel.

And it diverted

Israel's own security network within that country, diverted is the wrong word, blinded them.

And we're culpable, it seems, Victor, in part for

what transpired from,

you know,

from

disempowering Israeli's intelligence community.

I don't know, Victory, what are your thoughts on this?

And

it goes goes back to 1983 when they blew up our embassy and they killed, what, 243 Marines a few months later?

Hezbollah did that.

They killed, I don't know, dozens of Jews in Argentina.

Then they blow up a bus of Israeli tourists

somewhere in the Middle East.

So they've been killing people.

And our policy has been,

and we do something to the Lebanese government to

marginalize Hezbollah, which basically

runs Lebanon through its surrogates and Iranian money.

And so we've been giving them money for their armed forces and their intelligence.

And yet the more money we give them and empower them, the more Hezbollah

they get afraid of Hezbollah.

So they're integrated or embedded within Hezbollah.

So the net result is the money that we're going to firm up the Lebanese government, which is synonymous now with Hezbollah, is

not only helping them, but tipping them off of what we're in, you know, the intelligence that is found makes its way to Hezbollah and hurts Israel.

It's kind of like the, I think we've given what,

I don't know how many millions of dollars or billions of dollars we've given into Afghanistan after we left.

Several.

And that is the idea that we have to help the humanitarian organizations that we fostered while we were there for 20 years and the Taliban would let the money money get in there because then it would help in general.

And then they just take it.

It's kind of like the fuel that goes into

Gaza.

And we know now that they've intercepted telephone communications the Israelis have, where Hamas gets the fuel and then they store it because that promotes all of the electricity

and transportation and energy in this tunnel city below.

Okay.

So

it's the United States again being naive.

And if somebody just paid a huge, for me, it was huge income tax estimate.

I asked myself, why do all of us that are listening, why do we have to pay for this?

Why do we have to give money to these incompetence in the State Department?

And then they fund a gender studies program at Kabul

or they build a billion-dollar embassy and give it away to the Taliban.

Or even that Pentagon, you know, $50 billion in equipment.

And nobody's ever accountable.

Who did this, Jack?

Who were the people, the names, the rank that thought it was a good idea to pour millions of dollars into the intelligence apparatus of the Lebanese government that empowered Hezbollah?

And it's the same people who came in with Biden and decided they wanted to restore money to the PA and also

to Hamas.

And they never put their imprints on it.

They never have, they never take any fall.

They never, and it's,

it's awful.

And it's it's also another thing about it is once you start doing that, that puts pressure on the Israelis.

And one of the reasons that this Gaza surprise attack

worked so well is the Israelis were reacting to the new administration.

And the last thing they wanted to do was to suggest to the Biden administration that the two-state solution was not viable and you couldn't work with Gaza.

So they said, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're going to have guest workers.

They're going to come in just like you say, yeah, yeah, yeah, they'll work and they'll make, you know, five times what they make in Gaza and they're going to support all these Gaza and then they'll be essential and they won't be able to cut them off.

And then we'll kind of maybe the administration's right, we'll show them that we're working with the Hamas and then we'll play them off, but we'll play them off against the PA and back and forth.

And, you know, we wanted the Abrams Accords and then Biden said he wouldn't get credit for it, so he canceled it.

Now he wants to reboot Jared Kushner's thing and put his fingerprints and get Kushner out of the, give him no credit.

And now they're doing it.

And so we'll go along with it too.

And that's what happens.

The Israelis are in a fix because they're so dependent on American munitions that

they

have to react to this typical liberal left-wing administration that comes in.

not really interested in the security of Israel as in other administrations were.

It's a bad idea and there's no accountability.

We also have Victor, by the way, just I noticed yesterday's Wall Street Journal and Peggy Noonan, I know you've been kind of critical of her in the past, a big headline about Netanyahu needs to go.

And this

pressure to kneecap the president of that country at this time is

along with

our State Department's calls for pauses, et cetera.

I don't think there's any call for ceasefire yet per se, but but

as we're talking about

Jack, I don't understand that.

These people told us from 2015 to 2020 that Russia was interfering and colluding in our election process and this was a mortal sin when they weren't.

And they had bank paying, they were,

you know, the Axis bank was

communicating with Trump towers and they created a fake

laptop and they called it hunters because they were trying to get Biden to lose and all of this.

That's what we were told.

You don't do that.

And now they're openly advocating interfering as Clinton did

with Israeli internal politics.

It's like this,

you know,

when we were in college or high school, It was always the American colonialist, imperialist, or they got rid of Diem in Vietnam, or they went down and staged a coup in Puerto Rico with the Dominican Trujello or whoever he was.

And we interfered in Cuba with Batista, and we don't do that.

But again, when it's the Jews in Israel, it's okay.

It's okay to the extent that Peggy Noonan and Thomas Friedman brag about it.

We've got to get rid of, who are we to get rid of?

Netanyahu.

He's elected.

He's elected by the people of Israel.

We have no right to go in there and try to manipulate their election process, of which we say that we would never allow here in the United States.

And

why are they doing this?

Because they feel

that right now Israel was caught on guard.

And so BB's armor-plated reputation of deterrence has been challenged and he's therefore perceived as weak, both at home given the civil dissension over the Supreme Court matter.

But in our eyes, they feel that they can pressure him or weaken him or get rid of him.

And the Israelis are mad at him and they will go for that.

They also understand

that if Netanyahu is to survive politically

after

this kind of Yom Kippur surprise, remember that kind of got rid of eventually golden my ear

because the man at the top or the woman at the top always takes responsibility.

And Netanyahu, who's a bright guy, he understands that.

So he is going to show

the Israeli people, we have a coalition government, our intelligence, the Mossad, the IDF, me, everybody was responsible.

We're not going to point fingers, even though there's darty to do it.

But just watch me.

Just watch me.

I am going to go in there and I'm going to destroy Hamas no matter what.

And I'm going to avenge this atrocity and I'm going to defeat them.

And the United States said, well,

we don't quite sign on to that.

And he's got to do that to restore his reputation.

And he probably will do it.

So he will be blamed as the top guy for.

the incursion of October 7th.

I shouldn't say that euphemism, that massacre.

But he will also be given credit as the man at the top who destroyed Hamas.

So we can't let that happen.

So we're going to pause.

We want ceasefire and we want to interfere.

And that's what they're doing.

And

it's so weird about these people.

They feel

just when you get angry about people calling us, you know, imperialist, colonialist, interfering, then they do it.

And they say they can do it because it's Israel.

It's really amazing.

And

I don't know.

There's no consequence to it.

And so why don't you just let Israel take care of Hamas?

The Saudis wanted to do it.

The Egyptians want them to do it.

The Kuwaitis want them to do it.

The Jordanians want them to do it.

Everybody wants to do it.

So don't get in the Orwellian situation where when the Israelis are trying to avenge people who incidentally killed 30 Americans and probably have at least 12 Americans hostage, which we don't talk about.

Why wouldn't you want to help the people who are avenging the American dead and trying to get force Hamas to give them back and not do things that aid the people who killed the Americans and have the Americans hostage?

It's not that difficult.

Victor,

we're going to

stay in the Middle East and Hezbollah and talk about Russia's morphing role.

Maybe it's not morphing, maybe it is, but in this

emerging conflict, in part because the relationship that Russia and Israel had seemed to be generally positive.

And we'll get your thoughts, Victor, as a

military historian and analyst of these foreign policy events.

We'll get your thoughts on that right after this important message.

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

So Victor, to collapse some headlines into one, it seems like the broad, and it could be too overly broad, Russia to fund Hezbollah.

It's maybe the Wagner Group instead of quote-unquote Russia.

But there seems to be trouble afoot here with Russia and its ally, and that call it an ally, but not an enemy, Israel.

What are your thoughts of these as things emerge?

When the Ukraine war broke out February 24th of 2022,

everybody condemned it.

We all did.

We did it on this podcast.

And we wanted the Ukrainians to expel the Russians to where they had started on February 24th.

And of course, the agendas we've spoken about expanded to include

it was going to be iffy if they had the ability to get them back to where they were on February 24th.

But suddenly, before they had done that, and they have not done that yet, people were on to Moscow.

You have to hit places in Russia so they get out of the Crimea and Donbass,

even though.

Barack Obama never said that they were going to get out of those areas and Donald Trump never did and Joe Biden never did.

But nevertheless, there were ramifications about this.

Like, you know, the old rule, Kissinger, we were putting Russia friendlier to China than it is to us, and China friendlier to Russia than it is to us.

There was no more entrangulation.

In fact, Jack,

I don't know if you saw that Hamas official, but he was bragging the other day that the new China, Russia, Iranian, North Korea Axis had given them North Korea.

And North Korea is irrational, and it has nuclear weapons.

So he was basically saying, North Korea is going to hit the United States.

So we're creating this thing.

Okay.

And then everybody wanted people to condemn Russia, and the Israelis did.

Netanyahu did.

But then it was he didn't do it enough.

Well,

Hezbollah's activity is constant probing and attacking along the northern border.

So Israelis respond.

But the Russians are the de facto enforcers since John Kerry, after a 40-year hiatus, invited them back, remember that, into the Middle East.

They'll help enforce the WDMD red line that doesn't exist, that Obama said.

You know, if I see them moving around, that's the red line.

And they moved around and said, oh, my God, they're going to ask me to actually back up my soaring rhetoric.

And I can't do it.

So I'll have John Kerry invite the Russians in.

And that's what they did.

And so they're there.

And so when the Israeli pilots have to go in there and stop the shelling, they meet Russian pilots.

And Putin and Netanyahu had worked out a relationship.

And they were allowed to respond, which was pretty incredible, given Hezbollah's close ties to the Assad government, which Russia was propping up.

And also,

there is a long history of Ukrainian anti-Semitism.

And if anybody wants to look at the participation of the Ukrainian elements from June 22nd, 1941, until the liberation in late 1944, you will see that there were a lot of Ukrainians that acted on their anti-Semitism.

Why do I mention that?

Because

it would be, given current and past events, it would be natural for an Israeli prime minister to be a little skeptical about cutting off the Russians and just giving wholehearted support for Ukraine.

And they gave support for Ukraine.

Israel did.

But he was attacked.

And so now we see that that relationship has been destroyed, the Israeli-Russians.

So the Wagner group thinks,

Putin's thinking, how can we really hurt Israel and teach them the wages of being with America?

And how can we have, well, I tell you what we'll do.

They only have one leverage over

Hezbollah when they rock it, and that's to have the idea fly in there and hit these places.

What if we gave them a sophisticated Russian anti-missile system?

But we'll say the Wagner group did it.

So, you know, we'll just say, you know, we don't know where the Wagner group is.

I guess they gave you this system, Hezbollah.

Sorry.

Israel,

they just freelance.

That's what they're doing.

And the idea is they're trying to send a message to the West that if you continue to give HIMARS and all these sophisticated weapons to Ukraine, we have ways of retaliating to you with your

clients.

And that's what's happening.

I'm not getting into whether it's right and all and this and that, but it's expected and logical.

And the sooner that war ends, and I might may add that now Zelensky is having a problem getting people to fight on the offensive's over, the spring offensive and the summer offensive that we heard everybody say was going to go on to Moscow.

It never did, cost them a lot of money.

We've got up, we're way over 600,000 casualties on both sides, probably 700 or 800.

And the problem is not just, you know, we didn't give them enough Abrams tanks, we didn't give them enough F-16s, we didn't give them enough artillery.

No, they don't have enough people.

They've lost a quarter of their population as refugees, and they've probably lost 300,000 casualties, and they don't have the wherewithal, the manpower.

I had a chair of the military history working group at

Hoover, and we had a distinguished Ukrainian-American analyst who said when people were

very sophisticated scholars were there and people in the military of the highest echelons and rank.

And it was very shocking what he said, Jack.

He said, well, we can give them all the weapons we want, but ultimately it's a manpower.

It's a manpower question

they are losing bleeding population with refugees they were having people trying to get out of military service and they are the victims of russian calculus and russian calculus is we kill one they kill two and we have four times the population so we win and that's what they're doing and so

I guess what I'm saying, Jack, is the ripples of that war are everywhere, and they are affecting the Middle East.

And I don't know how effective a Russian anti-aircraft sophisticated missile system is

would be in stopping IDF retaliation if we get into a war, they get into a war, we get into a war with Hezbollah, but

it will definitely make it more difficult.

Yeah.

None of this would be happening but for the man who is the president of the United States also, Victor.

So the thing is that

it's very ironic that the man who came in and they warned him, if you move that embassy, you're going to blow up the Middle East to Jerusalem.

If you tell them the Israelis can do that, if you

say the Golden Heights are not going back to Syria, you're going to blow up the Middle East.

If you cut off the money through the UN Refugee Commission to Hamas and the PA, you're going to blow up the Middle East.

If you kill Soleimani, who's been killing Americans for 20 years, you're going to blow up the Middle East.

If you lift those sanctions,

if you sanction, excuse me, all oil exports, you're going to deprive Iran of $50 to $100 billion.

You're going to blow up the Middle East.

And he did all of that.

And you know what?

It was not blown up.

Don't believe Victor.

Believe Jake Sullivan, who went over there and said right before the war, there's nothing wrong.

It's all pretty.

And what he was basically saying is, we've done all we can to blow up this very calm Middle East.

And right now it hasn't blown up yet.

And I think it's our credit.

What he didn't understand was it was the fumes of the Trump administration.

And he'd already laid the eggs that were going to blow up.

And so that's what they did.

They blew up the Middle East by doing exactly the opposite of Trump.

And the Abrams Accord, they didn't want nothing to do with it.

They thought that they hated the Saudis.

Remember, Biden campaigned after the Khashoggi murder that he was not going to have anything to do with Saudi Arabia.

And everybody was saying, wait a minute,

is it corrupt?

Is it theocratic?

Yes, but it likes the United States rather than China or Russia in this limited opportunity world.

That is somebody we can work with.

And yes, they had people that did 9-11, but right now, given all the alternatives, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, what do you want?

And so all you had to do was have a situation where they could

have normalization with Israel.

And because it was Trump and Jared Kushner, they wanted nothing to do with it.

And they squashed it.

And now what are they doing?

They were desperately trying to reboot it under their auspices.

And the same thing with the border.

They blew up everything that the Trump administration had done that was successful.

And now they're just, they're even building a wall.

Not one foot, Jack, will a wall be built under my administration.

Not one foot.

And now they're trying to build.

So

I think the Middle East could be, if we get through this, it could be returned

to where it was if you had a different president and a different senate.

But,

you know, Trump's tweets apparently were more important than the Middle East.

And so

a lot of people who knew better said, you know what, not in my name.

I'm not going to vote for somebody who's called Stormy Daniels horse face.

Well, Victor, you talked about

Obama before.

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so Victor

we've made mention in recent podcasts of your relatively

new activity of once or twice a week engaging on Twitter now known as X with some long original thoughts.

And you have one from, I think it's just, it's today or yesterday.

It's titled Joe the Plumber Redux Obama and the New More Inclusive Capitalism.

I know he, I know Barack Obama likes your rockets, Victor.

I mean, he likes everyone's rockets, this character.

But hey, he's got his, right?

He's got his mansions, and now he's going to dictate what he's going to do for the rest of us.

He's bulldozed a very beautiful area of Chicago against community objections and have his Obama foundation.

But before the ground break, I mean, before it's dedicated, he's going to have an Obama Foundation democracy forum, Jack.

And

I just wrote it down.

He says

that he's going to call for a new economic framework that addresses inequality and prepares citizens for the coming changes, coming changes, I guess, that we're in for it,

in how we live and work that reaches, listen to this, a higher purpose beyond material consumption.

And he's called the Biden administration his third term.

Remember, he also said, I think it was in December of 2020, remember he gave that interview and I jotted that down when he said, if I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man, a front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats.

He works out everybody, looking through the stuff, then I could sort of deliver the lines.

But someone else was doing all the talking and ceremony.

Remember, by the way, he said that he was lazy.

He said his worst fault was laziness.

Then I'd be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.

So that's what he is doing.

He just admitted in December when he backed Biden.

He knew Biden was going to get elected.

Remember he had earlier said, Joe, Joe,

remember he said, Joe, Biden, to Joe Biden?

He said, Joe, you don't have to do this.

And I think, Jack, we all talked about that at the time, that Obama had said basically to Biden, you're non composment.

You shouldn't do this.

But now he's happy that he did because he fulfilled exactly the script.

And by the way, he didn't say that about having an earpiece and giving them the ideas and writing the script and all that until Biden was elected.

So he knew all along what he was doing.

My point in that tweet was when he says that he's going to give more inclusivity and equity, I mean,

Biden's already raised taxes.

If you're in a blue state and you're paying, well, the top rate goes up to 13.3 in California, but you do your property taxes, your payroll, Social Security taxes, your income tax,

state, your federal income tax, your Obamacare tax, your gasoline tax, you're paying way over 50% of your income.

So when he says he wants a new, more inclusive capitalism,

I guess the $1.7 trillion that we're spreading around that we don't have every year through the annual deficit isn't enough.

The $34 trillion in annual, excuse me, aggregate debt isn't enough.

The I just filled up jacket was $5.60 in gasoline wasn't enough.

The 7% interest rates that we got wasn't enough.

And then when he talks about material consumption, as I pointed out, number four, the latest one, was the Hawaii Beachfront Villa.

Remember that jacket?

It's right on the beach.

And he bought it for 8.5 million in 2000.

I think it was 15, the property, and it probably put another 8 in it.

And that was, you know, almost a decade ago.

So that thing is probably worth 40 or 50 million.

And then that was only number four.

Number three was that 30-acre multi-million dollar.

Was that 12 million?

Or 10?

I know that a lot of people criticize the low assessment.

I mean, they're going after Trump for that, but Morlago really is worth a lot more than they said it was.

But Obama said that

he got that, I think, either for 12 or 14 million.

People at the time said it was worth a lot more than that with a sweetheart sale.

30 acres, Martha Vineyard Estate.

I think he has 2,000 gallons and various tanks of propane to that hot gas.

And then he's got the Calorama.

I think he paid, what, 8.5 or 9 for that million.

And then he's got his Chicago home.

He's got four mansions, estates, villa, whatever you want to call them.

And he says that we have to limit our material consumption.

I guess he's going to sell one of those.

That's what he means.

Yeah.

And then he said

he wants this more inclusive capitalism.

So I was looking at that.

Did you know that Netflix was worth, they'd never disclosed to how much it was worth.

It was worth somewhere between $50 and $100 million for content.

They provide the content.

He narrates a few documentaries.

Wham.

And then I think the two memoirs, and then he wrote their book deal is 50 million.

And

Michelle went over to Germany.

I think she got 700.

The Climate Euros, 740.

I did the math.

She said she talked an hour.

It's over $12,000 a minute.

That doesn't seem to me like it's much equity.

And if you don't think, you think I'm crazy, that she was supposed to, I suppose, talk on the DI, the DEI trinity.

But I've noticed the weird thing, Jack, that the DEI

Trinity has morphed into a duality.

It's no longer diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Michelle said she was going to get $12,000 a minute to talk on diversity and inclusion,

but not equity.

I suppose that's kind of hard to talk about.

You're going.

Equity, remember, is the new left.

It's an old word that they have rebranded and adopted for inequality of result.

It's not equality.

It's equity.

It means we're all going to be the same on the back end.

And I don't know how you do that when you get $12,000 a minute, but you surely can't talk about equity.

And so

this third term was what I was trying to.

point out.

He wasn't happy given what he gave us in those eight years.

And if you look at the Middle East that's in the news now, he gave us the Shia Crescent creative tension.

He gave us the Iran deal.

He gave us Robert Malley first.

He gave us the massive

aid to

Hamas and the PA.

He was the one that resisted calling the Houthis terrorists.

I mean, Obama.

started it all and then Biden dash Obama continued that.

And that's why he's bragging that he can phone it in without having to do the hard work of the, you know, glad handling and flying to funerals or whatever they do.

He doesn't want to do that.

And he said so.

But

anytime someone who's very wealthy on the left talks about equity and inclusion, diversity, what they really mean is I'm guilty because I am the object of my own hatred.

And therefore, to square that circle, I'm going to project my guilt onto other people, but in such a way where you're not going to touch my material consumption or my non-inclusive capitalism.

Victor, he's the gift that keeps on giving.

He's really something else.

You're absolutely right.

He's very popular.

She's the most popular woman in America, but they did a lot of damage to this country.

And we should listen to what they say when he said Trayvon was this child, looks like the kid I never had.

And

my grandmother is a racist, and she panics when she sees a black man.

And we we know the police uh the beer summit what they did he trashed them

and then he said uh recip Erdoyan is my conduit to the Middle East he's the person I go to to know what's going on we backed Mohamed Morsi in Egypt the Muslim brotherhood guy so we we know what he did and he he's the one that blew up the Middle East Yeah, by the way, headline today, Aragon cuts ties with Netanyahu.

So thanks, Barak.

Yeah, he loved Erdogan.

Errol didn't particularly like him, but he fawned all over.

That's where I think the apologies were started in Turkey.

I mean, he went over there to a guy whose government had massacred over a million Armenians.

And I'm sorry to the Armenian community if I have the number wrong.

It's probably closer to a million and a half in the two

separate but continued Holocaust.

Remember what Hitler said?

nobody's going to remember the Armenians.

But after he did that, Erdogan said in commentary of the current one in Aberbajan, where by the way they ethnically cleanse, he's talking about refugees right now

when Turkish-speaking allies of him have ethnically cleansed over 100,000 Armenians and sent them back into Christian Armenia.

And he's giving lectures about refugees in the Middle East and Gaza.

This guy is probably the most,

what's the word?

Not technologists.

Yeah, really bad, evil person there is.

And he's dangerous.

And every time there's a crisis, he says things that are chilling.

When he gets in a problem with Cyprus over oil or Greece over overflights, he says that Greeks are going to wake up one morning and they're going to see things coming from Turkey, missiles into Athens.

He said the same thing about Israel the other day.

They're going to wake up and see things coming down on the sky.

I'm going to send troops to Gaza.

We don't approve of the United States taking nuclear weapons out of Isilor Air Force Base, meaning when we had a coup,

they tried to remove me.

I tried to shut that base down and make sure those weapons are not quite 100% American property.

He's a very dangerous person.

He tried to stop Sweden coming into NATO.

And he goes over to Europe and tries to rally

Islamic expatriates to cause problems for the European government.

He wanted to be in the EU.

He shouldn't be in NATO.

The problem is we don't have a way to get people out of NATO.

We have a charter that tells you how you can get them in, but it doesn't talk too much about how to get them out.

And everybody's attitude is

we would never let this SOB in again.

There's no way in the world we would let undemocratic, Islamicist, anti-American, anti-Western Turkey into NATO.

But he's in.

And he's got the second biggest military.

So what do we do about it?

And we need the Bosphorus open and the Dardanelles, and he's on the bridge between Europe and Asia.

We hear all that.

Obama's friend,

as a general rule, anybody that Obama appeased, and there were legions of them, then interpret that magnanimity, as I've often said, as weakness.

And they had utter contempt for us.

And that's why Putin went into the Donbass, and that's why he went into Crimea.

Just go back and read that hot mic, Seoul, I think it was Seoul, South Korea, March 2011, said to Medeved, just tell Vladimir I'll be flexible in missile defense.

This is my last election if he gives me space.

In other words, don't invade why I'm in the election cycle.

And I'll get rid of missile defense and hurt the national security of the United States for my own particular political agenda.

But once I'm elected,

you'll have no more missile defense.

And then, you know,

things happen if you go into Ukraine and Crimea.

Yeah.

Well, his big foreign policy aide

reign was supposed to be Joe Biden.

And we've got to talk about

Biden and

the new

scandal revelations that have come out this past week, Victor.

But

before that, we need to talk to our listeners, especially those who may think that they're too busy with holiday plans to cook,

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So, Victor,

two headlines, you know, if it was happened to Donald Trump or any fill-in-the-blank Republican, the walls, as we've talked about before, the walls would be closing in, et cetera.

Don't seem to be hearing that from MSNBC, CNN, or other news agencies, the walls closing in on Joe Biden.

But here are just two headlines that are, that are quite troubling.

One has to do with the with

James Biden writing Joe a $40,000 check immediately after

the Chinese had given one of these Hunter slash James Biden

entities a crap load of money.

I think it was a couple million bucks, but soon enough, big guy got his 10%.

So that's yeah it was fight on script just like the laptop oh i'm sorry jack just like the russian disinformation fake laptop

accused falsely john uh joe biden of it of getting 10 of chinese and other foreign nations transfers of money to the biden family and as leon panetta our distinguished Californian who was a former Secretary of Defense and recently asked if he wanted now to come forth and apologize that as one of the 51 signators of that accusation that it was likely Russian deformation, excuse me, has all the hallmarks of such

that he now knows that it wasn't.

And he misled

the country right before an election and a debate.

And he said, well, they do it all the time.

So he just said, basically, I was lying and I don't have any apologize because it worked.

So I thought I didn't read.

Yeah, he was even laughing.

Who's with Brett Bray?

It was disgraceful.

It was disgraceful.

I debated him once at a Jim Costa congressional event up in

near Yosemite.

Jim Costa was your congressman.

Yes, he was our congressman at the time, a Democrat.

And I was on good terms with,

he was my congressman, and he asked me to go to an event.

And then

there were some comments about

would I say something?

And

then Leon Finetto would reply or vice versa and Leon Finetto was kind it was eerie prescient it was just what he did this time it was

he's

I said something he said something

about

we need unity and it was about during the early Obama years I think we need unity unity it was coming out for the George Bush acrimony, which by the way came from the left and we have to get along.

And then I replied and sort of thing.

And then he just started attacking me.

And he started to attack George Bush and all these things.

And it was just ranked partisanship.

And he had just given a little, you know, prep,

you know, just a little introduction about how he was a bipartisan and he worked with the other side of the aisle.

And we have too harsh rhetoric.

And he just unloaded.

And I think at that point, my wife and I said, see, I wouldn't want to be you.

We just left.

As soon as it was over, we took off.

But

that's his style.

And he's beloved in Monterey by everybody from both sides of the aisle.

But

that interview, I think, is an epitaph for his career.

It really is.

I mean, when you are confronted with the truth and you understand

that you were a party to a lie that may have influenced an election and you can't even express any remorse

and yet you double down on it,

then

what do you think?

But that's the Biden family.

And we said, I said, Sammy asked me

on another matter about the Bidens.

And I think we just say, Jack, from now on, everybody's listening.

You call up the Social Security Administration.

If you're on Social Security, you just say, would you please put loan repayment on that check?

And you say to your employer, loan repayment.

And then I don't have to pay income tax on it because it's a loan.

Now, I don't have any record that there was a loan.

And I have no intention of paying Jim Biden back.

but it says loan right there on the little lower left-hand side of the check, loan repayment.

It's not income, so I didn't report it.

And this, everybody's known about this.

And you know what?

You get the impression that all of this stuff is now accessible, Jack, and it's building an overwhelming case.

And you don't even have

Raskin and those guys coming out and defending him anymore.

It's right there.

10% on the laptop, he got 10%.

And what did the Bidens do to earn it?

They had no demonstrable skills or expertise.

But the point is, why do we know, why are they, why are the Republicans able to access this information?

They've been stonewalled for years.

And the answer is, I think they feel that Joe Biden is expendable.

And I think a lot of people in the Democratic Party say, you know what, that is terrible what you're doing to Biden.

We got to end up this, we've got to end the politics of personal destruction.

It's just too much.

Here's another document you might find useful because they want him out.

And they know that if he runs again, they're going to get Camela Harris.

Maybe not.

They might get him in the next year and a half, get her in the next year and a half.

But they feel that if he runs again, he will not finish.

There's no way in the world he will.

And she'll be president and it'll be worse than this.

And they feel that they can get him out.

And then they have an open primary and they say, Camela, we really want you to run.

Oh, you didn't get a delegate second time.

Sorry, we've Gavin got some delegates and you didn't.

And then, you know, next time they appoint somebody by pre-selecting their gender and race,

I think they'll be a little bit more careful.

Well, Victor, the other headline, and these now seem to drop, you know, once a week, twice a week,

of just yet another brick in the wall of the this Corleone

family antics.

The headline was from.

I've been watching all three of them on

DirecTV this week, and that's an insult to the Corleone family.

Well,

they're a destructive people to Biden.

So we see that they don't care.

I know you said they're not going to let him run again, but I think his view is F you all.

I'm going to do whatever I want.

That's what he's done all along.

And he ended up being president of the United States because of it.

But here's the headline from the Daily Mail of maybe today.

Joe Biden's office allegedly helped coordinate Hunter Biden's China trips during vice presidency.

Then vice president Joe, blah, blah, blah.

Let me just see this here.

Donald Cloud, an advisor to then BP Biden, reached out to Hunter Biden's assistant, Katie Dodge, and suggested she communicate with the U.S.

Embassy in Beijing to connect with then U.S.

ambassador to China, Max Baucus, about Hunter Biden's travels to China, according to an email released

recently.

So, I mean, dang, this guy was vice president and he's helping his son with a hostile power.

It would be fair to call China a hostile power.

Here's how to navigate and get some dough.

And don't forget to give me 10% of it.

So anyway, Victor, I think we'll see something like this.

Again, ongoing every week, another email revelation, maybe some more from Tony Bobalewski, who's now being...

I think Hunter Biden

wants him

prosecuted or something.

Anyway,

I think everything is weaponized, and

everything has been weaponized.

The CIA, the FBI, the DOJ, the IRS.

And we know that from the IRS whistleblowers, we know that from testimonies of the last four

FBI directors.

We know this

particular treatment that was given confessed liars under oath like McCabe and Brennan and Clapper.

So it's all been weaponized.

So when anything comes out that's detrimental to the left in power, there has to be a reason for it.

And as I said earlier, he's expendable now.

And when you see him

on the stage, I think all of us are starting to think that the real villain here is Jill Biden.

Jill, Dr.

Jill, because she knew this person

was not able to fulfill

the responsibilities of presidency.

And I think everybody who's listening, if you're a lawyer, would you allow Joe Biden to present a case for your firm?

If you're a doctor and you had a doctor with former skills and he was at that level of cognitive awareness, would you let him operate?

Jack, would you let me continue this podcast if I was at Joe Biden's level of cognitive ability?

No.

So he's president, and what that sends the nation is that the presidency is not that important a job because he's got it.

And when you add all, it's like a trifecta now, though, because the corruption is starting to, as the left says, the walls are closing in and the bombshell disclosures are very frequent.

And then we've got the record of the border and crime and foreign policy and economy and interest rates, and that's not

helpful to him.

And then we've got the cognitive decline that he's not up for the job.

So corruption, decline, and an actual terrible record.

And it's, I looked at the real clear politics, and it's down to 40%.

And that means there's a lot of recent polls that are, you know, 38, 36, 38, 39.

But I don't believe that's possible.

I don't believe that people are looking at Biden, and he's polling higher than George W.

Bush was when he left office, or he's right about where Trump was.

But,

I mean, compared to either one of them, he can't finish the sentence.

And then you throw in the other liabilities.

Do you really believe, Jack, that any person who goes to the Oval Office for any ceremonial function,

any person to be sworn in at a sub-cabinet position, any prominent celebrity that's to highlighted his preference for Joe Biden, if they have a daughter under the age of 18

who is attractive or just young, or even six or seven, do they really believe that they will allow Joe Biden to come close to them and embrace her?

I don't think so, because they know that he either will try to blow in their ears or he will try to touch their hair or he'll do that very strange thing he did on the Finland tarmac, where he kind of turkey gobbled a girl's neck, a little tiny girl.

So

that's where we are right now.

And the media knows it, and they have to deal with it.

And I think the way they're going to deal with it is keep leaking these stories about the Biden corruption.

I mean,

if I was...

I don't like to get into it, but if you think about that family, it's toxic.

It is toxic.

When Hunter Biden takes pictures of him, almost full frontally nude, does anybody know people who do that?

I don't.

And that laptop has those.

Or then when you see these stories that Joe Biden swam nude and embarrassed deliberately, maybe

Secret Service female agents, and he didn't stop when he was told that that was offensive.

Or then when you have

Jim Biden taking funnel pictures of himself and they end up on gay web,

what is it with this family's culture?

I don't understand it.

Kind of like a family.

It's coming out of some, some, not a sitcom, but some mini-series about one of these really internal

exhibitionist family.

They are exhibitionists.

They feel that they're narcissist.

It reminds me of LBJ, you know, Robert Carroll's biography of,

you know, defecating with a door open to embarrass people or pulling out his phallus to show how big it was and referring it to the big thing.

It was just gross, gross.

This family is gross.

And it's very ironic because these are the same people who attacked Trump without mercy because he was crude.

But I don't remember anybody saying that Trump did things like that.

I don't.

While he was in office, especially, I know Stormy Daniels, it was pretty convincing that he'd had

a sexual encounter with her that was pretty gross.

But

my point is that

we've had people that had zero tolerance of this type of behavior with Trump.

And he didn't come close to

taking a picture and having it end up on a gay website, or his kids didn't.

And he didn't.

come close to swim nude in front of the Secret Service.

And

Don Jr.

or Eric didn't have a laptop showing them, you know,

fully new snorting cocaine.

And so I would just wish that this hyper-criticism of the Trump family would extend to the Biden family, just for the point of fairness or symmetry.

Yeah.

Well,

the Biden family is where me too came to die, it seems.

Hey, Victor, we have one more quick

topic to get to, and that's your old friend, Tony Fauci, and we'll get to it right after this final important message.

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

Victor, we just have a few minutes, and

I don't know, I scratch my head about how the CDC and Fauci has...

what they've done, not only what they did

once the story broke about, and the news broke, the reality of COVID happened, but what they've maybe been doing all along.

And here's a Daily Mail headline from the other day.

And we're recording, by the way, on Saturday, November 4th.

Headline is revealed.

Anthony Fauci-run lab in Montana experimented with coronavirus strain shipped in from Wuhan a year before COVID pandemic began.

The subheads are the NIH infected 12 bats with a SARS-like coronavirus in 2018.

It was shipped from Wuhan to a lab in Montana, where I don't know.

And, you know, Victor, I thought all this gain of function crap was illegal, but here they are, like Dr.

Frankenstein's playing with

things that could destroy humanity.

I didn't understand it because it was his testimony, sworn testimony to in those exchanges with Rand Paul that there was no gain of function ever going on.

And he was not subsidizing it.

And the amount of money or help that he had or connections with the Wuhan lab were incidental.

And they were the product of Echo Health, Peter Dosick's relationship with the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases.

In other words, that Fauci didn't really know much.

And those emails were misleading where right up on the discovery of the COVID infection and the seriousness of it, he wanted to make sure that people didn't come to the erroneous conclusion that it was a gain-in-function subsidized virus rather than a bat or pangolin-induced pathogen.

So

I don't know, Anthony.

How can you testify?

And then we found out that you prior to this

were importing pathogens that were very dangerous from the Wuhan lab.

So you must have had a connection with them that we were not fully appreciative of.

And you were doing things with those pathogens that apparently were pretty dangerous because you wandered amount in Montana.

And as someone who lives in rural America and might have at one point had a fleeting idea that when I go to Palo Alto, I don't like to be in the big city.

And during COVID, I thought it would be nicer to be out in rural areas.

And then I discover that actually our government either allows or promotes deadly pathogen research in places like montana or in my case 12 miles away in readley california where somebody right under the nose of our officials opened up a chinese biolab

and pathogens were found on you know in rats

you know, genetically engineered rats were dead on the floor.

Some were starving in cages, and there were vials, apparently, of things like measles, HIV, you name it, and COVID in Reedley, California.

And I think it's the old H.R.

Hamilton or the one near that packing house I used to work at when I was in high school for a couple of weeks.

So you can't escape.

My point, Jack, is you cannot escape Tony Fauci.

He's everywhere.

It's not just his bubblehead little doll and his posters in his office that he collects are everywhere in popular culture.

You can't just, you know,

everybody loads St.

Tony.

They loved him and he he was idolized, but he's everywhere.

And he was everywhere and we didn't even know it.

He's, I think his middle name is Tony Gaino Function Fauci.

And Rand Paul, you know, really had him to rights and he got out of that.

I don't know how he did it.

He's going to have a rendezvous with truth, though, and it's not going to be pretty.

And as an octogenarian, and one would not want to end a long career with revelations that he was dishonest, untruthful in the matters of the collective health of his nation.

But that's what's going to happen to him.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of your wisdom sharing.

A few things that we do typically now at this point in the show.

First of all, I would like to recommend to our listeners that they visit your website, The Blade of Perseus.

The web address is victorhanson.com.

There you can find links to Victor's various writings, American Greatness, Syndicated Column, archives of this show, his

other appearances on other radio shows and other podcasts.

If you're on the home page of The Blade of Perseus, if you scroll down a little to the right, you'll see the cover of Victor's forthcoming book.

It'll be out next spring.

It's called The End of Everything.

How Wars Descend into Annihilation.

It's your opportunity now to pre-order it.

You can also find links to Victor's other books.

just, you know, I had a four-book contract with BASIC, and the idea was to do two on history.

One was Second World Wars, and the one was

The End of Everything about how war becomes annihilation.

And then I did the case for Trump, and I did the

Dying Citizen, two non-historical, but some history, but mostly contemporary.

But

when I did this End of Everything, kind of wrote it during long COVID.

I thought, well, why am I doing this?

It's about four case studies in the past and the relevance for the present, but no one believes that war anymore can be existential.

Of course, that's the theme of the book in the case of the Aztecs or classical city-state of Thebes or Carthage or Constantinople, a whole society and culture can be destroyed.

Right.

A war.

And how does that happen?

And how do you prevent it?

And in the epilogue, I went through places like the greeks that are very vulnerable or the israelis etc

but i i there was something that i thought well this won't this won't be relevant or people won't want to read about this and now when you hear what hamas is saying and half the world's jews or more than half nine million

uh almost 10 are in israel and there's people talking about wiping them out and we saw what they wanted to do to all of Israel when that what they did to a thousand of them.

I think the book is going to be really relevant.

Yeah.

By the way, Victor, on that, we maybe should talk about on the next podcast, but I saw some tweet with a depiction of Jewish communities throughout the world, say in 1950.

And you talked before about Armenia and ethnic cleansing.

There were the prevalent

non-tiny Jewish communities in many countries.

They are gone.

Gone.

They are.

I mentioned that in in a call the other day because I saw some

Palestinian megaphone saying

there are all these refugees, refugees, refugees, refugees, refugees from what is now Israel.

And there are some people who fled and there were populations that were displaced, but

there were 900,000 Jews in places like Damascus and Amman and Cairo and Baghdad and Beirut.

And in a series of those, every time Israel defeated their enemies 47, 56, 67, 70, they ethnically cleansed portions, and now they're all gone.

But they're not called refugees.

They're just in Israel or maybe in Europe, at most in Israel.

There's no UN camp for refugees in Israel.

Any more than there is for the 13 million Germans who walk back from East Prussia.

And nobody in Germany is saying, I'm dangling the keys of my grandfather to my old ancestral home in Danzig.

And we had 500 acres of a royal estate out in Konesberg.

And nobody's saying that.

They just say, no, I'm sorry.

It's

Kalingrad.

You're never going to get it back.

And that's the tragedy and the horrors of wars.

But again,

Israel is a special case.

And the wills that apply to refugees or displaced persons do not apply to Israel.

Well, Victor, again, just to summing up here, close up about your website.

I want to encourage our listeners to visit that site and you'll find Ultra articles that are classified as Ultra, and they are exclusive.

Victor writes exclusively for The Blade of Perseus.

You need to subscribe.

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Little Old Me, Jack Fowler, writes civil thoughts for the Center for Civil Society at Anphil, where we try to strengthen civil society.

Civil Thoughts is a free weekly email newsletter that shares a dozen plus recommended readings.

Here's a link.

Here's an excerpt of, I think, important articles I've come across the previous week that I do believe

you will like, you will enjoy.

Wow, I didn't know this website even existed

that publishes such stuff.

So anyway, it's gotten very good

response from folks.

Thank you for those who do subscribe.

Go to civilthoughts.com

to do that.

One final little comment, Victor, off of iTunes Apples from one of our,

the folks can go there.

You, dear listener, can go to go to Apple and podcasts and rate the show zero to five stars.

leave comments we read them here i read them also on victor's website very simple we listen every week from richard fuego thank you so much for your top-notch podcast my husband and i have learned so much from you we have listened watched and read you for years that's a typical comment about from folks about their thoughts of the great victor davis hansen my friend man blessed to be his friend blessed to do this thank you victor for all the wisdom you shared today thank you folks for listening and we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

I much appreciate it again.