The Mugshot Seen Worldwide

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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, VDH.

Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

I'm pretty sure Victor will, in the next few days, be heading off to the aforementioned Hillsdale College.

Maybe the end of this episode, Victor, we can get a quick look at what you'll be talking about there.

This has been, this past week is just like wall-to-wall

events, things that require, beg for your commentary.

The top one being Donald Trump's arrest and this iconic mugshot of him that has been taken down in Atlanta.

We have that.

We have Victor Shokin, who's ratting out.

That's unfair.

He's not ratting out.

Rats rat out, but

he has given some statements about

Biden's shakedown in Ukraine.

We maybe can get to John Kerry and his

sticking his nose into that business.

And maybe also we'll talk about Anthony Oliver, the musician, and his

post-debate criticism.

Maybe we'll even talk about the debate, but Victor, we'll get to some, if not all, of these things right after these important messages.

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

Victor, yep, Donald Trump arraigned a mugshot taken in

Georgia.

I cannot imagine

a mugshot that is more predisposed to maybe benefit Donald Trump than this.

It seems like it was staged almost.

Yeah, it's so iconic.

What are your thoughts on that?

Where did he get the shadow?

He looked at it, and you see that shadow going across his face, highlighting him.

And then I thought, wow, everybody says he has a comb over.

When he bends his head, he'll be bald, but he had a full head of hair.

And it had that sort of, I'll get even look.

And

so

I don't understand the left, to tell you the truth, because they are going gaga over this.

They're going into his weight.

I think he listed 215.

In my heavy days before long COVID, I weighed, I'm 6'1 and I weighed 215 and I was fat,

but I wasn't as big as Trump.

And my father was about Trump size, 6'4.

And as he got older, he looked about like Trump, but not quite as heavy.

And he was about 240.

So I'm imagining Trump is about 255.

But I like the idea that he put down 215

because

what it does is all these obese people on things like The View and everybody were making fun of them.

And you know what they list their weight as

about 30% less than it is.

They won't even list their weight.

They won't even list their weight.

So, I mean,

I think the right went a little bit, our side went a little bit gaga in the sense that I know he raised $7 million off it.

It's on t-shirts, it's on cups, it's on posters.

And then they said, well, this is going to improve his street cred.

So they interviewed on Fox and on some websites and a lot of black males and said, wow.

Now we can vote for him because he's an outlaw like we are.

I thought that was kind of stereotypical in a biased way, but

I don't think that anybody's going to vote who was on the fence for Donald Trump because he has a mugshot.

What is interesting, there was no need for a mugshot.

Mugshots are, I mean, the theory behind a mugshot is you're arrested and then your picture's on file.

So people can share it with other law enforcement agencies.

And then you're, if you take off, they can put an all-points bulletin out for you.

But does anybody really think that

Donald Trump, somebody in the world doesn't know who he looks like?

So then when they put him on that $200,000 bond, and that African-American guy that was head of blacks for Trump, he was the only one of the 19 that they didn't give bail to.

And I didn't understand that.

They said that, well, he may have bumped a FBI agent, but he wasn't ever charged with anything when the FBI agent gave him a subpoena.

So I didn't quite get that.

And I didn't quite get why they're giving Trump a $200,000 bail when in California, both in Los Angeles and San Francisco, they are letting violent, violent, violent criminals out the same day that they're arrested with no bail.

And that's just going to set people off even angrier.

The left,

before we were talking today, I went and looked at MSNBC, CNN yesterday.

A little bit of the network news.

I mean, they're just hysterically happy, and they're really rubbing and they, you know, they're rubbing their nose, but they should realize that this is the weakest of all.

I think, well, Bragg was weak and James will be weak, but this was very weak because what she did was she took a series of incidents

and she says things like tweeting false things, saying false things,

telling,

trying to tell false things to a registrar.

None of them were in themselves illegal, but she's saying they show a pattern, a racketeering or a conspiratorial pattern to engage in dishonest ability, a dishonest behavior

in a conspiratorial fashion.

But you're down to the basic facts.

A, all politicians at times when they're losing in a very close election and they want to recall or they think they've been taken, they can call a registrar and they have a perfect right.

He didn't say invent, invent the 11,000 votes.

He said find them,

i.e.,

they're already there.

I know they're there.

He said that.

And you just have to find them, i.e., you're not doing your job.

I don't think you should have done that, but that's not illegal, believe me.

And all the other tweeting things that aren't particularly accurate, that you could half of Twitter would be in jail.

So

this is all bogus and I think it's going to be thrown out of court

and she wants to go in October and I would like to see

it might be good for him to get it out of the way because it wants if he gets something thrown out,

then I think the other ones will fall like dominoes.

And the only one I think he really has to worry about is the federal one.

And that's because A, it's a federal

prosecutor.

B, he has the resources and the authority and the fee days of the federal government behind it.

It doesn't look like a local one.

And

he's going to try to flip if he hasn't already done flip witnesses.

But there again, Donald Trump is going to try to show,

first of all,

that he had

He's going to try to show that there's precedence for what he did, and they were archival disputes.

So he's going to bring up Michael Pence, he's going to to bring up Joe Biden.

He's going to bring up Barack Obama.

And he's going to say all of these people, but in particular, Joe Biden, for 12 to 15 years, took out classified information, put them in three unsecure

places.

And this is really important.

He only notified the government when he unleashed the DOJ and the FBI at Mar-Lago.

Then somebody that was working with him to move said, oh my god, we've known for years that Joe Biden's got

classified papers.

So we'll just say we discovered them right now and we'll comply.

And then the media can do the rest for us as usual.

They can go say, well, unlike Trump, the media,

unlike Trump, the Biden team wanted to cooperate with the archivists and the federal government.

No, they really didn't because for over a decade,

they never told anybody.

So which is a greater offense, having documents that are classified in a gated estate for two years or spreading them around in your garage with access to Hunter

for

10 or 12 years?

The other last thing about all this, these prosecutors, Jack, nobody's ever really told us why Joe Biden did it.

They were easily speculating, eager to speculate why Donald Trump did this.

Remember what they said?

He wanted to sell them on the market for profit.

He wanted to leverage people.

No, he probably just thought that some of them might have exonerating circumstances, or if he was charged with something, he could have the evidence and he didn't trust the government.

Wrong, but in his case of being persecuted, it might be understandable.

But why did Joe Biden take these out as a senator and vice president?

Why didn't he tell anybody?

And there was that early report that some of the language and some of the documents might have been

mirror imaged in things that Hunter wrote.

But was he trying to take this stuff out so that he could create insider knowledge that would impress the Russians or the Romanians or the Chinese or the Ukrainians that the Bidens had foreign policy

insider knowledge?

Nobody knows, but it's really stunning how nobody in the media says, Joe, why did you take those out?

And they don't answer that question.

Yeah.

And for all we know, Victor,

I can't prove a negative view, but

there could be other documents locked away at wherever it is at the University of Delaware.

Apparently, there is, yeah.

Yeah.

And

again, for all we know, maybe Penn State or UPenn, wherever the hell.

I think he may have relations with both of those institutions.

Certainly he's had a lot of Chinese money going on.

Yeah, I don't understand this all.

I really don't understand this.

This media,

who

was so obsessed with the Montreal cognitive assessment in the case of Trump.

They brought in Bandi Yee, that bankrupt, now-fired Yale psychiatrist, to say that he should be restrained with an intervention.

You had McCabe and Rosenstein trying to wire themselves up to prove that Donald Trump was crazy so the cabinet would recommend his removal.

They do all that.

Then these same people, Mark Milley, you remember, called his Chinese counterpart who said Trump was crazy.

Where are those people now, Jack?

Where are they now?

When you look at Biden, he can't finish a sentence.

He can't walk upstairs.

They should be screaming and yelling.

McCabe should be on his lucrative consultantship on CNN and saying, get a wire.

Do what I did.

And then Chuck Schumer and all those people said, bring in a Yale psychiatrist and diagnose him at a distance the way we did.

And then that White House physician should say, get that Montreal cognitive assessment like Trump did.

That's a good thing to do.

Nothing,

nothing.

And then they, I don't understand how long this is going to go on when people on the left say,

well, who believes the IRS whistleblowers?

Now, we do believe Eric Caramella, that whistleblower who never heard the call that led to the impeachment, who was spoon-fed the information secondhand by Michael Vinman, the brave, illustrious, courageous, real whistleblower who now is an arms dealer profiting off the death and destruction in Ukraine, his native Ukraine.

We heard how wonderful whistleblowers are, but suddenly these whistleblowers are either disingenuous or criminal or not to be believed, but they're no longer heroic.

And then we go to Hunter's laptop.

And there's the evidence there, whether it's the big guy or the 10% or he takes half my income or I pay his utilities

or pictures.

Well, all of a sudden,

are we still believing what we were told in October of 2020, that a bunch of little Russians in some institute in Moscow 3D printed a copy of the laptop and then got a bunch of hookers to stage stuff and then got an actor who looked like Hunter with a cigarette in his mouth and posed.

And then they thought, wow, let's study the Bidens and we'll call them.

Did we really believe all that?

Because they said it was a product of less and just information nobody's ever said that's preposterous i'm sorry i was on msnbc and i said it was true and it was a complete lie what i said nobody says that

i went on that marco polo website that is the repository for the laptop and the just the sheer volume of stuff on it is staggering and

for someone to have created that as as some project you know out of whole cloth

is itself a fabulous idea.

And what was even worse, Jack, was that wording they said

they said wink, wink, nod, nod.

It has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, meaning we're telling you right before the election and right before the debate to swing it to Biden that we're 99% sure, given our authority, titles, and letters after our names.

But we're saying it has all the hallmarks.

So we have a 1% escape clause when you find out we're lying to you.

And that's what they're doing now.

And almost none of them have apologized.

None of the media has apologized.

But that's just the laptop and then just the IRS.

And then we have Victor Shokin.

We've talked about, he comes out and says, looks to me like they bribed him.

And he would know because.

He knows better than anybody how Ukraine works.

He was fired.

Then we were lied to, Jack, and we were told that for what, five years?

That was 2018.

We were, no, we were, yes, five years we were told that Shokin was hated by the EU, that everybody thought he was corrupt, and that was the consensus.

Now we learn from internal State Department documents that Joe Biden was entirely freelancing.

He caught everybody by surprise.

The official policy of the United States, as exemplified by the State Department communications, was that Victor Shokin was making progress.

And they had interviewed people

with him and him, and they were impressed.

And they had greenlighted the $1 billion in foreign aid.

And Joe Biden went over there to the surprise of the State Department and suddenly fired him and made them surprised.

And then when that became an issue, they all closed ranks and lied and said, well, Shokin was corrupt.

And so that's the third source of information about this crooked family.

And then we get to this oligarch that apparently what where there's 19

taped conversations, two of which he has with Joe Biden, that is a bombshell and

nobody's talking about that.

And then we have

another source, and that is why in the world is the Biden family using, in the case of Joe Biden, a fake name, an alias email account to communicate?

Why are they appointing Mr.

Weiss when they know it would cause outrage?

And the only answer is they're doing all of this because they're terrified about the information and the truth coming out.

So it's an open and shut case.

He is the most crooked president we've ever had in office.

He went out and he made, and his family made $30, $40 million.

And they made it from the Russians, the Chinese, the Romanians, and the Ukrainians.

It's very ironic.

Victor Shokin said,

I hold him responsible for the 2014 war when he did nothing.

And what he was saying is

that

Biden met with three Russians, including that infamous mayor of Moscow that had been involved paying off bill member 500,000 for uranium-1.

And she's not sanctioned right now.

And Shulkin's implication was that the Obama administration, i.e.

the point man Biden on Ukraine, he couldn't do anything because he was compromised by the Russians.

But this is very funny because there's a whole history there of Russian reset with Hillary in 2009 and overlooking the 2014

invasions of the Donbass, the borderlands and Crimea, and then

Obama's 2012 hot mic and sold, tell Vladimir, da-da-da, quid pro-quo, get rid of, I'll get rid of missile defense, he won't invade, he'll give me some space in my last election.

So what I'm getting, and then there was nothing, there was no pushback on the,

compared to Trump,

the Russians were invited into the Middle East after a 40-year hiatus by John Kerry.

So my point is that

the whole Russian collusion was an act of projection.

The people who had been colluding were the Bidens

and the Clinton State Department with a reset policy.

In the case of Biden, I think it was probably because his family had been making money from Russians.

And we know that Russians were doing that along with Chinese.

And so that explains, I think, the tepid response, at least that's what Victor Shokin thought.

Right.

Well, you mentioned John Kerry.

You mentioned a few names here that we need to touch on, Victor.

John Kerry being one.

By the way, Michael Vendman,

I tripped over some

a video clip of the Larry David show, Arrested Development.

It's not arrested development.

What's the, I forget the name of Larry Davids, you know, HBO comedy show, but then he had a segment on with Michael Vendman there.

And it's a uh, he's being praised for his book.

And then there's some skit where Larry is upstairs trying to buy you off a politician.

He's in his bedroom making a phone call.

And who's using the bathroom but Michael Vendman?

Alexander is it Alexander Vendam or Michael?

I can't remember.

Oh, whatever.

Colonel, Colonel, or, you know, the tenant.

Yeah, there's two.

He's a twin, right there's two of them well this was uh uh i think it was the oh the it is a twin but anyway it was it was presented as as the uh the uh colonel himself and but that he's become such an he's he's embraced by hollywood and idolized by hollywood he and the whistleblowers love him

i mean the culture loves this whistleblower, hates other whistleblowers.

But

anyway, that aside, Victor, you mentioned John Kerry, and Kerry is one of the individuals who, back in 2015,

when it applies to Shoken, where, yeah, we were with him, et cetera, doing a good job, sort of, whatever.

Nothing implication of criminal.

And

as for circling the wagons, Kerry has come out.

Oh, my gosh, we all knew this guy was a dirtbag.

So this is the post-reality 2020 election approach where

Democrats like Kerry.

Yeah, absolutely.

In the case of Vinman,

if you go back to that testimony, remember he corrected Debin Noonan and said, it's lieutenant colonel.

Yeah.

And then in addition to that, he was bragging, and it was very self-incriminatory, that he had been offered three times the defense minister post in Ukraine, which suggested that maybe his interest,

his anti-Trump interest,

had something to do with his own career trajectory.

Remember what we're talking about.

He was one of many in the National Security Council that routinely listen to calls that the president makes.

Donald Trump made a call.

Nobody else objected to it.

He took notes, and then he called up Eric Caramella, who was an associate of his, to hide his own role in it.

and then to get an anonymity for the prosecution.

And then the three of them, i.e., him, the whistleblower, and Adam Schiff, cooked up the basis for impeaching Donald Trump on two reasons.

One, that he was leveraging U.S.

foreign policy for his own particular political interest by delaying, but not canceling, delaying military aid that had been approved by Congress on the prompt of the White House to send them things that included offensive weapons like javelin missiles, which Biden and Obama had opposed.

He didn't cancel them.

He delayed them.

And his pretext or his reason or whatever term you would use to, would you choose to use was that the Biden family was utterly corrupt.

So here we have an impeachment on one basis that he was absolutely right.

He gave the weapons to Ukraine and they came in handy in the defense of Kiev, which they wouldn't have been there had the Obama administration and Joe Biden had their drothers.

And then in addition to that,

we know now that he had good reason to suspect what Hunter Biden and Joe Biden were doing in Ukraine.

And then he, the second count was that he did this to hurt or to affect

a likely, not the nominee, but a likely presidential nominee in the 2020 election that would be his opponent.

Now, that's exactly what Joe Biden is doing right now.

So what I'm getting at, Jack, is we impeached the wrong president.

Yeah, right.

We impeached a guy for delaying aid that he gave on the suspicion of corruption and supposedly going after a potential

rival.

And then We impeached him.

And we haven't done anything to Joe Biden, who we know, who we know was getting money, his family was getting money from Ukraine, and he didn't delay.

He was threatening to cancel outright military aid, which apparently did not include offensive weapons.

And he got a prosecutor fired.

Trump got nobody fired.

He didn't ask to fire anybody.

And then second, he has unleashed.

prosecutors and we now know that Fannie Willis will not talk or will not decline to answer, as did Alvin Bragg, the degree to which they had a coordinated effort with Jack Smith.

But Trump is leading, as everybody knows, the Republican primary.

We haven't had an

election yet, but he is, quote unquote, more likely a nominee than Joe Biden was in 2020.

And he is being hounded by the current president.

So according to the left standards, he should be impeached.

And I hope that when the Democrat, when the Republican Congress comes in full circle, they should on-impeach, is that possible, on-impeach Trump and the same day impeach Biden.

If they decide to impeach Biden, it would be a great thing to say.

We have two motions.

One, to apologize to Donald Trump and on-impeach him

because we now know that Joe Biden did what the Democrats allege and Donald Trump didn't.

And I think that would be a great thing to to do.

Yeah.

Well,

there's still an angle here, too, by the way, Victor, on the Biden administration's complicity with ongoing investigations.

And maybe we should get to that and then talk a little about

the debates

which just happened the other day.

But let's do that right after this important message.

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Interesting site.

So, Victor, if we get back to uh

the the biden and special prosecutors etc

jack smith is an allegedly independent special prosecutor right an independent but his uh staff one of the staffers was

it's just come out the news has come out in the last day or two was at the White House right before the indictments came down, meeting with

counsels for Joe Biden.

So White House counsels were meeting with Jack Smith's people right prior to the Trump indictments.

I don't, among the many things with Jack Smith, I just don't get

how this proves he's independent.

I'm being facetious.

Victor, do you have any thoughts about that?

Well,

we all know that they're all coordinated.

Alvin Bragg is coordinated, whatever Lee T.

I don't know if we count her as a pro.

She hasn't filed charges.

I don't think she has on the overvaluing of the real estate, supposedly.

But there are four prosecutors involved, Smith, Letita James, Alvin Bragg, and Fannie Willis.

And they, believe me, they've been talking to each other, and we know that because of what you just referenced.

And what is that?

But I mean, if you think according to the standards of the left, that is a conspiracy to interfere in an election, if that's true.

If there's evidence that they staggered these prosecutions one after another to tie Donald Trump up, then it would be pretty damning.

And what I'm getting at, Jack, is that

what I'm just so bewildered by is to listen to Rachel Maddow

or any of these people on the left.

Chris Matthews or any of these people, they're just giddy, the late night comedians, the anchors, and they have no,

they have no, Nicole Wallace is one of the worst.

They have no idea what they're doing.

They're criminalizing

the justice system and they're interfering in the election process.

And they're so arrogant in their alleged superior wisdom and morality.

They don't think, A, the Republicans will ever get the Senate, the House, and the presidency back.

And B, if they were to do that, they would never stoop so low because they are golfers on the 18th hole who play by the Marcus of Queensbury rule.

They don't understand what they've done.

They crossed the Rubicon.

We're into the days of the late Roman Republic, unfortunately.

And

they're going to go after these people because what they did was a travesty of justice.

And there's a 50-50 chance that you're going to have a Republican president, a bigger margin in the House, and the Senate.

And if if that were going to be true,

they're going to subpoena all the communications, all the phone records, all the text, every type of email.

And they're going to get prosecutors after pro and they're going to fire the entire DOJ people, and they're going to be looking at them in private life.

And is that good?

Not necessarily, but that's what they're going to have to do.

Because if they don't, it's just going to increase and increase and increase.

I shouldn't, everybody's going to say, well, Victor, you're talking about the end of the American Republic.

No, I'm not.

I'm trying to save it.

It's got to just take a deep breath.

This bunch was paying Twitter $3 million to suppress the news on the eve of election because they felt that it would be deleterious to Joe Biden on the laptop, including the New York Post.

Imagine that.

They're capable of anything.

The FBI can go in and monitor Catholics who may

go to a mass conducted in Latin.

They will go after school board parents because the head of the teachers' union tells them to do that.

These people are not Democrats.

This is a weird bunch.

This is a very strange group of people, and they have no public support.

And they're young and zealous, and they want to destroy people rather than just

offer a different paradigm, a different agenda.

All this could have been reconciled.

All they had to do was say: Donald Trump should not be president, if that's what they believe.

And we're not going to do any law affair.

We're not going to try to change the voting laws.

We're not going to pack the court.

We're not going to let in two states.

We're not going to try to abolish the Senate filibuster.

We're not going to try to

change the voting ID laws.

We're just going to play under the rules that we have.

And we're going to make a, we don't need $419 million by Mark Zuckerberg in fuse.

We don't need Sam Bankman Freed, the crook, giving us $100 million.

We're not going to go under the radar with George.

We're just going to show you, the American people, how we think Donald Trump should not be president and we'll have a feral.

And they can't do that.

They don't trust themselves.

They think, you know what?

Anybody in his right mind would close that border right now.

Close the border.

Anybody in his right mind would recall all of those DAs that have destroyed these major cities.

Anybody in his right mind would not beg the Saudis or the Venezuelans.

or the Russians or the Iranians to pump oil on the eve of a midterm or drain the strategic petroleum when you have so much natural gas and oil.

Nobody in their right mind would do that.

And nobody in their right mind would ever just pull out of Afghanistan without warning, just so Joe Biden can say that on the 20th anniversary of 9-11 or the original October invasion of Afghan, I'm the president that got us out.

Nobody would do that.

So they can't take the, and nobody would print $6 trillion

when there's a pent-up demand post-COVID lockdown and there's a supply chain disruption and throw that money without any audit or

examination of who got it and why and how it was spent, but to inflate the economy and ruin it, nobody would do that.

And so they know that.

And they know that they can't take that record to the American people.

So it's

where we are.

That's where we are.

You remember in 2000, right before the election,

the news came out, I don't know, it was about five or six days before the election about George Bush's driving record, that he may have had a drunk driving record.

They always do that, right?

That was, I don't think it was two weeks.

I think it was four days.

That's right.

It was very confusing.

And

they were sitting on it, sitting on it.

But they did the same thing with the Access Wall Hollywood.

They knew about that tape.

But

you can compare that, though,

a potential drunk driving thing from maybe it had been 20 years before with Bobaluski's revelations, the New York Post stories about the laptop and how the magnitudes of greater importance, which was all the more reason for them to

suppress

the news that was coming out right before the laptop.

They have a deductive mind because they're ideologue.

So they start with a premise

that we're for social justice and for equity of result.

And so we're morally superior and smarter than anybody else.

And therefore, we are entitled to do things that other people don't do.

And so

if we have an old tape, 10 years old, of

a Bush family member and Donald Trump talking trash, we're going to hold it and spring it right before the debate, 2016.

If we have information about George W.

Bush, we're going to hold it right before the election and do that.

If under the cover of COVID and frightening people about COVID, we can change all the voting laws so that 30%

instead of voting absentee

and early voting shall become 70% in most states with very little audit of the level necessary to authenticate most ballots.

They just do all this stuff because they start with the deductive principle.

We are better.

This is the vision and therefore the following must happen.

And if things don't fit the narrative, then they go after the person they censor.

That's how they work.

And if you keep that in mind, then everybody makes sense.

And what I'm saying is they go on from one lie to the next.

So everybody now knows that Donald Trump, we just discussed it, was impeached for things that Joe Biden got away with.

Okay.

Everybody knows that January 6th, Brian Sicknick was not killed by MAGA people.

Everybody knows that Ashley Babbitt right now was shot unarmed, a 14-year military veteran for the misdemeanor of going through a previously broken window by an officer whose name was suppressed for shooting an unarmed suspect, which never happens in the United States.

Everybody knows that five officers were not killed, as Nancy Pelosi and everybody said.

They died of suicide months later.

They weren't killed.

The only person who died violently was Ashley Babbitt and perhaps another pro-Trump protester, a woman.

Everybody knows that.

No apologies, no apologies.

Everybody knows a laptop was authentic.

Everybody knows that now.

Everybody knows that it would have made a big difference on that debate when Donald Trump said it was and Joe Biden said, no, no, no, 51 authorities.

Everybody knows that may have influenced, a poll said that, may have influenced the election.

No apologies.

Everybody knew that DeShinko

and Charles, or whatever his name, Dolan,

and Christopher Steele were frauds, and especially Glenn Simpson, and that Hillary Clinton took over an old Never Trumper file, inflated it with a million bucks, got the FBI on it to hire Christopher Steele as a consultant informant, hid her so-called legal expenses, and she was fined and cited for that violation through Perkins-Coey, Fusion GPS, DNC.

And that file was fraudulent.

It was made up.

I said that the first time I saw it.

There was no Russian consulate in Florida.

Michael Cohen didn't go

to, I think it was the Czech Republic.

And that was when he was telling the truth.

And all the details about his wife being

and her family being prominent, oligarch was false.

Everything in it was false.

He didn't urinate in a hotel room.

We know that was made up.

And yet we wasted 22 months

and $40 million to know what was obvious.

No apology.

In fact, not only no apologies, they got Pulitzer Prize winners, some of the reporters.

So

every time they give these monstrous lies, there's no apologies.

And why should they?

Because in their way, they're just narratives.

They're postmodern, Foucaultian, Lacan, Derrida, Narada, narratives.

They were useful.

So that's what they look like.

Well, they were useful at the time because when we went through the Mueller investigation, when we went through the laptop, we crippled Donald Trump.

And therefore, we were able to stop him.

We had anonymous, anonymous.

He was burrowed.

deep into the Homeland Security.

He was a minor official, but we said he was one of the major operatives in the Trump administration.

We lied.

And then we printed his op-ed because it did what it was supposed to do.

It weakened this right-wing agenda, so they think.

And we got Admiral McRaven, and he came in and wrote an op-ed and said Trump should leave the sooner the better.

And then we got all of the four stars, McCaffrey, McChrystal, Matt, all of them to say that Trump was Hitler, that he was Mussolini, that he was a liar, that he was dangerous.

We got Mark Milley to call the Chinese.

We did all of this.

And yes, we do not want this to be done to us.

If right now, Jack, a retired four-star general, Stanley McChrystal, says, or Jim Mattis says,

or McCaffrey says, or McGraven says

that Joe Biden is senile.

or he's dangerous, or the Afghanistan is a disaster, and he should be removed sooner or later, or his weaponization of the DOJ or the FBI is Mussolini-like,

or

his hounding of individual people at school boards, or the way he conducted the Mar-Lago raid is remnant of, it's Nazi-like.

And I'm just quoting from what they've said.

You know what's going to happen to those people?

You're going to get Merrick Garland to call up the Pentagon, and they're all going to be slapped with a Code 88 uniform code of military justice, and they're going to be court-martialed for disparaging the commander-in-chief.

Trust me, they would in two seconds.

And that's not going to happen.

First, they're not going to say anything because they're not equally going to apply their standards of correct behavior on the part of the, and second of all, they're not going to say anything

because they're going to say something with Donald Trump because they know that public, that the media and the Pentagon are not going to do anything to them.

It's not going to cost them a board chair

position or now.

Now?

Now?

Oh, man,

they would destroy them if they ever criticize the commander-in-chief.

They would go after him like you wouldn't believe.

And they know that.

And so what we're talking about, I guess, to sum up and end

this particular narrative is

they understand deterrence.

They are saying to the American people, We are SOBs.

We're capable of everything and anything.

Now, which side do you want to be on?

Right.

Because if you're on our side, you can do what Hunter Biden is.

There's no consequences.

If you don't like an election, call up the registrar.

We don't care.

If you want to withhold the voting, if you want to say that the voting machines are crooked like Jill Stein, go ahead.

She did in 2016.

If you want to subvert democracy and tell the electors to renounce their constitutional duties and vote for someone

that didn't win your particular state's popular vote, go ahead and do it.

The Hollywood Stars got coordinated in a conspiratorial fashion.

They did it in 2016.

There's no consequences.

If you want to be Barbara Boxer and 32 Democrats and say, you know what, we're not going to certify the Ohio count and hold up the whole election.

We're going to try to do that.

Don't worry.

They did it in 2004.

If you're Al Gore and the registrar,

the attorney general says, well, the votes have been counted and they have been certified in Florida.

Oh, Oh, no, we're going to sue.

We're going to sue and hold up the entire election for a month.

There's a hanging chad.

And so, no problem.

You can do all of that as long as you're on our side

because the Republicans play by the Marcus of Queensbury rules.

But if you don't do that

and you want to go on the other side, then you're going to be in big trouble.

That's the message.

What did Harry Reid say, Victor?

Yeah, that's a very good thing, Harry Reid.

He said, when they asked him, do you have any remorse that you got on the floor of the U.S.

Senate and said that for a decade, Mitt Romney had not paid fully his income taxes?

And did you have evidence for that?

He said it worked, didn't it?

He lost.

And that was a summation.

And they can't canonize Harry Reid.

And so, or when Jen Clyber during the first Tea Party, remember that?

That was in 2010, and there was a big tea Party, and he and some African-American legislators walked through and said that they were, what did he say, that they were, things were thrown at them.

They were spit on.

Spit on.

They used the N-word.

There was never any evidence that that was all concocted, all made up.

So it doesn't, it doesn't, that's, that's the message that they're trying to say.

That's what we're really getting down to.

Join the winning side.

It's sort of like in the Soviet Union.

If you're part of the nomenclature and you join the party, you're exempt.

If you're not, well, you're on your own.

And I think that's, I think people,

people say to me, well, you're an academic and you spent your whole life.

How did you deal with those 94% of all academics are left-wing?

And I'm just using that percentage because that's a percentage of those who give money to political campaigns.

94% go to left-wing or democratic causes.

And I said, I don't, and they said, why are they so left-wing?

Is it they have tenure?

They're exempt from the worrying about losing losing their job, they have guaranteed step increases, they have a nine-month work year, is it because they teach their one or two classes a semester?

CSU, we taught four and sometimes five a semester, but nevertheless, what is it that makes them, are they idealistic?

Does they deal with words?

And I said, no.

No, no, no.

They understand if you want to get tenure and you want to be promoted and you want to be liked, you just parrot the majority cause.

If it paid better, they'd be fascist.

It really would.

I think they also know, Victor, I'm assuming that even if they had the tenure, et cetera, that if they crossed the line, a way would be found to.

What is that way?

And I talked, I'm going to recite a conversation I had with a

op-ed writer.

I won't mention his name.

I won't give you enough information, but he's pretty.

Tell me offline.

I have a feeling I'm out of work.

And I said to him,

why do you go back and forth all the time on the one hand, on the other hand?

Are you sober and judicious?

And he said to me, do you really believe

that

a hardcore conservative

as opposed to a milquetoast Republican would get their books reviewed in the New York Review books or the New York Times Book Review, or

would they be on Network News ever as a commentator?

Or would they be invited to go speak at Harvard?

Or would they get a Pulitzer Prize?

Do you really believe that, Victor?

I said, no, I don't believe that.

Okay.

So why should I go out and carry water?

That's how they put it, for the right-wing cause when you completely are alienated to nothing other than a few right-wing right-wing awards and Fox News.

That's what he said.

And he said, if you say that to anybody, I'm going to deny it.

And that was pretty much what he said.

And he was right.

And I said, you're right about that.

But the only thing you're wrong about is, and I said, who gives ASHIT?

So what?

Who cares?

Who cares if the New York Review of Books?

Who cares this?

This is a whole new world now.

There's people who go on the internet and create their own books and outsell people.

Who care?

You think that, look at

Anthony Oliver.

The guy had no connections whatsoever.

He just put it out on his cell phone and bam.

I said, so, and I was telling him that this is a wide open.

There's no custodians anymore.

Who cares what the Washington Post says anymore?

Who cares what the New York View of Book says?

It doesn't matter.

I mean, it matters in your little coterie of insiders.

Oh, wow, that was a great review.

But for the guy out who buys books, it doesn't matter.

Well, you mentioned Anthony Oliver.

And Victor,

we've got to move on.

But

maybe when we come back.

I'd like to talk about him because he's been in the news lately.

Yeah, and that, and also get your opinion on

the debates, which if you

I'm not, I have not listened, so if you've spoken the same.

We had a little bit preliminary, but I'd like to talk about

the second wind analysis of the debates because it's a little different different than what people were saying i haven't changed my view but it's a little different yeah well let's get to that right after this uh final important message

we're back with the victor davis hansen show so How about Victor,

we get your take on the debates and then we'll,

you know, you and I, on our last podcast we recorded, I think it was the last one.

Anyway, you gave,

you talked about Anthony Oliver and

you've written an essay about, in part about him for the new criterion.

I haven't seen it, but you talked about your, you had your thoughts.

And so there's been a wrinkle here.

So your

reflections on

Oliver, which come in response from him to the debate, where his song and tune was part of the debate, came up as a question.

So anyway, first, Victor, your general thoughts about the debate, as you said, the second wind, and then your thoughts about Oliver, please.

Yeah, I didn't realize that Mike Pence and Roswami had the most talking time.

I think it was 11 or 10 minutes.

So

the after effect was that

Haley improved herself.

She did better.

And I think that I agree with that.

She did better after the debate.

She was in a better position.

I don't know if the polls show a little bit of creep up.

And why is that?

Because

she

kind of cunningly looked at

the field and she said, there is no

neoconservative, globalist,

2009 Republican hawk.

So I'm going to be all in for whatever Ukraine needs.

Nobody's saying that quite.

Pence did a little bit.

And then she's the only woman on the stage.

And

she showed she was tough.

She quoted Margaret Thatcher.

So if you want

a candidate that reflects,

but is an effective voice or megaphone for what, I guess you could say, the post-Reagan Republican was and what would that be

what George H.W.

Bush how he veered away from Reaganism or George W.

Bush with who was a good president I think in some ways a really good president but you know it was

it was Janet Napolitano gets the what was that medal of freedom and you get no child left behind and you get prescription drug and all of that and you get an open border,

quote, comprehensive immigration.

I can't stand that phrase.

And so, or you have Jeb Bush, or you have Bob Dole running in 1996,

or you have

Mitt Romney running in 2012, or John McCain.

If you like that, that's what you got.

But you got it, and it's a very, a very

good package.

She's attractive, she's young, She's well-spoken.

So she improved herself.

If you think there's any alternative, it was mixed.

First of all, people thought that DeSantis did not dominate as he had to do.

But then when

you went back and looked at what he actually said,

he did.

He went through pretty things.

He had only, I think, one weak moment.

And that has been remarked upon.

And I don't know why he did that, but they asked people, and I think he got confused because they said, would you support Donald Trump, the nominee?

And

everybody was looking around for a second because they didn't.

And then they had the quality, if he is convicted, well, everybody on the stage has to support the nominee or they wouldn't be allowed to be on the stage, right?

And we'll see if they apply that to Trump because.

Part of the requisite of being on the debates is you have to pledge that if you don't win the nomination, you will support the person who does.

But they added that qualifier.

And then before he put his hand up, you remember that?

He looked around to see if other hands were going up.

And that conveyed,

as the pundits looked, I think they were right about that, some uncertainty.

But when you actually look at his positions, it was really good.

So what was the criticism of him?

He was tough.

He made,

but it's

that I think what it was was the delivery, that his voice or his scowl, but he needs to lighten up, maybe.

That was all I could see.

But he didn't do himself any damage.

He's in a holding pattern.

So if he wants to emerge to increase his lead, he's number two.

Then he's going to have to smile more.

He's going to have to be witty.

He's not going to have to be so serious.

But on the issues, there's no one who's better qualified.

And then

I don't, I mean, why is Asa Hutchinson there?

I mean, he's not even, he's so out of touch with the field.

Is he the Never Trump candidate, the bulwark candidate, the dispatch candidate, the National Review candidate?

Is that the point?

Why is he there?

Victor, there are guys who just look in the mirror and have always seen the president looking back at them.

So I have a feeling it's probably a feeling he's had from youth, or maybe the governor of North Dakota, the same thing.

Well, I felt, and I mentioned that one to Sammy, and I haven't changed at all.

I don't think the

consensus has changed on him.

Didn't he have a torn Achilles?

Bergham, I think he had a

Douglas, I think his name's Bergham.

He had a

torn Achilles, so he was in pain, but he was very nervous and tense.

But I thought he did pretty well.

But he's not a serious, you're right.

He's not a serious candidate.

So take those two out.

I think they won't be there.

I think they have a stagger, at least for the first two.

If you don't get 1%

and then you have to get two or three,

you have to get

a particular level of

polling

gravitas each.

But I think it's stop.

I think they should just keep going.

You know what I mean?

So finally, you have to get 10% or 15%, and you get down just to two candidates.

That would be what they should.

But take those guys away.

Why is Chris Christie there?

i you know

i he's just a as i said he's a suicide vest his whole point is negative it's either it was i think his mission i thought he was going to go after desantis but his mission was to blow up trump and to blow up ross ras uh wami

ros and wami or whatever his name is and

vivaik, I guess you pronounce it.

So that interchange between the two was

dominated.

I don't think Vivak, everybody says he did, I don't think he helped himself because he said certain things that were ridiculous.

I mean,

people

said

he got on China and someone said

you had investments in China.

He denied that.

He did.

He had two subsidiaries.

Mark Thiessen, I think, wrote about it in detail.

And then when he said everybody was bought and paid for on the stage,

does that mean they were all on corporate boards?

Or what?

I mean, I could say that about him.

So I came out yesterday that he hadn't voted.

Yeah, I mean,

you just don't.

If you're going to elect somebody who

is not a politician, then we usually do, we do it with somebody like Ross Perot or Donald Trump that's been around.

Everybody knows them.

They're in business.

They've been public figures, but nobody knows anything about him.

And then when he goes in there and he screams and yells and gets things, he's very articulate.

So I think he's,

I don't think he blew it.

I don't think he gained anything.

I think people are going to get tired of Christie.

He doesn't really say what he wants to do.

The problem DeSantis

had was he didn't speak as much as the others, but

he had the actual agenda.

He said, I'm going to do this on the border.

I'm going to do this with a cartel.

I'm going to do this, this

on the economy.

This is what we're going to do in energy.

But

he didn't say it in a way that resonated.

But the other people who were more, I guess,

better rhetoricians, they were just negative.

They were just fighting with each other.

And

Russ Wami's whole point is, I guess it's to defend Trump and be vice president.

It's not going to happen.

Maybe people are talking about him as drain the swamps or something, but he seems to be aiming at a high-appointed position.

And I haven't changed my view, as I told Sammy about Pence.

I was really surprised at that, Jack,

because

he, I know that he's a evangelical Christian, but when he was vice president, he let that on, but it wasn't the centerpiece of his candidacy.

or I should say, it hasn't been the centerpiece of his candidacy that I can tell, and it hasn't been

emphasized when he, it had not been emphasized when he was vice president, number one.

And number two, he was always considered a very

mild and what, easygoing guy.

But when he got on there, he had been advised to accentuate that Jesus Christ was his personal Lord and Savior.

That's fine.

But he did it again and again and again.

And then he really went,

his duty was to destroy buyback, I guess, and then to go creep up into the third place.

So I don't, and he talked the most.

He was interrupted.

In fact, I couldn't believe that they had to tell Mike Pence to quiet down.

So I don't think he helped himself at all.

But I don't, on the other hand, he was polling about 2%.

So I think what they should probably do is get rid of Hutchinson and Bergham.

And then they need to,

I would get rid of anybody who's polling one or two percent.

and that would probably be

Christie, and it would probably,

I don't know who else, but Pence is probably, and then you would be with Scott.

I like, it would be a good debate if you had Scott and Haley and Virak and DeSantis, four of them.

And then you could eliminate two more.

And no questions about UFOs or other similarities.

The

worst moment is why did you have a student, was it from the Young Americans for Freedom, talk about on a TikTok thing about climate change?

It was just a joke.

And I thought that was DeSantis' best moment.

We don't need to go into this.

Remember when he said, take your poll, how many believe?

So let's just debate it.

But why did they have that in there?

I mean, that's just silly.

It was stupid to have some students tell the candidates what's your, it's the most important issue for young people, maybe young people in the university, which is about 40% of young people.

But I can tell you, when I'm looking out the window at this almond orchard, I see a guy in a machine who's about 25, and he's been working all night long, shaking and sweeping up almonds.

Climate change is not the most important issue in his life.

And I have today an electrician on a Sunday who's trying to find a short in one of the circuits in this ancient house, and he's on his hands and knees under the house.

And I've been with him yesterday under the house, and neither one of us talked about climate change.

He's very young.

So that's not the issue for having.

And I don't understand the issue.

If you're thinking about Maui and the fire, or you're thinking about the aspen fire or the paradise fire, it's about letting grass grow uncontrolled in Maui or having political hacks in civil positions that should have have not been there, or it's poor forest management in California.

But it's not this idea that suddenly for the first time in the

billion year history of the planet,

we heated it up in a way that we have to shut down the economy to save the planet.

And I don't know why they did that.

I have a feeling, Victor, there's a lot of younger Americans who live exclusively online and get their information from a source like Reddit.

And so, if you're Reddit educated versus non, that's probably a dividing line.

Yeah.

And then we go to, then we get to what you asked, Jack.

They played Oliver Anthony's song.

And that was sort of a

lead-in

to Why Were People Angry?

And that song is angry, and it's economically, that was the theme of the song, that miners are being screwed over, why we worry about Jeffrey Epstein, or people in Appalachia

don't have any money, but people on welfare are obese,

and people who are not on welfare are being put in the ground.

And so

that sparked a whole series of controversies.

And it turned out whether Oliver Anthony, who's a young guy, very idealistic, and I admire him, he said he doesn't want a producer.

He does not want an agent.

He does not want to get into the morass of the national country scene.

He just wants to sing his songs, revive the bluegrass tradition of Appalachia,

West Virginia, I don't know, southern or eastern Ohio, Pennsylvania area, and coal mining area, and then

restore that tradition and then be a commentator to bring people together.

Okay, I get that.

And that's very admirable.

He was living in a trailer.

And

you and I talked,

and I'd mentioned that to Sammy about Mr.

Gangsta number two song.

So why Oliver Anthony is being attacked?

He's living in a trailer that I think he bought for $750.

And Mr.

Gangsta, who has the most

pornographic song, as we mentioned, that I've ever heard, it's the worst song.

It has terrible lyrics, terrible music, but it's just creepy.

It's scatological.

Everything about it is repulsive.

And he's talking in that song about his Bentley Spur, which is, I didn't even know what it was, Jack.

It's a $300,000 automobile.

So

that's something the leftist can't get into, that you have an African-American young man who's a multi-multi, multi-millionaire splurging on a needless $300,000 car, bragging about it in a song as he

unleashes the most misogynist, miscut that, Robert, for a minute,

as he unleashes a misogynist song that's pornographic.

that belittles

really in a terrible way women.

So

I'm just laying the foundation for what's happened since we talked about the emergence of that song.

So the left has pounced on

Mr.

Anthony.

And I think they did it not just because North men,

men, rich men north of Richmond, and that's kind of, I think he picked Richmond, not just because that's sort of the dividing line.

Mason Dixon, or it's a straight drive, as you and I talked to Washington, D.C.

He's talking about people in Washington, lobbyists, politicians.

But it also rhymes with rich men, rich men.

He does that with minors and minors.

And that's kind of unusual in country music to do that.

But the other thing is that once he put the welfare line in, and once he put the minors in,

then there was going to be a pushback.

Because nobody likes to, nobody on the left likes minors.

Hillary Clinton said she was going to shut them down.

Joe Biden said they're going to have to learn coding.

Barack Obama said that they were clingers

in Pennsylvania,

western Pennsylvania.

So he was championing minors.

And as far as the left is concerned, they should not exist.

And then he said, if you're 5'3 and 300 pounds,

you shouldn't be buying fudge on welfare.

And that just set them.

Oh, he's fat shaming.

Oh, he's he's Reagan talking about welfare queens.

Oh, he's racist.

We know the code.

Well, no, we don't know the code because in Appalachia or where he grew up, the people on welfare are 99, 99%

white.

So I don't think there's very many black men or women or Latinos in the coal mining area that are on welfare.

And so that's what he was talking about.

So then what happens is they pounce on him.

And we mentioned that with Sammy, the Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, all of them went after him.

He's deserving of mockery.

He is a right-wing racist.

And he was shocked by it.

He was totally shocked.

I think he really thought

that because this song resonated not just in the South, but all over the United States, all over the world, it was a number one, as we keep saying on every chart, still may be as I speak, that he thought people

he was bringing people together against government that is insensitive and certain events like we saw in maui tend to to bear out what his argument is but you can't expect him to be a student of politics at that age given what he says about himself

so i don't think he had any idea that the left was going to go after him and call him a Trumper because he was male, because he was Southern, because he had an Appalachian accent, because he was Christian.

He used the word Lord, I think, twice.

And that he's heterosexual.

That was just bang, bang, bang.

He checked all the wrong boxes.

And then he gave the game away when he talked about Richmond being a better place than where Richmond are and they were off to the races.

Well, he meant New York and he was anti-Semitic and Richmond was a capital of the Confederacy.

And this is, you know, the night they drove Dixie down all over again.

And then he came out and he said, wait a minute, Fox shouldn't have done that.

They didn't have,

I was talking about those people on the stage.

They're politicians.

He had a point, wasn't he?

That most of them are north of Richmond.

Not all of them, but they have been.

But he wanted to have it both ways.

And then you wanted to stop and say, Oliver, whether you like it or not,

or whether I like it or not, 99.9% of the people who are attacking you are on the left.

And they're attacking you for two reasons.

Because you put themes in that song that they will not tolerate.

And they want to shut you down.

And two, you're a white male Christian heterosexual southerner.

So you lose, lose, lose.

You understand that?

Now, you don't like people on the right on Fox News, Laura Ingram, and others have championed you and given you airtime and tried to promote and promulgate your song.

You think that's partisan.

But 99.9% of the people on the right are not going to criticize you.

We had one, Mr.

Wright, I suppose, at National Review, but I don't think he's a man of the right.

So what I'm trying to say is, whether you like it or not, because of who you are and what you sang and what you said, the left hates your guts and the right is defending you.

That's end of story.

So he's trying to say, I'm above all this.

I don't care who's defending me.

I don't care who's attacking me.

I wrote a song.

I had certain beliefs.

I'm trying to bring people together.

Well, unfortunately, in this climate, when you mention people cheating on welfare, or you mention Jeffrey Epstein getting special treatment,

or you mention minors being neglected, or you talk about bad people in the north, in the north, i.e.

Washington, which is 90%

black and has a Democratic White House and a Democratic House right now.

People are not going to see it here, what you meant.

They're going to see it as a Merle updated what?

Okie from Muskogee Jack or Jason Aldean.

Don't try, try that in a small town.

And that's why you're going to be pigeonholed.

He said, I don't want to be pigeonholed.

Well, what should he have said?

He should have said, look, this was not a political song.

I am not a Republican.

I am not a Democrat.

I am a populist.

To the degree that somebody cares about people in East Palestine, Ohio, I don't care what party they're in.

I don't care.

I just want want people to

show some consideration for the losers in this capitalist globalist system.

And

I understand, though, that if people are attacking me, that's mostly from the left.

So I appreciate people on the right defending me, and I want to convince people on the left not to do that, because I didn't mean to.

He could have said that.

Yeah.

You wonder about the subtleties of people's own psychologies, Victor, because I don't, the one thing, I could be wrong here, here, that his song didn't seem to touch on was race.

And race is the overlying

attack by the left.

So

not a word.

They don't care about class.

They don't care.

We've talked about that before.

That was the contribution of Barack Obama to the history of the United States.

He took a traditional

class argument that every Democratic

nominee, whether it was George McGovern or whether it was Hubert Humphrey or JFK or LBJ or Bill Clinton.

Yes, they were championing the non-white, but they were also saying, We're this is a matter of class that transcends race.

Our constituents are poor people who happen to be any color.

Obama came along and said, you know what, race is not getting enough attention, partly because we look at it as a 88%, 12%

binary white, black, but I'm going to redefine it as the non-white.

So I'm going to go resurrect crazy Jesse Jackson shakedown Operation Push and the Rainbow Coalition.

So if you're gay,

you can join.

If you're poor, you can join.

But it's basically race, race, race.

And that's what he did.

And he got a 30% constituency.

And ever since then, we've suffered from it.

What do I mean by suffering?

I keep bringing up LeBron James.

He's a victim.

So is Oprah.

So is Megan Markle.

So is Maxine Waters and her fraudulent banker husband.

So is Al Sharpen and his shenanigans and his tax-exempt tax cheating, whatever he was doing.

It doesn't matter about Jesse Smollett.

Jesse Smollett's a victim, and it's perverted our entire discourse and jurisprudence because it doesn't matter about class anymore.

And he doesn't.

And so that's what he was trying to restore was the idea of class.

But he had nothing to do with race.

But people are saying there is no such thing as class.

That's not the divide.

It's too mobile.

Marxism doesn't work because people can make money one generation, lose it the next, and they're not permanent victims.

So class doesn't work anymore as a grievance and a democratic constituency and talking point.

Race does.

It's immutable.

Yes, we believe in constructing your gender.

If you have a penis and two testicles, you can construct yourself as

female.

However,

if you're white and you say that now you feel black, you were really born black and you want to change yourself into a black person like Rachel Dozo.

or

you want to be a Native American like Elizabeth Warren or Warren Churchill.

You can't do that.

You can't construct.

It's permanent.

It's immutable.

It's there.

And therefore, it's a complete brand of victimization and oppression.

And we can use this forever.

It's never going to, we're never going to forget slave.

We're never going to forget Jim's Cole.

Yes, we're in the 60th year of affirmative action.

It's going to go on for 100 years.

And

that gives us a constituency.

All the people now who are not white, they don't suffer from white rage, white privilege, white supremacy.

That's what it was all about.

And

that's why they hated him.

He was trying to bring in

working all day,

and they don't like that because he is an oppressor

by virtuous race.

So Oliver

Anthony is, you know, he's a victimizer.

Who is he victimizing?

He's victimizing,

I don't know, he's victimizing Chris Rock.

He's victimizing, as I said, Oprah.

That's who he's victimizing.

And that's why he's, you should, you should realize that that's why they're going after her.

Yeah,

I apologize.

I know I called him Anthony Oliver, so forgive me, listeners.

Also,

Oliver Anthony, isn't it?

Yeah, well, I but yeah, I didn't know you did that, but you know what?

That's not even his real name.

That's just a, I think that was his grandfather's name.

Yeah, I forgot.

Lansman, he's got a longer last name, but

I've been listening.

Leave it to me to muck it up.

Oh, don't worry about it.

I've been listening to some of his songs.

I don't have a dollar and I want to go home.

They're pretty good songs, actually.

He says he's very modest.

He says he's not a good musician.

He doesn't doesn't have a good voice.

I don't know if he's a great guitarist.

I don't know anything about guitar.

I have friends.

One of my closest friends is Clint Black, the country west.

And he's a really wonderful person.

I've listened to him about music.

He's trying to explain how to play the guitar to me sometimes.

But I don't understand it at all.

But he does have, for me, he has an adequate ability to play, but he has a wonderful voice.

What was really good about the song, I think, again,

I've emphasized that,

is it wasn't just the lyrics and the meaning.

What made it,

people have, if they had a bad voice and a bad tune, nobody listened to it.

But it was

sincere when he said, oh,

you know,

he said, I want to, you know, when I wake up and I want it to go, and it doesn't, it's too real.

And he was able to get angry in his voice and then soft.

And what the Romans called variatio, variation in prose and music is the key to

winning an audience.

And so

he had rhyme,

and then he had homonyms or homographics or whatever the term is for two words that sound exactly alike, but they mean different things and they're spelled differently.

Minors, minors,

or richmen, rich men.

And besides that,

there's authenticity.

tone volume was very, it was, you never know what to expect.

I came out of nowhere after all this stuff.

And all of a sudden, if you're five foot three and you weigh 300 pounds, fudge rounds, you know, that was just out of the blue.

Yeah.

I mentioned, I think the last time we spoke, Victor, to me, there's a little, there's a Bob Dylanist here.

Bob Dylan was not a, he was no pericomo when it came to the quality of a voice.

But damn, that voice and those lyrics

worked together.

So I think absolutely, yeah, you're absolutely right about Bob Dylan.

I've always liked Bob Dylan.

You know, I know that he was, he had his problems with his, people said he was cruel to women or he used heroin or whatever, but there's never been anybody that had that many songs in such range as a popular.

And he's actually a humble guy for getting all that attention.

I go back to that.

I think you and I mentioned that once

when he was walking before a concert.

Right, in New Jersey, right?

He was in New Jersey, and the local police picked him up and he had no idea.

He told him he was Bob Dylan.

They didn't have any idea who he was.

They took him down to book him.

He was going to be late for his concert.

He looked scruffy.

One person recognized him, an older person.

I guess it was a secretary or a bailiff or somebody.

And said, that's Bob Dylan.

He explained who he was.

They took him back in the car and they took him to the concert.

And this was,

and guess what?

They asked him, isn't this bad?

He said, no, I would arrest me too if I looked like I did without AD.

And that was right during the Skip Gates thing, where he was trying to break into his own home to get, he'd locked himself out.

And then, remember, the police came and didn't know who he was.

He was sure that because they didn't know who he was, they were racist.

And then they put little plastic things on his hands, cuffs, and he was going to donate those to the Smithsonian slavery exhibit.

And it was all a big psychodrama was it was just juxtaposed so

good old days of the beer summit you know so beer summit yeah we were off to the we were getting a glimpse of the next eight years with barack obama hey if i could just say one thing quickly before we end up uh geographically having lived um north of Richmond once upon a time with Mrs.

Fowler and a few of the kids, we lived in Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania, which is a,

when we first moved there,

well, sure.

I mean, just a tremendous place with Civil War buffs and a lot of, I lived atop of Maurice Heights and a lot of

where we were very close to Sunken Road, so many ghosts in that town, but it is a commuter

community for Washington, D.C., which became more so once a train went.

And so there's no question.

And Fredericksburg is probably, that's the city.

Next stop is Richmond between Richmond and Washington.

so um yeah north of richmond richmond i to me immediately it's oh you're you're talking about the very well-heeled bureaucratic uh regulatory class who is uh determining everything about america how how our toilets flush and what light bulbs we can use and

uh how much how we're going to have to have electric cars someday so hey victor uh thanks for all the wisdom you shared And thanks to our listeners for joining us today.

I would like to encourage those of you who have

yet to sign up for the thing I do, Civil Thoughts.

Go to civilthoughts.com and I write a free weekly email newsletter that has 14

suggested readings, articles I've come across the previous week.

Here's the link.

Here's an excerpt.

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And it's no risk.

We're not charging anything.

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We

thank you, no matter what platform you listen to this show on or you download this podcast.

Those who do so via iTunes and Apple can rate the show from zero to five stars.

Once again, practically everyone is giving Victor five stars.

They'd give him 10 if they could, but the limit is five.

Some people leave comments.

And here's a short and sweet one from Dan, who's, I guess he's 42 years old.

He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

It's just titled Excellent.

And this is applicable to

our last podcast that we have recorded, Victor.

Even though it's

really not funny, listening to Victor recite those rap lyrics almost gave me a heart attack.

That's damn.

So yeah, that was.

That was interesting.

It had a character.

And then I did, Victor, I did get several emails from people

just thrilled by the discussion of wrestling and Lucal Libre.

So I think that's something to

look into a little more deeply

in a future show.

I never understood, just to interrupt, I never understood why those, why did they talk out of the corner of their mouth?

You know what I mean?

They would go, oh, they would.

It's like Edward G.

Robinson, right?

Yeah,

they would think that like there was a cigar.

I understood why Curtis LeMay had Bell's palsy.

Ray Stevens would always, and he'd always say, I never knew what a pencil neck was.

Well, yeah, there was a there was a manager who was a bad guy on the East Coast, Freddie Blassey.

He came to Fresno.

He was called Classy Freddie Belassie.

And he'd always come to Fresno and he'd say, Hey,

you stick, you

hicks.

You never been to the big city, huh?

That's where I come from.

And he'd call it you, you pepper bellies, you chili bellies.

It was all anti-Hispanic.

And then Pepper would go out and

Pepper Gomez.

And I think it was Luis Martinez.

At the same time, there was a Hispanic champion on the East Coast, too.

Pedro Morales was a champion.

I remember, but

it's so funny because big-time wrestling, that's what they called it.

Yeah.

They understood the power.

There's an article in the Wall Street Journal about tribalism and this pre-civilizational tug that people want to identify for their own safety, I guess, or advancement with their tribe, their superficial parents.

And that we all say we're, you know, we're a nation of ideas, but that

whole phenomenon of wrestling appeared to tribalism.

Remember the sheik?

That was the Arab community.

Sure, yeah.

And then there was.

the white working class community.

And then there was the black community.

And then there was the Hispanic community, and they even had, oh, I remember Mitsu Awakawa.

Do you remember him?

Mitsu Awakawa?

I don't remember him.

No.

Oh, man, that was really.

He and Mitsu Awakawa, they had two tag teams, and they were kind of like, looked like sumo wrestlers.

And they wore a Japanese flag headband.

And they would talk.

I would come home from, I told you, I would get mad at the bus driver because my grandparents and mom didn't want me to watch it.

But I'd ride my bike down to my grandparents house where i'm living now and then i'd watch it and they would wear these headbands and talk about why you know we beat on december 7th we surprised you and you know they were probably like fifth generation american japanese right and they had the script down as if they were tojo uh

and Yamamoto or something.

And then they would relive and they would just

get booed and booed and right.

We had a guy like that, Taru Tanaka, I think was, and it was a Mr.

Fuji who I remember in their own right.

And then I think they, you know, remember they all had a, they all had certain holes.

So the Japanese wrestlers had the judo chop.

Remember, they would do judo chops that were supposed to be unfair to the throat.

And it was

a camel clutch.

I cannot believe all that.

And then all of a sudden, Pepper would start speaking with this heavily accented English.

And then he'd say to the host outside the ring, and now if you won't mind, I want to speak to my people.

And then he would go speak in Spanish really fast.

Those are just, it's just incredible that

they would accentuate that so much.

It made Vince and Linda McMahon billionaires.

Yeah.

It did.

And then everybody said, well, it's fake.

And so when my parents were gone, I had two brothers and a cousin, and we would play big-time wrestling, right?

Tag team.

And I swear to God, we'd throw each other on the sofa, and we all got hurt.

And my dad sat us down.

He said, you think that's fake?

Those men weigh 250 pounds and they're throwing each other.

I don't care if you stage it.

I don't care if it's choreographed.

Those guys know what you're doing.

You don't.

Actually,

I had a friend who's a lawyer and a CPA, big dude, and he's a great guy, Seth.

And he had been a professional wrestler.

And there was a humongous wrestler on the East Coast, Kamala, the Ugandan giant.

And Kamala had to be like 400, 500 pounds, but still nimble.

He could get on top of the turnbuckle and then jump off.

And so Seth,

that's not his wrestling name, but he was on his back when he should have been on his stomach or on his stomach when he should have been on his back.

And here comes 400 plus pounds of Kamala kamala on him and

ruined him so but these guys really took beating no they were they were real athletes yeah they were i mean they did all these stunts and i know it was choreographed but man anybody who could jump from the top of the turnstile all the way down on a person's throat and not hurt him and not hurt himself

incredible or pick up a guy 250 pounds and throw him on the canvas

yeah the movie the wrestler with mickey

that was a good movie that was the best movie he ever made you very entertaining.

I think a lot of truth in it.

Well, anyway, Victor, we could go down memory lines for hours on this.

And I know

you've got to go, and I've got to go.

Thanks, 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-Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you again.

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