War, Political Parties and Child Diplomacy

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Hello, and welcome to our listeners of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is our Friday news roundup, so we've got quite quite a few things we are recording a week ahead of time, but we will be looking at the Ukrainian,

I always want to call it the Ukrainian war, the war in Ukraine, the possible third party, the possibilities of a third party in our 2024 election, and a little bit maybe about Biden internationally.

So stay with us, and we will be right back.

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Victor, how are you doing today?

Well, it's going to be 112, supposedly in the San Joaquin Valley.

Death Valley, I hear, might be up to 131.

Yeah.

And I've been driving a lot.

I had been driving.

I've been re-examining California's road system, so I can't talk because this is supposed to be the upbeat moment.

But I-5 has turned into the 99 or the 101, at least.

from the Chico Pass latitude all the way down to Kalinga.

So anyway,

I'm pretty good.

I've been, let me see, what did I do today?

I sprayed the cancer-causing Roundup on weeds around the buildings on the farm.

Let's hope you don't have a cancer.

Then I used my old permit of a cyanide capsules for ground squirrels.

So I went through all the buildings.

and found all of their subterranean lows of interest and put the pellets in and closed it and got a little whiff of it.

So

that's kind of weird.

And

what else did I do?

I've been doing a little puttering around the farm and I wrote some ultras today.

I got a good, I think we'll have one's called the mystic chords of memory.

It's about when you get to a certain age, you look back at things that you thought at the time

were catastrophic or

full of despair and you look at the solidarity of the people working with you to overcome them.

And that reminded me of a line that I've quoted a lot.

It's been with me my whole life.

It's from

the Aeneid, book two.

I think it's line 203 or something.

And when Aeneas tells his almost drowned sailors, the Trojans that are escaping and they've had all these shipwrecks, he says,

you know, basically saying, Sure,

there will come a time when the memory of even this will bring you delight.

That's a great quote.

That's a nice one.

I quoted it in Fields Dream.

This one, one of those quotes, you know, you pick up in your early 20s

and you kind of

keeps with you.

Yes.

Nisus and Euralis that in the funeral games, then they ask him why he thinks he's going to win.

He says he wins because he thinks he can win.

That's a famous quote as well.

There's a lot of treasure quotes like that in Virgil's Aeneid and Horace's too.

I was reading to Author the other day too about

don't you know don't look back,

don't go back to the memory of the past.

And that's kind of the metamorphosis in the metamorphosis when Orpheus charms the dead and charms Pluto and he can get anything and he finally gets to have Eurydice

come back to the world of life as long as he doesn't look back.

And he's almost there into the daylight as he gets out of the underworld and then he looks back.

Why does he look back?

Why do you think he's worried about her?

He doesn't know whether he hasn't heard from her and he worries that she's tired or she's been in the underworld too long.

I don't know, but in that Latin phrase by Virgil, it's you know, it's really

pretty good.

Was was the implication that he should have just trusted his instinct and kept looking forward and known she was there, right?

She was supposed to be following her.

The myth has so many variations.

It's hard to know whether he was, because he had just charmed, he was, you know, with his lyre, and he was such a, he was the founder of Greek music, supposedly.

And it's hard to know whether he was too hubristic that he thought he could do what he needed to do or what he wanted to do, or whether he was,

I guess you'd call it too empathetic, but it's

very sad.

And, you know, it's

all his metamorphosis is a great,

you know, he's not a great poet like Virgil or Horace, but man, there's some really good things in there.

And,

you know,

Horace

has that really great line.

I was thinking that, you know, he's talking about laudatores temporis acti, praisers of the time that has passed.

And he says it

basically.

The Latin that follows that is, you know, that we are worse than our grandparents.

That are worse than our grandparents' generation was our parents who produced us, who are even worse, and we're going to bear more children worse still.

It's kind of depressing, but when you think about it, I was thinking about that line too.

I was reading a lot of Latin today, just for the heck of it, and going back to passages that I really like.

Yeah, it's like I was thinking of my grandparents' family that she had 12 siblings.

And then she had a family of three children.

And my parents lost a child, but they had a family of three.

And my

son has a family of two.

But what I'm saying is there's so many people that had 10 and then six.

and then four and then zero.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And it's, it's, it's a sign of something.

I don't want to judge people, but

it's a sense that we're not spending time

investing in a new generation or the country as

a whole

is more worried about partial birth abortion being legal in every single state than they are that

we're not producing enough people to replace us.

I guess I was thinking about that, Olvid.

I think I was just thinking to correct myself.

I don't know if it was Yubis, but I think he was afraid that

he was going to lose her.

And

he just wanted to look one more time.

You know what I mean?

Kind of neurotic.

Yes.

Because I know the word in Latin is metuens, auidus, lewinde.

He was afraid and he was avid or longing to get a look.

And so he turned, as soon as he turned around, she disappeared as a ghost, into a ghost.

Carnal existence.

Anyway, those are the things I've been doing today.

It's been a very strange weekend.

But those are some beautiful quotes from Ovid and Virgil's and Virgil.

Yeah, all of them.

Those are my three favorite.

Since you mentioned the past and the present and then the comparison, I want to just give a shout out to Kimberly Strassel, who in the Wall Street Journal just wrote an article on Biden, Carter, and I forget the last part.

She did a great job of showing the comparison of the 1970s to now.

And so it ends up as she compares everything about Biden and Carter with,

she doesn't say it, but there is this implicit optimism that perhaps, and she does say we need a leader and a leader on the order of the world.

I think you could retitle that article, Where is Our Reagan?

Because she's arguing that Carter came in supposedly to address the excesses of Nixon and Watergate and

all that.

And he fooled the American people by claiming that he was a southern moderate.

And in fact, he outsources the whole entire administration to hardcore leftists that created such a mess that out of nowhere, Reagan came.

And so she was saying.

Biden came in saying that he was going to address the anger and the fur of all the psychodramas around Trump and COVID.

And then he, just like Carter, he was lying and he outsourced it to the squad and the Obamas and Bernie Sanders and Lucifer Thorne.

And then she kind of takes a pause because the natural next step is: well, Trump is the savior like Reagan.

And she's basically saying no, that you need Reagan.

I don't know if it's a subtle hint up to

for DeSantis or some other candidate.

She's not critical of Trump at at all.

She's a very bright person.

We're very lucky at the Bradley Foundation

that she's our master of ceremonies each May for the Bradley Award.

She does a wonderful job.

She lives in Alaska, you know, and has children.

And her husband is a man of the earth.

I mean, he's a practical guy.

He has a machine shop as well as being very intelligent.

So she's one of those people that...

the right is so lucky to have because she's so pragmatic.

You know, Molly Hemingway is another person, kind of stressful.

That's one of the great strengths of the conservative movement.

They've got a lot of really good.

I've mentioned in the past, Christopher Caldwell, another talent.

Those guys at Powerline, I'm a little prejudiced about.

I'm fond of all three of them: John and Scott and Steve.

They're very good.

Yeah.

Well, since we are talking politics then and what may or may not happen in 2024, how about we address the possibility of a third party?

I see that in

the papers and magazines a lot, people talking about, and the very fact that the polls show that neither side is

excited about

their frontrunners, Biden or Trump, that it sounds, it seems to me there's a big opening for third party, whether it's on the right or the left.

What were your thoughts on that?

I must disagree with you, Sammy.

There is never a big opening for a third party, no matter how much the poverty of the candidates.

It's never worked.

The greatest share that we've ever had was Ross Perot.

And

he, for a time, was leading in the polls, if you remember.

And

he might have actually won

had he not melted down and withdrawn from the race in 1992.

he stopped George Bush.

There's no doubt about it.

He destroyed George H.W.

Bush's reelection.

He only got about 43%.

Had Ross Perot not run,

and that's maybe one of the reasons he did run, he hated the Bushes and he wanted to destroy George H.W.

Bush's reelection.

And so he gave the election to Clinton because for all of the left-wing distractions and dishonesty and disingenuousness, we know that most of the Perot voters were more conservative than left-wing, and they came from George H.W.

Bush.

So he got almost 20% of the vote.

And that's after he pulled out and came back in.

Had he stayed in, he had Pat Cadal.

Cadal, you remember working for a while before he melted down.

He would have got, he might have won.

I don't know.

But that's the closest we've ever come to.

And then he ran again, remember, and I guess it was 96.

And even then, when he was a spent force and people were sick of him, he almost got 10%.

And, you know, I don't want to disagree with you, but third-party candidates can affect an election.

There's no doubt about it.

Yes, that's what I was

suggesting.

If you mean that Al Gore might have lost Florida

because of Ralph Nader

who ran,

that might be true.

And so what we're looking at this cycle, there's a cartoon today and they have the debate.

It says debate of 2024.

And there's Donald Trump very heavy with a

chain and a ball and chain tied to his foot.

And he's in prison tripes on one podium.

And there's a Biden in a walker on the other.

I don't know what the answer is, but if you explore the, there's three possibilities of third-party candidates.

There's the no labels group.

These are kind of like the John.

Remember John Anderson?

He ran for a third party

in 1980.

And he was Mr.

I guess you would call him Mitt Romney Republican, but he was kind of liberal and he took votes.

I think he might have taken votes more from Carter than he did Reagan.

I don't know.

But the no labels is that kind of group.

There was always that third way, you know, that we're going to have the social concerns of the left, but the fiscal discipline of the right.

It never quite works.

And

they're talking about Joe Manchin.

But why would you want to vote for Joe Manchin when he's fluid and flexible and had a brief moment for being flirting with the Republicans while he always, in the end, went to the Democrats?

And then they got so crazy that he knew he can't win.

He can't win in West Virginia.

He will not get reelected.

There's no way.

They're tired of him.

But how about somebody like R.F.K.

Jr.?

I mean, not that he would do it, but what if he's

kind of

bridges both sides of this?

That's the second.

So you get away from a whole third party is what I'm saying, a no labels group that has a platform, not just a personality.

See what I'm saying?

There's a difference.

They're not built around a particular candidate yet.

They're saying we have an alternative to DeSantis and Trump, and we'll find a candidate that reflects that difference.

And people have mentioned Joe Manchin.

And I guess the guy who's the Republican,

he ran for president, the Utah governor, Huntsman.

So those are the type people.

Then there's a second one.

That's the end party rebel.

And that's what Eugene McCarthy destroyed LBJ

when he did so well.

I don't think he won, but he did very well in the New Hampshire primary.

And LBJ pulled out.

And so you have two choices.

You've got the hard from both both sides, kind of like John C.

Fremont from the left and

McClellan from the right challenging Lincoln in 1864.

And so you've got Cornell West, who if he were to siphon off,

I don't know,

there might be

30 million black, oh, probably 25 possible black voters, 25 million.

And if he were to siphon off in key states, three or four million black voters, he could really do some damage to Joe Biden or whoever the nominee is.

I don't know.

Why would he want to do that, do you think?

Why?

Would there be any motive for him to do that?

He wants to

take the Democratic Party even further left.

I don't know why he's running because Joe Biden has outsourced his entire administration to the hard left.

And this is the most left-wing administration we've ever seen.

If you look at the appointments, energy, race, you name it.

And he's never going to see a president before, a presidential candidate who says, I am going to pick my vice president by her race and gender, and that's going to be a black woman.

I don't care who it is.

It's going to be a black.

How could he find any person who would be so bold and so fixated on identity politics?

But that's who Joe Biden was, but he's running against him is what I'm saying.

And he's mad.

He's a very strange guy.

I mean, if you think about it, Obama used to consult him when Obama was a nobody, you know, when Obama had failed as as a House candidate.

He was tinkering around with his book and he was kind of run for Senate and he didn't think he'd had a chance.

Then we remember that both his primary and general election opponent mysteriously had their divorce records leaked by the Chicago apparatus in Obama's favor.

And he kind of said, Well, I don't know how that happened, but you know, it kind of helped me, didn't it?

Yeah, it did, but Barack.

And anyway, but before he became

a person of repute, he would kind of,

can I get to talk to Cornell West, the famous Harvard philosopher?

And Cornell West would kind of mentor him, so to speak.

And then when Obama got really, really famous in the Senate and he ran for president, and Cornell West said, he doesn't take my calls anymore.

Because Cornell West was crazy and he didn't want to be associated because he was feigning as if he was a moderate candidate.

And then remember that great article at Cornell West that he basically showed up at the inauguration with his his mother.

They didn't even give him tickets to the inauguration of Obama.

And he thought that his mere presence there would shock people, so they would give him tickets, and they didn't.

They wouldn't let him in.

They couldn't get in.

Yeah, that's so sad.

He's got, yeah, it is sad.

I mean, whatever you think of him, there's something called gratitude.

Yeah.

Obama never had that, an ample amount.

I always look at Cornell West, and he reminds me of Peter Falk as Colombo.

Like, he has this kind of slovenly exterior, but something

wicked smart is going on behind that.

Came from an upper middle class family.

I think he grew up in Sacramento, as I remember, but

he wasn't at all deprived economically, socially, culturally.

And he, you know, he's, he's made a great career.

Robbie George is a great guy.

He's on our Bradley board.

He debates with Cornell West.

He's affable.

He doesn't have a mean streak is what I'm saying.

A guy like Ellie Mistell, the guy who always says, I don't like white people.

I don't like to be around them.

That guy

he has a mean streak, but Cornell Wells doesn't really.

And then so there's that left-wing challenge within it.

And then you said there's the, I don't know if it's right-wing, the libertarian challenge of Robert Kennedy, and that would be on things like

don't trust the government on health policy, vaccines, probably Second Amendment.

It's nobody's business to go in and try to violate the Second Amendment, take your gun, maybe the border a little bit more.

But

definitely, he would be reaching out to the old white working-class lunch bucket crowd.

At least he says he was.

He does have a personal history that if he were to be

a major third-party candidate, the left would tar and feather him about, put it about three.

He's been married three times, and each time

his

fixations with other women have caused his divorce and caused caused misery and untold

anger from his wife, and they had family.

But I don't judge anybody, but what I'm trying to say is the left will.

And they're already skinning him.

So I don't think either one of them is going to make unless they want to persist with Joe Biden.

And as I said before with Jack, it's kind of a kabuki dance.

Now they're leaking on three fronts about him.

I say that because we didn't hear any of this because these

bureaucracies that have documents about the Biden, or columnists that usually support the Bidens, or news agencies who report things, or staffers who know things behind the scenes, we're told if you leak, you're done.

We're not Republicans.

We enforce Democratic Party lines in solidarity.

And yet,

and yet, in the last three weeks, we have heard on three fronts.

Number one, that Joe Biden is callous and cruel, according to Maureen Dowd and others, that he doesn't recognize the seventh grandchild.

And, you know, we hear she didn't choose her parents.

I talked about that the other night with Sean Hannity and Park.

Good point.

So, but they never mentioned it before.

So that's something that's new.

The second is this corruption.

People are really, there was a poll today that said,

I think it's about 40% of the Democrats think that Joe Biden took bribes.

And that, there's a lot of things.

If you get Mr.

Archer coming in, the associate who took the rap for Hunter, and he testifies, and he has documents that he was sending money to the Bidens and Joe in particular.

And you have an oligarch supposedly who has two phone call tapes with Joe Biden and 15 with Hunter.

And then you have more about barisma and documents from the IRS whistleblowers.

This is all

it just dwarfs.

This is what's so ironic.

It just dwarfs the meager evidence of the four prosecutors who are going after Trump on documents or overvaluing his real estate or making a phone call.

This is really corruption.

It's in the Constitution, bribery.

And so they're leaking it.

They're leaking about the granddaughter.

And now, guess what?

They're leaking about his senelity.

There's people on television that are on the left are saying, oh my gosh,

he tripped again.

And he called Mr.

Zelensky Vladimir, and he thinks that we're fighting in Iraq.

And this is, and Prince Charles doesn't know where he's wandering around.

I mean, he sees Joe.

Oh, hey, over here, Joe.

And he's at the beach, and those little lightweight two-pound aluminum chairs.

I mean, it's kind of hard in the sand, but he has trouble.

So they're allowing that stuff to come out.

And then we have this old yeller article.

It was kind of disingenuous.

It was trying to show everybody with a wink of a nod, oh, you think Biden's senile and he's had it, but he's a mean SOB behind the scenes.

He throws, he uses F-bombs.

Yes.

But yes, that's what you said.

But really, between the lines, you're telling us what a nut he is, that he just flies off the handle like, get off my grass.

Okay, so your suggestion is they're going to get him out and bring somebody else in.

Yes.

No.

No.

They're not.

They're doing this to right away abort his any idea that he's going to run for re-election because they know he will not win and he will not be able to govern.

He'll be completely non-composment.

So, what they're doing is they're opening the field up and getting Gavin Newsom in there.

And this gets rid of Camilla Harris because they're not going to dump Camilla Harris.

Why would they?

They're going to say, Look,

Camilla, Joe can't do it.

And you're welcome to run in the primary against Gavin or anybody else.

We urge you to.

No, wink, nod.

She doesn't have a blank, blank chance.

But we didn't push her out.

It's just that the tenure.

So what is the key to make this thing work?

He's got to finish the next year and a half.

And so notice what I'm saying.

They are leaking evidence of really serious crimes, or at least allowing it to leak, but they're not ever, ever going to say, okay, Republicans, we should impeach him

and convict him.

Of course, yes.

Yes, because that's Kamal Harris.

And notice, they're leaking things about how he flies off the handle, he forgets, he trips, but not to the extent that anybody's going to even consider the 25th Amendment as they did with Trump.

In other words, they don't want him to be removed.

So they're going to give, it's like giving just enough poison to destroy his reelection aspirations, but not enough poison to give you

Kamala Harris

in the next year and a half.

And that's once you get that.

narrative, everything makes sense.

Yes.

Well, what about on the Republican side?

Is there any incentive or is it more incentive to stay in with the party, like Vivek, Ramaswamy, or Chris Christie, and get a position in

the cabinet or something rather than run as a third party?

Although I don't think Chris Christie would get a job.

Ramaswamy might, but

the big worry about the third party, there's only one worry, and it's a legitimate one.

If there is a heated, nasty primary fight,

let's say Trump

hemorrhages some poll numbers and he decides to go into the debate stage of all those, I don't know, what, 15 debates, and it gets nasty and he loses the nomination.

He could threaten to have a third party.

That would be a little different.

That would be a human suicide torpedo.

So, yes, that could happen.

But for now,

what does Nikki Haley want?

What does Mike Pence want?

What does Tim Scott want?

What does Chris Christie want?

Ramaswamy, what does he want?

They're not going to win the nomination.

They're there for one or two reasons.

One reason is if Trump gets indicted, right,

and

he's not viable because he has gag orders or he's in jail.

Who knows what the left is capable of?

And DeSantis, nobody's seen him really debate on a national stage.

But if he gets up there and he's Scott Walker redukes and he implodes, I don't think that's going to happen.

But then you see what I mean?

You have a safety group of people.

They'll say, I'm here.

Put me up here.

And that's one thing.

And then the second, as you alluded to, is I'd like to be Secretary of State.

I want to be Attorney General.

I want to, you know what I mean, Secretary of Defense, that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

And that's so strong, those people would never go third party, right?

No, you wouldn't do it.

Yeah.

The only person who has the ability to go third party and do damage is Donald J.

Trump.

Okay.

All right.

Victor, let's go ahead.

But he would do damage.

Yeah.

Let's go ahead then and take a break and come back and talk about the war in Ukraine.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

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Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, and we haven't heard a lot about the Ukraine war on this show recently.

I mean, we do talk about it all the time, but we really haven't heard a lot in the presses about this spring offensive that the army in Ukraine has been engaged in.

And so, I was wondering if you could give us an update and some of the information on the spring offensive.

Yeah, you know, it's very funny.

I went back

and I

perused all the news accounts in March and April.

In fact, I had, as I had mentioned, alluded to before, we had a big conference at the Hoover Institution on Ukraine in March, and I tried to assemble, you know, generals, former high officials in government, pundits, military officers, retired and serving, et cetera, people from Ukraine.

And everything was talking about the spring offensive.

It was coming, remember?

Coming, coming, coming, coming, coming, coming.

Yes.

And this is,

and all of a sudden

it's silent.

And what was weird about it was

while we were talking about the spring, quote, offensive,

those aerial photographs started to surface among

you know, among the media.

And you looked at this zigzag trenching.

It was something like the Great Wall of China.

I mean, it had reinforced tank traps, it had concrete reinforcements.

It had crossfire artillery plants.

It was dug deep right in the way of the spring offensive.

And then it was backed by air power and missiles and drones for air cover.

Kind of like a magnet line.

And everybody ridiculed it.

Look at the static defense.

Don't they know anything about history?

And I was watching this and I thought, don't you know anything about the Russian army?

For the Russian army to win, they always have to almost lose.

That's just

so Charles XII goes in and he's beaten Russia all the time and pitched battles.

He goes in and he starts to win and he loses.

And he ends up a captive, basically, or of the Ottomans for five years.

And then you've got Napoleon.

And of the seven or eight major battles that Napoleon fought, I think you could make the argument that he only really lost one.

But his army of 600,000, 500,000 were casualties, right?

Yes.

He destroyed it.

He burned Moscow.

He took it.

He burned it.

That's why Hitler didn't think it was so important because Napoleon had taken it.

But, of course, Moscow in 1814 was not Moscow in 1941.

And then

you have Hitler.

And General Halder had that famous quote.

He said, it's no exaggeration that

one could say in the first 11 days, the war against Russia has been won.

He said that.

He was chief of staff of OKW, you know, the over

command of the Wehrmacht.

And what happened?

They killed 3 million Russians in June, July, and August, and early September, and they lost the war in December.

Basically, after that, they couldn't win.

And so when you look at the same thing, you take Stalin up in the Mongolian Manchuria of 1939.

And there's the Japanese army with veterans in the years of fighting in China.

And it's, you know, it's there.

They're in China.

And they start to batter Zhukov.

He was a young on-tried officer.

And you know what?

When it was all done and they recovered, they killed 75% of the Japanese.

And then everybody says, well, look at the winter war.

Yeah, look at it.

November 1939, it was a terrible thing.

They went, Mannerheim, they attacked.

the Finns.

General Mannerheim was their leader, brilliant guy.

And they went in there.

Were they poorly led?

Terribly led, the Russians.

Were they badly supplied?

Horribly supplied.

Was there any good morale?

No.

Nobody wanted to go in there.

And the geostrategic politics were just insane.

They were a party to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

So Germany was their nominal ally.

And here they were fighting their ally's ally, Finland, over the border.

And

the Finns Finns had white sheets on.

They were expert skiers.

They were some of the best marksmen in the world.

They killed or wounded 400,000 Russians.

And what happened?

They ground them down, finally, the Russians did.

And Mannerheim had to accept kind of a

forced negotiation.

And when they went into Poland, people said, Hitler said, well, where are they?

We were supposed to divide Poland up.

And Stalin didn't even start till September 17th when Hitler Hitler had almost overrun the entire western and central part of Poland, done the heavy lifting.

And then even then he had problems for a while.

So everybody says, well, the Russian army is bureaucratically burdened.

Yes.

It's in AP, yes.

But

that doesn't mean it's going to lose.

So when I heard all this and I looked at those fortifications, I thought to myself, how are you going to break through those?

You're going to carpet bomb.

That's what the cluster bombs are are for right the rain of steel we're supposed to have given them the f-16s they're going to fly and evade sand missiles and then just carpet a pathway through and then like george patton the ukrainians and their challenger and abrams and

french tanks leclerc or whatever they're called they're going to break through i don't think so well haven't they mined the whole those two states that they've taken over yeah well the trench and the fortifications not only have reinforced concrete tank barriers, but they've got landmines everywhere.

And so my point is that

Ukraine had 40 million people.

It's got about 30 or 29 million now.

It's lost a fourth of its population have left.

We don't know how many people have been killed.

Russia probably has 200,000, maybe

casualties rather than fatalities, we don't know.

But Ukraine might have half of that.

And we're supposed to believe that after a year and a half of fighting, that once they get Western tanks and Western, they're going to plow through that thing and go, what would they do when they plow through?

They're going to cause a mass panic and every Russian is going to leave the trench and run back.

Isn't that what the spring offensive was supposed to be?

I mean, I haven't heard of it.

It's been overbike.

I don't want to mention any names.

Some of them are my colleagues.

I don't want to mention any names.

I don't want to mention any pundits.

But, you know, at our conference, you know, there were a few people there.

David Goldman was one of them brilliant guy.

And he was very, very skeptical of all the talk of, you know, the war is over in June because of

the spring offensive.

And it just didn't happen.

I mean, it's happening, but it's not making much progress because it's Stalingrad.

It's Verdun.

It's the Somme.

It's trench warfare.

And yes, trench warfare exists even in the postmodern age of drones and missiles and sophisticated computers.

It's still with satellite communications and surveillance, it still can exist.

And that's the problem.

So,

to boil it down, for the spring offensive to work, they're probably going to have to lose 20,000 soldiers.

And after a year and a half, maybe they'll be willing to do it.

I just think that anybody who says that

the Russian army is inept, yes, it couldn't take Kiev.

It always is inept when it goes into other people's country, right?

Yes.

It doesn't mean it loses, though.

It's inept.

And it fights geometrically better the closer it is to its homeland, if not on the border or inside Russia.

And that's where it is now, pretty close to the border, not that far away.

And they're fighting, they think, for mother Russia.

And yes, as Putin...

For Gozin, that was a

fantasy coup, whatever that was.

Maybe he's dead now, who knows?

And everybody says, Well, the spring offensive will not only break through, but that's the end of Putin.

That's the end of Putin.

Crimea and the Donbass will be like dominoes that fall.

It's going to be over.

I've heard that so many times,

and I just don't believe it.

I wish, I mean, I'm for it.

I don't like Putin.

I would like him to get out of Ukraine, completely go back to the 2013 borders.

But that requires a cost and blood and treasure that i don't think the ukrainians have the wherewithal to pay yeah but

you mentioned stalingrad and verdun even those had ends but you can see this going on even longer leningrad even that came to an end right

um so it well leningrad started remember and uh i mean stalingrad when you say it had an end staling paulos was basically trying to take Stalingrad in September of 42.

And he was doing pretty well.

And they destroyed 90% of the city, and they killed more people than they lost.

But he surrendered in February of 43.

So September, October, November, December, January.

Five months.

And Leningrad was one of the longest, almost a thousand days, or you know what I mean?

Four years.

Yeah,

it was four years.

Yeah, it was almost four years.

It started basically in

September of 1941, and it wasn't liberated till, what, late 44?

And a million people died, starved to death.

And so it just went on and on.

This thing couldn't go on and on.

Somebody should talk about how it's supposed to end.

Is it supposed to, and usually it ends when one side gains an advantage on the battlefield and wants to negotiate from a position of strength, and the other side is depressed.

But

everybody kind of just forgets that there's still 144 million Russians, and they still have a GDP 10 times that of Ukraine, and they have a territory 30 times of that, and they're de facto in alliance with China, and

they're not an enemy of India, and they have Iran, and so,

and they're selling oil all over the world.

And so, I know their economy is smaller than California, but California's economy is pretty big.

So, we always underestimate what they're capable of.

And that's not said in terms of admiration nor in awe.

It's just realism.

That to defeat Russia inside Russia or on the borders means you're going to get a lot of your people killed.

Yeah.

No way around.

It's a warning.

You don't ever get excited that the Russian army is in disarray.

When you read all this stuff in the Atlantic Monthly or the New Yorker or the Intelligencer or the New York Times,

or you read former officials of the Obama administration lecturing, The end is in sight.

The walls are closing in on Putin.

He may be dead already.

Our sources tell us there's no morale at all among the Russian least conscripts.

The Wagner group lost 40 million, that kind of stuff.

And then, okay,

everything you said is true.

Then they broke through, right?

It's what?

It's no longer spring, is it?

Spring ended in June 21st.

And we're into the summer offensive now.

And I don't think they've made much progress.

I think

go on to another.

Are you done?

I'm sorry.

Did you want to?

I am done.

Yeah, okay.

So let's move then to another international story.

And I noticed that China was cracking down on dissidents and activists.

They say that there are eight dissidents that are living in other countries, that they've put up a $1 million reward for apprehension of them.

And

that's not surprising so much as the fact that the article, which was in Real Clear Politics, said that the Western nations, which some of these activists are in, are allowing for them to be hunted down in their own nations.

And that struck me as really bad.

Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean, look, there's 300 and anywhere, depending on the particular year, pre or post-COVID, 330 to 370,000 Chinese students.

There's thousands of Chinese business people and academics and media people in the United States.

There's millions of them worldwide on their silken road, Belton Road, the Silk Road, whatever you want to call it, projects.

They're in Greece, they're in Italy, they're in the Netherlands, they're in Africa, they're in Latin America, South America, Asia, everywhere, right?

And so China, that's a great strength of China.

They're spies,

They

gather intelligence.

They coerce foreign governments to the degree they can.

But there's also a downside in it.

That the further they get away from China and the more they get out, sometimes they find that they have skills that would be remunerated pretty well in Europe or the United States.

So if you're a medical student, a neurosurgeon, and you're studying at Johns Hopkins, and the Chinese government makes you report in and consult with them, and yet you see this liberal society where Chinese Americans make a lot of money.

Maybe you would like to defect.

And maybe part of your defection would be you'd be interviewed by an American about how Chinese coerce their academics and their espionage, things like that.

And so they're paranoid.

So they even had a, you know, they had their own police in New York.

that

were allowed to arrest them.

And we had the

Confucius Institutes, which basically basically were fronts for Chinese spying.

I keep saying and reminding people that Stanford had a faculty member from China who was a member of the, not a spy, but a member of the People's Liberation Army within

the Why wouldn't these Chinese be every bit as much political refugees as people coming across the border, which is how they're allowing them to come in, that they have some sort of refugee status?

But why wouldn't we protect these Chinese activists as well?

Why would they allow for them to be hunted down in our country?

Is this a t-ball question, Sammy?

I guess it is because they're doing it, and I'm shocked.

And I won't shock.

I promise I won't miss the ball that you placed on the t-ball.

And the answer is:

if

Iranians come over here or North Koreans, what are they going to do to us?

Right?

So an Iranian comes over and says,

that's a horrible government.

It's terrible.

They kill people.

They stone homosexuals.

They rape women in prison.

And I want to become an American.

I'm an academic.

And they'll say, okay, they're not going to turn in the word of the Iranians unless it's crazy Obama or Biden, maybe, but most people wouldn't.

But that's not China.

And you don't have Bill Gates, and you don't have all these corporate people with these huge investments in China.

Billions, trillions of dollars.

And you don't have these investments.

And you don't.

Iran

may have some influence on John Kerry, but Obado may have some influence.

But they don't have the vice president at the time and his son flying to China.

And they don't hear that they're getting $10 million from the Chinese.

And these other governments

don't have Fang Fang sleeping with a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

And these other governments don't have a chauffeur reporting back to them for 20 years as he drives and hears the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Diane Feinstein, talk on her cell phone.

That's why they're so

embedded within our own system.

And they have the goods, whether it's bribery or they can blackmail people.

That was what Fang Fang was doing.

I mean, look at Swalwell.

He doesn't want to talk about it.

He doesn't want to talk about it.

They removed him.

He didn't really put up that much of a fight.

They all said, oh, that's terrible.

He was removed from the house and television, but they didn't really, because you can't, they knew you can't have a member with a security clearance sleeping with a Chinese spy.

And

I don't know why they let Dianne Feinstein off.

I guess she didn't know it, but they really just didn't even seem concerned.

But there's so much money from China.

When they can reach the president of the United States, how can you not think they're giving concessions?

I mean, my God, they created a virus gain of function and it escaped and it killed a million Americans.

And even to mention what I just said is still controversial.

No, no, Victor.

Don't spread conspiracy theories.

These were pangolins.

Remember that.

There's a statement.

They sent a

balloon over Alaska into the continental United States and it just hovered over our bases taking pictures and really, well, no, it was,

you couldn't shoot it down, Victor.

It was, it might collapse on somebody.

Or he was out in Montana.

Who

cares about Montana?

Well, there's missiles out there.

And they just went through.

They didn't do anything.

They hack.

They get into all of our data, private and public.

Nobody says anything.

And they're buzzing our planes in the South China Sea.

They're trying to play chicken with our surface ships.

And nobody says anything.

That was any other country.

We almost sunk an Iranian ship under Trump Trump that tried that.

And so the reason is, they're so wealthy and they compromise people in two ways.

They either become too familiar with them and they have them on women or bribes, or they allow them to make so much money that it would be insane.

Michael Bloomberg was running for the Democratic nomination, and he had $10 billion

of investments for startup companies in China run by Chinese citizens, half of which had ties to the Communist Party, and he was running.

So that's why.

They don't touch China when it goes after its dissidents.

That's why they don't have dissidents, because China tells everybody, oh, you're going to go to Stanford for a year.

Oh, you're going to be a visiting professor from Harvard.

Remember one thing.

If you get a nice apartment and you've got a beamer and you think you're going to have a capitalist lifestyle and you start to defect or you don't want to come back home or you don't want to work with us just remember what happens to people who are dissidents they don't protect you they will never protect you they'll turn you over to us they will leak to us because we have them over a barrel just remember that that's a very powerful deterrent yeah that sure is well with that victor let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about joe biden nibbling on children and geraldo uh fired from the five, I believe.

But hold, stay with us, and we'll be right back to discuss it.

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We're back and Victor, so Joe Biden's diplomacy included a scene in Finland, I believe he was, where he was nuzzling up to a young child.

And I was

wondering, yeah.

Turkey gobbling.

I mean, did you see his jaw going up and down?

Yeah, you know what?

I used to, we used to, my grandfather had animals, and I used to see a turkey guy, and they would come up and bite your leg.

That's what he was doing.

And then he tried, and then he was kind of repulsed.

She was repulsed, right girl with you know native instincts that were superb she spotted this guy even at a very young age this guy's weird and then he tried to get closer with a second attack and blow at her and so my point is that was an iconic jump the shark moment wasn't it i don't think you i think at that point

everybody in the United States said this man can no longer be president.

He's creepy.

He's a pervert.

He's senile.

Because presidents of the United States, when they are told again and again and again,

and Joe Biden has apologized to women.

Remember that.

He was forced to in the primary for touching them too long, for having mouth-to-mouth kisses with strange women he'd met on the campaign, to getting young girls, especially and blowing in their ear and their hair or calling them out, oh, I was 30 and

she was 15 or 12.

You know, oh, that's a pretty girl over there.

Are you going to stand up?

That kind of stuff.

And then when you see it, and he's told not to do it, and he can't stop himself, it was pretty embarrassing.

And then this is juxtaposed to the trip where he's fell again, even though the ship that he's getting on new entrance to Air Force One, the steps are shorter.

He still falls.

He's still bewildered about where he should be.

So everybody's looking at this week and they said, you know,

that's it.

He's not going to run for it.

And we're going to try to prop him up.

Like,

just consider him some kind of inflatable president.

And they're pumping oxygen or air into him on a bicycle pump just so he can float around for another year and a half, but no more.

He did his job.

They got rid of Trump by lying that he was old Joe Biden from Scranton, the moderate, who was your kindly uncle when he was a creepy guy then.

And he was even when he was a senile creepy person, he was never a nice guy.

He was a mean SOB.

Just go back and look at the tapes of the way he treated Clarence Thomas.

Just go back, Wadall, when he would go out and talk about,

you know, race and drugs.

He can't, he couldn't finish his sentence without foaming at the mouth in some racist fashion.

Yes.

Kim Strassel's article had these wonderful pictures of him and Jimmy Carter nuzzled up together.

He was Mr.

Carter's favorite senator.

Do you know why?

Because they were just alike.

They were phonies.

They were both

Mr.

Moderate, who

got in a hard left agenda.

That's what they were.

Or they either didn't believe anything.

It's hard to know which.

But

this was really bad.

You know what bothered me about it was he did that weird thing on the baby's back, but then he went to smell her hair.

And he does that with older women all the time.

And does does that mean that he thinks the baby is like an older woman or older women

are like babies is what I think.

He's sexualizing a young child.

That's what he's doing.

You think so?

Or he put it this way: if you were a mother and you had a young child and you knew what he has done, would you allow your child to be anywhere near him?

No,

I wouldn't.

No.

No.

I mean, is that a t-ball question?

Yeah, it is.

It is.

It's a Dr.

Laura question.

Joe biden wants to take my young child what do i do

luck so he's he can't they know that i mean this is this he can't stop himself this is the equivalent of hunter biden's cocaine right a guy who's addicted on cocaine thinks it's normal so he looks at the world as everybody does this so you as i said to jack You leave a pipe in the car.

Everybody does that.

You lose your gun in the dumpster.

Everybody does that.

You lose a laptop with felonies on it.

Everybody does that when they're high.

Well, the same thing about Joe Biden.

He is so addicted to getting some kind of perverse thrill out of getting close to young

pre-mature women that

he thinks everybody does it, so he won't stop.

There's no downside to it.

Just like there's no downside to Hunter.

He thinks he can always get away with it.

It won't stop until somebody says to him, you're a pervert.

You understand that?

And then he'll forget it promptly.

I hope Robert Kennedy has a debate with him.

I really do.

Maybe he'll say to him, of course, they'll get some lines canned for a repartee to Kennedy.

But

if Trump debates him, Trump would say something like that.

But it's just really disturbing that President of the United States does that.

And

it was a disaster for Biden.

And he loses his temper, he yells out, he says stupid things.

Whether you like

Zelensky or not, or whether you want them in NATO, when you're asked about that, you don't say, like,

Ukraine's not ready yet.

Well, maybe it's true, but you just shut the F up about it.

You know what I mean?

And that's

this is so funny because his exuberance, his excesses really dwarf Trump.

You can say Trump was perverted or he was Randy or the access Hollywood or his serial adultery or stormy, but you look at the exact time he was in the White House.

He may have had off-color language, as every president, but you can't find a lot of people coming forward and saying he molested me, he blew in my ear or anything.

He was the most watched, audited,

observed president in history.

And he knew the media was looking for him to sneeze and turn that into a felony.

Joe Biden had the reverse.

There was no deterrence because he felt they would always,

you know, they would always, I don't know, they would say that contextualize any offense he gave.

Yeah.

I don't think they're going to do that anymore.

I think

this one was,

you know, this was the Fonzie jumping the shard.

Yeah,

he's headed on the way out one way or the other.

What about Geraldo?

I find it interesting that Fox fired him.

And I find it interesting that I find Geraldo a sympathetic character, even though he had that show where he'd get people to fight on stage when he was young.

But he's surprisingly sympathetic, and he is their liberal voice, and he does quite a good job at it.

Any thoughts on why he was fired?

Why he was fired because

he was on the five, which is the

huge audience for that time slot and that genre.

And he was lucky.

He's 80 years old, Sammy.

Yeah, I know.

You never know.

He looks like he's 60.

He's had a lot of facial work.

He's got his hair.

He's a fanatic health nut.

He works out.

He looks like he's been married a lot of times.

He has young women.

He looks like he's 60, but he's 80.

Remember that.

And so

nobody cheats nature that long.

So he,

when you say he, when I or you say he was fired or he quit, he's 80.

So

he had a great career as far as he's concerned, but he wanted, he got in fights with Greg Gutfeld all the time because Greg would, you know, call him on his left-wing bladder, and then they'd go at it.

And

Geraldo has a habit of really going after the jupiter.

I've been

on him before, and he has a little technique that he says something, then you say something that you don't reply to him.

You just give your review.

And then, when you're off the air and you're not going to come back on, but you're on the screen, he attacks you like a Parthian shot.

You know what I mean?

That bam, and you have no chance to reply.

That's what he does.

He's a

cheap shot.

Yeah, he does.

He is.

And so

Gutfield got bigger, much bigger than Geraldo.

And he didn't have to take it from him.

So he crushed him.

And

Geraldo looked around.

He thought, well, how about where's my, I'm Geraldo.

I'm an institution.

You're not going to let this upstart.

And nobody sympathized with him.

So he said, you know, they're all against me.

So he went into Fox and, you know, he kept losing his temper and melting down.

They'd suspend him for a couple of days.

And after fine, you know, they just said, you're done.

I'm done with you.

So they fired him from the five.

And then I guess he probably tried to leverage.

And they said, but you can go on your other little and your other appearances, which are scarcer and scarcer.

And he said, I'm not going to do that.

So then he said, I quit.

But he was really fired.

He quit from Fox when they offered him a milk bone after they took away his steak.

That's what I'm saying.

And then he made a big deal that he told Fox where to go.

And then he went right on the view.

It's not a good thing to do.

You should never do that

when you want something and somebody fires you and you go right out and attack them unless they've done something existentially wrong to you.

Even Tucker, when they fired Tucker, he didn't really go after Fox.

No.

He's pretty careful.

I mean, they may say he's violating the contract because he has an alternate media presence now, but he didn't really go into attack the Murdochs personally, publicly.

No, no.

He took a bigger hit than Peraldo ever did.

You know,

the funny thing was, he said that he couldn't.

And then the interview with the View,

you heard he said he went after Tucker Carlson and said, I can never forgive him for his conspiracy talk

on January 6th.

And I thought, okay, let's see what Tucker said.

Tucker said the following, that

there wasn't really an insurrection.

And notice the word insurrection doesn't appear anymore.

The left doesn't use it very much.

And that nobody, Tucker then said too,

nobody was killed violently unless they were Trump supporters.

They were saying that five people were killed because they were counting suicides up to six months later.

Remember that?

Yes.

They didn't die on January 6th.

Ashley Babbitt, an on-armed military veteran, was shot and killed by Officer Bird for the misdemeanor of entering a broken window.

That was killed.

And there was another person that may have been roughed up or not by police.

We don't know the circumstances full.

And that's what Tucker said.

And then he said there were a lot of FBI informants all around there.

And so everybody got mad.

Mr.

Epps, on four occasions, said, we got to go into the Capitol.

You can see him on the air whispering in a person's ear as the guy then immediately goes and tries to attack the police barricade.

Do we know that Mr.

Epps was, in fact, an FBI informant?

No, we don't.

We don't.

We just know that Tucker said on the air,

here he played the clips where this guy has, we got to go into the Capitol.

Yeah.

We got to go on the Capitol on four different occasions.

And then he, as I said, he whispers and then he texts and says, I helped organize it.

So why would he sue Tucker for libel when prima facie, he's the guy who gave Tucker the evidence by his own conduct.

And now what happened?

He was on the FBI's most wanted, and then he mysteriously disappeared, Sammy.

We can't figure out why.

And everybody in the January 6th committee said he was

a respectable figure.

And now all of a sudden, he's been, what?

And he's been arrested for

felonious behavior on January 6th.

That's not going to be a very good reason to sue Tucker Carlson, is it?

And that's what Tucker said.

Three.

And then four, he said the FBI knew about.

And what do we know?

We have the Pulsar Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, Matthew Rosenberg, that got ambushed on James O'Keefe, Operation of Eric Tottes.

Remember him?

Yes.

In the bar bragging to a young woman about, this was just a joke.

All my people thought it was a melodrama.

It was nothing.

There was no danger.

Heck, I looked around.

There was more FBI informants I recognized than there were.

Remember that?

Yes.

And so that's what Tucker said.

And then he showed clips.

And I'm not saying that wasn't bad.

You should never go into a Capitol or any government building that's closed.

I would never do that.

Never.

I wouldn't.

That's wrong to go into a government building that is not open.

And it's wrong to even touch government property.

But it's not an armed insurrection that requires 20,000 federal troops as if Jubal Early is attacking a Capitol and it's 1864.

Come on.

And then you had Mr.

Buffalo Horns.

Remember him?

Yes.

That poor guy.

He's obviously compromised cognitively.

And

you would have thought he was a ringleader, but Tucker showed the clips.

He's just walking around talking to people.

And then the cops were, or the security people were trying to help him with some of the doors and show him police.

Should he have done that?

No.

Should he have been there?

No.

Was he dressed outrageously?

Yes.

Should he have told the policeman, what can I do to help to stop this?

And we'll get everybody out?

Yes.

But was he a violent insurrectionist?

No.

There was not one person arrested with an active loaded firearm in that thing.

That's what Tucker said.

And Geraldo said you can't forgive him for saying that.

You want to talk about conspiracy theories?

You can go back to Tucker.

I mean, you go back to Geraldo's.

Remember Al Capone's vault?

Yes.

We had to hear every night the vault.

24 more hours, and then you open it.

And what is there?

An old wine bottle or something?

Geraldo was telling Americans, you know, basically they were going to open up.

There's going to be a whole treasure chest of mafia gold or something.

Yeah.

Well, he was an expert, a Dickensian expert at making cliffhangers for his audience.

Or when he went to Afghanistan, remember when he's there?

He's there with his brother and he's drawing a map of U.S.

deployments while they're filming it.

And they send him home.

Remember?

The U.S.

military?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean,

for him to say that Tucker's a conspiracist, when Tucker had reason to point out about informants and the questionable behavior of

Ray Epps

and the one-sided violence toward the is just beyond the pale.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of our episode.

So thank you very much for all the wisdom and the discussion of the war in Ukraine in particular today.

Appreciate it.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.