Investigations and Foreign Visits

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

Victor is a commentator and an analyst of current political affairs and military affairs.

He's also trained as a classicist and even more so a philologist or more specifically a philologist and has written much on both the ancient and modern worlds.

So, for everybody who's a new listener out there, that's Victor's background in a nutshell.

And he is also 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, and we've got a lot of things on the agenda, lots of testimony going on in the Congress, and we'll get to that right after these messages.

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Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody they can find Victor and his work at victorhanson.com.

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So we welcome everybody.

Well, Victor, I know that I start with positive news each time.

And I would like to say that

have you heard of this organization?

I'm sure you have, but the Moms for Liberty, they had a Philadelphia conference.

I was impressed.

Yes.

They're often maligned.

Yeah.

I was really impressed by their lineup.

They had DeSantis talking, Haley, and even Trump was coming to give a talk.

So they

wait.

What does even Trump mean?

That it was impressive they got a former president?

Yes, absolutely.

And they're training moms to become advocates for their children's education and to.

They started

as an anti-identity politics group.

So their main mission, as I understood it, was against, you know, identity bias, affirmative action, LGBTQ,

Chalvinism.

And then, of course, because they got to be pretty powerful, they were libeled as, what do you do when you have a conservative group?

You always have to do what they're doing with the new movie, you know.

Yeah, sound of freedom.

So you say the magic QAnon.

Yes.

And then

when you say that, all this January said, QAnon.

So that's what they always allege at the Moms for Liberty are.

Yeah, a word that almost everybody is like, what does that mean q and on yes well our hats off to the co-founders tiffany justice and tina uh deskovich i hope i hope i got her name right and the second

interesting and good thing is dylan movaney left the united states

uh well

I think he also decided he's now heterosexual.

Oh, wow.

That's nice.

So he's dating women, which would mean that if he considers himself a trans woman, that he is a lesbian.

I guess.

But he is in some sense a heterosexual.

I don't understand that once you transition what term you use when you

are

interested in the opposite biological sex of the one that you were born with.

Yeah.

And then they would have to be, they would have to be interested in dating somebody who was of their same sex, but really, actually, the opposite sex.

I can't figure that one out.

You know, the people he dates.

I don't think they can either.

He's an arsonist, though, isn't he?

What did he do?

Well, he came in.

He got his little moment, five minutes of fame.

He did that giggling, narcissistic, self-infatuated.

fixated on himself commercial that had nothing to do with why anybody would want to buy a Bud Light.

It was all about him and the virtue signaling performance art of Anheuser-Busch to the gay, trans left-wing community.

And then he cost them billions of dollars and destroyed the brand.

Costco is selling it for the price of water now, I think a dollar a can.

And then he left.

He lit the match and he burned down Budweiser and he's off playing the victim that I was run out of the United States by death threats.

And making a caricature of women on top of it.

So he's done a lot of damage.

I know, this idea that

you get out in the public square square and you say things and then people threaten you and I get them all the time.

It's no big deal.

I mean, that's, it's sort of like going in the arena and getting hit in the face.

That's what boxing is about.

If you say things

that are controversial and almost anything is today in the world of social, people are going to write.

You know, you have to take it as fun.

That's why we have the angry readers.

You know,

we have one coming up.

It's really funny.

I mean, it's just all capital letters, exclamation points, four-letter words, schatology.

It's got every imaginable, as I said earlier, angry reader point given to it.

And you get, you know, you get people that bug you and talk about you.

You know, I get tired of this little phrase I see.

I used to read your books and now I picked it up and threw it against the wall.

I've heard that about five times.

So what?

Yeah, I know.

It's a free country.

Burn them for all I care.

So, I mean, it's, you've got to.

So, when he says that he's being hounded, or there was, I won't mention a name.

There was always a guy at the National Review that said, I'm being hounded by people.

And it's almost as if I'm on a cutting edge and I'm so courageous.

No, you know what's courageous?

I tell you what's courageous is going into Fallujah with the Marines.

I had a student, Alex Martin, and a bunch of students at the naval.

Those people were courageous that went into that hell hole.

Places like that are HIT or Haditha,

or

that's courageous.

Or guys that I see in rural Fresno County, they get on a 70 horsepower tractor with no cab and they go out there in 110 and they disc all day.

That's courageous.

Or a guy who's on his back at a

auto service thing and he's on his back on a rack working on an engine for nine hours a day for 16 bucks an hour, 20 bucks an hour.

That's courageous, not what we're doing.

It's not courageous.

I mean, that's important, but we're not heroes like those guys are.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, let's then turn to the news of

this week and look at

Christopher Ray's testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee who's testifying on the FBI political bias in investigations and, of course, trying to deny it.

And I was wondering what you made of the hand,

what you make of the handling of the

Hunter's laptop and all the lines.

He's got a bad hand.

He took over after James Comey

leaked a private conversation with the President of the United States, probably was illegal, should have been classified.

And then he lied or pled amnesia 245 times under.

So they got rid of him.

And then they put in Andrew McCabe, who was conflicted because his wife was running for the state office and legislature in Virginia, while the

Clinton Consortium

were, what, they were giving him money and he was going, why his wife was getting money from Clinton relate Terry McCall's PAC or whatever it was, then Andrew McCabe was supposed to be a disinterested investigator of Hillary's emails.

That was a joke.

So then he lied on four occasions, three times under oath.

So he was disgraced.

And then Christopher Wray was supposed to come up and clean it up.

Did he really address that they had lied to a FISA court and said that the steel dossier was reliable?

No.

Did they really worry about Kevin Kleinsmith being convicted of a felony for doctoring a court document?

No.

Did Christopher Wray get really worried they were paying $3 million to the FBI, FBI to Twitter people

to suppress information harmful, apparently, to the Biden administration?

Did they care that the FBI had Hunter's laptop for a year, knew it was authentic, even though 51 quote-unquote intelligence authorities were swearing otherwise?

Did they come out and say, wait a minute, hey, you 50 people, we have the laptop.

Don't do that.

It's authentic.

No, they didn't do that.

They turned into a personal retrievals service for the wayward Biden family members.

Lose a diary that says you showered with your dad, who's the president.

The FBI will shake down James O'Keefe and find get to the bottom of it lose a gun that was falsely registered maybe they can work with the secret service and find that revolver if it's hunters hunter lost it what one two three we'll find him don't worry that's what the fbi had descended into yes and they don't they don't i mean did anybody really think that the secret service or the fbi was going to find who left the cocaine bag?

No, they're not going to do that.

They've been told by whistleblowers whistleblowers that they've got 17 phone calls, two of which are Joe Biden is on.

Let's find out if that's true.

That's an impeachable offense.

$10 million.

They've got people swore that they gave $10 million.

They've got all these Chinese-connected companies and they can't produce documents or they lie about it.

So Merrick Garland came in and he basically told the FBI, I mean, the subtext was, those guys screwed me over.

I was going to be a Supreme Court judge.

So Biden picked me to get back at them.

And one of the ways I'm going to get back at them, the way they treated me, I'm going to weaponize you guys.

So here's what I want you to do.

I want you to go to

what?

I want you to go to school board meetings.

I want you to monitor Catholic services that are conducted in Latin.

I want you to go after anti-LGBTQ, supposedly.

And if there's violence given right to life, sinners, just ignore it but go after any purported uh

protests etc uh abortions that's what they do that's what they died of and this ray gets up there with a straight face and says that wasn't that wasn't that wasn't on my watch that wasn't on my watch well

okay

some of it was but we'll

we'll agree that you're only half lying so would you please tell me how you're addressing everything that robert mueller and james comey and andrew McCabe did.

Can you tell me who you fired?

What did you do?

I mean, James Baker was your legal counsel and he went to Twitter for $8 million a year.

What?

There's 11 of your former colleagues are working for the Twitter 1.0.

Why were they rewarded for that revolving door?

Because they were what?

Suppressing information?

So, I mean, that's what they do.

It has to be...

To save the FBI, it has to be recalibrated.

And that means, I think it means they have to get that office out of Washington.

And they've got to take major divisions and farm them out to the Department, some to the Department of Treasury, some Homeland Security, some Department of Justice.

But there's too much power and too few hands, too centrally located, too near the White House.

Okay, but I was wondering, given all that and the way you address it is sort of like we all know this is going on.

And so

what are your thoughts on or how do you assess the GOP's questioning of Ray?

And can they do anything different from what they're doing?

No, because you know what they do.

Every single answer is a variation of

we can't discuss this.

It's currently under FBI investigation.

We can't discuss, so those documents are of a confidential nature, and that's it.

So, what can they do constitutionally?

They can do one thing.

If it keeps doing it, they can

either do one of two things.

That's all they can do.

They can,

if

James Comey, on 245 occasions, said he couldn't remember, and they had got a good lawyer to go back through there like a criminal prosecutor, and they had found that he'd said something that contradicted a sworn fact or he had made earlier or some data,

they could have issued a criminal referral.

I don't think they would have indicted him.

And the second thing they could do is they could say, you can talk like that all you want, but we're not funding your new FBI headquarters.

I'm sorry.

It's just not going to be built.

You can just crowd in where you are.

There's nothing wrong with the J.

Edgar Hoover building.

The problem is you.

You're too big.

You're too powerful.

Just shrink down so you can fit in the existing building.

And what they always do, though, they say, oh, if you do that, you know.

Criminals are going to do this.

I mean, they don't have a very good record to tell you.

The Sarnoff brothers, they were tipped off by the Russians of all people, that these people should never have been led in the United States.

They were tipped off by the San Bernardino terrorists.

There's a whole history of people who have tipped them off about

very dangerous people.

And there's something,

you know, when Christopher Wray was asked about the January 6th FBI, he really didn't answer it.

He said he wasn't aware, there weren't many, or he couldn't just, you know, he said, there was a New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning

reporter who was there on January 6th, and he gave a James O'Keefe ambush interview.

He was ambushed in a bar, and he said, you know, it was kind of a joke.

There were more FBI informants around.

He recognized them all.

Everybody knew there were.

So

they don't want to complain about that.

I don't think it's, you know, the end of the world that there were FBI informants on January 6th, but they at least should be honest about it.

Yeah,

They have an arrogance, it's an institutional arrogance about them.

They just don't want to, they don't get it that they work for the American people.

And they're bullies when they, you know, that poor guy was out in front of an abortion clinic and he, they pushed his son and he tried to push back.

And then the next thing they know, the FBI in SWAT style,

you know, appeared at his home.

Yeah, they raided his house.

And they remember the way they did the Mar-Lago raid or they want to do a performance art raid with James O'Keefe to get him in his underwear.

They try to humiliate people.

And that's part of the, you know, the perp walk, the SWAT team.

And

how did all CNN and all these people show up at that

Roger Stone's residence?

They knew the FBI was going to stage a raid because they tipped off the media.

That's what they do.

They don't, they're not ethical anymore.

And the worst thing was when they had that steel dossier, which they paid for in part, he was a contractor.

They were working basically with the DNC and the Hillary people because they were paying Christopher Steele as well.

And they knew that thing was fraudulent because there were people at the time who expressed that in writing, that it was not reliable.

And they offered a million-dollar bonus if he could prove anything.

He couldn't do it.

And that should have told them that it was bogus.

And what did they do?

They sent that to FISA judges, either on the idea that the FISA judges were stupid or they were compromised.

But the FISA judges took that information that the FBI knew was unreliable and they issued warrants about

surveilling American citizens.

And there's no consequences for it.

There should be.

Yeah.

Mr.

Gray knows he's going to be fired.

If he knows, he knows that the first thing any Republican president will do is fire him.

And he knows the second thing that they'll do is they will have some type of special

select committee to investigate the FBI.

And he won't be in a position to refuse a congressional subpoena, nor will all

subpoena.

If they get the House and Senate, it will be like the church committee.

You know what I mean?

They will go after them.

And so he knows that.

So I think

he's a very worried guy because right now his whole career, his reputation hinges on Joe Biden and Merrick Garland retaining power.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk about the

House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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So, Victor, we've got another investigation that, well, it's concluded now.

And so they've come out with their report.

And there are some new interesting things.

I know that we've all kind of understood that

they lied to us.

I don't have any other term for us about a lab or I mean about a natural origin with the Fauci administration.

But this report has some emails in it that, that, you know, they're kind of revealing because one of them acknowledges that if they had

allowed it to be a lab origin, that the whole thing would have been and the words were quote and these are not my words, but shit show if they had,

you know,

I don't know, I want to say copped to the idea of a lab origin.

So they stuck with the natural origin story.

And that was a 2020, March 2020

email.

Yeah,

even the redacted trove of those Francis Collins,

Fauci, and others that were on those email chains, even the redacted forms

show you pretty early that within 90 days of the suspicion that the coronavirus was in the United States and was spreading, there was almost a panic on the part of U.S.

health officials that somehow the Wuhan

viral lab was involved.

Somehow

it was a gain in function or related type of engineered, human-engineered virus, and that the United States had issued money or sent money to that lab for that specific sort of research, albeit channeled to a third party, EchoHealth, Peter Dasek, a crony of people in high echelons of the health establishment and the government.

And they understood that.

And they understood very quickly.

There were people who said, this looks bad, or I'm afraid to say this.

If you read those emails,

and so, you know, I was talking to

a scholar this week at the Hoover Institution, and we were talking, and we just said, if you just,

if you just cleanse your mind of all of the left-right conundra

and all of the controversies, and just look at it on the facts, you're left with a very scary idea.

You're left with people in the United States government gave approximately $600,000

and hid the source of that, in a sense, because it was illegal to conduct gain of function.

So they did two things.

They routed it through a private individual's nonprofit

to send to the biology lab.

And

that was one thing they did.

And the second thing they did is they gave expertise, machinery, I think, other accoutrements that allowed that research to take place because they believed it was important,

even though it was the position of the United States government, that it was too dangerous in a cost-benefit analysis for any perceived benefit that it would give us.

And so then the Chinese

People's Liberation Army that was in control of the lab was

obviously attuned to what they were doing.

And apparently, this thing escaped.

And they were probably looking for some type of vaccination against it.

There was a series, from what we understand, there were other gain of function vira.

And maybe a couple of them were much more lethal or more potent, or maybe they are today.

But at some point, point, if you think about it and cleanse your mind of all prejudices,

certain people in the United States government had a hand in the creation of the coronavirus.

And one million Americans died.

And I'm not blaming in Dr.

Fauci or Collins, but I go to sleep at night thinking, what if

Anthony Fauci had said the following?

That type of research to me looks too close to gain of function

for me.

That is now prohibited.

And there's a reason why it is prohibited.

And even though I disagree with that reason, I'm not going to circumvent the law.

So we're not giving any money to that lab, nor are we going to allow U.S.

researchers to go over there and advise them or

give instrumentation or appurtences that would further that research.

We're just not going to do it.

Did they do that?

No.

And so you tell me what the culpability is.

And

that's why Dr.

Fauci was on TV 24-7,

and he had his bobble dolls, and he had all of his idolization.

And his,

you know, he became a popular cult hero.

And he labored at that because he understood the more layers of publicity and

notoriety that he could add to his

vulnerable or

suspicious persona, the more he would be exempt.

But the fact of the matter is, when he went before Congress and said that there was no gain of function research, Rand Paul just shredded him.

He knows what happened.

He knows what happened.

And a lot of people died.

I mean, this is a lot of people died.

And

there were, you know, there was 100, what was it, 70, 80% of Americans got it.

So you're talking about 260, 270 million Americans, 10% of them, 27 million still have it.

Long COVID.

And so at some point,

somebody is culpable for that because it didn't come from nature as they told us it did.

Nobody believes in a pangolin anymore.

I know they have these reports and stuff, but no serious person believes that a pangolin or a bat

transmitted this virus.

There's never been one case of a dead pangolin or a dead bat with the coronavirus prior to the first known human infection.

It just didn't happen.

Yet he still says that.

And then he modifies it and says, well,

maybe it was,

it started in nature, then they took it into the lab to study it, then it escaped.

But he always tries to finagle a nuance because he's a dir in the headlights.

But, you know, he knows what his legacy is going to be.

His legacy is going to be, he subsidized the engineering of the coronavirus.

Yeah.

And hasn't evidence come out recently that the first three people, I think it was, that got the virus came out of that lab?

Yeah, they did.

Yeah.

Okay.

I thought they had that evidence.

Even John Stew, even liberal Jon Stewart, remember that kind of funny little interview he did?

And I think Colbert was making fun of me.

He said, wait a minute,

Patient zero right next to state four

level four biology lab in Wuhan, controlled by the Common Party.

Come on now.

We don't need a bat to explain this.

We don't need a pangolin.

Come on, look at it.

Yeah,

you know, it was so funny.

I was going back and in March and April, I wrote some columns about.

the likelihood because there were people saying that with expertise.

It wasn't me just

yeah.

But I got

I got so much criticism.

I got things from like the Stanford alumni, a letter to me about

weighing in.

I got people at Stanford, you're out of your lane, you know, and then there would be letters.

I get letters with people with their initials after it, BHD, MD, da da da da.

You are out, you know, how dare you suggest this?

It's a medical fact that I have studied the DNA strand, I have the genome, and this is impossible.

This could have been fabricated.

They all knew it was.

One of the bravest guys was Stephen Quay.

I mean, we had him on the show, but

nobody's refuted him.

He just laid it out.

And they ruined a lot of people's careers.

They really did.

That were Nicholas Wade.

You remember the New York Times science writer?

Yes.

The British fellow, man of the left, very full of integrity.

And he wrote, didn't say it was from the lab.

He just gave you all the scenarios and let you pick.

And by the end of the story,

it was pretty clear where it came from.

We don't know whether it was a bioweapon or not.

I don't know whether it was or not, but there was something fishy about it.

Yeah, definitely.

But speaking of logic, it seems to me the Chinese seriously lack it, and maybe they don't care because they're making a gain of function virus, which means they don't, once they put it out there, they don't know which specific direction it's going to take, nor even if they are.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

There is, no offense, Sammy, there's a fallacy in your logic.

Wait, can I finish and then you can tell me the fallacy?

So, even if you do have an anecdote for it for your people, you don't really know, given whatever direction it does take in its gaining function, that that antidote or that serum is going to help protect your own people.

I mean, that's just really, to me, you know, even if they're doing that.

Okay, go ahead.

But, why would you, now we're in the field, everybody's listening, so we're not

Dr.

Sammy and Dr.

Victor.

Okay.

We're informed citizens, I think, that we're trying to just have an intelligent conversation.

So please don't email me and say, how dare you without an MD speculate.

But there is evidence in popular literature, at least,

with a lot of suggestions that they were

interested in gain of function viruses from bats, maybe pangolins, to increase their infectiousness and in some cases, their morbidity or even lethality.

And this wasn't the only one they had looked at.

Yes.

And co-committed with that, they were looking at

supposedly, how do you justify that research?

They justified the research for the purposes of humanity to make vaccines, right?

That's what Anthony Fauci said.

It's important to make these gain of function viruses so we can make vaccines.

Well, given the logic of the communist mind, they obviously were working at the same time on gain of functions as they were vaccines.

They didn't,

I don't think they deliberately, when you say release, I don't think they deliberately released it.

No, I don't.

I think they were perfecting it and they had a lot of different examples, but they weren't going to release it if they were going to release it until they had decided that we had SARS-1 and that was a dangerous respiratory virus.

So we want everybody to be vaccinated.

And they were vaccinating people.

They were going to vaccinate people, and then maybe it might leak out.

But no, the communists were never going to

endanger their own people unless you're really Machiavellian and saying, well, they have too many older people, and they engineered a virus.

I don't think they did that to kill off their own older people.

I think

the virus will kill off older people.

Yes, I think the point was that they were experimenting with vaccines and more lethal viruses at the same time.

Yes, I understand that.

Something broke down.

The audacity of, I mean, you don't have to go all the way back to Charles Darwin, but he does say nature has a multiplicity of variations.

So even if you set up your gain of function virus and you, let's say you released it, I'm just doing a hypothetical here.

You really don't know in the multiplicity of variations, which direction it's going to take.

So your hopes of having a

vaccination for it is

a little bit crazy.

But this wasn't a natural virus.

We had Stephen Kuay who talked about the millions

of possible variations on the sequence.

Yeah.

And

to get exactly in every category of infectiousness or morbidity, the more lethal or the more severe one, it was beyond the range of hypothetical.

It couldn't have happened.

So, what they were doing, the cleavage site, whatever you call it, at each stage of this engineering,

they erred or preferred whatever term on the one that would make the virus more infectious.

Yes.

What was found in nature because that was the purpose of it.

Yeah.

And so they knew what they were doing.

Yes, I know they did.

I know the flu kills a lot of people, but in my hometown,

there were, which is mostly Hispanic,

almost any Hispanic male that was over 55 that had some diabetes issues or weight problems

either died or got severely ill or is still ill.

It was just devastating on that community.

Yeah.

Because those were comorbidities.

And

I'd never seen anything like that.

You know, swine flu.

We had swine flu.

We had avian flu.

We had all sorts of flus, West Nile virus in this area, but never one that just swept through the community and did such damage to pre-selected individuals.

You know, and I've had malaria, I've had amoebic dysentery, I've had, you name it, being in Egypt, the Middle East.

I have never

had something that made me for 14 months have zero energy.

And it's not my, you know, it's not psychological.

It's just, it's this weird taste.

Have you ever heard of a thing that takes away people's taste and smell, maybe other than the flu for a week or two, or attacks neural swelling with your eyes and ears in some cases, or gives people rapid heartbeat when they get up out of a chair or neuropathies?

All of these things were,

I think, a degree of either viruses, the spiked protein that was gravitating to areas of the body that excited an extreme immune response in susceptible individuals, or the vaccine.

The vaccine.

Yeah.

I mean, this wasn't really a vaccine.

It was sort of genetic engineering.

It was creating not a weakened replica of the virus, but a portion of the virus, the spike protein, and then making them in enormous numbers as irritants, as irritants.

And they didn't even perform, I mean, they saved a lot of lives.

I don't want to be so unfair to the vaccine, but it didn't fulfill the mission of giving protection about being infected or being infectious as promised.

So it didn't really, the demonization that they did to people who didn't get vaccinated, and I'm speaking as someone that did get vaccinated, I don't think was worth the cost.

And then to lie and say that natural immunity was of inferior value or

of marginal value when people who actually got the whole viral sequence and then made a noun by it.

So, natural immunity was as good or better in some cases, depending on the individual.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, since we're on to this and China itself, I was wondering, just, you know, sort of as a digression a little bit, what did you think of Janet Yellen's visit to China?

She's speaking of a doll, a dashboard doll that bobs up and down.

She seemed to do that a lot with the Chinese

hosts.

That came with Obama.

Remember he bowed to the Saudi

Saudi crown prince.

He bowed to the Japanese,

not the president, but the Japanese emperor.

He bowed to him.

And it's not a good idea for an American that represents a constitutional republic to bow to other leaders, especially autocratic leaders such as the Chinese.

So Yellen did that.

Yeah, way beyond the polite level.

She was bowing three or four times to him.

So why does any American,

why does Blinken and why does Sullivan and why does Yellen, why do they all, why did the Biden, why do they all go to China?

Yes.

Why don't the Chinese come here?

I mean, they have 380,000 students here, so they're capable of finding America.

Why do we have to go over there?

And why do we go over there?

I mean, why do we go over there when they sent a balloon and we lied about it on their behalf?

I mean, it was sent here to spy.

It hovered over bases.

It took pictures.

It relayed them.

And it went across the continent.

And they had a virus that killed a million people.

And they will not to this day be honest about it and open the lab and say, here's the data.

You figure it out.

They won't do that.

Instead, they lie.

And they buzz our planes in the South China Seas.

They play chicken with our ships.

They threaten Taiwan periodically.

So where do we get this idea that just because a bunch of corporate grandees are making a fortune there, that we're an ally of China?

And the Biden, as we know from these FBI documents and from what we're hearing from the House Oversight Committee and other committees, the Biden family is compromised by China.

And why do we take Bill Gates when he announced that China was doing a great job about

COVID quarantine and suppression of the virus?

They weren't.

They were a police state that even their draconian measures didn't work.

But

why do we do this with China?

They cheat on patents.

They cheat on copyrights.

They dump product to get market share.

They manipulate the currency.

They have a police state that exploits the Uyghurs.

They harvest organs.

They're not a nice group of people under that government.

And yet we keep finding ways of bowing to them and allowing them to get away.

And here's John Kerry about we're going to work with China on climate change.

What does that mean?

We haven't built a coal plant since 2012.

We need cheap energy.

We got the third largest coal reserves, I think, in the world.

We're exporting it to China.

We're not building coal here.

They're building

two a week.

And so my point is that if you really are worried about climate change, Mr.

Kerry, go over there and talk to them.

Tell them, stop that.

But don't yell at us and say, you know, we've got to stop natural gas cooktops.

Compared to the Chinese coal emissions, it's nothing.

And it's the same thing.

I don't understand this mind.

You remember the Iran deal?

Kerry was always going over and telling them, we're going to give you this, and we're going to give you

this withheld money years ago, and we've got billions for you.

And

we're going to announce when we're going to inspect the nuclear facilities.

We'll give you 24-hour.

It was always concession, concession, concession.

Same thing he does with China, concession, concession, concession.

Same thing he did after he inherited that mess from Hillary and the red lines in Syria with bringing

the Russians in.

Remember, they went into Syria.

Suddenly they're back in the Middle East.

Kerry's working with the Russians to ensure us there's no W.

Concession, concession, concession.

That's what they do.

They always do that.

I don't know if it's because they have no confidence in America or no empathy for it or that they're afraid of people or they're going to, they think their magnanimity is going to be turned.

Yes.

I think that assessment of yours, which you often say is the right one, they think this is, we're being magnanimous and so it's going to be returned at some point, even if it's not now, right?

It'll be returned, but it will be returned with spite and insolence and.

revenge.

Yeah.

I think the people get insulted.

They think, oh, look at those Americans.

They come over here and they give us all these pat us on the head and say, keep burning that coal and we're going to restrict those yokels in East Palestine.

But they don't respect that.

They think what a bunch of stupid idiots they are to go be tougher on their own people.

It's like, remember I told you that Fang Fang actually came up to my office?

Yes.

And that was years ago.

And she came up with her.

I think I've told the audience that.

I wrote a lot of critical things.

This is a person from the Chinese consulate.

Well, I said, okay, I'll talk to whoever it was.

And like a nanosecond later, she was up in my office.

She was already on campus.

And then fortunately, I had the door open.

I had a couple of people there that we were in.

But she said something I'll never forget.

She did the Bally Girl, right?

I went to Cal State.

You know, she said she went to Cal State.

I don't know, it was Hayward or something.

And hey, man,

you know, know, let's talk turkey.

But she didn't do that until the end.

At first, it was, this is fang, fang.

You know, she had the

troubled English accent.

Yes.

And then when I just laughed at it, then she went into, I'm a more American than you and Valley Girl.

And she said something that was very interesting.

She said she couldn't figure out.

why Obama allowed China to interfere in its airspace and its naval space.

right?

In other words, not,

I shouldn't say Obama's naval.

Why did

China go into South Korean airspace and Japanese air and sea space and near-American bases without

being

told not to or without planes being scrambled?

And I said, I don't know.

We were just trying to talk adversarially.

And she said, something I'll never forget.

She said, every leader,

man, every leader has one concern, his own people.

So why does your leader doesn't care about your people?

We want to know why he doesn't care about your people.

We wouldn't do that.

That was a good question, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So, you know, it's like.

And then she said, you know, one mile, she said, one mile, you let one mile, you go two miles.

You let two miles, you go three miles.

You let three miles, you go to four miles.

So they stop you at four.

You start the sequence over, you go six, and then they stop you.

And

that's,

it was, she had a good point, though, that every leader's responsibility, first and foremost, is the protection and security of his own people or her own people.

And we don't do that.

And they were

dumbfounded why we don't.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take our second break and come back to talk about Biden's visit to Britain.

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We're back, and I would like to remind everybody that Victor can be found on social media.

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So Victor.

Biden went to Britain and apparently, according to the papers, offended Charles, I think he's Charles III, so King Charles, by breaching protocol.

So he uh very good about that, and they had climate talks.

I want to read to you something from the telegraph, which is the conservative newspaper in Britain.

I've never heard anything quite so cruel.

I'm only going to was that, was that, was that written by Niall Gardner?

I think that's the guy.

Uh,

I've met Niall, he's a very bright guy, yeah.

He's uh,

he's he's an effective polemicist, and he's, of course, pro-British, he's British, but he's also very, very bright.

Yeah, this is.

And he's unafraid.

So, yeah, he says here: no president in modern American history has done more to undermine the partnership with the UK.

His, meaning Joe Biden's shameless knifing of the Defense Secretary Ben Wallace's candidacy to be the next NATO Secretary General was classic ruthlessness from Mr.

Biden, who can barely disguise his sheer hatred of Britain, Brexit, and British history.

He has built a well-earned reputation as one of the most crude, narcissistic, and rude politicians of our time.

He has amply conveyed this approach in his dealings with Britain, bullying of the British government successfully over Northern Ireland protocol, sinking a trade deal with the UK after several rounds of negotiations by the Trump administration.

And dot, dot, dot, dot.

That article goes on and on, and he is just just brutal.

Yeah, I don't understand the Biden.

This,

the left does that a lot with Britain.

You know, FDR did that with Churchill

at

Yalta.

FDR before they, he said, let me talk to

Uncle Joe.

He hates Britain.

He hates your guts.

He said that to Winston Churchill.

Wow.

Said that to the head head of a government who

was the only major belligerent in World War II on either the Allied side or the Axis that went to war

for

a reason other than either attacking someone or being attacked by them.

Britain went to war for the sovereignty of Poland, and no one had done that.

And nobody else did that except Britain.

And Britain was the only country, remember, that from September 2nd of 1939, I guess this is September 2nd of 1945.

It was the only country that was there on the first day of World War II and on the last day.

We weren't, the Russians weren't, Germans weren't, Japan wasn't, Italy, they were.

And so they have a certain, this is all besides our heritage.

I know Joe Biden always brags about his Irish fruits.

I'm part Irish.

I had a grandmother that was Irish,

as well as being Swedish, but I don't understand that.

I really don't.

Maybe it's the new multiculturalism, but

we had a revolution that was not as violent in part because we were rebelling against the British.

You know what I'm saying?

If we were rebelling against the Germans, we wouldn't be here.

Yes.

Maybe even the Spanish or the French.

But we were rebelling against a parliamentary monarchy, constitutional monarchy that had a parliament.

And it had

a tradition of enlightenment that was unmatched in Europe.

And much of what we owe this country, we owe to Britain.

And then when you look at our partnership in World War I and World War II,

even when we humiliated them gratuitously like Suez,

that didn't reflect well on us.

And what I'm trying to get at is, yes, the British are eccentric.

Yes, they have a monarchy.

Yes, they have a sense of

lost grandeur, but they're our friends.

And they're always there when we need them.

And they're good people.

It's a wonderful country.

It's got a, it's, it's something that every president should cherish.

And this idea that we snub them or we make fun of them, it doesn't make any sense.

No.

The Bidens do that.

I don't understand.

And Brexit is an internal British matter.

They don't come over here and tell us how to vote.

And, you know, I was cured of this anglophobia.

I never really, because I grew up on a rural farm.

I never met anybody who was British, right?

Yes.

There was a friend I had whose father was a B-17 pilot, and he had married someone who was British.

So when we went over to his house, she had a British accent.

She was probably about 50 at the time.

This is like 1969.

And I didn't know what it was.

And then when I was in classics, that had been a British domain, Oxford, Cambridge, Regis, Professor of Greek, et cetera.

That was a pinnacle of world classical studies.

And there were no jobs in Britain, and America was still booming at that time.

So every university had British academics,

right?

And they were, they didn't know how to teach Americans, and they were very different.

And we all thought they were arrogant, right?

And they would say things like,

you know, Mr.

Smith, would you decline

Luo in 360 forms for the class?

And they were grammarians and they knew it and they rubbed everybody.

Okay.

And when I was 18 or 19, I hated British.

I thought, oh, these academics.

And then there was these American copycats, right?

So So you'd see students that are 18 or 19 in classics and they wanted to be considered, what, a real scholar at 19 or 20.

So they would wear British clothes, you know what I mean?

Kind of dress up like British and they would wear.

They would act like they would actually get an affected.

There was a, I won't mention people's names.

They're probably still alive.

But when I got to Stanford at 21, there was a guy there that I thought he was British.

He sounded just like it.

I said, where's he from?

They said, he's from Texas.

So, but my point is, is, there was a really good professor there.

And

I said, he was from the British lower classes, Mark Edwards.

He was a brilliant guy.

I don't mean in sheer scholarship, but just in personal relationships.

He tried to, he liked America.

He really resented the British class system.

And he came up to, I didn't know him very well.

I was only a graduate student.

He came up and said, I got to talk to you, Mr.

Hansen.

And I said, he said, you made fun of a couple of British things the other day in class.

I said, Yeah.

And he said, That's really beneath you.

I said, Why?

And he said, You know,

did you have family that fought in the war?

I said, Yes.

He said, Do you have any idea what the Psalm did to British families?

And then, you have any idea what Passion Day?

And I had been reading.

I said, No, I didn't.

And, you know, and he gave me a lecture.

And then he said, You know,

British people like you.

And don't judge Britain by some academics.

And even if you don't like this academic or this professor who you think is, and they were kind of haughty, you know, can't you learn something from them?

Can't you learn something about inscriptions?

Can't you learn something about comparative philology?

Can't you understand this person when he's trying to explain why Latin is different than Greek?

So why would you try to not absorb that just because of your tribal chauvinism or prejudice?

And it was really shook me up.

I got so angry.

and i remember i was 21 my parents uh were they were visiting the bay area and they stopped in to see me in my east bow alcohol apartment i said that my mom said well that sounds like pretty good advice

it was good advice yes and after that moment at that it was like a lightning bolt hit my head and after that i i developed a lot of good friendships with professors that i thought I would have thought otherwise were haughty.

And I didn't really care what their mannerisms were or their little quips like, you know, we were in World War I, we were in World War II, well before you came in.

True, they were.

And so, you know, during the Gulf War, I said something about British taking credit, you know, and somebody corrected me and I said, that was a really stupid thing I said.

So, yeah, I mean,

he's got a point.

Britain should be our partner and there should be no daylight between us and the British.

It doesn't mean they're obsequious, but they do a lot of good in the world.

They always have done a lot more good than they have done bad.

And that's not true of most nations.

We have a special, I think, obligation to support Britain and to the degree that they ask for protection to help them.

I know in the Falklands War under the cover,

we had our, you know, we have a large Latino population.

We had

New World considerations, but we did help Britain in the Falklands.

And that was a wise thing to do that Reagan did.

I think Hag and other people suggested he not do that.

Yeah.

So I am very sympathetic to what Niall Gardner said.

And I would have said the same thing if Trump had done that.

Yeah.

You want to keep them on your side because they're wicked smart, all the way from that article to the decoding of the Enigma machine in World War II.

You know,

Hitler, you know, in his table talk, he expressed unlimited admiration for the British, but not in the sense that he liked their

humanizing effect on civilization, but they were devilishly crafty

and he thought they were formidable enemies.

So every time,

you know, he came out with a snorkel, they came out with an improved sonar or a new type of depth charge or a new...

ASDAC or something, they were always or every time he thought he had a Fokwuff 190, they came out with a new version of the Merlin engine and Spitfire, or they put it into a Mustang, or when he had it,

you know,

every new weapon.

The British seemed to,

he had a Panther and tiger tank, and the British figured out how to put a 17-pounder on a Sherman chassis and blow them up.

They were very, very

clever people.

Yeah, you want to keep them on your side, whatever their eccentricities are.

If I were to say

what would be U.S.

foreign policy on craftiness,

I would have four allies.

And the number one would be the British because they're ingenious.

I mean, they started the Industrial Revolution, and they always come up with good ideas.

And we snubbed them on D-Day when they had all of Hobart's funnies.

You know, they had all these different types of adopted Sherman tanks that would sweep the...

the beach of mines or alligators that would go over ravines.

And we didn't fully utilize it.

And they always came up with a solution.

So we want to keep them.

And the Israelis are ingenious.

Yes.

They are really, really smart people.

And we want to keep them on our side.

And I know that people make fun of the French.

Remember when Foreign Minister Villippon, he was ranting and raving against the Bush administration going into Iraq.

And he sits.

And then they started taking an interest of him.

And he had written a book.

I read it in French.

It was called Cry of the

Gargoyle.

It was about crazy Napoleon to the skies, as I remember.

But he said something on TV, I'll never forget.

And he said, How do you think that the French will do it?

And said, Well, we're going to, we all will do it.

We always do.

We rely on Gallic ingenuity.

But he had a point.

I mean, they, in World War, I mean, they created the tank along with the British.

They made really good tanks.

The British started it and they improved on it.

And

even when they were overwhelmed and

Mark Bloch's

strange, strange defeat,

they were creating fighters and shard tanks that were just as good as the Germans.

And they were very brilliant.

They're very ingenious people.

And when you, you know, you can make fun of all the things that are wrong with France, but you go there and you see them and what they've created in that city and French cities.

And then, of course, I don't mean crafty in the sense of ingenious, although they are, but the Germans are

craftymanship.

They have precision

tanks.

I mean, you look at what they produce,

dishwashers or BMWs or Mercedes.

They're just craftsmen, and they're very good at what they do, and they're disciplined.

And you put them all together, and any president goes in the White House, you'll say, you know what?

There's not going to be any smart alley diplomat who's who's got some theory we're going to alienate the French or the Germans or the British or the Israelis.

Or the Israelis.

And he's going to have to say, I know that they get on our nerves.

I know they think that Europe is a center of the universe.

I know they think that we're hicks.

I know that they think we're money crazed capitalist cowboys.

I don't care.

They're in our interest and they are an integral part of.

a humane civilization.

And I would include the Canadians and the Australians as well.

And that should be our foreign policy.

And, you know, even the Japanese, they've done wonders after the war.

Yeah, that's true.

I don't understand why you'd even hesitate to, I don't know why the ankle biting is what I guess I'm saying.

Yeah, that's very strange.

You know, the other strange thing is that John Kerry keeps popping up everywhere, every once in a while.

He's kind of like a homeless person that comes out of his tent and wants to make a bunch of noise and then goes back into his tent for a while.

But he showed up there on the whole climate change initiative.

And apparently Biden has made him the special presidential envoy for

climate change.

And so he's been doing that for years.

He has to have a job.

He's a busybody.

They have a word in classical Greek for it called a polypragmon.

It's a term of insult in Aristophanic cat comedy.

A polypragnon pragmon is a guy who sits around the agora.

They also have a word that that translates into an agora lounger.

And he just sits there and his eyes bolt around.

And any little business, he runs over and gets in the middle of it.

And he tries to do this.

And he screws.

Kind of like Joe Biden when that famous quote from

Barack Obama, don't underestimate the ability

for Joe to F it up.

That's John Kerry.

Remember, he was the guy who delivered this horrible Iran deal by giving all these concessions.

And then when Trump threw it out, he snuck over like a poly pragmon to Paris.

And oh, I'm not violating the logo, any act or anything.

But he was meeting with the foreign minister, or at least the former foreign minister of Iran, to kind of, and then he's now he's slittered around and he's in China.

But at whatever manifestation he has of the moment, the theme and the character is always constant.

It's John Kerry,

speaks French, aristocrat, married a multimillionaire the first time,

aristocrat, born into aristocracy without sufficient money to satisfy his material appetites, but married a multimillionaire, then divorced her, and then moved on up to a multi-billionaire widow, heir to the Heinz ketchup fortune, and has his private jet.

And when asked why he has such a carbon footprint, he says, I've got to.

I've got to spew carbon and get quickly to save people from spewing carbon.

That was his argument.

And that's what he always does.

He always cares.

He has two traits.

One is the process, not the result, is what's important.

And two, it's always concession, concession, concession.

The United States is going to, I don't know why he does that.

It has some.

Something to do with the aristocracy, the bi-coastal elites despising of middle America or what America is, or America should always do this, or America owes this, or America must do this.

America must give concessions to iran if you're going to inspect their nuclear site don't you've got to tell them in advance or china go ahead and build coal plants and you know we understand and we won't build any at all and we'll try to get you to make i don't know please give us 40 a year rather than 52 or something and that's how he thinks and he never

what the guy needs to do is go to elco nevada or

I don't know, El Paso, Texas, or Bakersfield, and just be around people.

And you remember when he was running in 2004?

You know,

he told that group, you better stay in college or they're going to send you to Iraq.

And that was when these people were dying in Iraq.

And anybody who went over there, and I did go over there in 2006 and 2007, could see that those guys in Iraq had very high IQs.

I'm not just talking about the colonels and lieutenant colonels and majors, but some of his kids that were captains and sergeants and privates.

I rode in a Black Hawk with a guy with a 50-caliber machine gun right outside, sitting there smiling.

And he could tell you every target to shoot at, not to shoot at.

So they were smart people.

And the idea that you're only dummies went over there is insulting.

Yes.

And he always did that.

He always said something.

Remember, he said about George Bush, he had caught him on a hot, I can't believe I'm losing to this guy.

And then

they leaked his SAT scores.

I think W had a higher SAT score than Carrie.

So, you know, George Bush

was actually very,

he had an aptitude and intellect.

He did.

The truth is a hard master.

That's more so than Carrie did.

Yeah.

And so anyway.

Well,

that's the end of our show, Victor.

I have one comment I would like to read to you.

It's kind of a critique of starting with optimism.

He says, I wanted to let Victor know that I, for one, do not need any forced optimism.

I've been listening to VDH for years.

Lately, I've been hearing about listeners emailing about the lack of optimism in Victor's podcast.

We're all blessed to have our minds blown on a weekly basis from Victor's insights.

And any optimism one seeks should be sourced from within.

Okay, I want you to cut, to print that out.

I want it to cut, and I want it on your refrigerator.

and you need it every single day.

I'm glad I knew people were out there that agree with my Eeyore take on what's going on right now.

But I'm glad to be reaffirmed for a change.

I am optimistic.

I had a bad cold coming back from the, and guess what?

I remember that a good friend of mine told me that you take two things.

I know I'm dispensing medical advice.

You take French pine bark and you take quercetin at double the dose.

And I did.

And I had a fever and a messy cold.

And in 24 hours, I was on the way to where I am now.

So I'm very upbeat about that.

Because I know that if you said that to an MD, they'd say,

integrative medicine, that's just quackery.

Maybe, but maybe it was just power of thought.

But that's a good thing.

And then I drove all the way from Palo Alto this morning.

I left at 4:45 and drove across California.

And I only hit four detours.

One of the mountains.

Yes.

And I was almost home.

I was trying to get home for an interview.

And I'm finally into the valley.

And I'm cross 41.

And I'm just, Mountain View is closed down, of course, because of Stonehenge, the big, you know, high-speed rail for the last four years that destroyed our avenue.

And so I thought, you know what?

I'll take my custom Nebraska.

They would never shut down in a hurry.

And of course,

under construction.

So I had to back up, go back all the way over to floral avenue and they always get you in california but i did make it in four hours i have one thing just to say i i wonder that he well i i appreciate the comment but at the same time i'm thinking but every time victor starts with something optimistic he always weaves it into pessimism anyway so you sound like my mother you serve two masters there sound like my mother my mother would my father would give me an annual critique when i started to be a professor.

They were so worried that I was such a slob.

So my mother said, You will go twice as far in this world if you just smile.

You have a

good smile.

Don't hide it.

I know you don't think you do, but you do.

Smile and you'll win over people, but don't frown.

You always frown when you were a little baby.

Your baby pictures are full of frowns.

I was worried about the status of the world when I was one, maybe.

And then my father said to me, No matter what you do,

no matter what you aspire to, you're only going to get halfway there if you continue to dress so casually.

So as you told Jack, he gave you angel flight.

Yes.

And he was the one that gave me the love boat

wardrobe.

Yeah.

But anyway, he was.

All right.

And

I try to remember both of those smile more and try to dress.

I do try to do that now, but I always remember that.

All right.

Well, Victor, thank you very much for all your wisdom.

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