The Indictment Revealed and Other Current Affairs

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, and Victor Davis-Hanson is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

The federal indictments that have come down against former President Donald Trump. Victor spoke a little about this the other day in his previous podcast episode with Sammy.

Some more details have come out. So we're going to get fuller thoughts from Victor on that, on Hunter Biden's.

Well, I should say that the House

committee has seen some of these FBI documents about Hunter Biden's and Joe Biden's Corleone family shakedown or bribes from the Ukrainians. And what else are we going to do?

Tucker Carlson on Twitter. Maybe we'll get to China's spy island off of Cuba.
Victor, we'll get to your thoughts on all these things right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show. So two things, Victor.
Various images have come out about the Trump indictment,

some of the grand jury testimonies or investigation, Trump's conversations with a publisher of newspapers talking about attack plans, et cetera, a whole host of things have come out.

So, really, I think for the general public, who are not as consumed by politics as you or I are, or not so deeply ingrained in conservatism as you and I are, I think maybe to the general voter, these images may be just what Dr.

Merrick Garland ordered, a political, harmful political attack on Donald Trump, that Trump that will resonate with

your average American voter. So that's just one thought, Victor.
I think there's a, regardless of the justice or injustice of this, there's a political consequence that we'd like your opinion on.

And then just to jump off here, I'd like to read the beginning of the Wall Street Journal's Saturday Wall Street Journal's editorial. It's titled A Destructive Trump Indictment.

By the way, I don't endorse this editorial or oppose oppose it, but I just think it's a good jumping off point for you.

Whether you love or hate Donald Trump, his indictment by President Biden's Justice Department is a fraught moment for American democracy. For the first time in U.S.

history, the prosecutorial power of the federal government has been used against a former president who's also running against the sitting president.

This is far graver than the previous indictment by a rogue New York prosecutor, and it will roil the 2024 election and U.S. politics for years to come.

Victor goes on to say that

no one should be fooled.

This is Attorney General Merrick Garland's responsibility. Mr.
Garland appointed Mr. Smith, that's Jack Smith, the special counsel, to provide political cover.
But Mr. Garland, who reports to Mr.

Biden, has the authority to overrule a special counsel's recommendation. Americans will inevitably see this as a a Garland-Biden indictment, and they are right to think so.

Victor, I think that's dead on. Maybe other things in the editorial aren't.
Victor, what are your thoughts now, two, three days removed from the announcement of the indictment?

Well, before you get to what the, you know, the journal says that Trump's anti-democratic excesses, but whenever anybody says that, they have to specify what they mean.

So I would ask the journal editorial writers, what do you mean? Exactly what do you mean? Donald Trump then took all of these archives out.

He was careless, even though Mar-Lago is a locked compound. And he was in a fight with the archivist who, and I guess as this happens, these are usually civil matters.

And then they sent FBI people to him. Okay.
So

is that a, what is that? an insurrection against democracy? Did Donald Trump hire a foreign national like Christopher Steele to disrupt a campaign? Was he like the FBI under Barack Obama that,

as we know, opened Operation Crossfire? Obama was briefed on it. He knew about it.
And he knew that it was bogus. Even John Brennan said that it was a Hillary Apple campaign.

Did he do what Joe Biden did? Did he have one of his, Mike Pompeo as his Secretary of State? We know in 2020,

would Trump order Mike Pompeo to call up people in the CIA and lie and say,

if the, let's say, the laptop

was rushing disinformation, would Trump have said, okay, you guys, Pompeo, you get on the phone and you tell that old Mike Morrell to round up 51 people to swear that it's authentic when he knew it wasn't.

So what I'm getting at is that we're living through the most egregious period of corruption. And I haven't talked about the Biden family's money processing consortium in our history.

So, anytime you talk about,

yes, Donald Trump's bad, but they did bad things to him, and you make that asymmetry, then you have to get the ledger and let's start looking at all the bad things, Donald Trump, the phone call from Ukraine?

Is that what you mean?

Or go to this, the reckless statement, go to the Capitol and assemble peacefully?

I mean, he shouldn't have said it, but is that an assault on democracy like Hillary Clinton using a private server and then destroying

subpoenas from the Justice Department

from the FBI for her emails and her devices, or hiring a foreign national, which is illegal, to go into a campaign and try to smear her opponent and using three paywalls to do that? So

that's what is bothersome. The other question is:

is the actual, not the Wall Street Journal or people's reactions, but the actual asymmetry. So he has an aide, Jack, a cook, a Navy cook, 10-year veteran.
I think his name is Will Nauta.

Nauta is a Greek, a Latin word actually for

seaman. Isn't that kind of strange? He was a veteran, and then it's a feminine noun.

It's a feminine-looking masculine noun in Latin, Nauta, nauta, but it means sailor. So Will Sailor basically worked.

He was a Navy SEAL, right? Yeah, I think he was a cook, actually. Oh, okay.
Okay, but he became sort of like Obama's bagman.

Only, you know, I don't want to suggest anything, but they had a strange relationship.

But he was a bag man for Trump. And then he retired from the Navy, and he was assigned by the government to Trump.
He wasn't working, obviously, for Trump in the White House. He was a government

employee in the Navy. So then he goes as a private person.
Then Trump tells him, puts these here, and these here, and these here.

And he's asked under oath, did you put these here? And he said, I don't know. And they're going to, they indicted him.

And they're going to go after him for making a false statement. Okay.

If you made a false statement, let the law fall upon him. But the man has no money and he's a Navy veteran and he was doing what Trump did.

And he thought the the ex-president of the United States told him to do something.

And he knows that the people in the government, the Biden administration, the bureaucracy fight with Trump all the time. So

he doesn't know who to adjudicate, but okay. He said that he didn't know.

Pause, stop.

James Comey went before Devin Nunes's House Select Committee on Intelligence and on 245 occasions when he was asked about the dossier crossfire hurricane, he said one of three things.

I don't recall, I don't know, I don't remember. And did he have any consequences? That was under oath before a congressional committee.
John Brennan went before the U.S.

Congress and he was asked, did your agency, you, CIA director, did they spy on the

staff computers of U.S. Simpsons? No, they did not.
That was an out-and-out lie. I think even the Washington Post called for him to resign.
He was asked another time,

did you have collateral damage when you go order these CIA drones? No, we do not. That was a lie.
There was no consequence. He even had a security clearance and he monetized it.

And then James Clapper went before Congress. Has the National Security Agency, as director of national intelligence, do they spy on him? No, they do not.

And then they presented evidence where he was flat out lying. And he said,

I don't know. I gave the least untruthful answer.
No consequences whatsoever.

Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel by the gymnastics of James Comey, who leaked, I think that was against the law too, a likely confidential or not classified document of a private conversation, solitary conversation with the president of the United States, in which he lied and said that Donald Trump was not under investigation when he knew that that's exactly what they were doing.

He leaked it to a third party to the New York Times. No consequences whatsoever.
But that dossier

and the work of fusing GPS were the catalysts that prompted Comey basically to go rogue and when he was

in the process of being fired to, as he in his own words said, he wanted Robert Mueller to be special counsel.

So when Robert Mueller completed his $40 million, 22-month investigation, he too went before the intelligence committee, or maybe it was the oversight, can't remember.

It's a congressional committee under oath. They asked him about the, I don't know anything about that.
It's not in my purview. How about the steel doll? I don't know.
That was a complete lie.

He couldn't have had a committee. He wouldn't have been there if it wasn't for Fusion GPS.

So my point is, and we could go into Anthony Fauci swearing under oath to Rand Paul that he didn't subsidize gain of function research when every notable,

we had Stephen Quay on there in a really brilliant, I thought, interview that he gave us showed exactly how it was gain of function research. Everybody knew it was.
He flat out lied.

He redacted the email.

My point is that this administration or these permanent bureaucratic people throughout any administration lie with impunity and it hurts national security and nothing happens.

Then they take a 10-year military veteran

and they're going to ruin his life. And that's what people have to point out.

And so,

you know, there's two issues for all these candidates. I was listening, Jack, to Chris Christie

comment on it.

And I was listening to Nikki Haley. Chris Christie said essentially, it's a damning case.

And then Nikki Haley said, we got to move on, like write him off, he's done.

And then Mike Pence said, we have to follow the rule of law.

And I couldn't believe Mike Pence said we have to follow the rule of law because Mike Pence was vice president and he took out classified documents and he didn't tell anybody he did until they found out about it or that they had gone after Trump and he had somebody to go look.

Oh,

I did exactly what these other guys did. I'm only going to bring it to your attention because you caught them and you might go after me, but I'm Mike Pence and I'm cooperating.

So that's the difference. Okay, well, all those people just blew up.
I don't think they had a violence. They just blew up their nomination because they didn't have to say that.

There was only one response if you were not Trump. Only one.
And you had to say the following.

I am sick and tired of the asymmetrical application of the law. There's one law for everybody in Washington to lie and to break, to commit felonies with impunity and then to inflate misdemeanors.

And we're talking about a civil suit, basically,

because most of these archival disputes can be solved bureaucratically. And if they can't, they're civil suits.

But they're taking a civil suit and going through every aspect of it and then trying to milk a felony conviction like espionage or perjury, all about an archival dispute.

Nobody believes that Donald Trump

took those documents and sold them or gave them to somebody. They said, well,

he was going to sell them. No, he took them all out there because we know what he was going to do.
He was going to have a tremendous, gargantuan, beautiful, best presidential library in the world.

And he wanted documents that he felt

in that presidential library reflected his greatest achievements, or at least he was afraid that the archives might not have them in the way that he thought would reflect best. Was that wrong?

Probably so. But it was a civil bureaucratic matter that could have been resolved without FBI agents.
So when you're a candidate,

you have to say, this is horrible. Now, I understand

that if you're a candidate and you can't go to the next level, because you're a rival of Trump. And the next level is sort of the people on Fox News saying, oh, primary's over.

The American people need to flock behind Donald Trump. They need to annoy him.
No, you can't do that. You're having a primary.

And if you say something like that, oh, this is terrible what they did to Donald Trump. Donald Trump is completely innocent.
He's wonderful. Well, you know what Trump's going to do.

He's going to take that video clip. If DeSantis were to say that, he's going to take that video clip and do what he does with the nightly Fox commercials, throw it back in his face in two months.

So the best thing to do is to

be empathetic to Trump by deploring the unequal application and the witch hunt targeting of Donald Trump. And

anybody who doesn't do that and attacks Trump is done for.

And myself, I would never vote. I'm not going to vote for, I would never consider voting for Christie anyway, but I wouldn't after that.
I wouldn't vote for Haley after that. I like Mike Pence.

I think he's a decent person.

But he's got a, to, if he's going to comment on it and say that we have to follow the rule of law, then he has to preface his comments with, and I myself broke the law because I took out classified information.

But what distinguishes me from Trump is when I discovered that because they were going after Trump, and that was the only reason that.

I discovered it because I was perfectly happy having my papers out of mind, out of sight. I didn't care.

But once everybody else was in a legal jeopardy, I re-examined me and said, found out that I had a potential

felony? Is that what we call it now? So then he should have said that. And then he should have said, and this is not a symmetrical application of the law.

You know, Victor, there is a case of someone

stealing documents. Remember Sandy Berger.
Stuck it in his crouch.

Well, maybe he didn't have any room left in his socks because that's where he was stealing classified documents from the National Archives,

a lot of them. And he ended up, he died a couple of years ago, I believe, but

he

sentenced to two years of probation, a misdemeanor, 100 hours of community service. He was fined 50 grand.

And he's stripped of his security clearance for three years. But this is an overt act of thievery of classified documents.

And I think with the case of Trump and

Pence, and for all I know, Dan Quayle has some classified documents, you know, in his

under the coffee table in his living room.

It seems to me that when you leave office as your president or vice president, this is going to be something that happens.

And whether it happens intentionally or maliciously or, you know, different things. That said,

what are your thoughts about some of the legal

analysts who've...

I mean, I really like Jonathan Turley. Turley, yeah.
Yeah.

Yeah, both of them. Dersowicz, I think, is still thinking it's such an outrage, right? I mean, he doesn't like Trump.
He didn't vote for Trump. I understand that.

But he still thinks it's an outrage of asymmetry. Turley's a little different before when they were leaking, and they always leak, don't they? They were leaking the indictment.

And he was outraged

the first day and said that they had never done this before, right?

And this was a first in American history of a sitting president's administration indicting not only an ex-president of the opposite party,

but more importantly, also one who could be his likely rival in 2024 in the next election. And Turley didn't like that.

And then Turley essentially said, as he reviewed the Presidential Records Act of 1978, and I read it too after I listened to him,

that the thrust of

those protocols are that these are bureaucratic civil matters. And they apply to the vice president, too.
So Joe Biden was in violation of them before he came president.

He's in violation of them when he was a senator and he took them.

He was in violation as a vice president when he took them out after that tenure, and he was violation of a sitting president. The president of the United States for 20 years

has had classified documents without the permission of government in violation of the presidential records office in four different locations, and whose number we don't even know, but we do know some of them from photographic evidence were in his garage where Hunter used them and

hint and wink nod in leftist fashion.

The inference, if you read Hunter's emails where he was broadcasting to potential quid pro quo clients of his expertise, they contain language that was diplomatise.

And so there's an inference that we need to know.

If I was a federal special counsel investigating him, I would take all of his emails, every one that he sent to any of his colleagues or

foreign operators. And I would do a word search and see if any of them,

if there's a data bank of these presidential papers, copies of them on hard online, and see if any of that wording matches.

I would be not surprised that Hunter was using official diplomatic language that he somehow had access. in to showcase his expertise.

There has been some suggestion of that already by people in Congress. And so

that's so Turley, getting back to your, to finish your question, Turley now has said he's looked at the photographic evidence that was leaked, I guess, the first day. Now it's out of boxes slopped.

I don't understand how those boxes in the bathroom or the closet are any less or more secure. I think they're more secure, actually, than Joe Biden's garage.

But he feels that that and the fact that Donald Trump in an offhanded matter, said these

were not declassified. Well, Donald Trump says a lot of stuff, exaggerates, you know, trash talks.
So I'm not sure that that was.

Anyway,

he's flipped now, I think, and feels that Donald Trump is facing a serious matter. There's a couple of other issues, Jack, that...

I think our listeners know about, but

Mr. Smith,

I know that Donald Trump.

Yeah, Donald Trump should not be attacking a special prosecutor. I get that.

But

there are some

you can't have a special prosecutor to do something that's never been done, right? Never been done.

When his wife is a leftist documentary filmmaker and just put out in 2020 an obsequious, toadious, sham documentary becoming, idealizing Michelle Obama.

So you're going to have him beyond any suspicion of bias or prejudice to do something that's never happened in a U.S. history and double that.
You've never in U.S.

history ever indicted an ex-president and you've never indicted

the main likely presidential opponent of the existing president. You've never done that.
And who do you pick?

You pick a prosecutor whose wife has made a career of doing puff pieces on leftists like Michelle Obama.

And then, you know, there's all these other things that we just talked about, but the president can declassify things, the vice president can't.

So Joe Biden took those things out when he was a senator and vice president, and there was no ambiguity. He couldn't declassify them, and they were classified.

Biden had them for what, if you, if he left the Senate, Jack, in 2000,

early in January of 2009,

he's had him for a decade and a half, right?

Yeah. Yeah.
And Trump's had him for what, 18 months?

And he was president.

Yeah, and he was and he was president. And

Joe Biden is, as you say, is president of the United States.

If the special counsel and Professor Turley think that this is a felonious act, then the President of the United States is sitting on a lot of felonies because knowingly and willfully he assumed the office of presidency with full knowledge that he had taken out classified information that was illegal to do so as a senator and as a vice president and further compounded that illegality by possessing illegal classified documents in at least four locations.

And he was president. He is president.
It's a little different. And then a couple of other things uh

you know that are

that i think

we should think about and that is that uh

as i said these were civil these are civil matters and i don't know

it it parallels the alvin bragg campaign finance you take something

and uh

you don't act on it until you you don't act on it, but then you inflate it and you graft it. Or I think Turley and people like that use the word bootstrap.
You bootstrap it onto other things.

Otherwise, there wouldn't be the other thing. So don't obstruction.
Yeah, I think that's what I mean.

Yeah, obstruction, espionage, perjury. All of that comes in context with the initial premise that you're taking a civil matter and making it into a felony.

And then once you do that, anything around that civil bureaucratic dispute, then you're going to criminalize in a felonious matter. And so that is that.

And then, you know, I know I know the listeners say, Victor, don't recite this again, but I'm so obsessed with it. I mean,

these people are all weighing in. I just turned on the TV yesterday.
John Brennan is weighing in.

James Comey is weighing in. James Clapper is weighing in.

Andrew McCabe is weighing in. They're taking victory laps on social media.
Yeah, and CNN.

And so John Brennan was an ex-CIA director he lied on two occasions clapper did on one we just mentioned that mccabe did four times according to the inspector three of them are under oath hillary clinton two-time what presidential candidate secretary of state ex-U.S.

Senator. I guess we could do that.
She destroyed her subpoenaed emails. She smashed those communication.
Remember that? She smashed the communication devices. Yeah.

It was illegally to transmit any of that classified information on her homebrew server. She no prosecutor would

consider according to the Comey standard. No, only Comey wouldn't.
Only Comey wouldn't. She unlawfully also hired a foreign national.
I looked up that.

That's a violation of campaign statutes to hire somebody who's not a U.S. citizen to work on a presidential campaign.
That's what for Christopher Steele.

And she knew that, and that's why she hid it through DNC, Perkins-Coey, and Fusion GPS, the payments.

And then, you know, of course, this is not the first thing. You got to put this in context, Jack.
This comes after he was the first president in history to be impeached twice.

He was the first president in history to be tried as a private citizen by the Senate after he had left office.

He had 22 months and $40 million of the Super Duper all-star team, the Hunter-Killer team. Remember all that stuff? The all-stars, we were told, the Mueller people.

He had,

so my point is, they went after him in the 2016 election and they failed.

And they got even in the 2020 when they interfered by paying Twitter to suppress, and I think Facebook suppress any information they deemed harmful to Joe Biden.

They prepped him for the campaign by giving him this phony letter from 51 intelligence, quote-unquote, authorities to refute Trump on stage.

And then we get finally, Jack, do you really have to take armed FBI agents in a performance art raid, swoop down with cameras blazing when

Joe Biden is basically, hey, Joe president, you know, it looks kind of bad that you may, can you just check? And there's been rumors that you've got stuff and we'll talk to your lawyers.

And there's lawyers that, you know, Joe's got a lot of stuff okay well what do you want us to do uh just send over some guys and we'll talk to them versus what they did to trump and so the whole thing is rotten and i wish people would start with the rottenness and then after it's rotten say that donald trump didn't do himself any favors i know the wall street journal said that lying but

They didn't tell, and when everybody said he's undermining institutions, I want to know exactly how he's doing it. I want to know exactly how he's doing it.

When he was in office, was he using the Trump family to monetize? I don't like what Jared Kushner perhaps did with Saudi Arabia, but he did that as a private citizen after he left office.

And if you're saying, well, he got those contacts, well, they all do. That's why they go into politics to make the

contacts that they can monetize. That's what Lloyd Austin was an expert at.

So, you know,

it's really disturbing. And

I don't know where it all ends, but this is how I don't think any American, if any American diplomat, state, Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, Vice President goes to Vietnam, goes to, I don't know, Jordan, goes to Venezuela and says, I tell you, you got to have a constitutional, transparent society, they're going to laugh.

They're going to say, you're,

you're copying us more than we're copying you. Yeah.
We are a reflection of Venezuela

right now. Victor, my own defense about just raising that journal editorial.
Again, I don't necessarily defend it or

but the fact that at the outset

it was allaying this as a political thing that the great Merrick Garland, remember how he was going to be such an objective,

a liberal, but he should have been on the Supreme Court. He wasn't a leftist.

I can't imagine someone who's more of a leftist in practice than the Attorney General of the United States right now, except his boss, the President of the United States.

When you say the name Merrick Garland, you just have to remember three things.

Number one,

when he went before Congress and they were asking him why the FBI was infiltrating school board meetings to go after parents worried about critical race theory, indoctrination

instruction to their children. And why, when the FBI blew the Sarnoff case, they blew the San Bernardino terrorist killer, they blew all these things that they were warned about.
Why did they do this?

And it was pretty clear why Garland did. He got a letter from the teachers' union, right?

National Education Association of White Administrators or something. Superintendents

of schools.

And he tried to lie about that, but that's why he did it, because that was a constituency. The ed unions and the schools are a big constituency, and he knew that, and he was told to do that.

And so that was one thing you got to remember about Merrick Garland. And then he was brought on to

Congress, and they asked him point blank, it is a felony

for people to mob the house of a Supreme Court justice with the intent of affecting a future opinion.

And they ask him about that. And in fact, we know

that an assassin, would-be assassin, turned up in the vicinity of Gorsh's house. He was a trans person.

And the only reason he didn't act out on it, he had the weapons to do it, was that he texts his sister. Apparently, she talked him out of it.
And they asked him about that.

Why didn't you protect them? Why didn't you disperse? And he said, well, everybody has a freedom to protest. And they said, no, this is the statute.

You cannot get near the homes of a Supreme Court and scream and yell and try to influence them and threaten them and intimidate them. And he couldn't answer.

And then he said something like it was, well, it was really the responsibility of the Marshal Service. Yes, the Marshal Service, of which is in the, I think it's not a prosecutorial agency.
Yes, yes.

And so

he didn't do that. And then he was asked point blank,

why are you going after these people on January 6th when the Antifa BLM rioting of 120 days was coordinated in conspiratorial fashion across state lines.

It's across state lines, which is a federal felony and entailed $2 billion worth of damage, 35 to 40 deaths, 1,500

injured police officers, looting, arson.

Those are felonies. And you had it in, there were 14,000 people arrested.

Why didn't your your office intervene and say, we're applying to these ringleaders federal statutes of conspiracy racketeering?

Or why didn't you go after these protesters with federal indictments when they burned down a federal or tried to burn down a federal courthouse?

Three of them, I think Las Vegas and Minneapolis and Seattle.

And why didn't you go after them when they stormed on, tried to break in and attacked Secret Service and Capitol police that were defending federal property, the White House grounds.

They had just torched the St. John's Episcopal Church, and they wanted to get into the White House grounds and get out the president who was taken away.

And then, of course, the New York Times said Trump cowardly flees. Trump flees.

Yeah, he fled a mob that was committing a felony. And nothing, nothing.

That guy, you know,

I had a dog.

I only take in, I guess they call them rescue dogs, but pound dogs are this morning, a German Shepherd came in. It looks like somebody's beat the hell out of him.
And all my four dogs

tame to us in those fashion. But there's this, I had a dog that I felt bad once.
He came, and he had been so maltreated, or not maltreated, I don't know, maybe he had been vicious.

But every time I got near him, he rolled over and urinated on himself. And I fed him, I petted him, I put him on my truck.

In fact, if I was farming in the morning, I took him out and irrigated, I put him in the cab of the truck, I drove up to Fresno State, taught for three hours, had him in the truck with the window down, and then we drove back.

I didn't want, but I could never, I could never save him. And then one day he just

ran out in the middle of the road and got killed like he was going to commit suicide, I guess. I don't know.
But that's Merrick Garland.

That guy is so bruised over Mitch McConnell's finessing, and rightly so,

that they didn't act on his nomination. He went to every Republican and said, he besieged them.

And they just told him, said, we're using the Biden rule.

We didn't start it. You did.

Biden and everybody said, I'm warning you that if a president is a lame duck president and he nominates somebody in a Congress that is on the way out, we're not going to act on it.

And he never got over that. And you can see it in his face.

He's completely crushed and he's completely spineless and he's an invertebrate and he does whatever they tell him. And I think he's thinking, I got this job and I'm going to redeem myself.

I got a job. It's as important as the Supreme Court.
I'm going to do exactly what they tell me. And that's what he does.
He's a total lackey.

And, you know, this is all, I guess this is all sort of around what we're not talking about in America. And that is that if you watched Joe Biden the other day

with the British prime minister, or you watched him in a couple of public... He didn't remember Churchill's name, right? He did not know who.
How do you not know Churchill's name?

He didn't know that there's a prime minister in Britain rather than a president, but he was stumbling. He couldn't talk.

This thing, I keep saying it's occurring geometrically, not arithmetically, but his decline is such that

I don't know if he's even going to be alive. He's one more fall, just one fall from Kamala Harris.
I'm serious.

And everybody should think about that. And they like him.
What's weird about it is the left likes this because they prop him up

and they

unleash him from nine o'clock till two, three or four days a week. They put him on ice for the whole weekend.
They write the script on the teleprompter.

All he has to do, and he can't do it anymore, is read off the teleprompter. And then that expression of bewilderment that people with alzheimer's have

that angry you know they get angry because they're angry at they can't remember so he goes over there and he scowls and he spits out this hatred you know like i'm at howard university and i'm not here just because it's black but these these people these white supremacists you know it's just It's pathetic.

And I don't know. It's very dangerous because when you look at all of our, we'll talk about that, but all of our foreign relations, our allies no longer trust us.

Neutrals are joining the other side, and our enemies are getting on their hind legs.

They mock us, and we'll get to that. Yeah, we'll talk about China and Saudi Arabia.
And, well, let's take a break now because we also want to talk about

Tucker Carlson. And how about we do that right after these important messages?

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. A few things, folks.
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Victor.

Tucker Carlson has

re-emerged. I don't know that he ever...
went away, but boom, there he is on Twitter with twice, I believe, this

past few days. And gosh,

the second,

I'll call it an episode. He had about a 13-minute spiel and what, 40 million people watched? Staggering number of people watched it.
So Tucker is back.

And what are your thoughts about

that, about him, about anything that you might find consequential here, Victor?

Well,

I should say just before I start, on the Ultra, we have not just the two columns I write a week, but I try to write three new ones every week.

So when you get to Ultra, I don't want you to pay your $5 a month and go on there and just see

two articles that are conveniently located, but you can access them elsewhere.

There's going to be three articles, usually about 750 words, that will be there on every Tuesday, every Wednesday, and every Friday. And only you can access them.
And

they get kind of viral sometimes. I got a note today.
That's why I'm mentioning it from somebody who sent it out to a lot of people that were on the Ultra list.

So that's something that I try to take very seriously. I'm going to be overseas for almost three weeks.
So what I'm doing now is writing, I'm going to try to write nine of them.

So ensure that all you listeners that are on Ultra have your three exclusive pieces for those three weeks. And so that's

no downtime in the land of of Hansen, whether it's not pets or ultras. There's no

obligations. Not if you pay

$5.

Right.

So where are we again now? We're

a Tucker Carlson storming Twitter.

I want to know if you wanted to,

we're done with the, I guess we're done with the Trump thing, but don't

if you want to before we get to Tucker, is there anything you want to say about, I did mention at the beginning, Victor, that, you know, these Hunter documents.

Yeah, that was the only thing I wanted to mention because

the Hunter documents, let me be very brief, Jack. Sure, go ahead.

If there was nothing there

and

it's not classified, it's just internal FBI nodes, then the

overseeing Senate committee, there was no problem. But why, why, why did Christopher Wright

refuse to show them? And to the point of being in contempt, now, he didn't care about contempt, at least until the Democrats took power again, because Eric Cohler got away with it. He said, screw you.

I'm not giving you fast and furious information. It's too embarrassing.
And they held him in contempt, and he was a hero on the left. And then Steve Bannon tried it.

And, you know, he said, I was a special advisor to the president. And those were...

presidential, confidential. And they not only

held him in contempt, they indicted him and they convicted him. He would be in prison right now if Trump hadn't pardoned him on the way out.

And so it was, it's kind of a serious thing that he was risking Christopher Wray in this climate because the Republicans will find him in contempt.

And there would be a lot of public pressure saying, listen, Ray, you guys started it and you put contempt of Congress into felony territory. And so, but why did he do it?

And the only answer I can think of is that

the people who have looked at the two-page document are correct, that it outlines $5 million to Joe and $5 million to Hunter.

And that has been corroborated by other documents that suggested they did get $5 million each. And this is the tip of the iceberg.
And Joe Biden then had the audacity to say, show me the money.

And you think, wow,

you have a lot of confidence in these sham country.

companies that in these documents, the Ukrainians are bragging that they have helped Hunter hide these payments to such a degree that no one will ever trace it back to the Bidens.

And you must be channeling your inner confidence in that illegality to show contempt to the American people when you say, show me the money. How about having a real

prosecutor?

Not some phony quote-unquote in-house special counsel, but an actual prosecutor. And given the proclivities of Mr.
Smith and given the left-wing feeds and the Sorrels connections with Mr.

Bragg and Ms. James and Ms.
Willis, how about just getting a prosecutor and to make things equal that was a prosecutor in the MAGA administration?

Just get one like that and give him full reign like Bragg has and Letita James has and Willis has and Smith that.

I'm sure Smith's getting advice from his wife about the optics of his press conference and she's an Obama filmmaker. But nevertheless, just do that and say to Mr.
Biden, I want

every bank account, every checking account, every bill paid from when you went into the vice presidency to now. And I want to know exactly

where you were, what cars you purchased. how you bought your three homes, and how Hunter

existed without any known source of other employment for these years. And I want all the expenditures and then I want your tax records.
And I want to see. And we're going to talk to Tony Bobalewski.

Yes, Tony Bobalewski. Yeah, as well as we're going to do what they do with all the Trump employees.
They're going to go to every single one of

Jim Biden and Ashley Biden and the nieces and the nephews and the daughter-in-laws and their friends. And they're going to get them in a room and say, you know what?

This is what we have, and we're going to go after you and destroy you unless you cooperate. And then see what happens.
And I don't think he's going to say, Show me a money.

He says, Show me the money because it's, he knows there's no consequences. So that was, but I, that's true.
By the way, Victor, you have five million bucks when he was vice president.

Yeah, not in the two months.

No, no, no, no, no. Yeah.
Well, Victor, when he was vice president. Getting back to, I just wanted to finish up.
So Twitter. Twitter was,

you know, when he first came on, immediately in the 24-hour news cycle, he did his 10, I think it was on Monday, his 10-minute monologue, and he got, what, 12?

It's gone viral, but I think the initial was 12 million. And

that's roughly four times more than his 3.2 or 3.3 Fox audience. That was in the same 24-hour period.
And it has a lot more legs in putting the clips of Tucker on the Fox News site, right?

Apparently.

Well,

they really don't do that. They do that at Fox Very,

you know, you're not going to be able to see the whole thing unless you're subscribing or something like that. Yes.
So, but, but,

so what was the reaction of the left? They said, oh, he had a terrible studio. I've been to a studio in Maine.

I don't know to what degree Fox contributed to it, but I imagine that's going to be used as a studio in

Florida. And I can tell you, I've had people tell me that he's gearing up.

So he wanted to see how that did. It blew everybody away.
He did another one. And boy, that was volatile.
It was on the dam being blown up, as Sammy and I talked about in Ukraine.

And before you think he's crazy, and I don't know who blew it up, he's alleging that the Ukrainians did on the premise that Crimea is almost entirely in Russian territory and it depends on the goodwill of the people.

And while it may be of some utility to the Russians to flood the front in that sector, it's outweighed, according to Tucker, by destroying the lives of your own people.

Not that they're not capable of it, but it doesn't seem as logical. And then you have to add in that Tucker said that

the Nordstrom pipeline was either blown up by the United States or Americans in concert with Ukrainians. I think that's pretty accurate now.

I don't think there's anybody anymore who seriously says, as our entire intelligence bipartisan swamp said, that it had to be the Russians.

Not when people were bragging about it, both before and after the bombing in our government. And so that was a pretty volatile second one.
He also says something that was very strange.

I don't know if you remember, Jack, but he was talking about taboo subjects that we live with the lies and we don't dare talk about them.

And these come from people who are so quick to accuse and destroy other people's character. And he just basically nonchalantly, I know people picked up on it, but I watched it twice.

He just said, you know, and then we had a president of the United States, and he had a very strange relationship, family relationship, I think, i.e., the implication was that Barack Obama had been matched by Jeremiah Wright

to Michelle Obama, and that he may have had other proclivities other than a traditional heterosexual married president. And that's what he was suggesting, I think.

So what I'm saying is, so he was being volatile and he was daring people to contradict him. And it went to what, in that cycle, it went from 12 million the first 24-hour to over 100 million.

Wow, is that what that happened? Yeah, I think it was 112. Oh, wow.

And he's, I guess he's in the business of absolutely rescuing Elon Musk's Twitter, but he also said, if I'm censored, I'm out of here.

And so there's two issues here. One is that Fox is arguing that he's breached his contract.

And I don't know what's in his contract. And it will probably adjudicate whether the contract says he can't do alternate media or he cannot just do alternate TV shows of the same nature.
i.e.

go to Newsmax or something. So I don't know, but he apparently feels confident that he will be okay.
And he may feel confident because Fox has been leaking apparently to news reports.

They deny that and their defense, they deny it. But all of these things with those clips that we saw, and I didn't understand that.

I don't know whether the clips were being released as alleged by Fox people. I don't know whether the clips were

hacked, as we know some of them were, by Democratic connected operatives. I don't know if they were actually given to Dominion in Discovery and

they were leaked, but

they didn't harm Tucker. They made him look human.
He was funny. He treated his employees well.
So I didn't understand that strategy. So here we are with this blockbuster

initial two appearances.

And where the left says, oh, the studio was bad. Oh, people are going to get tired.
It was 10. No, no, no.
They don't understand. This is incremental.
He had two 10-minute monologues.

He's going to have guests. He's going to fly people to his studios for what he did with Fox National.
He's not going to be for Fox Nation. He's going to have long interviews with controversial people.

He's going to develop, I guess, funding or investment. He's going to have the ability to do live view or Zoom or Skype interviews all over the world, just like he did on Fox.

And he's going to create a 30-minute video clips, interviews. It's going to be just like Tucker Carlson on Fox, except

he's like Prometheus. He's Prometheus on bound.

There's no, I mean, he can talk about Ray Epps all he wants, and then nobody can do anything. And if Elon Musk is under pressure, he's got to weigh the fact he's got 113 million new viewers.

that are tuning in. So I don't know.
I do think I've heard rumors.

I don't want to confirm them, but i i do and i'm a guest at fox that people who appear on fox are going to be advised not to be on tucker carlson show i don't know what that means but a person associated with fox told me that we'll see

it's understandable they've they've led 1 million viewers so in a tough corporate world if you've got a guy who was your anchor yeah that led you here on the West Coast five, six, and seven o'clock, you know, or eight, nine, and ten on the east,

Man, and same in the Midwest. He's your anchor.
And he ballooned up the audience, and then he handed the baton to Hannity, who handed it to Laura.

And you look at Laura's ratings, boy, it was 10 o'clock on the East Coast, and she was getting over 2 million people. She was getting more then than the 5 o'clock here, 8 o'clock dash

slot is now. They lost over a million viewers.
Yeah. They were running neck and neck.
Jesse Waters was almost passed by MSNBC.

So

in retrospect, it kind of reminds me of the Budd decision, the Target decision,

the L.A. Dodgers decision, and the Disney decision.
I went through Jack and I read all the news reports on Disney, Target, Budd, and L.A. Dodgers, which is just starting, in terms of

diminished stock value, diminished either attendance or subscribers or diminished audience

or diminished sales in the case of Target and Bud. And you add them all up, stock, sales, streamers, subscribers, and put them all four together, and it's about $40 to $50 billion and lost revenue.

And now you're going to add, I suppose you're going to add Fox to it. And

when I read accounts, the defense of it is there's so many different defenses. They can't all be compatible.
Well, Tucker hated by the left who boycotted, so he only had my pillow.

And yes, he had great readings, but he didn't bring as much revenue as he should. Okay.

Or

the outtakes that you saw were not the outtakes that the Murdoch family saw. So maybe he was more offensive and he insulted the hand that fed him.
Okay, I heard that.

Or he was getting into Ray Eps, January 6th territory that was off limits. Okay.

Or

Mr. Zelensky called the powers that be at Fox and said, this man is endangering my country, okay.

I don't know if they're compatible or mutually exclusive, but there was a lot of reasons that were cited. And the thing about it, I would just like to detour here, Jack, about Ukraine.

It's your show, Victor. You can detour wherever you want.
I think everybody deplores. Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

Everybody also understands

that there are contours that the left doesn't want to talk about. They won't talk about it.
And what are those contours? One,

that Putin never invaded in 2017 to 2020.

He only invades when there's a weak or appeasing president.

He invaded in 2014 because Barack Obama was A, considered weak after what he'd seen in Syria and Libya and what he had said on the hot mic in March of 2011 when he said, give me space, tell Vladimir if he gives me space, i.e.

he doesn't go into Ukraine now why I'm up for re-election, I will cancel. Basically, I'm putting, fulfilling

what the implicit message was, I will cancel missile defense. He canceled missile defense.
Putin waited until he was re-elected, and then he went into the border and Crimea in 2014.

He did not go, as I said, during Donald Trump's period, but he did go during Joe Biden. So that's clear.
It's indisputable. He goes in when there's a weak president.
He takes advantage of it.

And I think people should realize that. The second thing people should realize is that giving arms to Ukraine to defend itself is different than giving them offensive arms

to

liberate all of Ukraine back to the pre-2014 borders, that is, before he invaded during the Obama administration. That brings up, Jack, a lot of interesting questions.

The first one is, if Zelensky says the war gives him an occasion now not only to repel the invasion of February 2021,

21,

22, excuse me, 2022,

but it empowers him now to rectify the 2014 and we sign on to that, then why didn't we ever do it before? All these people are saying on to Moscow. Okay, but

he illegally or improperly or unlawfully, whatever term, took borderland under Biden and under Obama in 2014, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22.

Why didn't the left or the neocon right or whoever they are that want to go under, why didn't they say this will not stand? We've got to give them javelins. We've got to give them F-16s.

We've got to get those damn Russians out. They didn't do it at all.
They did not do it at all. They never said, we're going to arm Ukraine.
And they were ongoing theaters of fighting.

So all of a sudden, the mission has metamorphosized from getting him back.

and making him pay for what he did a year ago or a little year and a half ago to making him pay and getting him out from everything.

And that brings up the next question. That requires a little bit of escalation.
To get Putin out of Crimea and out of the Donbass and the borderlands, then you're going to have to do what?

Sink capital ships in the Black Sea. We did that.
Apparently, we're going to do more. Give them F-16s that have capability to go into Russia and attack supply lines.

We already know that they're doing that with drones. They probably sent drones all the way to the suburbs of the Kremlin.
And my point is that if you collate all the conversations,

musings, threats,

nutty stuff coming out of Russia that we're going to nuke Britain, we're going to nuke the United States, we're going to use tactical, we're going to blow up Kyiv,

it's about, I just cataloged them, Jack, there's about 30 of them. And every single one are met with, this is crazy, don't listen to them, it's bluster.
How do they know that?

In other words, if you start to go into into Mother Russia,

not fighting Mother Russia when it's in your country, but you go in there to reclaim all of the stuff that has a lot of historical baggage, especially Crimea,

it was Russian until 17, I mean, it's been Russian without any doubt since the Ottoman collapse in 1787.

And my God.

And you're going to supply them javelins and F-16s and Abrams and 130 billion. People forget that in the 12-year, 12-month period that we supplied, and now we're up to the 18th-month period.

So let's take 18 months. In that period,

there's three nations in the world that have the largest defense budgets. It's us

at somewhere around 700 billion,

maybe more. It's the Chinese, and we don't know what that is because they lie and they, you know, they don't, we count pensions and healthcare and they don't, but maybe 400 billion.

And it's Ukraine, number three, at about 130 billion. And so Ukraine is actually the third best supplied or most invested in military of all the nations in the world, the 180 nations in the world.

This is incredible. It's a superpower and it's all due to in some part NATO, but 70% of it's coming the United States.
And

we're getting into a commitment we've never had before we've never done this before

except i guess you say with vietnam but we were fighting vietnam uh in vietnam and every time we go you bumped up against nuclear china or nuclear russia we pulled back so if there was a chinese or uh russian ship on loading death and destruction against us in the haiphong harbor we didn't bomb it because nixon or johnson said you know no no no we don't want to get in a nuclear, but we've just thrown all that out the window.

We don't care. We're right on the doorstep of Russia.
We're inside Russia, nuclear Russia.

And this is all beyond, transcends the new alliance of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and probably soon Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait. It's all lining up anti-American.
Yeah.

And I assume there'll be an expectation that America and American taxpayers will have to be on the hook for rebuilding the shambles

once the war ends.

And you know what's going to happen when they lose the Senate and the presidency, somebody's going to appoint a special prosecutor and they're going to look at how much money came from Ukraine.

And

another thing is that I sympathize with the Ukrainian people. I want them to expel the Russians from the borders a year and a half ago.

But Ukrainians are not innocent. They have been deeply, deeply involved in U.S.
politics.

In 2016, the Ukrainian ambassador of the United States wrote an op-ed urging people to vote for Hillary Clinton. That

Mr. Lieutenant Colonel Venman,

who I think still has Ukrainian citizenship, a dual citizen, he was offered on three occasions, according to his own bragadashio, to be minister of defense for Ukraine while he was advocating,

he was doing things that led to the impeachment of a U.S. president.
And so they are in, and then we don't need,

we remember Joe Biden's boast about how he, damn it, I fired him, son of a bitch, he got fired, ha ha.

And then we have burisma. So this government is corrupt and it's been deeply involved in trying to warp and change U.S.
foreign policy in a way that no other country has done that.

Obador just says, hey, if you're in Florida, vote against DeSantis or vote, don't vote. But he's saying that from Mexico and there's not a lot of clout that he has.
This is different.

These people are giving a lot of money to U.S. interests.

And

the funny thing is they didn't give any to Trump and he gave them javelins in a way that Obama and Biden who were intimately involved with Ukraine, at least Biden was, they wouldn't give them javelins.

Well, Victor, speaking of foreign policy, there's a little, we're going to run long today, folks. Many of you listeners like that.
And we're going to get Victor's thoughts on the

Chinese coming

within 80 miles of the United States,

their friends, our enemies, Cuba. We'll get Victor's thoughts on this and maybe a little bit on Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia, right after this final important message.

Back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show. Hey, before we get Victor's thoughts, let me get a quick thing in here for Civil Thoughts.

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Anyway, civil thoughts, you can go to civilthoughts.com, sign up for it.

It comes out every Friday, and I collect 12 to 14 recommended readings, important things I've come across in the previous week that I think people, dear intelligent American, is how the newsletter begins.

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So, Victor,

two things. You mentioned a little bit, you know, about the weakening of how we're perceived

abroad. And there was a story that came out,

I think, in the Washington Post the other day about when Joe Biden met with

the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and they gave the fist bump, but Biden was going to maybe going to teach the Saudis a thing or two under tough guy Joe Biden.

Well, what happened, the understanding is at that meeting, the Saudi Arabian Brits threatened America, threatened the economy.

And looks like Biden backed down from whatever tough guy stance he was going to take. But in the meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has flipped the bird to the U.S.

We talked about in our most recent episode of forming a navy under the guise of China.

You know, that America's role and standing in the Middle East, thanks to joe biden and in the world is is is in a free fall meanwhile victor one last thing uh

cuba is giving an island

uh off the island of cuba to china so it can engage in spying activities on the united states for all we know they've already been doing that but victor right on our doorsteps cuba is 80 miles from florida

uh wow do you think that would have happened when donald trump was president victor what are your thoughts on these not unimportant matters?

That's a t-ball question again. No, Donald Trump would not have allowed that to happen.

And this Mohammed bin Salman, this MBSs were known, he just said, what, a day ago that he was going to wage war on us, economic war, or major economic pain in this oil feud.

As I said to Sammy, his attitude is, you've got more of the dirty, filthy fuel than I do, and you call it dirty and filthy, and you don't want to get your hands dirty producing it enough to support yourself.

So, if you choose to buy the dirty, filthy fuel from me and make fun of me and call me all these names, then I'm not going to give it to you very cheaply.

I'm going to cut back, and that's going to hurt the world's supply. But you know what? If you don't like it, then just pump more oil.
You got it.

But don't be a hypocrite and say that it's dead and it's doomed, and

you're going to transition away from it.

and then just beg us and drain your petroleum reserve and beg Venezuela, beg Iran, beg Russia. So it's a ridiculous situation that the Obamas are in.

Excuse me, that the Biden's administration, the Biden people are in. Obama did the same thing, and that is every time the midterm came around or an election came around, he wanted a cheap gas.

And then as soon as people voted, he tried to restrict it. And same thing with Biden.
He's such a hypocrite.

You know, he drains the reserve, one of our key assets, just for the midterm advantage when he won't pump oil, cancel ANWOR, cancel new federal leases, cancel Keystone. So

Mr. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Solomon says, screw you.

I have, you won't protect me from Iran. You're going to give them the bomb.
You trash me. You come over and brag during your campaign that you're going to cut us off and you think that we're terrible.

We're a hell of a lot better than the alternative, but you know what? We're going to deal with the alternative. We're going to make a deal with Iran.

And that means that all the bad actors in this area of the world,

Iran, Hezbollah, the Syrians,

Lebanese, Shia,

and Hamas, they're all on our team now.

We just bottom off, and we're not going to fight these crazy people with the assurance you're you have our back, you don't. Maybe China will be more valuable.
It's very hard to do what he did.

Biden, he destroyed the entire Aboms Accords. He destroyed the entire effort to keep the moderate Arab regimes on our side.
And he deliberately made Israel more vulnerable than it's been in years.

And I guess that was by direction.

And this conveys weakness. So does, as far as the Chinese are concerned, they think like this.

We're going to go to Anchorage, Alaska, third month of this guy's, and we're going to just insult these people

because we know we've seen them. Sort of like Hitler said of Chamin, we saw them.

I saw him at Munich. He's a worm and he gave me everything I want.
And I still would like to jump up and down and break that stupid hat and umbrella that he has. He said that.

People have contempt for weakness if they're a right-wing or a left-wing dictator. And the Chinese look at magnanimity as weakness.
They have to exploit. They do not return it in kind.

So they sized up Biden from the campaign. And they said in Anchorage, they took Jake Sullivan, our national security advisor, and Anthony Bleak, and they chewed them up.

They spit them, they swallowed them, and they vomited them out. And that was a disaster.
And that set the stage. And then the Afghanistan

humiliation was, you know, an encore. And they looked at that.
And then they looked at the stumbling Biden and falling Biden. And then they thought, you know what? We engineered a virus.

And the PL, the People's Liberation Army was the overseers.

And it got out. And we sent everybody that we knew was infected to San Francisco and Los Angeles and Europe, but we didn't let them go out of Wuhan.
And you know what? Screw you.

We're not going to tell you anything how that thing was manufactured or escaped. And if you do, you keep pressing it, we're going to buy off people in the Lancet.
We're going to buy off Echo Health.

You name it. We'll stop it.
We're not going to ever explain why a million Americans are dead. And we just took it.

And then they looked at that, and then they sent the balloon around, you know, and they thought, you know what, we're just going to take that thing right across Alaska, right across the continental United States, and

we're going to focus on military installations. We're going to take instant pictures.
It's going to be a lot clearer, a lot steadier than a satellite.

And when it's all said and done, we expect that weak, worthless Biden administration to find ways to either praise us for doing it or to contextualize us. And we did.
Oh, it's too deep.

We couldn't have sung. Oh, it might have fallen on people.
Oh,

it wasn't doing anything wrong. Oh, the pictures wouldn't have been as good as satellites.
Oh, we didn't know about that kind of stuff. And they were right.

And then they look at Taiwan and they say, you know what?

They won't defend Taiwan. And so now they've dreamed up a really devious, satanic, but devilishly brilliant ploy.

And that is to go right down to Cuba and put a spy base right there and violate the Monroe Doctrine. And they're doing it for three reasons.

They're doing it because they can, because they know we won't do anything after everything I just recited. And number two,

they know that it brings back shudders to the American people because they remember some of them. And

court historians remember the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. And they're basically saying, you remember that the Soviets did that to you? And you went nuts and you almost went to a war?

Well, here it is again. How do you like that?

And that's violate the Monroe Doctrine, bring memories of 1962. And then finally, they're saying, hmm, isn't Cuba an island?

And isn't Taiwan an island? And isn't Taiwan close to us? And isn't Cuba close to you? And don't you suggest that we can't do anything on Taiwan that's sovereign? And we're going to suggest to you

that we're here on your version of Taiwan because it is, you know, You think that Cuba has historical ties with you, but we don't.

We're going to get a very close relationship and we're going to use it to your disadvantage. And the danger, of course, with appeasement is that the correction is very dangerous.

And appeasement finally leads to war, but when you have to stop it, then war is inevitable. So somebody better gradually get out of this

appeasement, but that would require the removal of the entire Biden team that brought us into it.

I get really angry when I think about this because I think of all these people I used to sort of know, kind of know, a David Fromm, a Bill Crystal, Charles Sykes,

Stephen Hayes,

all of them.

Elliot Cohen, they were all good people. They were all smart, nice, and they were all very hardcore conservatives.
And for 20 years,

I would read what they wrote, and it was all about big military budgets, deterrence, defending American values, domestically small government, low taxes, deregulation, reforms, conservative, and it just doesn't exist.

They just threw it all away and became leftists. They became anti-Trumpers for about a month, and then they became Democrats for about a month.

And now they're attacking people in the Democratic Party that are not woke. It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen.
But my point is this,

that they empowered this Biden, and he's wrecking the United States, border wrecking, crime, wrecking, energy, wrecking, race relations, wrecking, inflation, wrecking, interest rates, wrecking,

low growth, wrecking, foreign policy, wrecking. And they're for it.
Not only did they allow it and help it,

but they're for it still.

It's the weirdest thing in the world. Yeah, it's,

I can't, I don't know. It's a challenge.
Some of them are money.

I don't know. I guess it's, what's his name?

eBay or whatever he was, Pierre Amador.

Yeah, he's funding a lot of it. I guess you can't bite the hand that feeds you, but

it's very strange. Either it's one of two things.
It's just, you know, Max Boots.

I like Max Boot. He was a good friend of mine.
I knew him.

When I was a professor at the Naval Academy,

I had him there. I've reviewed his books favorably.
I invited him to the military history working group. But the things he writes are just vicious.

You know, and I knew Gabriel Schoenfeld was my editor at the Commentary Magazine, and I worked with him for years. And he wrote, I don't know,

2,000 words claiming that I was a fascist and anti-Semite.

And so this is

what I'm getting at is not these little squabbles, but

there's a lot of people who couldn't just make a basic decision of 51%, 49%, said

this leftist woke stuff is going to destroy the country. And I don't care who it is.

We've got to stop it. If you don't like Trump, you can use, say you can use Trump.

They could have said, well, we don't like Trump, but we're going to use him temporarily to stop it because he's the only one that can stop it for now. And then we'll get rid of him.
Okay, I can

understand that if that's your position. But this idea that you embrace it and you glorify, it's just crazy.
And it just suggests one of two things.

Either you're being bought out or you never believed it in the first place and you're happy that you're back where you always wanted to be. Yeah.

Or please don't, oh, it's so nice to have your the people you castigated for years to now to be supplicant to them so they don't attack you anymore. Of course they will eventually.

They'll get eaten by their own.

That's the biggest problem with Republicans, not the MAGA people. They don't give a crap and that's why I like them.
But But it's always,

oh,

I'm being suffering. The New York Review of Books doesn't treat me well.
Oh, there's not a good review in the New Yorker. I'm not being interviewed by New Yorker.

Oh, I went to Georgetown and there was a party and they kind of looked at me weird. Or, oh, my book

is better than that book, but oh, I can't get on NPR or PBS or they don't put me on Face the Nation or meet the press. Oh, it's so unfair that how I've suffered.
That's how they think.

Well, you know who suffered under Biden?

It's

Hilario Lopez. It's got an old beat-up truck, is paying $5 a gallon in gas today as I speak in California.
It's got to go do landscaping.

Or it's Emmett Taylor's poor working guy in a forklift that can't afford to buy eggs anymore with this hyperinflation. That's who suffers, not these grandees.

So, and that's it's it's all right. Well,

let's wrap it up. We gotta wrap it up.
Oh, Victor, thanks for all the wisdom you shared. Thank our listeners for doing that, listening.
And

those who leave comments today, I'm going to read a comment, not from Apple or iTunes, although thank you, those who do leave them. We read them all.
But I was looking at some of the comments on

your website, The Blade of Perseus, and someone was reacting to the piece you wrote about D-Day. We're talking now

a few days after the anniversary of D-Day, and you and Sammy on the previous podcast recorded it. He had a great discussion of D-Day.

And anyway, I just thought this was worth it. David Johnson wrote

in response to your piece: This was an excellent read. Although short and well-focused, the tight language evoked more than what was presented.

My father was an 82nd Airborne officer during World War II, gravely wounded during the Italian campaign and ultimately medically retired.

I can recall him being treated at Walter Reed off and on during the early 1950s, and he would sometimes tell me that he regretted he was unable to participate in the D-Day assault.

My father ultimately succumbed to his injuries in 1957 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Thank you for this article.
You know, Victor, that I don't know, just kind of touched me.

And I, you know, we know so many people died, obviously, died in the battlefield, but David Johnson's father and others like him, how many men suffered for years later and like his a decade later? So

I know

I had that.

My grandmother's, my cousin, my second cousin, my mom's first cousin, Holt Cather, was killed right after in the push in the next few days. And I was on the American Battlefield Monuments Commission.

And one of the things is you, I didn't use official junkets or anything, but when I would travel as a private citizen, I would, as a board member, I would go talk to the people we were supposed to oversee.

And the Normandy Cemetery,

you know, and he was buried in the Patton Cemetery in Belgium. But

that was bad. And that family, the Cathars, never recovered from that.
And then their other son, my other second cousin,

Belden, B-E-L-D-O-N, he got dinghy fever and brain damage in the Philippines campaign. He was never the same.
He had a bike he would ride around the ranch.

He was really a sweet guy, but he couldn't work. And my grandfather kind of took care of him.
And then there was, you know, my father,

I don't know. My father never drank and he quit smoking when I was a kid.
He was an excellent, he was a health fanatic. He was 6'3, solid muscle, 210.
And then all of a sudden he turned 50 years old.

And he, for the first time, when he was in his 50s, he started talking about

losing this plane and his best friends were blown up right below him or watching a B-29 drop napalm right on top by accident and burn up another beat or the plane, you know, three planes that parked from his plane, they bailed out and they were all beheaded.

They found out when they when they landed and all of a sudden he started drinking and smoking two or three packs of cigarettes.

And that's when I when I so when I turned 18, I had gone from a guy who was really

you know, as straight as you could be and a health nut. We had to have wheat germ and solid muscle and lift weights.

That's what kept him alive till 75 because the last 25 years years he talked about that. And he didn't want to talk about the strangers, but he would just talk about,

did I tell you, Victor, oh, you have a sinus infection. I blew out both eardrums on a mission over COBE.
And he'd say,

did you, you know, we would just swallow sulfur packets all the time. Or,

did I tell you the time how I won this medal? I went out with a screwdriver in an open bay over Tokyo and tried out a burning napalm. I never heard of it, but he would drink when he was doing that.

and he never was the same. And then his first cousin, who was adopted, was killed on Okanawan the last day,

the last day of Sugarloaf, May 19th. They had won the battle.

He was killed four hours before they took the hill, and he'd fought the whole 20 days. And

they couldn't get his body down for two days, I think, a day and a half. And then my grandfather, you know, he was, my Swedish grandfather was,

when he finally died,

it was funny. I was in high school.
I went with my dad and the radiologist, he had mouth cancer from the damage from phosphine gas.

He'd lost a lot of his gum tissues and saliva glands, and that finally became cancerous in the 70s. But when they it got into his lungs, so the oncologist said, look at this.

This is a very strange cancer. It's eaten up two-thirds of his lungs.
They don't exist. My dad said, no, no, no, no, no.
That's phosphine gas.

And they got another consulting guy. And he said, no, no, these are old injuries.
He never had two-thirds of his lungs, you know.

And so,

and his stomach, too,

ate up a lot of his stomach because he swallowed some canned meat that had phosphine on it. Oh, my gosh.
So, yeah, you grow up with all that stuff.

And it makes, and that particular article I wrote, you know, it was a syndicated column. So you can't write more than 700 words, 730.

So it's hard to compress it, but sometimes it's more effective if you can do that. But the other column I write is 2,000 words, and sometimes it's easier.

I think people should realize it's much easier to write a 2,000-word column than a 700-word column

if they're going to be good, because you have to compress your ideas

from like Tacitus versus Libby or Thucydides versus Herodotus. Yeah,

it's kind of, yeah, it's hard to crowbar the genius into 750 words. Well, Victor,

that's about all the time we have.

I hope our folks, our listeners, enjoyed it, and we will be back soon with yet another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. Bye-bye.
Thank you, everybody, for listening.