Budget Drama and Graduation Antics

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Welcome.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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

This is our Friday edition.

So we do a news roundup and we've got lots of news on the schedule today.

One thing about being a democracy, it is definitely very exciting in the world of news.

So we've got the debt deal made by Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden on dock.

And then we also have a speech given at the City University of New York coming up.

So stay with us and we'll be right back with the news for the week.

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Welcome back.

Again, this is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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Well, Victor, we always start off with something good in the beginning of these.

And I was wondering if you had something.

I'm having trouble myself thinking of something.

I know we're headed in down the road.

You shouldn't be asking me what's the good news.

What is the good news?

I personally feel that I turned the corner on long COVID.

It's been 13 months and just the last few weeks.

I'm thinking

back to old Eeyore Victor.

Oh, nice.

I just went up to the Sierra Nevada, and I've never seen Huntington Lake

or the high Sierra with so much snow and so much water, and everything is green.

So much

permanent climate change, drought that Gavin Newson

told us about.

And that is good news.

There's an Artesian pond on what used to be our property next door to mine, and it's full.

The ponds are filling up.

That's good news.

However, we

the news is bad most around the world, but

it's, you know, life goes on.

I think

the conservative, I wrote an article this morning.

The conservative sleeping dragon has been poked too much.

And it woke up.

And it's breathing fire and roaring.

And guess what?

It's found out that it's actually very powerful.

And we'll talk about that.

But I think others are now saying, you know what?

Screw Google.

Screw Facebook.

Screw the Ford Foundation.

Screw George Soros.

Screw ABC News.

Screw MSNBC.

Screw the View.

Screw the NBA.

Screw Hollywood.

Screw the Tonys, the Oscars, the Emmys, the Grammy.

We don't care if they have all the institutions.

We have the people.

And you poked us and now we're roaring and we're burning up targeted, Bud, Disney.

How's that?

Yes.

And maybe as part of that, I had this for later, but maybe we can talk about it first.

Those two veterans or three, sorry, veterans that got into a fight with a group of young people

in San Clemente.

I thought it was very interesting.

They were walking away from this sort of horde of young people.

And this one guy punch sucker punched uh one of the veterans and he just turned around and ran straight into that crowd after that kid and went and got himself into a huge fight but it was just entirely impressive that he was undaunted by the crowd i was wondering your thoughts on that

sucker punch him because the three marines said On Memorial Day, it's against the law what you're doing with your firecrackers.

Be careful, because I think some of the sparks were hitting them

and of course

all of these cowards felt brave when there was a huge mob and then they he went after one of them who hit him first

and then in typical wolf pack style they all swarmed him and began they would have killed him but two random random passerby said stop this you know basically have you no decency

And this was kind of a bad, I don't know if they knew they were Marine.

There was a couple of things in the story I didn't like.

I get tired of the mayor of San Clinton.

I get tired of this rationalization contextual.

Well, they didn't know that they were Marines, as if it's all right just to go beat up anybody.

I know.

That was weird.

That's pathetic.

And then they got kind of carried away.

No, they didn't get kind of carried away.

They were criminals.

And I get

tired of that.

mainstream, bipartisan establishment that always contextualizes deviant savage behavior.

And I think until we say, screw you, follow the rules, there is such a thing as the law,

we're never going to make it.

No.

Well, it does seem that San Clemente, San Clemente police have arrested nine and five of them they're charging with felony assault.

So maybe it's going somewhere.

The DA is not

like the Los Angeles DA.

There was also good news.

There was a highway patrolman in Los Angeles that was being attacked by Hispanic homeless man, and he had all this gear on, so it was very heavy.

And the guy was very agile and knocked him down, was pounding him.

And three different Mexican-American Latino from

the video, it looked like they were jumped out of the cars and ran over to help the policeman.

I thought that was really good.

Yeah, that was.

If the people who were in charge, when we talk about all these problems, Sammy,

and we talk about race or class or gender, it's always, there's always a bi-coastal small elite

who is never subject to the consequences of their own policies, politics, ideology that promulgate this

defund the police, critical race theory, critical legal theory.

They dream it up in the corporate boardroom and the academic lounge, and they foist it upon us as if we're lab rats.

They're experiments.

And when the lab rat turns into Frankenstein monster, they hide in their own place.

But they're never on the beach at San Clemente at night when

these things happen, when people feel there's no consequences for lawless behavior.

you know they never walk right on down market street every day or sell hot dogs next to somebody defecating or they never

uh you know or walking around midnight without security when some nut tries to do

and they do and when they are subject and when that facade wears like the pelosi family when somebody breaks through the security network and is in there then when they call 9-11 it's not five-hour wait it's bam bam bam The police are there in two minutes and they get really angry.

And that's what's so strange about it.

Even they, they're going to come, the lawlessness is going to come for you.

You think that

you're not looking for it?

It's looking for you.

And if you think that you can destroy the whole system of jurisprudence and the rule of law, and that you're going to have some castle in Malibu

or some castle in Woodside or some castle, you know, in Mill Valley, and it's all going to get, you know, down there in Fresno and Bakersfield.

Ha ha ha.

It comes for you.

There's no.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, since you mentioned the faculty lounge, why don't we turn to the speech that was given by Fatima Musa Muhammad at City University of New York, which was basically anti-Semitic, anti-police, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, and a call for revolution.

I was wondering your thoughts on that speech.

Well,

it's very hard to adjudicate exactly what went on because the City College of New York, they're very defensive now because A, they customarily review these speeches, right?

Yes.

And they didn't, or they did, or they didn't, or they did, because they're coming under a lot of fire.

They're public-funded university.

And there's three things that weigh against the fact that they were caught blindsided.

One, last year they had an anti-Semitic radical speech.

So this was in that tradition.

And it doesn't matter whether students pick them or not, the ultimate arbitrator of who speaks on a campus is

the administration and the president.

Number two,

number two,

they admit that the speech that was submitted to them in some form they looked at, but it was expanded upon.

by her ad hoc.

Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but there at least is some indication that they had some foreknowledge of it.

And three,

Allah Stanford Law School and their DEI person, the dean of the law school was in the audience and apparently was caught clapping.

So there was a institutional nonchalance or an actual endorsement of what she said.

And that would not have happened.

if they had voted to have a student, a Reaganite speak or somebody like that.

They would have gone ballistic.

So they're complicit, and they expect the New York taxpayer to keep paying them money while they subsidize, sponsor, and promote anti-Semitism, anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism.

The next thing

they, oh, okay, go ahead.

That speech was entirely incoherent.

She just started on a rant and she brought no data.

White racism, capitalism,

imperialism, Zionism, all these isms.

And you want to know exactly how that has made her life bad.

She was born, I think, in Yemen, wasn't she?

Yes.

I have been, I haven't been to Yemen, but I've been to all, you know, I have been to Beirut, I have been to Jordan, I have been to the West Bank, I have been to Egypt, I have been to Syria, I have been to Libya, I have been to Algeria, I have been to Morocco,

and

I have been to Old Cairo, I've been to the hellho of Tripoli.

I have been to Algiers.

I have been to Beirut.

And I can tell you that at least until the woke revolution, this is heaven compared to all of those places.

So when her family or she comes over here and then she blasts this horrible country, this amoral,

what's the question?

Well,

what's the counter to this?

The Middle East?

Islam?

Arab governments?

You chose to come over here.

Your family did.

You're still here.

I know the left is going to say, oh, Victor, why are you descending into that knee underthal?

If you don't like it, love it or leave it.

No, I'm not descending into that.

But something has gone wrong, we know, with illegal immigration, but it's also never disclosed, never discussed, never talked about.

Something's gone wrong with legal immigration.

We are taking people a million a year and we are not inculcating them.

They come to this country, and I'm generalizing, but generalizing, I think, quite accurately, with no civic education, with nobody saying, These are the principles of the United States that made you want to come.

This is what capitalism did that distinguishes it from Yemen or from Mexico.

This is what freedom of speech distinguishes it from Saudi Arabia.

This is what distinguishes it from China, the rule of law.

And we don't do that.

And yet,

the immigrant comes in and surveys the institutional landscape and says, hmm, my little finger's in the wind.

And I realize that if I play victim and I say that I'm not white or I'm not traditional or not patriotic or not conservative, then the lucre pours in, the scholarships.

the speaking engagements, the graduation talk, the more that I distinguish myself as not part of the toxic majority, the better I do.

And that's not healthy.

We need to go back to assimilation, integration, or intermarriage.

And if we can't do that, then we should not bring in any more immigrants.

Because what we're doing is we're importing people who feel that the first or their career will be enhanced by trashing their home.

It's like saying,

I'm having dinner.

I'm inviting six guests and you bring a guest in for dinner and the first thing he says

wow that's an ugly sofa wow i went to your bathroom and i saw some toothpaste on the counter that's gross wow who cooked this this whole thing repulses me you'd say what would you say you'd say get the f out of here and so i'm that that's another thing i cannot stand in gratitude i'm quoting now

I guess, Tommy Lee Jones.

Remember that scene in Lonesome Dove where they're beating up newt and he goes berserk and hits the requisition officers from the U.S.

Cavalry, and then all the townspeople are astounded that Tommy Lee Jones went nuts and he says, I will not tolerate bad behavior.

That's what I think we all need to be like.

We need

immigrants, legal, illegal, to one standard.

You chose to come here.

We didn't go to your country.

We didn't invite you to come.

You chose to come.

And you have

some moral obligation to enhance your host rather than to get up in front of people at a graduation ceremony and defame and libel Jewish people and American institutions and brag as if the antithesis to America is so superior, which you yourself did so much to flee from at all costs.

And that's not asking a lot.

Well, Victor, how about let's look at the

debt deal made by McCarthy and Biden.

And the news seems to be all over the place on it.

But if I could sum it up, it seems that there are some pros, spending cuts, a trillion over 10 years,

that those who side with it are presenting.

And then those Republicans who are not happy with it say it's not enough spending cuts post-COVID,

that they're allowing the FBI, the IRS, and the National Institute for Health to have spending increases, which they cite the increases since 2019.

And

that the other big critique is: well, the left isn't saying anything, so they must be very happy with this.

So, where are, what are your thoughts on this

deal?

The reason that this conservative base is angry is because of this.

But let's be clear.

In

1998,

99, and 2000, excuse me, I think I can go back to 97.

We had a balanced budget, and we would have been on track to have paid down what was then about a $5 trillion debt.

We'd be debt-free now.

And that was accomplished by Newt Ginreach

demanding a spending freeze and increase and Bill Clinton getting a

tax hike, which is about what it is now.

Okay.

Okay.

And then George W.

Bush, after 9-11, he had big tax cuts, but he did not have spending cuts.

In fact, we had

No Child Left Behind.

We had prescription drug, you name it.

We had the whole Homeland Security TSA stuff.

So we expanded government.

So let's get that straight.

And then what happened was George Bush in eight years increased the national debt to, I think, to about three and a half or something to eight.

Then we had big spending Obama.

who got it up to almost he doubled it in his eight years he always brags that he his last four years he

he wasn't in the trillion-dollar range.

Well, that was only because of the Tea Party, which he despised, that shut down the government and forced him to get down to 500 billion.

And then we had Trump.

And I know everybody's going to say, well, COVID, yes, that was the big $2 trillion deficit.

But we were running in 2017, 18, and 19,

we were running 500 and 600 and $700 billion deficits.

And note, I'm just noting that.

And then, why people are angry is Biden took the $500 to $800 billion reckless annual deficits, and he did something that nobody's ever done.

He got up to $2 trillion, and now he's up to $4 trillion, supposedly.

So we're at a magnitude now

where we're

getting close.

Our national debt's $33 trillion, right?

So the annual deficit is getting close to eight percent a year

of the national debt and if you look at the national debt as in terms of gdp we're we owe 130 percent of gdp so all this democratic talk

about

oh we have to do this and you don't have the money You don't have the money.

And all this Republican, we're going to do that.

You've got to get a holistic policy.

That said,

there's other things that we're not talking about.

Right now,

the Republicans have nine seats, Sammy.

That's all they have, a majority.

They operate one half of one-third of the country.

They do not have the Senate.

So they only have half of the legislative branch.

They do not have the presidency.

And while nominally they have the Supreme Court, in some rulings they don't.

So they don't exercise enough power to demand the types of necessary action if they were smart and wise and brave enough to do it anyway.

So we're all screwed is what I'm trying to say until both sides can say, you know what?

We don't have the money and it's not a matter of revenue.

The revenue keeps going up every year.

And the taxes, whether it's property taxes or state and local taxes or Social Security payroll taxes, the level that they hit you on Social Security, that limit goes up every year.

And we're back up to almost 38%.

So it's not a matter of revenue.

I would say to my Republican friends: if you're outraged,

you're outraged at this, okay, I agree with you.

But you have not won 51% of a presidential vote since George H.W.

squeaked by 51.2 or something against Mike Dekakis in 1988.

30, you know, 35 years ago.

Is that right?

Yeah.

Yes.

Okay.

So why is that?

And out of the last eight elections,

the last eight elections, 92,

96,

2000, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020.

You have not won the popular vote.

So don't all of a sudden say, oh,

we got to stop it.

You don't have the power.

You don't have the power to stop it.

If you want to shut down the government, I'm all with you.

But you know what?

You're going to get killed in the media.

And so, yeah, Joe Biden's got the presidency and he's got the Senate.

So what did you expect?

So, instead of screaming and yelling, don't nominate candidates that lose the popular vote, or if you're going to nominate them, go out and outrage the Democrats.

You can't tell me that it's written in stone, they've outraged you three to one, or start going in and stopping this crazy changes in balloting laws.

But I wasn't impressed.

I'm sorry, I wasn't impressed with the George H.W.

campaign of 1992.

I was less impressed with the

Bob Dole campaign of 1996.

I wasn't impressed with the

George W.

campaign of 2000.

I was less impressed by the McCain, that was pathetic, 2008.

I thought the 2012 Romney thing was pathetic.

And I supported Donald Trump, but there was

the Republican split, the Never Trump.

It was, I couldn't believe he won the Electoral College.

2020, I think there was a lot of problems with

70 people not voting on 70% not voting on Election Day, but we should have won that election.

And so, and you add in the midterms.

And this is something that I know.

And I was a big supporter in 2016 of Donald Trump.

I think he did a wonderful job.

But my God, when you have the presidency,

as we did in 2017, and you had the Senate, as we did, and you had the House, and you can't submit and approve and ratify a reasonable budget, and you have to borrow $600 billion

for two, seven, when you have all of then you're yelling and screaming about these mega deficits.

And all the Democrats are doing is saying, well, you know what?

You believe in deficits.

You spent $700 billion and you're the tightwad.

tightwad, so we know we're spendthrifts.

But what'd you expect?

If you don't like it, take back the senate and the presidency.

And that's where we are.

Yes.

And do you think that

we're broke?

We're just borrowing it.

Yeah.

Look at the interest.

We're just skating by, and all of a sudden, the interest rates are going sky high.

And when you have to service $33

trillion,

you do it at five, six, seven percent a year.

you're you're getting up to, you know, you can get up to a third of your budget very quickly.

That's just going to interest.

And then the only way to get out of that is to either inflate the currency, like the Germans did in 1923, pay back what you owe in barrels,

wheelbarrows of empty currency, or you can go expropriate people's money, their 401ks.

You can do that, give them credit for security, or you can just renounce it and say, you know what?

I'm sorry, Mr.

and Mrs.

Smith, that have their life savings and treasury bills.

We don't have the money, so we're going to start from scratch.

And you think, well, Victor, you can't do that.

I was a member of Sunmade Raisin Cooperative.

Same thing.

It just spent money that it didn't have.

It kind of hit it.

And then we all had capital retain.

My family had $88,000.

And one day, Mr.

Frank Light, the CEO, said, you know what?

It doesn't exist.

Sorry, we're not going to pay you.

Well, we had a contract.

We put 7% of our money every year you took from us.

You put it in the revolving phone.

Screw you.

It doesn't exist.

You're back to zero.

And you say, well, I'm going to quit.

Good, get out.

That way we'll have fewer people that we owe.

And that's what they did.

And that happens all the time.

Look at what Barack Obama did when he came in when Chrysler went under.

He just said, you know, here's ABCD or owed under bankruptcy.

Hey, you bondholders, or you guys that have Chrysler paper,

we're not going to, we're going to help the pensioners, we're going to help anybody but you.

So you're not going to get paid.

Well, that's not right.

Well, there's no money.

And so that can happen if we're not careful.

Yeah, absolutely.

I get tired of all these outrageous speeches I hear, you know.

This is

I'm on the side of the physical conservatives, but my God, it's a little late.

It's like you're going over the cliff and you're saying, this is unfair, this is terrible.

I'm falling.

I'm going to be smashed.

Well, how did you get in that situation?

You got in that situation because Republican presidents and Republican congressmen and senators from 2001 to 2008

did not do anything about it.

And then in 2017 to 2021, they didn't do anything about it.

Yes, you were misdemeanors compared to the felons on the Democratic side.

But once you committed that sin of being profligate and spending money you don't have, you greenlighted and lost all moral authority to check the left-wing nuts.

And that's what gets me so, this self-righteousness drives me nuts.

Yeah, it sure does.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back.

I have a couple of questions still on this.

I wanted to ask you, they talk about a ceiling suspension or extended.

And then also, I wanted to know how you think this is going to affect the 2024 election.

But stay with us, and we'll be right back after these messages.

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Welcome back.

Victor, so I was either one you can answer, but I was wondering, you know, the 2024 elections, given all that you've said about this new bill, how do you think it will affect it?

I mean, the Republicans have a very small minority, as you said.

I think it's nine, and that some of those seats are in very contentious, like they barely won those seats.

Well,

in a normal, sane world, Joe Biden has gotten down to 36% in the Reuters poll.

You get a bunch of left-wing polls, and maybe you can leverage his average to 40 or 41%.

Look at every one of these issues that his hallmark agenda,

border, crime,

budget, inflation, interest,

you name it, energy, it's below 50%.

Some of them are 35%

on the economy.

So it should be a field day.

You look at the actual makeup of the Senate.

There's a lot more Democratic exposure in re-election than there is Republican in the Senate.

And you go into the 2024 election with a Republican majority that you can build upon.

You look at the Democratic field and what do you see?

You see somebody who's non-composment in Biden.

You see somebody who doesn't have that excuse.

Kamala Harris was more incoherent.

And she's a black woman who was promised that job in advance.

He said that he was only going to appoint people on the basis of their race and gender for vice president.

And she was the only person, I guess, he felt.

that

he could satisfy that promise in the post-George Floyd world.

And she's an utter disaster.

So you can't really displace her and bring in somebody else without being accused of being racist.

So

it should

feel

Republicans, but I'm not confident.

I'm not confident at all.

But has McCarthy done anything with this budget deal with Biden to help secure those or is it going to go against him?

Well, it depends on if he has discipline, but

he had a bad hand.

He only has nine-seat majority in the House.

He's got a,

he's not dealing with Democrats.

He's dealing with fanatic

woke progressives that took over the Democratic Party.

And he's dealing with a crazy guy, Joe Biden, who's been asleep and won't even meet until recently.

This could have been settled in February.

Everybody, McCarthy warned him.

And Biden deliberately waited or was too busy or needed his nap or whatever the reason was.

But

it should be a field day for Republicans.

They should be able to run on the idea that they did whatever they could to,

you know, not a lot, not much, but they did what they could.

And they at least did some things that were very important.

What was one of them?

They make students now have to pay back their loans.

That was just insane that here we are a year year after the COVID epidemic and everybody was just riding high and thinking, you know what?

I'm never going to pay that $1.7 trillion tab.

I think it's $2 trillion now back to the government.

We stopped that.

We had some little anemic, but nevertheless some requirement that you work if you're going to take federal money.

People got angry at that.

But as far as the actual money, what Joe Biden, everybody remember what he did is he printed $4 trillion and then then we're going back down to about $2 trillion.

And so everybody said, well, why don't you get it back to $500 billion deficit?

Yeah, that'd be nice.

Why don't we get it back to where we were when we had the Senate and the House and the presidency?

Could I politely suggest, what if you had the Senate and the House and the presidency, and you'd cut

with a veto-proof

government, and you'd cut down to $100 billion.

Wouldn't that be nice if you'd done that?

But what I'm trying to say is: if you borrow $600, $700 billion and you're the party of fiscal responsibility, and then you lose the elections, and then the spendthrift party comes in and tries to trump your deficits by a magnitude of three, and you're outraged, then be honest about it.

Just say,

well, we're furious because you're borrowing three times times what we borrow.

But they don't say that.

And that's what gets me angry.

Oh, we can't do this.

This is unsustainable.

We're the part.

No, you're not.

You know, the left has one point.

You go look at federal, just go Google.

If you don't trust Google, I don't, Yahoo or whatever.

Google federal

deficit, federal budget deficit year by year, and go back.

And it starts, just go back,

you know, 30 years.

And you will see, and I'm serious, Sammy, that under the Democratic administrations, you can say, well, they raised taxes, whatever, but there's four years there where we did not borrow money.

And it was Ginrich was speaker and Clint was president.

And for those who say, well, please raise taxes.

Well, the taxes were no longer higher there than they are now.

So you figure.

Yeah.

Somebody did something right.

And I get really tired of it getting self-righteous.

Can I just ask you the last technical question, which was,

what does it mean to suspend or extend the ceiling of the debt?

Does that mean they have no ceiling?

Or what?

It's everywhere and I can't figure out.

The House under our Constitution appropriates money, right?

For

programs.

The president submits a budget, the House approves or disapproves, but the house doesn't have to approve anything.

So if the president has a budget

and

it

is way, way over what the house thinks, the house

and has to be, you know, passed by the house and senate.

But if the house thinks it's too extravagant, they can just say, we're not going to vote on it.

And then what happens?

We have no budget.

It's not that they reject it.

They just say we're not going to vote on it.

And then we have no budget.

And there's a certain time, according to our physical protocols, where,

you know, it's like you turn the pump off on a farm for your house water.

So

you're not getting any new water, but the water that's in the system under pressure, you get one flush per toilet.

And you can maybe fill up, I don't know, 12 ounces of water, then it's gone.

Well, we have money in the pipeline.

And that is when we run out sometime according.

if we don't extend the amount that we can borrow, i.e., print,

then we're going to run out of money, except for I think it's veteran affairs and some special programs.

And then people don't get their checks.

And you know what happens when they don't get their checks?

The whole country is subsidized by the government.

And you know, when the last time we had a meltdown, I mean, there was almost a riot because

there's so many people that have zero income other than a welfare or social security check.

You cut that off, or pension, there's nothing.

Yeah.

So

a suspended or extended ceiling on the debt means that

there's just whatever the natural ceiling is going to be given, whatever the president's proposal is.

Legal construct that says

we're not going to give you the permission to borrow more money after this

this debt

so you have 33 trillion you borrow you need this year two trillion more to go up to 35 trillion okay you can do that and that's the only thing that the house of representatives that's the only ammunition that a republican majority and they're right about that that's the only clout they have it's sort of like samson and the two pillars the republicans will say we're not going to approve it and then biden says Ah, yeah, you're going to shut down

the government.

And then we're going to demagogue you and say that all Granny is out on the street eating dog food because of you, because you wouldn't just sign a piece of paper.

And then they're going to say, Yes, but we do that every year.

And each year, the currency gets worse and worse and worse, and we're bigger and bigger in the debt.

And at some point, we have to say, No, mas.

And that's how they go back.

But

typically, the

republicans lose when they shut down the government why

is it their principles no they're very principled the problem is they don't control silicon valley the media the popular culture the bureaucracies the administrative state and they get killed in a in the court of public opinion The only time they've ever done it is during their Tea Party.

In the long term, it works.

If you go back and look at Obama, once the tea party got so furious over those big deficits he started and they shut shut him down and they took back the congress the house and then the whole congress he was like trump he came in with the house and the senate only he had a veto-proof senate but it it worked in the long term but they got killed in the short term i think they're going to be helped by the fact that they did something yeah taxpayer but if had they shut down the government i'm not sure they could have won that pr back

yeah okay well let's um then look and go to um it there's a article in powerline by john hendiker that says that flattening the curve which was a

statement made or a policy directive i guess or about the covid in the the covid policy in the beginning where they said we're going to lock down temporarily so we can flatten the curve, meaning that we won't have so many people with COVID overloading the system initially.

And he says he's found in a memoir by Deborah Bricks that, or Biricks, sorry, that she says that they

instituted this idea of lockdown as flattening the curve

before they would do a more aggressive policy that would look more like Italy's lockdown.

And so here is his evidence that flattening the curve was a lie.

My question is just this.

That was very early on in the COVID crisis.

And I don't think the government knew where their lockdown was going early on.

And that,

you know, her writing this in her diary doesn't mean that they had a premeditated idea that they were going to go on to more and more lockdown.

But he seems to think it does say that.

What are your thoughts on that?

God Atlas addressed her memoir in

his own autobiographical memoir, A Plague Upon Our House.

Remember that?

Yes.

In that memoir, the villain is not Anthony Fauci so much as her, Dr.

Burks.

And it's primarily because she was always from the very beginning for a complete lockdown.

And the problem with what you said, Sammy, is this.

There was a whole corpus of research prior to COVID, some of which Obama followed with Ebola and swine flu.

At least he brought it up, that A, masks are very little utility unless you're sitting right next to somebody's spraying.

Even then, they collect the virus on the mass material almost like a petri dish.

Two, that absolute lockdowns versus targeted quarantines, targeted meaning rest homes or retirement villages or something like that, among the most vulnerable.

But there hadn't been very much evidence that quarantines that were complete lockdowns rather than targeted work.

So, what I'm getting at is there was a whole corpus of research over the last 50 years that suggested if you

locked down the U.S.

economy completely, we'd never done that before,

then

the effects of it, the ill effects, would outweigh the dangers of the actual virus.

And by that, I mean in two ways.

Number one,

suicide, spousal abuse, family abuse, drug abuse, mismedical procedures, misdiagnoses, school lockdowns, robbing children of that was formative years of instruction.

All of that

would weigh

much more

negatively than would the infection of the COVID virus.

It was known pretty early on with COVID that, and I'm speaking of somebody who got very ill from it for over a year, so it's not like I'm trying to play it down, but it was very early on that most people, unlike myself, got over it.

They may have had long COVID, 10% of them, but it wasn't.

And

part of the problem was that when you locked down everybody, it was like shooting a shotgun at a deer or something from Tuvalu Hard.

You just scattered your shot versus a bullet directed right at it.

So if you had been smarter, you would have taken all of your resources, kept the schools open where we knew children were not susceptible to the same degree as adults, and then put all of your money and manpower in rest homes and the elderly.

And we didn't do that.

We tried to do everything.

And we protected people who didn't need protection.

We shut down institutions that were essential for health.

And then most importantly,

we censored, denigrated, maligned people who disagreed.

So a person like Scott Atlas or Jay Bacharia or Martin Kullendoff, we tried to destroy.

Now, there's 300 today,

300 scientific papers that have been withdrawn in the major journals because they were fraudulent.

In other words, once the government,

the narrative was locked down this, and only the government knows how to treat this disease, and

you have to use Paxavoid, maybe and the vaccinations, and there's no such thing as a hurt immunity.

And if you waver from that and you say masks have no utility, or show me an example with a complete lockdown was beneficial during a pandemic, or

hydroxychloroquine or ivermedsin or cingular, any of these off-label uses have no utility.

And that's what these 300 articles were saying.

They've all been rejected.

So what am I getting at?

Well, look at China right now.

They've got a little mini epidemic of COVID, and a lot of people think it's because they locked down their population further to further extremes than any other country and people lost some of their natural immunity.

I'm not saying let everybody get infected, but when you lock down people, you weaken their immune systems.

And so what's happened with China, they're much more vulnerable than we are or than Europe is.

And so that was another downside.

So, what I'm suggesting is, had we gone back and listened to dissidents, we might have had a partial lockdown.

People would have been exposed to the virus, the vast majority of whom would not have been seriously ill and would have developed something which was taboo to talk about, called natural immunity, which we know now was as valuable, if not more valuable, than vaccine-provided immunity.

We would have looked at therapeutics and said, you know what?

There's never been a successful

vaccination against the coronavirus.

So the idea that we're going to make a magic operation work speed

seen, that it's going to be the cure-all, is just fanatic.

It's just not going to happen.

That's just the talk of zealots.

And so what we should be doing is if we're going to produce new vaccines, we should be working with palliative care and off-label usage.

So you look at the literature, and there are people who have shown that there are particular drugs that are out there.

You know, ivermedsin actually had some utility.

So did hypoxychlorofine, not maybe as much as their supporters trained, but it had utility as an anti-inflammatory and antiviral.

So did monolucos, singular.

So did Pepsid.

So did azeseltine, the antihistamine.

So did some other antihistamine.

There were a lot of drugs out there that people were using in combination and cocktails that had some value against, and they were maligned.

And you couldn't even get some of them.

These regular over-the-counter or pharmaceutically prescribed drugs, you couldn't get them.

They were so paranoid.

And then the idea that you were going to create a whole new

hypovaccination, the mRNA, that was going to create these spike proteins, not weaken the virus, but emulate portions of it and then imprint it into your genetic makeup.

That's kind of like genetic engineering.

We never done that before.

And the idea you were going to rush through that without proper, I don't know, and paranoia that we're all going to die from COVID, that was a mistake.

So what I'm getting is there were indications in the literature.

that a total lockdown, quarantine, mask wearing would have deleterious effects, social, psychological, health-wise, and would not mitigate the spread of the virus.

So what we look at now

are states are nations total death rates.

Because, you know, who knows who had COVID and who didn't?

A lot of people were never tested.

A lot of tests were invalid.

But just look at how many people die in the United States in 2019, then 2020, 2021, adjusted for natural population growth.

And you can tell the degree to which COVID increased the death rate or did not.

And it's pretty clear that if you look at an open society like Sweden and you compare it to Belgium or France or Germany, it had a less severe increase in the annual death rate, excess death, I think that's the term they use.

Yeah.

Would you, oh, go ahead.

So there was that was, and they didn't just dream that up.

They looked at the data and we had a lot of people who said that we could have done the same thing

would you say that the covet policy then was a mistake and they they were mistaken or was it a premeditated effort to make sure donald trump was not elected in 2020

well

if you look at what people were talking about not what victor says but what they were saying what did hillary clinton say this is a never

let a crisis go to waste moment.

We can push through

one-payer health care.

What did Gavin Newsom say?

What did Gavin Newsom say?

He said, this is a one-in-a-lifetime chance to get a more progressive capitalism.

What did Jane Fonda say?

This was kind of a gift from God.

So there were people across the left spectrum, political celebrity, you name it, who were looking at this lockdown as a chance

to have people vulnerable,

susceptible to new ideas they could promulgate, paranoid,

fearful, and therefore receptive for radical changes.

And what do I mean?

Yes, but is that just analysis or was Fauci and Burke's

premeditating?

That's their perception.

Then we go to the second half of my answer to your question.

Were people in that climate who saw that perception and felt that perception, were they deliberately,

deliberately trying to lock down the economy to destroy the monster Trump?

I think a lot of them were absolutely.

Yeah.

The people like Anonymous that we know were in the deep state that were advising.

So I guess the way to pose it is this.

If

Barack Obama or if Joe Biden or if Hillary Clinton were president and they were booming and they had a good record and they were going into an election year,

would and would, would, would, the Council of Economic Advisors,

would the

CDC, would the NIH, with the FDA, would the National Institute of Allergies, and would they have all advised a complete

endless lockdown?

No, they would not

because they would have felt that that would have injured the political viability.

They might at first, but very quickly they would have been under enormous pressure to stop it.

What they did with Donald Trump was they put him in a bind.

They said, you've got to lock, lock, lock down.

And if you don't, you're a murderer.

And

they, there were people dressed up as death with hoodies and sighs walking the beaches of Florida.

And they were calling DeSantis the death, you know, the death governor.

Yeah.

He opened up Florida, which I don't understand right now because

in this back and forth, where Trump is saying that more people died in Florida than New York or California per capita.

Yeah, because they're old.

They're old.

That's a retirement.

They had the largest number of vulnerable cities and they kept open.

And they had no more, they were fewer, they had about like New Jersey did, but they were not number one in the country in deaths per capita.

They were like a number 11.

But they're in terms of economic growth and excess deaths, they weren't, they weren't, it was wise to do that.

So Trump would argue and say that he is open when Trump.

And I'm not blaming Trump because he was forced to basically by the advisors around him and the media that forced him to sort of, you know, they were going to call him a killer and everything.

So, and they did a lot of damage to him.

The Pfizer vaccinations were known to be useful and had been announced as such that they would make a sweeping proclamation in late October or mid-October.

And Pfizer deliberately delayed that announcement to after the election, because if they had announced that Donald Trump's warped speed had a vaccination, which they claimed was 96% effective, Donald Trump might have won the election.

And so they do all sorts of things to politicize at his expense, but doesn't justify him then going after DeSantis for something DeSantis didn't do, because all it's going to do is welcome the countercharge that,

well, I'll look at my record as far as the openness of my economy and my society inside Florida versus yours.

And

it won't be favorable to Trump on that particular issue.

Yeah.

Well, these things are very important.

And especially, I think we have another virus that is, or maybe not another virus, maybe another

form of COVID that is

breaking out in China today.

Is that right?

Yeah, yeah, it is.

We don't know because,

you know, common cold doesn't kill us.

Some of the common colds caused by coronaviruses.

Some of them, SARS-1, SARS-2, they have different levels of morbidity and lethality, but you do get apparently some

natural immunity or vaccine residual immunity from what we've gone through the last two or three years.

So these new variants

are trying to find, you know, biologically and genetically in Darwinian terms, are trying to find these...

these viruses

ways to be more resilient and to get inside our immune systems and that means that they might be more lethal, I suppose.

But so far,

everybody you see at those crowded airports, if you had a little red glow on the people who were vaccinated with boosters or who had got COVID, or

everybody would have a red glow on their head.

It's 95% of the population either has had COVID or was infected, which by the way was sort of what Scott Atlas said, perhaps not so diplomatically, but he just said, eventually the thing's going to peter out when everybody has natural immunity.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Victor, let's, oh, go ahead.

Did you have something more?

Let's go ahead and take a break and come back and we'll talk a little bit about Trump's recent antics.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

Victor, so recently,

Trump has criticized his former press secretary, Kaylee McEnany, who is a Fox News anchor.

And she was

doing her job and talking to some

specialists.

And

she happened to say that DeSantis was, quote, closing the gap.

And Trump did not really like that.

So he said, Fox needs to hire real stars.

And Kaylee McEnany is milquetoast.

And she had been his big defender while he was in office.

So this is, my question is this, is this just the beginning of a campaign of vitriol?

Because I'm not looking forward to that myself, and I have a feeling a lot of our listeners are not.

But what are your thoughts?

Well, she was talking about the Iowa caucus, and there had been movement toward DeSantis after he declared in one poll.

And she

suggested that I think he was from 40 to 30 percent.

His lead had declined.

And he took issue with that because the majority of polls don't show that.

But more importantly, he took issue because with Donald Trump, it's loyalty or you're a traitor.

There's no shades of gray.

So

she had been appointed by him after working at Fox.

And in Donald Trump's way of thinking,

When you say Kaylee McAlam,

who knew her?

Did you know that name before she was press secretary?

I didn't.

No, that's true.

Occasionally, as a reporter, right, in the field, or a,

I don't know, a makeup anchor when somebody was sick.

But that magnified her position.

So in the Trump world, then she owes absolute loyalty and can't show any hint of doubt.

If you look at her point of view, And I'm trying to be a fair broker here.

The idea that she's melted toast is absurd.

You remember those press conferences when she went in there and small, petite woman, and she had that binder, and she wasn't like Corinne Jean-Papier.

She didn't read all scripts.

She just had this so that ad hoc, when they lied about Russian collusion or the lap, whatever it was, she just flipped to the

color-coded and she read them the Riot Act.

But my point is, they were mean, savage.

It was like

today,

press conferences are like

a game, a joke compared to what she went through.

So the idea, she was milquetoast.

And you know what was weird is that she bested the reporters.

She was as good or better than Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

So she was magnificent.

Yeah, I thought so too.

She did a great job.

Small petite woman at the, you know, who was trying to defend the president and

it was easy to defend his policies i think but trump being trump i mean he would say or tweet things that they just fixated on and they hated her so i don't i don't i guess your point is that after doing all that for him

why would he suddenly attack her and i guess why it was the answer the thing about trump you got to remember i did write a book about him so i read all of his books and i've i examined, you know, thousands of pages of transcripts of things he said.

And I looked at all those YouTubes when he was back on OPA and everything.

It's two things.

And I think if you understand these two things about Trump, you can understand his modus operandi.

He believes in deterrence.

So his way of thinking is, I've got a lot of people that work for me.

And we know what happens when John Bolton defects and has a memoir that hurt me.

And that might have helped me be impeached.

So I'm going to stop it.

And I'm going to swallow, devour any former subordinate that does not express 100% solidarity with me.

And that will send a message to everybody out there that work for me.

You better be on Team Trump, or I'm going to try to destroy you.

Maybe destroy can be defined as make you look negative

in the poll and in the media, because everybody who gets in a ring with me, no matter how crude or uncouth I get, people expect that of me.

They don't expect it of you.

So that's one thing.

He does believe in deterrence, and that's why he's doing it, because he does not, and he's done that with Congress people, too.

The second thing is a very little bit more subtle.

Donald Trump has a long memory, but I know people are going to say, are you crazy, Victor?

But

he's vindictive and he's not vindictive when he sees what's in his self-interest.

So take Ted Cruz.

Lying Ted Cruz,

and he went after Ted Cruz's father and claimed, remember that he was a communist?

Yeah.

I mean, some of the stuff about Ted Cruz's wife, and you would think after that, there'd be no way in the world they could

reconcile.

But then Trump went down and campaigned for him.

And Trump praised him to the skies.

And

Trump did that with a lot of people, which said that he's capable of seeing what's in his self-interest or he's not that vindictive.

And that's what's so, so he goes after Kaylee.

But if

he wins the nomination, he wins the presidency, he'd probably be

pretty fair to him.

My former congressman, because I've been redistrict, was David Valdeo, right?

He was one of the 10 people who voted to impeach Trump, right?

Yes.

Eight of those 10 people were destroyed by Trump.

I mean, he didn't give him any money or the RNC didn't.

He campaigned against him.

But he understood that Valadeo was in a plus eight Democratic district.

Our district is.

And Republicans can't win that unless they kind of

be flabby on a couple of issues.

And David was, but he should have never voted to impeach Trump, but he did.

And the point was, after that was over,

that impeachment didn't change the impeachment.

He would have been impeached anyway.

And David could come back and win re-election

if

Trump didn't go come all the way out to the San Joaquin Valley and damn him to hell.

And he didn't do it.

And David didn't apologize.

He just kind of left him alone.

And

David squeaked by.

And I couldn't believe that happened.

But then it reminded me that for all of Trump's bitterness and hatreds of people,

he does not carry a grudge in the same manner that the left does.

He's willing,

you go to Donald Trump, apparently, and you say, look,

this SOB stabbed you in the back.

But right now, this SOB is for you and he's of some utility.

And Trump would say, What do you want me to do?

Okay, I'll go campaign.

There's no such thing anymore as little Marco.

And if Jeb, if low energy Jeb wants to come and talk to me, I'll be happy to come and talk to him.

And if that SOB, Mitt Romney, who I went out and campaigned for and endorsed, and then he bit me again, if he needs help, I'll do it.

That's how it feels.

Yeah, that sure is.

About him.

And as far as your other comment, you hope it doesn't get ad hominem.

I hope so too, because they have no margin of error in this

primary.

In a perfect world, they'd be on the same ticket.

Don't tell me who should be at the top or bottom, but they should be on the same ticket.

They can't unless somebody moves out of state.

That's not going to happen.

And

you can see what very quickly, because we're running out of time, I'll just basically look at the dilemmas that each have.

Ron DeSantis' dilemma is he has a great record,

but he can't criticize Trump's record because

there's no major issue they disagree on, except

if he says, well, Trump locked down the economy or Trump spent too much money or Trump trusted the administrative state or Trump made bad appointments or his COVID lockdown.

That's pretty much where he has to work within those sidelines.

But he has to do it in a way that A,

doesn't offend Trump, who helped him be elected the first time.

And B, should he be the nominee, does not polarize permanently his constituency, the Trump constituency.

So what does he have to do?

He's got to say,

we owe a lot to Donald Trump because his recalibration of the Republican Party saved the party and saved the country.

And whether it was China or energy independence

or

deregulation, Donald Trump did a lot of our

trying to secure, and indeed by 2020, securing the border, he did a lot of wonderful things.

And he is the target of an on-call for vendetta.

who are trying to destroy him and his family.

And that's abhorrent to me.

However,

I can't improve on that, but I will promise you that I will not be, because I have a different persona than he does, I will not put you in positions in which porn stars or somebody comes out of my past and tries to weaken me and therefore the agenda.

So you get the agenda with me without the psychodramas.

That's one thing he's going to say.

Number two, he's going to say, and I don't know he's going to say this.

This is what I think.

He's going to say, I'm in my early 40s.

I'm not 76, nor will I be 78 should I be elected, nor would I finish out my term at 82.

We've seen Diane Feinstein.

We have seen Joe Biden.

We have seen Nancy Pelosi.

A person's got to know their limitations when you get in your late 70s and you're not in perfect, perfect health.

And that's what his argument was going to be.

And then, third, he's going to have to say,

we need to win elections.

Let's not go back and replay 2020.

We as a party lost seven out of the last eight popular votes.

We haven't won 51% of the vote since 1988.

Donald Trump did not get the popular vote in 2016.

Donald Trump did not do well and lost the House in 2018.

Donald Trump did not get the popular vote in 2020.

Donald Trump lost the Senate in 2000.

That's four elections that he has not been able to win the popular vote in a way that

was possible.

So that's going to be what he will say.

I can win.

I'm looking forward.

I'm not going down the cycle.

And then on the side of Trump, he is going to say,

well, if I had such a good record,

why are you running against me?

And I lost those elections because

of the media and the deep state, and I've become attuned to them, and I now understand how they operate.

So we're going to win.

And we got Biden to show you what happens when you let the left take control, and it's been a disaster.

And I helped you get elected, and you're still young.

So what would be,

there would be nothing wonderful that I would participate in a DeSantis 2028 campaign.

I would be elected in 2024.

I'd have another smash up four years and I would coordinate you as my successor.

What is so wrong with that?

Do you have to be president in your 40s?

Why couldn't you be sober and judicious and hone your skills and keep your promises that you're going to be?

That's what he's going to say to Ron DeSantis.

That would be an argument.

And

then

Donald Trump then

has to be very careful.

I said that DeSantis has to be very careful about insulting the Trump banks or attacking Trump personally.

Same holds true for Donald Trump, but he's kind of violating that.

You mentioned that you were uneasy with Kaylee,

but he is, I mean, they're running ads that do you really believe that a picture of Ron DeSantis suggests he's a groomer of young girls?

I don't.

That was a terrible commercial.

And some of the commercials are just silly and they're mean-spirited.

Yes, but are they effective?

That's the problem.

They are with me and you.

because there are three things that were in play that account for DeSantis, who was only down by eight, being down in polls at 30 to 40.

And let's enumerate them.

Number one, the natural and deserved empathy that Trump got for these out-of-control, outrageous indictments.

by Wright and by Bragg and the ones that are coming from the three other prosecutors.

That gave him a lot of empathy.

Number two,

DeSantis had not declared his candidacy, and people in the media had beginning to turn on him and calling him Rudy Giuliani and waiting as remembering what Giuliani did in 2012.

And then, third,

is what you mentioned, the Omkrums, ad hominem,

make him bleed ads.

We don't know the degree of

that each of those roles played, but we're going to find out really quickly.

Because in the next 30 days, DeSantis is going to unleash, no doubt, this huge war chest he has.

He's now a declared candidate.

And people are going to see that

there's going to be, there's an article this week about Letita James are already leaking to the media that Donald Trump just didn't overvalue his assets 10 years ago.

Everybody does that, but he did it by magnitudes of, you know, 50, 60 million dollars to delude banks.

I don't think it's a merit.

There's any merit to it, but you can see where that's going.

So we're going to find out to what degree uh de santis' candidacy what degree trump's legal sequential challenges and to what degree these ad hominem attacks change things i don't have the answer to that my only answer is

to all those who are listening who

uh

are

unshakable Trump supporters and would go vote for nobody else for Trump, and to those people who liked his policies but felt DeSantis would be a more effective emissary that could win and break this Republican 35-year problem with getting presidents elected.

Just stay within the sidelines and agree to back the nominee and more power to the debates.

And let's have a free for all lucha libre and let's go at it.

But let's keep it as Reagan did, the 11th Commandment.

Let's not get dirty below the belt.

And more importantly, let's have everybody swear that they will endorse the nominee.

It would be very good, as I said with Jack, that for DeSantis to say that when he's way down, he should say, right now, I plan on getting the nomination, but if I should not, I will do my best to make sure Donald Trump is president, and I ask him to do the same.

And then if Donald Trump tweets and things, with hints that the MAGA base would never support dissent is, i.e., I might be a spoiler spoiler and money as a third can.

I don't think he will, but that's a threat that he feels is of some value.

Then that would hurt him if he won't do that.

But the point is that at this late date in American decline, we don't have any,

there's no margin of error.

There's no luxury anymore.

This Biden.

presidency was a disaster.

He's just a thin veneer for a hard socialist agenda that's nihilistic.

We've We've been talking about, you know, Miss Muhammad in her speech at City University of New York or what you saw on the beach at San Clement, that this is an everyday event, this decay of our civilization.

And it's going to take everybody out in the audience and traditionals and conservatives to unite because we're outnumbered, at least institutionally.

We have the majority of the population, but not if we get into a death fight.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

I have talked to people who support DeSantis.

I have talked to people who

support Trump, and it's starting to get polarized.

So people on the DeSantis side said, I can't vote for Trump after I saw those ads.

I said, oh, yeah, you can.

And people at Trump said, hey, Victor, what the hell?

This guy didn't wait.

I would never, I won't vote for him.

Yes, you will if he's known.

That's the thing I insist upon.

Well, to the end of sustaining civilization, I have a comment from a reader and an inquiry actually.

It's from Mark from Marco Island, Florida.

And he says, we love your podcasts and our happy subscribers.

I have trained my 14-year-old daughter to be a great reader and a good student.

We have started her on classics like Antigone based on your recent podcast.

My daughter is going to be a sophomore in high school, but has a reading level of a senior in college, and she wishes to become a lawyer someday.

Could you give me a reading list for her and me to grow to love the classics?

And I was thinking, maybe, where would you go after the Antigone?

Maybe a couple of books, Victor, not the whole list, but.

Yes.

Well,

the greatest epic is Homer's Iliad.

The most accessible for students

in high school is the Odyssey.

So I would,

and I would start with a great classical translation, Richard Lattimore's Odyssey.

That would be number one.

That would be a wonderful introduction to all sorts of things about issues of heroism and family and the unexpected, et cetera, leadership.

And then I would pick one play from each of the authors.

Now, if the person was a college student, I would say Aeschylus's Orastia.

But the shortest of the Aeschylian plays, I think it's the shortest play in all Greek literature, is The Prometheus Bound.

That's a great play about the rule of Zeus and unyielding resistance and to what degree when you resist authority, it becomes self-destructive to you and people around you.

So that would be one play.

I would read the Antigone, as I said.

The Oedipus is good too.

So my favorites are the Philoctetes and the Ajax, but that's kind of a perverse taste of mine.

And of Euripides, There's some great plays.

The most popular is the Medea.

I think that would be a good play.

The Bacchae is the most sophisticated.

I think it's the best play in Greek literature, but I would hold off on that.

And then very quickly, I would look at some key.

No student in high school, I was assigned it as a freshman at 18 in college to read all of Thucydides in three weeks, and I didn't know what I was doing.

But there are certain passages within the history of Thucydides that I think a student would really benefit could master.

Number one, the funeral oration of Pericles in book two.

I think that would be the stasis at Corsaira, the revolution at Corsaira in book three, the Melian dialogue in book

five,

the plague in book two.

And then finally, the last portion of book seven on the fate of the Athenian expedition to Sicily in the comic.

That would be wonderful.

I would Herodotus' account of the 300

of the speech on democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy that he has between three players on the Persian side.

I would have a description of the Battle of Salamis.

Those would be good passages to start out with from Herodotus.

I would have one comedy.

Probably the best and most accessible of the 11 comedies of Aristophanes is the Lysistrada, a sex strike to end the Peloponnesian War.

It's pretty funny, actually.

My favorite, again, perverse is Acarnians, but I wouldn't recommend that to others.

And finally,

you should have some poetry.

And Greek lyric poetry is quite rich.

I would read four or five poems of Sappho.

I would read some short poems of Archilicus.

And I would read two or three of the longer ones of Simonides.

And I think that would be a good introduction on the side.

Yeah.

Well, thank you, Victor.

Latin recommendation, but we'll wait till another date for that.

Yeah, we'll do that.

Thank you very much for all the wisdom and the commentary on current politics.

We really appreciate that.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

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

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