Lies and Liars
In this episode, Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler talk about sex change operations for minors, construction of sex and race, the logical conclusions of the primal scream, the immoderate left, and the Adam Schiff trajectory.
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Hello, ladies.
Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.
I'm Jack Fowler, the host, Victor Davis-Hanson, is the star and namesake, and he is also the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.
We are going to be talking about lies and liars on today's episode.
And actually, I think, Victor, we just discussed, Victor and I just discussed what we'll be talking about, but there was something you said, Victor, on our previous podcast.
You made a quick mention about
your house up in the mountains.
And there's still, in May,
still 15 feet of snow outside your house.
Yes, yes.
I mean,
the China Peak Ski Resort, I think, is going to be open still this weekend in mid-May.
I think the only reason that they're planning to close down is that, you know, people gravitate to other outdoor activities.
They don't associate May and June with skiing when you can be on the lake and the boat and stuff, swim or whatever, but there's snow enough.
So
I went up there two weeks ago today,
and
I
give you an example.
The snow was about 15 feet against
the wall of the front of the house up to the, above the garage roof.
And so when I was digging, I felt a little, I don't know how to say it, I felt a little shock.
And I thought, wow, I've got this long COVID neuropathy and maybe that's, but it was weird.
It got weird.
So as I was chipping away the snow to get close to the house, I finally, after about an hour and a half, you have to chip it and then you have to blow it somewhere.
But the mountain is over, it was over 15 feet high.
So you couldn't, I had to have the, to show you what happened, I had to have the blower go straight up in the air.
almost.
And then when I got near the bottom of the wall, the first four feet, it has a stone facing.
All of a sudden, the stones just
exposed them and they just fell over.
In other words, they had been so
frozen, snow on them for so long, the mortar had disintegrated, and the whole wall fell out on the ground.
And then I realized why I was feeling that way: that the outdoor light fixture, like a big lantern stuck to the side of the wall, the snow had knocked it off.
It was dangling in the middle, and the connector for one of the live wires was off and it was into the snow so
oh my glacier yeah and then i went to the other side of the house and it was i couldn't even i mean the
and i haven't been there in two weeks and
The garage is, we had a guy who tried to help and he hit the garage door and it doesn't work.
And so I'm going to spend,
we have an E, I'm going to spend the last two weeks in August up there.
And all I'm going to be doing is
either hiring or helping myself to fix an entire eave that's collapsed on the garage, trying to remortar the stone fascia on the front of the house, trying to see if I can get new light fixtures that have been, anything that was exposed.
that stuck out from the side, it was like a knife.
The snow came right down and cut, it cut outdoor plugs, it cut the outdoor light fixtures and stone that stuck out it just it just destroyed them but I don't think you can get in I can't I don't think I can get in there until late August wow who'd have thought
my friend my friend Chad from Integrity Roofing is a great guy and he put he saved me because he when I had a the roof was damaged from the fire heat and he convinced me to take it all off.
I wanted just, you know, me, farmer, I just go over the top.
He said, no way, because you have a bad,
you can't put good money into bad money.
So he ripped it all out.
He came in with a new product, a fiberglass type of
pad, about three quarters of an inch.
And then he put a 50-year,
I think it was called Presidential Plus or something roof on it.
And that thing did not, that survived it.
The only problem was i had a little leaking because my fault because well the people who dug the roof through that i hired
i think i said through the snow to the sides they should have started from the sides up and that side had i think it still does it did two weeks ago about eight or nine feet of an ice wall kind of like the ice wall the battle of poetiers
where charles markell said that the Islamic words hit a wall of ice of Christians.
But anyway,
the water hit the ice when it melts and then it goes back and it drifts out of it.
You gotta go somewhere.
It's gotta go under the shingles.
Yeah.
So I've got to have, I hope Chad will come back if he's listening and help me redo any the Eve.
And he's got some great workers.
So I'm trying to get people to help.
But everybody, there's, you know, there's homes that have exploded from propane explosions.
There's, God, it's tragic.
There's three or four condominiums not too far that are just destroyed almost.
I don't know if it's not fire.
It's ice.
It's crazy, Victor.
It is.
Two years ago,
an eighth of a mile, an inferno came within the house and destroyed the homes of a lot of really close friends of mine.
It was tragic.
Well, we're going to get started, Victor, with some substantive
discussion.
And
you write these ultra articles for your website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.
And you've written a series, three-part series so far on the day we're recording on the existential lies they asked us to believe.
And we're going to get your explanation of this series, Victor, as we start off talking about lies and liars right after this important message.
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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.
So Victor, of course, I always read the ultra articles, and I might as well get it in now.
Folks, you should subscribe to victorhanson.com because if uh well, you can visit there and you'll find all kinds of links to Victor's various appearances and his books and
American greatness pieces.
But you will click on the links for something like this, The Existential Lies They Asked Us to Believe, and you won't be able to read it unless you're a subscriber.
Victor writes, This is a three-part series.
He has so much original content here.
Several books worth a year of original material is published on the website.
$5 gets you in the door.
It's $50, discounted for the full year at VictorHanson.com.
Victor, this is a three-part series.
Again, so far the day we're discussing this, I'm drawn to part two in part because you're talking about
getting your tonsils removed and how tonsil removal was almost gospel.
And this is an example.
I'm older than you.
Was it true of you two?
Well,
I almost died having, as a little kid, I almost died having my tonsils removed.
I would be on the very end of the bell curve.
I remember waking up in an oxygen tent from it.
But yeah, I had mine removed, and so did all my siblings, and so did everyone I knew growing up.
But it doesn't seem like it was necessary.
Discuss this in the whole series, please.
Well, I was trying to suggest that, and there was a typo and I said 1917 for 1971.
I want to apologize, but
I was trying to make the point with this transgender movement that in 1971,
we thought there was about 20
people who declared themselves transgendered or transsexuals or whatever the word, transvestites, if it was a matter of clothing only, out of every 100,000.
And then
at the millennium, you know, it went up in just 30 years to 250.
And now we're told young people,
it's 5,000, Jack, 5,000 per 100,000.
And so I was asking myself, is it
that everybody, there's an epidemic of some kind of virus?
Is it people became aware?
Was it their, is it a fad like hula hoops or pet rocks?
Is it kind of like cramming into a telephone booth or Volkswagen?
Is it swallowing goldfish?
Is it indoctrination from fact?
Is it trying to be cool?
What is it?
Because the data, the scientific data doesn't support that idea.
And then when
you collate that with these surgeries, say if you're a man and you want to transition to a woman, that you're going to be,
as if you're a eunuch in the Constantinople harem, that you're going to have your testicles removed.
But even worse or more dramatic, you're going to have your phallus, your penis removed and have a vagina built.
And then you're going to take, I guess, a lot of estrogen to develop breasts.
And all of these are big pharma chemicals that we were told to be very skeptical of because they can alter your physiology and your body chemistry with long-term carcinogen consequences.
And then if you're a female, you would have a constructed phallus
and you would have your breast removed.
These are very serious things and they're predicated that this is a very common but undetected phenomenon.
And I just don't see the data historically that in 50 years in any case that there's been a sudden such radical
change in perceptions of an ancient phenomenon.
I mentioned, you know, that Catullus has a poem, the Roman poet Catullus, about Attis, about a man who in frenzy, through the gods Sibylle, cuts his testicles off.
And then halfway through the poem,
the Latin demonstrative pronoun and the nominative ile becomes illa, feminine, a masculine, because now he's a woman.
But then he regrets it.
He's on the seashore crying that he's been indoctrinated.
Very weird.
And there's a passage in Diodorus, the historian, about somebody that had, you know, two genders.
And I go through Petronius, people dressing up in the opposite sex clothing.
So it's an old phenomenon, but
it's an epidemic now.
And I just finished the piece by saying, they keep saying this is the science, just like Fauci did about COVID.
And the science, when I, my father had,
you know,
he did.
you know, have a drink once in a while and he smoked cigarettes and he was big, not heavy, but big, and he had reflux, gastric reflux, very bad, and even an ulcer.
And they told him it was from stress or smoking.
And then all of a sudden, when he was 55 or 60, it was H.
pylori.
Remember that?
And all of a sudden they gave him an antibiotics and it went away.
And they said now
that a bacterial infection or an overgrowth of a particular bacteria in the stomach flora can cause these ulcerations, but maybe not in 20 years.
People are already questioning that exegesis.
And the same thing, and I finished with tonsils.
We went down to the local rural hospital when I was, I think, five and a half.
And the doctor said, you know, Mr.
and Mrs.
Hanson, I delivered you, you're both your kids for the price of 150 bucks.
So take them in here, and I'll do the tonsils for the price.
And all I remember was I used to have sore throats, or not more than anybody else, but we were told that was the protocol.
So I went in there and the doctor said, hey, you're twin twin one, you get in there first.
They put that awful ether whose smell I had forgotten about until 2006 when I smelled it again in Libya when they gave it to me to take a ruptured appendix out.
And they took it out, my tonsils.
They took my brothers out and my older, we all had it out.
And then, you know what?
I was plagued with strep throats.
I would say from the age of six to to the age of 35, I must have had 20 of them.
And then all of a sudden, as I got older, they disappeared.
But
there was a, I guess what I'm getting at is the tonsils serve a purpose, just like the appendix serve a purpose.
And that's why they're there.
They're not vestigial organs, as we were told.
We were told they were sort of like,
you know,
a tail that doesn't, you know,
a tail that serves no purpose.
But they did serve a purpose.
They catch germs and they neutralize them.
Yeah.
And when you take them out, you don't have that level of protection.
So when I had three children, I said to myself, I'm never going to listen to anybody that's going to take their tonsils out.
And I said to their doctor, I'm not going to take their tonsils out.
And he said, what?
Tonsils.
He was young, wasn't
a really good doctor.
I had Marshall Sorensen was wonderful.
But he said, another doctor, and he said, I haven't heard of that.
I said, Yes, they took consoles out automatically.
He said, Really?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And so he thought that was so absurd.
And it is.
Were you
that's what science is?
They're going to say to Dr.
Fauci, your whole theory of anglin bat transmission is absurd.
Don't quote the science.
The science is fluid.
You know what I mean?
To a certain extent, you don't change the
scientific table, atomic table, but you can change
areas of disease and its remedies.
Yeah.
Unless they become
politicized.
And then,
so a quick, first of all,
you are a twin.
Yes, fraternal.
There's not two of me, thank God.
And you are a twin one or twin two?
I'm a twin one, and I have been blamed for taking all the oxygen and food out of the sack.
And my mother had the heaviest birth that year in 1953, and she had a little award.
I weighed eight, seven.
I think my brother weighed eight five.
Oh, wow.
Big boys.
Big boys.
Yeah.
Now, that's a little light.
I do square heads, square heads, Swedish square, big, huge football heads.
So it was difficult in delivery.
Gosh.
Didn't you have a head nickname also in high school?
Did you have some nicknames?
Was your nickname related?
It was about cactus hair.
Believe it or not, I'm bald now.
I'm had thick hair that I didn't comb well enough.
They call me
my older brother called me cack or cactus head.
And then the people on the football team call me football head because they had no helmets that could fit me.
Oh, my gosh.
And
et cetera, et cetera.
All right.
The levity aside, I do want to note on you because you said this was prompted in part by the whole whole trans
stuff, is that I saw on Twitter
an image about when in so we on our previous podcast, Victor, we were talking about
fighting, but what are Republicans going to do to fight back, you know, in the culture war?
Yes.
And so this was a place someone was calling out the leadership in North Carolina, which has a Republican majority, to say, well, what are you guys going to do about this trans insanity?
Because at the three major hospital systems in North Carolina, including, let's take Duke, Duke University's healthcare system.
Do you know how old you can be when they start doing trans?
Yeah, I can imagine.
Two, two,
two years old.
So, like, okay, how, of course, these numbers are getting insane.
I don't know how the hell a two-year-old can
make a claim of being born into the wrong body, et cetera, but it's perverse.
It's a taboo subject.
You can't talk about it.
So if you suggest
that men
transition with genitalia and the hormonal advantage and the muscular skeletal advantage of puberty into adolescence,
and they're winning women's sports and destroying women's sports, and you object to that, you're going to end up mobbed and taken hostage at san francisco state and the president of that university is going to side with the mobsters not you
or you're going to be turn up as a transgendered person but nobody will mention it at the home of brett kavanaugh talking about texting about killing him or you're going to be involved in the national nashville
murders and you're going to have a manifesto about your transgenderedism and guns and et cetera, and we're going to suppress it.
No other group would be suppressed, but for this group, it's going to be suppressed, lest we draw generalities in the way that they do about the non-transgendered.
And then you saw that
prime evil
primal scream, I should say, at the San Francisco Board of
City Council or Board of Supervisors.
She was very angry.
And she was angry because
that
I guess they had shot a transgendered shoplifter that assaulted a security guard and shot him lethally.
So
it's a taboo subject.
Nobody wants to talk about the young people that may embow when
I was 13 to 15 to 17,
I shudder at my worldview.
Do you know what I mean?
I shudder about it.
I thought that I could go to school when it was 45 degrees.
My mother would say, you've got to get a sweater and a coat on.
I would wear a t-shirt.
And, you know, it was just crazy.
I'd go to undergraduate and I would study from six to nine o'clock.
I'd eat dinner at 9:30 and I would go to bed at 2 in the morning and get up at 6.
And I'd say to my mom, it's really weird.
I'm getting all of these strep throats and colds.
And she said, Well, you sleep four hours.
Why are you doing this?
My point is when you're that age, you don't know anything.
And the idea that you could make a decision on your own about the rest of your life and that people would actually be sort of indoctrinating you to make a particular decision, it's criminal.
And that's why I
we have politics, we're getting back to the politicians that need to do something.
When Ron DeSantis was challenged on that, I don't know if you heard him, he said, Why are you interrupting or why are you intervening into the medical decision?
Between he said, It's not, it's mutilation, use the right word, and you know, cutting the breast off of a 14-year-old girl.
What is that?
And so that's important.
And the same thing about critical race theory.
The left says, you're banning books.
You're telling qualified professionals what they can assign.
No, they're just saying, you know, you don't, you could, you know, it's like saying, if you want to teach World War II, you can teach
Mein Kamp to understand the mentality of the German people, but you're not going to teach Mein Kamp is a biblical
canon text.
You're not going to do it.
And that's what the difference is.
We're not going to teach critical race theory as anything other than a passing phenomenon, but we're not going to teach it as some authoritative text.
So, you have to get, you have to push back really hard on all that.
And that's why we need leaders that, gosh, they got to, they have to be well-informed and they have to understand what the left does.
The left always says, well, you're suppressing free speech and expression.
You're taking away the patient-doctor relationship.
No, no, no.
We've been there, done that with you guys.
We know what you do.
It's not going to work.
You know, Victor, the leaders,
well, we talk about leaders, we think of political leaders, but leadership can come on many levels and can be parents also.
And we've discussed numerous times on this podcast, Leah Thomas, the Penn,
University of Pennsylvania swimmer, award-winning swimmer.
And
there's a woman who writes, who's a columnist for the Daily Mail named Maureen Callahan.
And she has a column out
this a few days ago.
And it's,
here's what
she urges.
Women athletes, next time you're told to race against a biological man with so many physical advantages, ignore the starting gun.
Remain in your marks.
Only a strike will end this madness.
Now, Victor, even for a woman who may be in high school, because this is happening in high school students, never mind
women in college.
But I think there's parental obligation here, too.
After Leah Thomas did his shtick and finished his career in college, then parents complained.
Parents who for years took their kids at all hours to swimming lessons, you know, seven days a week and the cost that a lot of people put into that.
And they sat there kind of quiet while this
dude perverted uh the sport, and then when it was all over, then they opened up their mouths and complained.
Well, better they complain, you know, later than not at all.
But I do think, Victor, back on the leadership, leadership can come uh at various levels and it can come from parents.
And I like what Maureen Callahan says here, and I think parents should encourage their kids if they're put in this position or this situation, don't compete, stand there, don't jump off the block into the water.
If it's a race, track meet, just stand there and make a joke of what these
athletic directors have already made.
There's a simple answer to this.
All you have to do is say,
if you say there is a third gender and it is biologically or scientifically predetermined,
And people have to switch back, but in that process, switching back to the other gender gender that comprises a new group, then why not have your own competition?
It's just, we have it for people who are disabled.
We can call it the Transgendered Olympics.
Yeah, sure.
And you know why they're not going to do that because it would not get the money and publicity and career trajectories that women's sports do or men's sports.
And then, as I said to Sammy, we don't hear a lot of women transitioning to men that are stars in major league baseball or male swimming, do we?
So it's not that transgendered should have the exact same sign.
We're talking about a particular phenomenon of that movement of male bodies, biologically male, hormonally male, at a time at most of their development years, taking advantage of females.
And nobody wants to discuss that.
And that is a selfish act.
And it's going to destroy what what all of those brave women did to try to gain parity for female sports.
And everybody knows it.
So if you're a young woman today and you have a natural talent in swimming or volleyball or basketball and your parents want you to develop that both for your own happiness, but also perhaps to gain a scholarship and further
career success, that is in danger now because some male can come along and claim that they are female and they're going to have enormous advantages in skeletal size, muscularity, hormonal advantage than you do, at least during the period of puberty and development into an adult.
And nobody wants to talk about that.
Yeah.
I'm just waiting for five guys to pull some scam at a college and say they're women and walk on and become the girl's bass.
Well, we've seen it.
We've seen that once you go down this Foucaultian
paradigm that everything is socially constructed and there is no biological predeterminants,
or there is no natural law, or there is no absolutism in nature, then everything is up for grabs.
So we had,
didn't a father of five say that he was a black lesbian not too long ago?
Yes.
Yeah.
So, I mean, you can, and now.
I think he was trying to make a point.
Yeah.
So, why don't we go back and recalibrate?
You know, Ward Churchill misinformed the University of Colorado on his affidavits about his ethnic background, but
give him credit.
He grew his hair long.
He married Native American women.
I think two.
One of them, I think, well, I won't get into that.
But he wore buckskin, he wore beads.
Remember that?
He went the whole nine yards.
And he said he was Native American.
Maybe he can self-identify as such maybe he was mentally confused at birth that he really did believe that he was native american rachel dozel maybe she really was black and who's to say she's not you saw the story of the warren elizabeth warren was a little girl in oklahoma she said that mama what she called grandmama mama grandgra or something she called her grandparents.
They told me that I had high cheekbones when I was an Indian.
Remember that?
Maybe they were right.
Maybe she has a right.
Who do you say?
Who does who's to say that DNA should matter?
Did she say she's an Indian?
She wrote a cookbook.
Do you see the new story, though, Victor?
In a Native American cookbook, remember?
Yeah.
12th right.
I forget her recipe.
Kind of borrowed recipe you saw
New York.
Borrowed identity, borrowed recipes.
Wait, I have to tell you, you saw this story just this past week.
White University, UC Berkeley professor now admits she was, quote, incorrectly identified as a Native American.
This is very important because
if you were running a lab experiment in the scientific fields and you said the following,
at what period of social equilibrium
or asymmetry, rather, do people predetermine their race and for what reason?
And would that determine what advantages accrue to somebody as race?
You'd be very interesting.
Because when I was a kid, I grew up
in a very predominantly Hispanic group.
And I went to a local grammar school where I think there was eight or nine of us that were non-Hispanic out of about 400.
But the Mexican-American community called some
Blancos and Blancas.
They didn't mean us, they meant people from Mexico, not intermarried at that point, who had just come from Mexico, but maybe from northern Mexico, or maybe could trace their lineage back to Pedro Alvarado from the Conquistador.
I don't know what, but there were a lot of people.
Ricardo Montobanta.
Yes.
And they did not speak, they were, or there were other people who were darker, but their parents were integrationalist, radical in those days.
They were conservative.
And they said, Mike, you remember this?
No speaking Spanish at home.
In fact, it was a rule that you could not speak Spanish at school.
If you did, you got to go to the, you know, people will say that was racist, but the point was to integrate and assimilate and Americanize as rapidly as possible for the benefit of everybody.
So they thought.
Well, my point is that
they called them white Mexicans and they resented it.
All of the people that they called white Mexicans didn't really, it wasn't predicated on skin color always.
Sometimes it was, as I said, but it was on the idea of their willingness to completely integrate.
And of all those people I went to first, second, third grade, fourth, fifth, sixth, I'd say I still followed maybe 20.
And most of them married somebody either
that was not in their particular ethnic group.
And what do you, what, what is that then?
Can't they decide what they are?
Do they have to always be constructed as Latino?
Maybe they don't feel Latino.
And then on the other hand,
I won't mention her name because she still may be alive.
I remember a girl in seventh grade
who just knew that she was Hispanic, even though she wasn't, right?
She was as white as you could be with an Anglo-Saxon name, but only her friends were Hispanic.
Only her boyfriends were Hispanic.
She had a Hispanic accent.
She wore what she thought were sort of...
pre-gang attire to be on their rough side.
And she married a person who was Hispanic.
She thought thought she was Hispanic.
Who's to say she's not?
Well, I mean, if you say that you can change your sex and construct it, why can't you construct your racial identity?
And that's where you're going to see things that are very interesting because that's not going to happen because the whole leftist
Jacobin movement is that
class is no longer a barometer
of poverty or victimization or oppression because it's too mobile.
Yesterday's poor little guy guy that only makes 20,000 a year can get up, he can be a contractor or electrician, and no longer does he have a revolutionary conscience.
That's why Marxism failed in this country.
We're too upwardly mobile.
And yesterday's rich man is tomorrow's poor man, and tomorrow's poor man can be rich man.
I know that the left said that's impossible, but that's why we could never get a permanently oppressed class.
Obama came along and said there's diversity, and I'm redefining oppression as anybody is not white.
Now it's no longer, you know, 12, 88 white, black.
It's 30%
non-white.
And they are oppressed.
I'm oppressed.
Michelle is oppressed.
Eric Holder's oppressed.
LeBron is oppressed.
Oprah is oppressed forever because that's immutable.
But you come along and say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Barack, you can become white.
You can just say you are.
You hang out with David Geffen.
You've got three mansions.
Your accent doesn't reflect your ethnic fides, unless, as Harry Reid and Joe Biden said, unless you want to.
His mother's white.
Yeah.
And so the point is, and then somebody can be black.
Right.
And that won't happen because that would take away the entire foundation of left-wing reason to be that you're champions of an oppressed class based on a person's race, based on a person's non-white.
But if you have a lot of white people saying, you know what?
I'm non-white.
And you know what?
They are.
They are, Jack, because you hear rumors from students.
I have a lot of students that come in and see me sometimes as a resident nut at Stanford.
And
they're very brilliant.
I'm not going to be prejudicial, but something about conservative students on left-wing campuses.
I don't know what it is, but there's a garrison mentality that everybody's against them, so they have to be better.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
And so that, I mean, they're just absolutely brilliant kids.
And they come in and
they tell me of the shenanigans that people are doing to get into the mixed race category.
So much so that you'd almost have to take a DNA test.
Once the university says that it's a one-drop rule that we're going to let somebody in with a Hispanic name or Portuguese name or Brazilian name, who knows?
But how do you adjudicate that?
You can't.
So people are claiming that they are minorities, racial minorities.
And he was, one person was laughing that a lot of Arab Americans were saying that came from Egypt.
Some Coptic cops, people from said they're African Americans.
Well, they are.
They're from Africa.
Right.
And so, but Arabs don't count, at least under the old rubrics, as an oppressed class.
They may now under the diversity rule.
So a lot of people that are of Middle Eastern extraction, ancestry from North Africa can say that.
But the university, and then you know what, once you go down that route, you have to go back to a system
uh
a system that had answers to those questions and they're not very nice systems so when you look at the stanford website for admittees they have black latino white mixed race right right they got that from where south africa so there was the white and then there was the black african but then there was the mixed race remember that they were in between and the same thing, if you're going to say that, well, I'm going to apply to Harvard, but my great-great-grandfather was Navajo, then you're 116th drop and you're eligible.
See, tribal societies, I mean, the tribal casino society community uses that rule, 116th.
Where did that come from?
That came from the old Confederacy or the
anti-bellum South.
Absolutely.
One drop.
And so that's what happens when you go down that racist route and you call it liberal.
Ultimately, you're going to have to inherit the baggage and the superstructure of a society that preceded you that was racist.
Now, you say you're not racist, but you're going to have to use to establish the rules of who is and who is not under your racist paradigm a victim.
You're going to have to go back to the old South or South Africa.
Right.
Take a 23andMe test and hope that
you're 98% Italian and 2% Tunisian.
You know, like, yes, yes.
Well, Victor, you mentioned before that
screaming lady at a San Francisco board meeting.
And I'd like us to return to that and some thoughts
on modesty and immodesty as the ancients uh perceived it.
And we'll get your thoughts on that, Victor, right after these important messages.
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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.
So Victor, I saw the video of that woman screaming at the meeting, a trans woman.
And she said, I have no words to say, but the pain of what happened, whatever shooting happened.
And then she screamed like an insane person.
And maybe she indeed was an insane person.
So she's an example, Victor.
But
you and I, and I'm sure many listeners pine for normal.
We were allowed once upon a time to say, well, that was
this is normal.
And normalcy seems to be a sin now.
Abnormal
seems to be a virtue.
But part of this abnormality, Victor, and this woman's screaming and all other kinds of displays of disfiguring of the body and tattoos everywhere, piercings everywhere, people that put horns on their head.
How do you get plastic surgery to put horns on your head?
But people do.
And
public displays displays of just rage.
I just, it gets me thinking like,
what the F ever happened to modesty in this country?
And
why is it being immodest?
Why is screaming
when you're a legislator and screaming in the middle of a session?
Why is that virtuous?
So anyway, Victor,
I had wanted to bring this up for the last couple of
episodes to get your thoughts on modesty.
How did the ancients conceive of modesty?
Was it a virtue?
Was it a weakness?
Was immodesty something that was also perceived as its own thing?
Maybe it goes by a different word than modesty, but Victor, this is well, there is a word in
Latin, modestea.
Okay.
Kind of me and the Romans had
pudicitia,
and that was sexual modesty.
But,
you know, at 21, 20, I entered this philology department at PhD, and it was not just classics.
It was retrograde classics.
It was philology.
So it was one of the only two left.
It was kind of a vestigial idea that all of the ancient world
rests on philology.
So you have to have a word.
You have to have the living, the Greek language that is ancient Greek is a living language, whether you're going to to study ancient history, archaeology, literature, you have to know how to read Greek and Latin and write in it.
And then there has to be a word for it.
I think I've mentioned that.
There's no word.
And
if you take this to the extreme, the gravity doesn't exist in the ancient world because there's no Greek word for gravity.
But when you would go to an ancient history seminar,
I had an Austrian professor, German professor, a lot of English professors, and they would say, what's the word?
What's the word for it?
Mr.
Hansen, you've said something now.
And
what's the word?
Or they would say things such as, Well, this was a common phenomenon.
Can you think of five words?
Or you've said something, I don't think there's a word in it.
It was the tyranny of philology, but nevertheless, you were trained to be a philologist.
It changed my entire life because I always would try to think of words for things to prove their existence or their commonality or their rareness.
And Greek, when you say modesty,
my God,
you think of hydos,
and that's the main one.
And that means shame.
It's not a guilt society, as Bernard Williams and other classical scholars pointed out.
We are a guilt society.
When you do something wrong,
you
feel that the punishment will come from your own private sense of guilt.
Now, that can be religiously generated.
You're going to go to hell, hell or you have to confess or it can be socially constructed guilt.
You're a grandee living in Knob Hill and you walk down Market Street and a guy came up and shouted at you and you turned your head away and didn't get near him.
And now you feel guilty inside.
It doesn't really do much.
But the ancients had a shame culture.
We did in the 19th century.
That meant that your behavior was correct because it brought shame on your family.
And that was excessive behavior, sexual behavior, alcohol behavior,
adornment behavior, anything
that made you, that belittled you or your family or your ancestors meant you had no hide-offs, shame.
And so
that was one.
There was another word, though.
I think it was sofosune.
That meant that
you were careful, you were sober and judicious.
So, when everybody was screaming and yelling, you weighed in, not just on the one hand or the other hand, but with an insight that was listened to because you were known as a person that just didn't want to hear your voice.
And you would only say something if it could contribute.
That was sofosune.
That's a Socratic term.
There was a word cosmios.
from cosmos, and that meant well-ordered or adorned.
In other words, you were a person
that dressed a certain way, not showy or indulgent, but not sloppy, that you were well-ordered, or your family,
there was not a divorce, or there was not a thief in your family.
It was well ordered.
Your house was clean.
And that was the cosmios, that idea of
moderation or good temperament.
And then finally,
you know, we get this word
golden mean.
That comes from Tometrion Crusion, the golden mean.
And that meant that between every extreme, there was a soft spot that incorporated some and others elements from both sides, and you incorporated them, the golden mean.
And so the point of all this
excursus is that The Greeks had a pretty sophisticated across the spectrum definition of moderation.
And that shows us as philologists how important
it was to being a classical Greek, that you were not of the extreme, you were not sloppy, you were not shameful, you were not excessive, you didn't stand in front of the bulletarian and scream your head off like this woman did.
because you wouldn't do that, because it showed everybody that you were immoderate, you brought shame upon your family, and
it gave you less believability.
Everybody would say that's an immoderate trait to scream and yell above the normal voice levels of people and to disrupt and cause, you know,
disruption.
They may still believe that, the majority, but I think they would be afraid to say it.
now where they might have said it.
We demonized shame, you know, we've demonized, we demonized all these inheritances from the Greeks.
And we said, you know, stop letter shame.
We're not that kind of, we were in the 60s, I heard that, you know,
oh, it's not shameful to, you know, not shave your legs.
And I remember going to the,
this is a funny kind of off-color joke, not joke, but I remember there was a swimming pool at UC Santa Cruz at Cal Call, very small in those days.
And I went there and there was a, in those days, people didn't shave, right?
Women didn't.
No underarm, nothing.
And a woman had a very thin
bikini, and she hadn't shaved her upper legs.
Can I be discreet?
And she walked around.
Her cubic hair would be showing.
And I was 18, like just like shocked.
And she turned to me and she walked over and she goes, there's nothing shameful, young man.
This is natural.
Get over it.
And I thought, there is shameful because you're drawing attention to yourself in a sexual manner.
That was the old way of looking at it.
And
so
we've discredited shame or the old day, I'll give you another example of what a shame culture operates as opposed to a guilt culture.
I can remember in the early 60s, there was a very prominent family in my community, and one of the kids was caught stealing from a liquor store, and they got caught, right?
You know what they did on stage?
You know better.
Everybody knows what they did.
I'll just use pseudonyms.
They said, last the Fresno V, I think it was something to the effect, like 1960, I was only like seven years.
I asked my mom,
the
Bill Smith, son of Gladys and Herbert Smith of Salma, California, address,
was found at age 14 in a liquor store.
And then the next day, the neighbors would bring over food.
It was a funeral, right?
And then they would go, and everybody would whisper.
And we're back to, you know, Zorbita the Greek shame culture.
It's supposed to be so horrible.
But there were some elements, the Greeks would say, that it was a prod
or an incitement for good behavior.
And everybody was afraid of that.
So I remember one day I was, I don't know, 17, and I was working
out in the field.
And I went with a bunch of guys the night before.
We had about three cores beers, illegal at 17.
And we were out in the field out there.
And we all had those,
what would they call
have a banana or something?
Or have they were cigars?
Yeah.
We all say white owls.
Yeah, they were cheap, five cents.
Nobody inhaled them.
You just thought you were cool.
And then when everybody left, they didn't want them to go home and have them.
So they threw them in the valve, right?
I forgot all about next morning, Friday and I.
Next morning, my grandfather calls, said, we're going to go irrigate at six o'clock.
I'm get up.
I'm twisting.
I get to that valve.
And my grandfather looks down there.
He sees all these cigars in the irrigation valve.
And he says,
do you know anything about that?
Well, why would you want to know?
And he said, well, if you did know something about that, there's nothing sillier than to put that thing in your mouth and to walk around and to think the davis and the hansons raised kids that would put that thing in their mouth and walk around like that so did you do it i said yes i did i'm sorry he said well get that out of your mouth it doesn't reflect well on our family
wow that's what i guess the 60s people were listening to this and said yes victor and that's what we rebelled against
So maybe so.
I'm not going to take side, but that's what a shame culture does.
It tries to inculcate a particular type of,
and that's what the Greeks did.
They did the same thing with a Dow.
That was another inheritance we had, you know, that was supposed to be terrible.
You don't give money to your daughter so that people will marry her.
And then all of a sudden, when I got older, I thought, wow,
when women get married and have children, they're especially vulnerable.
Right.
Because their husbands could leave them or their boyfriends could leave them and they're not going to have the earning choices as a man man because they're going to be responsible fairly or not or for childcare.
So when even when I had nothing, I think I had a minus bank account, I said to myself, I have two daughters.
One thing I'm going to do as a classicist is to make sure they each have a house and they have money so that if they ever get married and kids and it doesn't work out, that is in their name.
And I did that.
One of my daughters passed away, but I did it with my other one.
I was doing it when she passed away.
But the point was that when I would meet Greek women, 40 or 50 in Athens, you know, in, you know, just at seminars or something, they would always say, well, yeah, where do you live?
Well, I have a nice apartment or flat.
And I said, you do?
Yes, yes, it's mine.
It's not my husband's.
It's not my exposure.
And they all inherit it from their fathers.
So the Doron, the gift, the dowry was a pretty good idea, I think.
Even though I know our listeners are appalled, but if you have three or four daughters, I think if you're a father and you give the chaotic times that we have where we get up to 50, 45% of divorces and all of us men like Hunter are kind of getting like Hunter Biden where they're not going to be there
and test child support or old Gramps Joe Biden's going to disown.
Whatever the circumstances are, if you have a piece of property and a home and a household,
you're going to have some clout and independence.
And so I think it's a great idea if you can do it.
Very hard.
Victor, may I, you mentioned Zorba the Greek and
great knowledge.
Yeah, but and the movie, of course,
is great.
Yeah,
and Anthony Quinn,
but the
shame that I found really
disturbing what happens to that woman in the movie.
Do you think, though, that is
reflective of what
Greek life was like?
I think that
it was set in the 1950s or thereabouts.
I think it's supposed to be right after World War II, but that's you got to remember that's in A Crete and in a rural area of Crete.
Right.
Okay.
They have to go all the way into Heraklion to get supplies.
Right.
Okay.
And, you know, Tatsan Zakis is now a national hero, but as I remember, his tomb is up on
a hill above Heraklion.
You can go up there.
I've been to his grave.
I can't remember if he's buried in Hanya or Heraklion, but he was kind of a national hero.
He won a Nobel Prize, right?
And
he did some things that the Greeks, I guess,
I guess he was born in Hanya, as I think about it.
Yeah, it's above this city.
And he wrote The Last Temptation of Christ, which kind of got him in,
you know, that troubles.
That was one of his later novels.
But that whole novel was a tragedy of that really brilliant, beautiful
Irene Papas, I think, was played the role, didn't she?
Oh, she's gorgeous.
She's gorgeous.
But the whole point was, she was a woman who was widowed.
And according to the dictates of the village, the village elders would get together and for her shame and to protect her family reputation, they would then find somebody to marry her.
And because she was so beautiful, of course,
the elder son, the mayor, one of the prominent people wanted his son to marry as an object of status.
And she didn't want to.
And so then she got involved with Alan Bates.
It's a tragedy because he doesn't understand.
He's supposed to be half Greek, I think, in English, at least in the novel.
And he comes back and then
he has this fling with her.
He doesn't realize what he's done to her, that he's exposed her her to shame, and then that he's besmirched the honor of the family whose son is now
considered not good enough by a woman who sleeps with somebody who's not her husband.
Right.
So it's trying to show the evils of a shame culture.
Okay.
Well, somebody who should be shamed, Victor, is
Adam Schiff.
I think he has no sense of shame, but we're going to, since this podcast has a little bit of a theme of lies and liars we'll we'll we'll end it with some discussion of congressmanship
and we will do that after this final important message
We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
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Victor,
there is a publication
put out every once in a while by the Real Clear Media Fund.
And it's a nonprofit affiliated with Real Clear Politics.
David DeRosia, my friend for a long time, I know you know David very well, and others have published this thing.
It's called Unum.
And the current issue of Unum, which I get in the mail, I send some money to the media fund, so I get this, is by Paul Sperry.
Paul's an
investigative reporter for Real Clear Investigations.
And the title is Adam Schiff Cyberbully.
And
Paul Sperry, as a reporter, and he had a pretty significant Twitter following of several hundred thousand, he had the temerity to reveal the report on Adam Schiff.
When I remember when Schiff was
in the Democratic majority and running the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,
and he revealed who some of these whistleblowers were and
other such things.
But Schiff,
Schiff does not, Schiff, who took a vow to uphold the Constitution, which does have
a First Amendment and it does have protection of a free press in it.
Schiff worked very aggressively
through his staff to get Twitter, pre-Elon Musk Twitter, to remove Sperry from Twitter and succeeded.
And he was banned.
No explanation given.
He's back, but Adam Schiff,
Victor, do you know that Adam Schiff is a phony and hello life?
He's also a cyber bully.
Your thoughts, Victor.
Well, what's scary about him was, you know,
he ran, as I recall, for state legislature.
He was wiped out by Joe Rogan, that guy that was on the
John Rogan, I think, on the impeachment of Clinton before he became a congressman.
And he had very close races, believe it or not.
He was almost
beaten.
He only, I don't think, I think the first two or three times he ran, he down in his Los Angeles, just was 51.
And then he became on the House Intelligence Committee, and he created this new persona of Adam Schiff, Bulldog.
He used to be, he was kind of a laid-back ex-screenwriter, you know, intellectual, Stanford, Harvard, a whole bit.
But he...
When Devin Nunes was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, remember he was the orchestrator.
They had that phony deal where they were going to
report two people to the ethics committee for supposedly leaking or something.
And the Democrats
pointed to Nunes and the Republicans pointed to Schiff.
And then this committee was supposed to exonerate or look at them.
And of course, you know what they did.
They broke the deal and they let Schiff off and they took.
Nunes out of the committee chairmanship for a few months.
It really hurt that.
And then he orchestrated the idea that Devin Nunes
was
lying on professional about what?
The whole Russian collusion.
So Devin Nunes, I mean, he had this Cash Patel and he had Jack Langer.
He had some of the most brilliant aides in Washington, and they cracked open the entire idea.
Nobody believed that Christopher Steele
had created this dossier and was being paid by Hillary Clinton from the DNC, Paywall, Perkins-Coey, Fusion GPS.
And then when they released that the FBI had hired him as a, no, everybody said he was a liar.
That was true as well.
So my point is, through all of this uncovering, Schiff became a folk hero to the left.
I walked down the street in San Francisco and I saw a little
office.
It was about, it was dedicated to destroying Devon Nunes.
It was a political office.
And they had posters.
And I walked in and they, you know, we can get rid of Devin Nunes in the next election.
There were billboards.
Devin Nunes is a friend of Putin.
It was the greatest character assassination I'd ever seen of him.
And he was behind that.
And then they had a majority and minority report.
Remember that?
From the House Intelligence?
Sum up what they found.
And
Schiffs was just total fantasy.
It was just a lie.
And yet the left ran with it.
And when Nunes issued the majority, everything in that majority report has been verified.
And what did people do?
Do you remember our former colleague at National Review
David French called for Nunes
to resign from the committee as punishment for telling the truth?
It was just a hysteria.
to get him.
And Schiff was behind that.
And then Schiff went on to got the majority in 2019.
And what did he do?
We saw he was the orchestrator of the Venman, Eric Sariomala, whatever his name was, impeachment.
He lied.
Remember that?
He said that he had no contact with the two when they were orchestrating with him.
Then he read into the
remember the intelligence committee file what Trump had said on the call as if it was a verbatim account.
And everybody halfway, what are you doing?
He didn't say that.
Well, I'm trying to be impressionistic, what I should have.
He thought he was Thucydides in a speech, you know, in the history, that he was going to make up what should have been said.
And it was complete fabrication.
So everything that guy has done has been not just ideologically extreme, but bankrupt.
It's false.
And people in his own party knew it.
So remember this guy that Javier Becera went into the Biden administration and he was attorney general?
Well, Schiff
was trying to get that job, you know, because he wanted Diane Feinstein's seat.
And he thought that he had to transition from Washington and have a base in California where he could be there and raise money and have a high-profile.
I'm a Harvard law graduate, Adam Schiff, and, you know, do the left-wing thing.
And Gavin Newsom didn't want him.
They appointed another left-wing guy, Bona or Bonta is what his name is.
So he couldn't even get that.
Now he's running for Senate in a three-way race.
I'll be surprised if he wins.
I really do.
Who were the other two?
Well, one is that crazy
congressional representative.
What's her name?
Oh,
the white lady from Los Angeles who barely won?
Yes, slightly heavy, I should say.
Pleasingly plump.
And she's the one that all of her aides don't like because she yells and screams at them.
Right, right.
And they both have been very, I mean, they all talk about
don't be ageist, don't be prejudicial against Joe Biden, don't say that
he's non-composment.
And then they're basically calling on
Diane Feinstein to resign because she's senile.
And then they want that seat.
So
the other one is, I mean, it's a real, that race is a,
it's a comedy of Confederacy of dunces.
It really is.
I mean, you've got
Barb, what's her name?
Barbara Lee, that crazy House representative is running.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, she's running.
And then you've got
whatever her name is.
And you've got Adam Schiff and the three of them.
And I don't know if there's any ideological differences between them all, but
I would be surprised if Barbara Lee doesn't win.
I know she's getting up there.
She's in her late 70s.
And I think Adam Schiff is.
But Katie Adam Schiff is her name.
Remember Katie Porter?
Yeah, Porter.
Yeah.
The dynamics of California, which maybe everyone doesn't know and seems unique to California, is that it could be the election could be two Democrats.
Yeah, it's a, whether do we call it, a jungle prime?
There's no party affiliate.
Anybody can run.
There's no primaries.
There's no primary by party, as I should say.
And every time a Republican who's kind of a moderate run, they think, wow, the Democrats are going to split the vote.
No, they're not.
You're not going to win.
It doesn't happen.
We don't have one statewide Republican
representative, office holder.
They have a supermajority in the
state assembly and senate we did we were down to seven of 52 house seats i think we're up to 11 now it's a
i just mentioned that because i i won't mention any names but there was a prominent local representative republican and i was at a political event introducing a candidate and he kind of attacked me because i said it was going to be very hard in california to have a republican win a seat and his argument was:
well, that's because we don't empathize with the other and we don't put ourselves into the life of, i.e.,
the marginalized person.
I said very politely, I don't think that Mark Zuckerberg does either.
And I don't think that the people that run the state who jack up power bills for people in the San Joaquin Valley or $5 gas for a guy who's commuting to San Joaquin or the transgendered issue resonates with the Hispanic community when they break into a Catholic
service and try to disrupt it.
So I don't think that's the argument.
I think the argument is that in the period between Ronald Reagan, George Duke Majin, Pete Wilson, we've lost anywhere from eight to 10 million middle-class conservatives who have left for the high taxes regulation and the little they got in return in terms of substandard infrastructure and schools, the fact that we had more people come illegally from the southern border than any other state who are now basically citizens, and the third of that trifecta, we had $9 trillion in market capitalization, the greatest concentration of wealth in civilization.
You put those forces together and you get what we have.
And that's pretty much the looniness of California.
It's a one-party state, and they're going to fight it out, Barba Lee and Adam Schiff, and this Representative Porter.
And the thing about remembering California is that being crazy and hard left Marxist is not a disqualifying trait.
It can be a plus, depending on the degree of charismatic ability of the candidate.
And so we don't know who's going to win.
But Adam Schiff,
I just would finish this by saying he has the ability to create suspicion and distrust by his own allies.
When he wanted to be attorney general, when Biden was elected, it wasn't the right that stopped that in California.
It was the hard left.
They said that they thought he was too tough on crime.
Can you imagine that?
That he wasn't like Boudin and Gascon in L.A., but the real reason was I think they just thought he was arrogant.
and he thought he was better than everybody, which he does.
He thought he was a novelist, screenwriter, intellectual.
Was he a screenwriter?
I don't think so.
I think he thought he was.
He was going to be one for a while.
He might have dabbled and used his contacts in Hollywood in that area, which he grew up in, or his family moved to.
But his...
His calling card, what made Adam Schiff, he was nobody.
Nobody even heard of him.
And what made him is that when Devin Nunes exposed what that dossier was and the role of the FBI in promulgating it and disseminating it before the 2016 election
and
the peripheral fallout about what they were doing to Carter Page,
the role of the FISA court, and we got into Comey and all of that stuff.
And he had the best staff in Washington.
Some of these guys were PhD editor book, former book editors that Devon had.
They were
absolutely
top-notch.
Right.
And they really laid it out.
And then it was untenable for the left.
And so Adam Schiff then stepped up and said, I'm the ranking member of this committee in the minority, and this is a lie.
And this is this.
And remember what he had?
He had a really good stick.
He'd go on MSNBC and CNN,
and he'd say, they'd say, well, are the walls closing in?
Is there another bombshell about Russian collusion?
Even the laptop.
And he'd always go like this.
He kind of had that professorial, he said, wow,
I'm a very,
this is a matter that I can't discuss because of the roles.
of confidentiality and classification that we use in the intelligence committee where we're a group of professionals.
However,
there are things there
of the nature I can't disclose, and the details
I won't mention, but there are things there
that look very, very incriminating to Donald Trump.
I'm not going to say that he's a Russian asset, but I have at my disposal confidential matters that if I were to disclose them, they would be pretty damning.
That's what he did.
He did it almost every day.
And he was on there hundreds of times.
And it was
the same snarky, a little snarky attitude.
Yeah.
Well, Victor.
And then you'd get Nunes on there on, you know, Fox or something, and they'd ask him.
He would just tell the truth.
I mean, it was, it was true.
I remember, I forget this Republican woman who was on Morning Joe
and
mocking Devon.
Oh, man,
being a cow, a cow.
Yeah.
I wrote about it in
The Dying Citizen, as when I talk about the snobbery of the elites.
They kept saying that Devin Nunes will be no match for Adam Schiff or Robert Mueller because,
well, he went to Cal Poly.
They'd have no idea that Cal Poly is the hardest of all the state universities to get into, and it's harder than every UC campus except for two or three, Cal State,
San Luis Obispo.
And then they said, well, he grew up in a dairy.
He's an immigrant.
Has anybody understood what it means to run a dairy?
They mostly go broke.
It's almost impossible to do.
You have the government regulating milk prices.
You've got to get labor.
You've got the environmentalist on your back.
You've got nature on your back.
You've got animals that are alive and breathing.
And you're responsible for producing a product.
that can either be nourishing or interest to the public.
It's the most difficult job in the world.
It's hard.
And so anybody that grew up doing that compared to being a would-be script writer coming out, it's just a joke.
And yet they demonized him and demonized him and demonized him.
And it was, you know, I just drive down the 99, you know,
up to Fresno or down to Tulary or something, and I'd see these billboards about Devin Nunes.
It's really despicable what they did.
It really was.
And Adam Schiff was one of the people who did that.
And the funny thing thing was, just to end this, I think it was 2014, I'm the chair of the Military History Working Group, and we had a conference on intelligence, right?
And it was on the use of intelligence in military affairs historically and in the present.
So I called Devin Nunes to come up, if he would do that, to go to the Hoover Institution.
And to the degree as the chairman of the House Intelligence Intelligence Committee, he was off the record, and there was, but it couldn't be classified, but yet we would not repeat anything he said, but he wouldn't say anything classified.
But here's what I'm getting at: the guy drove up.
The people at Hoover said, Well, where do we meet him?
He just drove up in his own car by himself.
He didn't have any aides.
He didn't have any security.
He was the head of this intelligence committee.
He just parked on campus.
He came in and he gave a great hour talk.
And you know what the theme of the hour was?
But you cannot trust Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Putin is very dangerous.
And what the Obama administration is doing is going to have ramifications, i.e.,
they haven't said anything about the invasion of the Crimea.
He took the Donbass.
He has this new reset, reset.
We're in an asymmetrical missile treaty.
They don't care that Russia's taking.
He's in Syria now.
John Kerry invited them back in after a 40-year hiatus.
They've got the Wagner people operating.
He's not retaliating.
We've lost deterrence.
Russia has interfered.
Their cyber, it was just laid it out.
And so I remember that.
And this is what was so strange about there were people, you know, we had Max Boot and other people who have been very serious critics, but they all loved him.
They all thought, wow, it's so reassuring.
And we had people bipartisan we had on that group, liberal, conservative, paleos, neo-you name it.
And when he left, everybody said, that was a very professional.
I'm sure glad a guy like that understands the true nature and danger of Vladimir Putin and Russian aggression, because I'm afraid the Obama administration has
done nothing but appease them.
So when this whole thing started with these billboards, I thought, wow, this is just surreal.
The toughest guy in Russia is now called a Russian puppet because he's exposing how Hillary Clinton and her team used Russian sources who were the source for Christopher Steele, who hadn't been to Russia in two decades.
And it was a method of Putin interfering with the election by having Russian and Russian-affiliated people feeding lies to Steele so he could feed lies to the permanent state.
So Donald Trump would be accused of collusion and Hillary Clinton would be elected because Hillary Clinton had a reset policy under Barack Obama and would be a much preferable candidate to Vladimir Putin than would Donald Trump be.
And guess what?
Donald Trump went in and he got out of the missile deal.
He bombed the Wagner group in Syria.
He upped the sanctions.
He flooded the country, the nation, the world with cheap oil, what the Russians didn't like, except he sold javelin offensive weapons that were put on hold by the Obama administration to Ukraine.
I can't even get started.
It's such a complete distortion of history.
Yeah.
Well, Victor, that kind of reminds me of
the plot pulled against.
uh
Jimmy Stewart's character and it's um Mr.
Smith goes to Washington you know this contriving contriving uh uh evidence that is 180 from actuality but didn't that guy who contrived it didn't he have a heart spasm or something and confessed at the end what he at the end he tried to he tried to he tried he ran out of the chamber it was claude reigns who's just a terrific guy and he tried to shoot himself and he stopped and then he i don't think the left feels one iota of shame no shame right yeah no they're they're proud of it well that's about all the time we have uh victor except that we will thank our listeners for listening and no matter what platform you do that on Google, Play, Stitcher, if you're on iTunes or Apple Podcasts, thank you.
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Thank you for your podcast, the Hoover Institute, and your work at Hillsdale that you bring to us.
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