Suspicion: the Polls and the Panderers of the Deep State

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Hello, ladies, and hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

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

His official website, The Blade of Perseus, is found at victorhanson.com.

And I'll tell you more about that later.

As always is the case.

There's plenty to speak about, plenty to get Victor's wisdom on.

I think the first thing we should hear from Victor about today is Donald Trump.

This past couple of days, he spoke, he had his first major campaign rally Saturday, the 25th in Waco, Texas.

That's on the heels of some really interesting social media output by him on his Truth Social.

And we'll get Victor's thoughts on that, on some foreign policy matters related to China and Putin and the Middle East, Anthony Fauci laughing off lab leaks, maybe something else.

But we'll get to Trump and politics right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So, Victor, you've seen the news.

Donald Trump, you may not have watched, I didn't, but you

may not have watched his speech in Waco.

It got, of course, some attention.

First major campaign rally.

He is an announced candidate for president after all.

This comes on the heel of a couple days

after he posted some stuff on Truth Social,

his social media platform, in which there was an image of him holding two images, you know, side by side, him holding a baseball bat, looking like he was going to hit something, looking to his left.

And to the left was an image of

Alvin Bragg, the DA

in Manhattan.

Last week, when we recorded our podcast, Victor, it was possible at that point that Donald Trump might in the ensuing days have been arrested.

Obviously, he has not.

He, though, has called for his, if he's going to be arrested, he wants the perp walk, he wants the handcuffs.

And, you know, there are some numbers that may be bearing out political reasons for this.

There's a new Newsmax poll out that shows John McLaughlin conducted it.

And in a Trump to Santos head-to-head in January, the numbers were were pretty close was trump had 52 to 41 over de santis but since all this um

has come out about bragg's intention to have donald trump arrested uh the numbers amongst the republican base have risen dramatically for trump uh 61 to 31 that's a head-to-head with desantis so victor we have donald trump out there

in many ways physically at rallies very very

uh controversial postings on social media.

Victor, what are your thoughts on this whole enchilada?

Well,

every candidate, when

he's an abstraction or a romantic abstraction,

polls higher than when he has to come out and take polls.

And then every candidate who's been done an injustice,

as Trump has, gains sympathy.

So I don't go by the polls right now.

The fact is, DeSantis, in an interview with Piers Morgan and then with Tucker Carlson, took some positions that he was criticized by the mainstream media.

Specifically, he used the word territorial dispute.

I don't know quite why the psychodrama is a territorial dispute.

It's also

a continental

World War II style war.

Maybe you could say he wasn't as comprehensive, but you cannot say it's not a territorial dispute.

The whole thing started over the Donbass and Crimea or we wouldn't even be talking.

And then Putin,

because he was given that basically by the West.

And by the way, as I said with Sammy, Jack, nobody since 2014 that I know of has said one of the most serious national security concerns of the United States is to make sure Russia gives back the Donbass and Crimea that it took in 2014 under the Obama administration.

That is our central position.

Nobody said that.

It was only when the war came that that was recalibrated as a

critical issue.

I can see that, but it's a little disingenuous to say that that has always been a concern of the West.

It was of no concern, that territorial dispute, until Putin got even greedier because of the degree of appeasement that was shown him by Biden and Obama.

And

so

that shows you that the polls are fluid as

DeSantis will take positions and as Trump is continually hounded,

and Trump is hounded, everybody understands that this is just in the same line of

Trump disarrangement syndrome as we saw with Robert Mueller and Russian collusion, and then the laptop and Russian disinformation, and then we saw with the Mar-Lago raid and the two impeachments.

And it's the old, as we talked before, Jack, the Wiley Coyote syndrome.

I think Trump made a strategic mistake in in attacking Bragg that is a completely disreputable person.

But when he shows images of violence, I mean, this is sort of an obstruction of justice

caused.

You can't do that with a public prosecutor.

You can't attack that person personally.

You can criticize him.

You can say, but that when you start to attack him, then you're going to

sort of boomerang on yourself.

So I don't think that was wise.

As far as the

nobody in either party can get those rallies, the problem we're having with the rallies is

in the 2020 narrative, we saw those wonderful rallies.

There were 40, 50.

I remember the ones in Pennsylvania were just on the eve of the election.

And then when you saw Joe Biden's honk the horn, unless there was massive fraud, and I think there was irregularities, but the point is Joe Biden was was inept.

He just had these pathetic little

what was like a drive-in movie, Jack, where you honk your horn or something.

I think he had a rally that nobody was at.

Nobody was at.

So, what I'm saying is that

it's not an accurate barometer of what Trump really needs to do.

We know he can do that.

We know he can get the base fired up.

We know, but we have

two

unknowns because he did not win the popular vote by his own admission in 2016

and he didn't officially lose it win the popular vote in 2020.

So this third time around, he has a magical number he has to get.

And what are that?

What is that magical number?

That is a number of suburban crossover soccer moms, women who are worried about the Biden disaster, the open borders, the crime rape, the

Stalinization of the schools.

Is Trump doing anything to appeal to that rubric?

No.

So I don't quite understand going to the base and revving it all up with anger at DeSantis or other things when they're there with you.

And what you need to do at those rallies is tell the base that they've all got to go out and convince the people who either sat out in 2020 or voted against Trump that that was one of the stupidest things they ever did.

And they've got to come back and they've got to vote because the country's on the precipice.

And said, you know,

it didn't help him.

I know, I understand he's rising in the polls, and that's because of what Alan Bragg is doing to him.

And

I think in the long term, that so far, DeSantis's occasional barbs back at Trump, why Trump attacks him in the long run, are helping him.

And when you look at the polls of head-to-head,

Biden, Trump, Biden, DeSantis, DeSantis actually does a little better than Biden.

And so I think it's too early to see the polls.

I just wish that Donald Trump would, and he's doing a good job with those videos that are directed toward the border or crime or energy or education or foreign policy.

But

it doesn't do him any good to max out on that base.

with all of that gratuitous stuff because they're going to vote for him no matter what.

And that other stuff that he says when he says Ron DeSantis is a terrible governor or he makes fun of him.

I watched a clip, Jack, where the crowd got quiet when he started attacking DeSantis.

I don't think they like that.

And so

he's got to be very careful.

And I think DeSantis was wisely here and there

basically saying, I'm too busy to get involved.

I'm not going to get in this.

I don't know anything about porn lawyers and porn stars.

That's a good, you know, reference it once in a while, and then don't really go nuclear until you're forced to.

So that's where this thing is.

And it'll depend on a lot

on these first two primaries.

And I think the primaries in places like New Hampshire and Iowa will help DeSantis.

The debates will be very important.

And we saw that with Scott Walker.

Scott Walker was a wonderful candidate, and everybody thought that he he was the perfect can-do realist governor who had governed so successfully in Wisconsin.

But on the debate stage, he melted, partly because of the pressure applied to him by Trump.

And so we don't know what's going to happen on that debate stage.

I've seen DeSantis bait

in the governor's primary.

He did fine, but you never know what's going to happen.

So the debates in the first two primaries and all this now is speculation.

Yeah, no, Victor, we now, you know,

risk we have, every dollar above $250,000 in a bank is magically protected by Joe Biden and the government, the endless printing presses we have now.

But

there's news afoot that Deutsche Bank has almost gone under this

full expectation that other banks are going to go under.

The banking industry is in

true crisis.

And back to the American politics,

I think it's the suburban voter

who may have a ton of money, a relative lot of money in a 401k or something that

should be most worried.

I'm not saying that people who are below a

lower income shouldn't worry about these issues, but many people,

they don't have enough money in their bank, if a bank account at all, to, I think $400

is a standard.

You know, we blame the Federal Reserve.

And I wrote a couple of columns called Zero Interest Money.

And they were inaccurate in the sense that the inflation rate at

1.9 or 2.3, the interest rates were basically below that.

So they were negative money.

And

why those banks made billions and trillions of

30-year mortgages at,

I think my son's mortgage is at 2.6.

that's crazy so they they have on the books 30-year responsibilities where they're only each year going to get 2.6

and the inflation rate has just eaten them alive and they're going to have to how can you get money coming in at 2.6 that you've already given out

You've given out trillions of dollars to people to buy homes and they're at 2.6, 3.1.

And now you've got a bunch of investors and depositors who are saying,

look,

I want 5%.

The savings and loans gives me 6% on my money.

And, you know, there's not a lot of places to go with Wall Street and turmoil and the real estate market and a roller coaster.

So the banks are competing to up their interest rates on deposits, but they have so much overhead and exposure from this crazy heyday of zero interest loans that they gave out.

And I don't know how you, I don't know.

We saw what happened when this, when the Silicon Valley Valley Bank tried to, you know, just say, you know what, we screwed up.

We put a lot of money on the other end of the ledger into 1.5% bonds, and that's not enough money to pay the interest for our depositors.

So we're just going to take the hit and sell it off

and reinvest.

And that just caused a panic.

And so.

Well, that's politically, don't you think?

Instead of,

look, Donald Trump can't not talk about himself.

That's how he's wired.

And then in the midst of this heated season of maybe he's going to get arrested or not, I can see Trump being Trump talking about that.

But I mean, looking forward to 2024, it's

the the idea I was trying to present was,

is the swing voter who he should be addressing and can be addressing through tying Biden to this current banking crisis absolutely going to get worse.

I don't know.

Is that too complicated?

No, no, it's not.

No, all

DeSantis or Trump is going to have to say is essentially this is a worse president than Jimmy Carter.

And that's not rhetoric.

Everything Joe Biden touches turns to draws.

He has the on-midas touch.

He took a vibrant

1.7, 1.8 inflation rate, GDP almost recovering at a rate that was going to be 2%.

Unemployment,

3.4, he got it down to 3.5, big deal.

He did it with funny money.

And he ruined it.

He ruined it.

And whether it was energy that we got up to $5.

$5

a gallon for gas and cal, I just filled up.

Gas was back to $5 and diesel is $5.50 a gallon.

That didn't happen to happen.

It didn't have to happen.

He jaw-boned the frackers.

He jawboned the

horizontal drillers.

He said they were going to be out of business.

He shut down Anwar.

He shut down Keystone.

He

canceled existing federal leases.

He put

critical land off limits.

He begged Venezuela.

He begged Russia.

He begged Iran.

He begged Saudi Arabia.

That's what he did.

He destroyed the energy market.

We should have 15 to 16 million barrels, and we're doing 12.

And so that was a disaster.

No need to get in the border.

It was a total disaster.

7 million illegal entries.

And it was very inhumane to invite people to come in here and just have them walk in with no means, no services, nothing.

and to just

blatantly destroy federal immigration.

That was an impeachable offense.

offense.

I think it was.

I don't even want to get into Afghanistan.

That $50 billion

in military hardware, believe me, will end up in the hands of Iran and Russia to the degree

that it's useful to them.

So everything that he's done is terrible.

And then when you see what kind of person he is, while this is all going on, Jack,

the House committees are releasing these letters that show he's an absolute crook.

He got money from the Chinese.

We know he got money from the Ukrainians.

And his own son is terrified that Joe Biden's going to turn on him.

And I had said that earlier in a broadcast.

I don't, if you remember, I said, why does Joe Biden put up with Hunter Biden?

doing this art scam, which he knows embarrasses him, this paint with his mouth and selling these to Chinese investors, this trash art.

And I said, because they have a tense relationship.

Hunter says to the Biden people, I can destroy my dad if I tell the truth.

And then Biden says to Hunter, you may end up having to take the blame for the whole thing.

So there's a great tension there because there's so much legal exposure.

It's there with the deposits from the bank.

This man is not only the most incompetent president we've ever had, he is the most compromised, crooked, crooked, leveraged.

And when I saw him in Canada with Trudeau and he substitutes China for Canada to the chat to his Canadian host, he says he calls them Chinese.

Then he does that spooky, eerie, creepy whisper.

And it's just,

he just slurs his speech.

It's, you know, when you listen to him, it's like, well,

you can't understand him.

And it's like, I watch this and I say to myself, is there anybody in the United States that sees this poor man cannot fulfill the duties and obligations of being president?

He cannot speak the English language.

He cannot read off a big-lettered teleprompter.

He can't keep the Chinese from the Canadians separate.

He doesn't understand the work.

He's not capable of doing this.

And the idea that he's even going to run,

I guess it's come on.

Maybe Jill Biden, Jill Biden wants to be president for four more years.

Well, I'm no doubt.

She and Michelle both, maybe they'll run together.

And I mean, this is all the subtext of all this is that Camilla Harris must really scare the Democratic Party.

We make jokes about, you know, how she repeats herself, her word salad, her incoherence,

her incompetence.

There must be people who know her better than we do and say, you know what, I will take a non-compost Biden any day over her.

That's how bad she must appear to the Democratic kingmakers.

Yeah.

By the way, you mentioned the job approval numbers.

The most recent from Real Clear is

Fort Biden's job approval, 43.3% positive, 52% negative.

And I saw some headlines somewhere else in the last day or two on some other.

That's an average, by the way, that was down to 38%.

So

where's that 43 i don't understand that i can't believe that poll is accurate do you really believe that when you walk down the street four out of 10 people think that the energy policy is good the crime policy is good the border policy is good his advocacy of the lgbtq plus community is good that afghanistan's good i don't think so i i can't see it

I mean, everything about him is maybe they're just, I can see 25% saying I'm a Democrat and I don't care who's in the White House.

That's my guy.

But this guy is in a separate category.

Well, I mean,

it may be people aren't honestly answering the question one way, that like it's just about him isolated.

I guess from a spot.

I've got a lot of people.

Well, they could be saying, I approve of him because in the back of my mind,

this is really about him or Trump.

So maybe that's where I can see that.

I can see that.

But

I think

what enrages me is this canard that he's good old Joe Biden from Scranton, that he's a kind person, that he's a moderate.

He is one of the most mean-spirited SOBs I've ever seen in politics.

He screams, he lies, he yells.

And when he gets into that ultra-maga semi-fascist mode and what I inherited, and then he just says these things.

I inherited inflation.

No, you didn't.

You had 1.9.

I inherited high gas price.

No, it was $2.50 a gallon until you doubled it.

I inherited a mess in Afghanistan.

No, you didn't.

And he just keeps

it just lying.

Lying.

Lie, lie, lie, lie.

And then you look at what he's telling the American people that he grew up as

Jewish and Puerto Rican and Italian,

black, black shirt, and semi-long-haul driver and

arrested in civil rights demonstrations.

It was all lies, lies.

On two continents arrested.

I know it.

There's nothing redeemable about him.

Then you see the lifestyle he led, and he says he never discussed anything.

He never met any of Hunter.

And you have all these pictures where they're engulfing, and there's all these cronies that are leveraging the Biden family for influence and paying them millions of dollars.

And so I just don't get it.

I really don't.

This guy is.

I was critical of Obama, but this guy is 10 times worse than Obama because at least Obama was compos mentes.

And then Obama could say to the hard left that are pushing, he said, you know what?

I want to go down in history as the most famous, beloved, heroic president in history because I'm an egomaniac, megalomaniac, and your radical agenda will make that impossible.

So just cool a little bit.

And that's what he did.

But Biden, Biden's attitude is: well, I just want to go to sleep and take a nap.

Let them do whatever they want.

And he turned over his entire agenda to the hard left, hard left.

We've never seen a left like this.

Well, Victor, the only other person you may have worse feelings about than Joe Biden is Anthony Fauci.

And we'll talk about him right

after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

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That's Victor's official website.

Its name is The Blade of Perseus.

When you go there, you'll find links to everything Victor writes and his appearances on other shows, other podcasts.

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so victor uh anthony fauci

was the re

was uh on a pbs i think american masters uh show this past week uh i don't watch them usually i understand they're usually reserved for artists but this was a special on on tony in his house we've seen and heard about this before

His house is just littered with pictures of himself, right?

The narcissist.

He laughed off the

idea that

the COVID-19

pathogen was created and released from the Wuhan lab.

By the way, on a total, not total aside, but I was at a dinner this past week in of all places, West Hartford, Connecticut, and Dr.

Harvey Risch was there.

He's the Yale, retired Yale epidemiologist.

He was beyond fascinating.

There's just no way.

There's no way this virus did not come out of that lab.

And

I recommend folks to check out Risch's writings.

He writes from the Brownstone Institute.

You'll find his writings in other places.

He's been on Fox a lot also.

But that, you know, Fauci's just barefaced on this, Victor, and

laughing at it.

I mean, it's so galling.

How many people have died?

And the destruction of our economy?

Sick.

Well, Fauci knows what he has a rendezvous with.

He has a rendezvous with the entire implosion destruction of Fauci Incorporated because he's retired.

I guess he's retiring.

It's already taken effect, hasn't it?

I think it has.

Or is it scheduled?

He is retired.

He is retired.

Yes.

So what that means, Jack, is that $50, $50, $50 billion that he doled out under the auspices of the National Institute of Health as the head of, you know,

the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, that's gone from his fingertips.

And when you talk,

every time I talk to a researcher or a PhD, I ask them, was Anthony Fauci political in the allotment?

He said, was he political?

You couldn't say a word about him.

So all of that phony, yes, it could be a pangolin.

Yes, it was probably a bat.

Yes, mandatory mask is what we recommend.

Oh, yes, you have to shut down the schools.

Yes, the Moderna and the Pfizer will give you 96% permanent protection from either infecting someone.

That was all predicated on I want my grant money, and that little bastard's got his hands on it.

And he doesn't have that power anymore.

So, you're seeing a lot of people speaking up.

We're going to have Stephen Kuade back on because he's written some very disturbing

recent articles, one of which is that the Chinese lab in Wuhan is still engaging in gain of function research.

And by the way, that gain of function research was made possible not just by the grant, but by the encouragement of Anthony Fauci for researchers to give their expertise or their published knowledge or even some of their access to laboratory material so they can continue gain of function research.

So that's all going to come out as he becomes a private citizen and all of the people who suffered from his edicts are going to come forward, especially in the medical community.

But I mean, there's no there there, Jack.

He was wrong on shutting the schools down.

He was wrong when he said that little babies and preschool kids should be vaccinated and boosted twice.

And we know that the side effects from young men from ages one to 20 or even maybe into the 30s, there was more danger from the mRNA vaccinations than there was from COVID.

They shouldn't have been vaccinated.

The shotgun approach took away attention and efforts and capital from the people who were vulnerable, over 60.

He was wrong about travel bans, even though he backpedaled six or seven times.

He was wrong about mandatory masks.

He was wrong

about the origins of the, where it leaked.

He did that for

selfish interested career-saving purposes, as we saw in those really embarrassing emails with Francis Collins, where almost immediately they were worried that somebody would connect their routing of American monies to the Wuhan lab to defy the American government's prohibition of gain and function research

with him.

And then he would be blamed for helping to birth or create vicariously one of the most deadly viruses in modern memory.

And he didn't want that to happen.

But that's ultimately what he's going to be spending the rest of his life doing, Jack.

Anthony Fauci, I think he's 82.

He has one mission in life.

He has one mission in life, and that is to convince the American people people to listen to the left and say, and listen to the left and be sure

that the central truth of his existence does not become canonical.

And what that central truth is,

Anthony Fauci, along with Francis Collins, thought maybe naively, maybe for a good reason, that engineering

coronaviruses was essential to medical research.

And he didn't care that it was banned in the United States.

So he took extraordinary measures with people who had a profitable interest in it, like Peter Dasick, that that research could continue under the auspices of that lab that was under the auspices of the People's Liberation Army.

And when that virus leaked, he tried to suppress that narrative and tried to destroy people who believed it.

And that's not going to be refutable.

That's just canonical itself.

And he's going to spend the rest of his life trying to evade someone saying, you know what?

I thought every step in this tragic chain of events.

I've analyzed them.

I've pondered them.

And I came to the conclusion that when you go from Z back to A,

you go from Z, a million Americans dead from COVID, and you get back to A.

who helped create this virus?

It's Anthony Fauci.

I mean, he didn't do it deliberately in Wuhan, but he encouraged it and he made sure the Chinese had the expertise and the know-how to continue that line of research, which his superiors and which his betters felt was too dangerous and hazardous to continue.

He did it anyway.

And then we all thought that he was bipartisan.

And the documentary, the excerpts I saw, wasn't he weeping in adulation or glee that Joe Biden was a non-yeah.

and he tried to deliberately destroy Jay Baccaria and the great Barrington people.

He forced Scott Atlas out of the inner circle of Trump.

He was a very mean-spirited person.

He was an egomaniac.

You mentioned that.

His house is stuffed full of pictures.

And I'm looking at my office right now out here in the farm, Jack, and guess what?

I can't find a single picture.

No pictures of Victor on the wall?

No.

And I think that there's all of our listeners out there.

Would you do the same?

I think you'll look around.

I mean, you might have family albums, but go to your office or where you would do your work and see how many bubblehead toys you have and little endorsements about yourself.

And, you know, and then his wife, they remind me so much of

Harry and Megan.

Did you hear what the wife said?

No.

Yeah.

Well, they had a clip of her.

I think she's one of the, he's the highest paid federal employee at almost $500,000, and she's up there at 400 000 so they're getting nine hundred thousand dollars a year

and that's just the beginning of this

he's writing a book he's going to monetize this like you would not believe we know that he had some connection with the silicon valley people and suppressing information blah blah blah so what she says is it's so hard

You know,

there's good and bad, and it was just so hard to be in the public eye.

And we didn't add, you know, there's response, you think it would be satisfying, but there were so downsides, and it was just so burdensome.

And I'm thinking, okay, don't do it.

What a cross.

Why don't you?

I mean, Burks was an egomaniac, but she didn't have the following that Fauci did.

Collins is an egomaniac, but he didn't have the following.

I don't even know who the F.

you know, I,

the Federal Drug Administration, the FDA person, I don't know who they were.

CDC, I don't know.

People don't know those household names.

They only know his.

But when you look at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, it doesn't rank up there with the CDC or the NIH

or the FDA.

So why did he get all the attention?

And because he demanded it.

He said, I am the science.

And he was, and what's the subtext of this whole discussion?

And I think all the listeners saying, Victor, get to the blank point.

We know what the real central truth is.

Say it.

The central truth, Jack, was Donald Trump was headed to a massive reelection.

And they said, ah, this is the bullet that will take him down.

If we can shut down the economy and destroy this once-in-a-lifetime 3.4 unemployment, booming economy, self-sufficiency and energy, and

disinterested, non-partisan, above it all, Anthony Fauci is the guy who can do it.

And so he was full blast for the lockdown.

And if you doubt that, listeners, remember what he said.

He not only cried in glee at the Biden administration, but he said that those Republicans and those red states, they don't like to do anything that you tell them.

And they're the problems.

And I'm thinking, okay, so the New York, let's take two red states, two blue states.

So the Texas-Florida death rate was at a major, major percentage higher than the New Jersey, New York.

No, they weren't.

They were either comparable or slightly higher.

And the trade-off, of course, is their economies are booming in a way that New York and New Jersey's were not.

So

he did this politically.

And I think the left adopted him.

It's almost like the Ukrainian war.

The left adopts these particular causes that they think feed into their Trump derangement syndrome.

And they do that a little bit with Ukraine.

They think, you know what,

we had Putin and Trump on Russian disinformation laptop.

We had them on collusion.

And now we got Putin.

We see the whole world sees we were right.

And

they're obsessed in a way that's not empirical.

And by the same token, I think Anthony Fauci

fed into that obsession.

He was, yeah, he saw that there was a political career to be made as a man who stood up to Trump and forced him to shut down the economy.

And then he just gave, he gave up all semblance of bipartisanship when he went on CNN, MSNBC, da-da-da.

Laura Ingham, to her credit, was one of the first people who saw through him right at the beginning.

And she nailed him very early on.

Yeah, his self-obsession has been going on for decades victor i think um george

bush uh not george w h w but w

i think he gave him the presidential medal of freedom yeah i think he did

i think he didn't

and we you and i talked about the african-american man who shredded him in that documentary no he didn't i was just going to ask you about that oh i mean i mean yeah i mean i know it i mean he was

he came out there and and you thought that fauci was going going to awe him.

And what you saw was incredible.

Fauci just flat out lied.

He said, well,

this is dangerous.

Fauci goes, no.

And he says, how long

was this vaccine tested?

It wasn't.

It was rushed out in months.

And then he said,

Fauci said, well, I can guarantee you that if you get vaccinated

and boosted,

You're either not going to get the virus or you're going to get a mild case.

I'm thinking, I'm Victor.

I had two Moderna shots.

I had a Delta with 102 temperature.

And then I had Omicron with 101 temperature.

And I had it for nine months with long COVID.

And I had a booster.

How could that be, Dr.

Fauci?

You said that's impossible.

Everybody that listened to that, and there are millions of people.

Everybody I work with at the Hoover Institution that I know well got two boosters.

I think one person I know got three.

They all got a bad case of COVID.

He just flat out lied to that.

And he just shook his head.

That the

guy just shook his head.

He couldn't believe that Fauci was lying.

Every time Fauci tried to say something,

his argument was: you rushed out these vaccinations without proper testing.

We don't know about their safety.

They do not protect you

ironclad,

in ironclad fashion, as we were told.

And some years the flu is just about as deadly.

I don't know if that's still true, but there were very reasoned answers.

And Fauci was kind of like a deer in the headlights because here was an African American

and he couldn't say anything.

If that had been an East Palestine mega person, he would have just gone off on him.

But he couldn't say anything.

Yeah, it was a great

exchange.

And I'm not cheapening it by saying it reminds me of a little of Pygmalion, you know, with Eliza Doolittle's father.

There's this just inherent wisdom of the streets and of normal life.

And it confronted Fauci.

The whole thing about Fauci.

You know, the worst thing he did?

The worst thing he did.

And

I'm not advocating medical advice because I'm not anywhere knowledgeable of medical device.

I just am aggregating what I've read and what I've personally experienced.

But he

deliberately

downplayed therapeutics.

So you go back early on

before any of the COVID hysterias, and there were articles that

things that became very controversial, like ivermedsin and hydroxychloroquine, had anti-inflammatory properties for off-use labels.

I've seen the articles that were written.

They didn't say they were cure-all, but they said these are pretty much time-tested therapeutics.

I don't know to what degree that they would suppress or mitigate the symptoms of COVID, but there was anecdotal evidence they were of some value.

He demonized those.

He said they were dead.

They were dangerous.

People, we got all this about

fish tank poison and horses and all this crap.

And then there were other people who came out again and again and again.

They said the asthma drug, singular, had efficacy in repressing some of the effects of breathing problems and inflammation in the lungs.

There were people who said natural supplements like quercetin, for example, massive doses of vitamin D, zinc had some utility.

There were people that said the anti histamine, the H2 histamine for gastric problems, Pepsid, faminidine, that had antiviral properties.

They were all these were

published.

And the point I'm making is that the scientific community below the radar was trying to find

medicines well before Paxlovid that would be, and he just ignored it.

or he downplayed it or he sent his minions out to tear those people.

You're a criminal.

If you were, you would lose your life.

Yeah, and we had we had no therapeutic.

We had no therapeutic.

I don't know how many people I've talked to who said, oh, I only,

I'm on an asthma medicine, singular, monolukos, and I haven't got COVID.

It seems to have some efficacy.

And I would look it up and it did.

There's scientific, and then there were other people I know, a person who took ivermedicine

and another person who took hydroxychloroquine.

Were they cure alls no but they were not deadly off-label crackpot ideas and you to be demonized and made fun of especially when you look at the cost benefit analysis of that and one of the boosters with an experimental vaccination that uses the spike protein almost like genetic engineering and floods your body with spike proteins so that your body gets into a hyperstate of immune response, which vaccinations do.

But this spike protein was very new.

And it was much riskier, I think, than taking a course of ivermedicine

or hydroxychlorine or a pepsid every day or quercetin or,

you know, PEA or vitamin D.

All of these had some usefulness, but he just completely ridiculed that.

And then he was bragging.

He got,

I didn't, when he said that to that guy that he was interrogating in Washington, here's a man who got two of the mRNA vaccination and two boosters, Jack, and he got COVID.

And I remember he got a bad case and he took Paxlovid and he relapsed.

And yet he had the gumption to look that guy in the eye and say, if you follow the vaccination protocol, you'll only get a slight case.

You probably won't even know you have it.

He's a pathological liar.

Yeah.

It's insane, Victor.

Gosh.

Well, we have,

by the way, I do have one picture on the wall in the room.

I have a couple of pictures.

Two of Bill Buckley and

one is of Victor Davis Anson.

None of Jack Fowler.

Well, anyway, I will say that

Fauci.

I was down and giving a talk on Friday night down in the desert, and somebody asked me about the deep state and I just said

Anthony Fauci,

Mark Milley,

Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe,

James Comey, Christopher Wray, John Brennan,

and James Clapper.

Need I, Bruce Orr,

do I need to go on Francis Collins?

And the answer is, what do they all have in common?

They were all arrogant.

They all thought the law did not apply to them.

They could lie under oath and there would be no consequences.

And they were going to get very, very wealthy while in office.

And then they were going to ply their trade when they retire

and use that.

Millie has already got a book contract.

And there's all these puff pieces about the Princeton.

general and how he was so unfairly attacked by Trump.

I don't think Trump ever attacked him.

I think nobody wanted him until Trump made another one of his bad appointments and gave that job to him.

And then he abused the job and yet he's now a folk hero.

So that deep state that produced Fauci is a very scary enterprise.

Really is.

These people are judge, jury, executioner.

They're unelected and they're dangerous.

On Millie,

and we have one more topic to talk about coming up, but

on Millie, when he was was appointed, not that it had to come up, but did it come up

in the military kind of circles that

you operate in it sometimes, that this was a head scratcher of an appointment.

Did folks, anyone say that, or maybe they didn't?

There was.

I think the Marine Corps was especially suspicious of him.

And there was a sense that

he was arrogant.

And that because I know that our listeners can correct me if I'm wrong, he made it very well known that he was a general of the future because he'd had a bachelor's degree, I think, from Princeton, an M.A.

from Columbia, then I think he went to the Naval War College.

And if he did so, if I'm not mistaken, he got another M.A.

So he was considered the thinking general,

but he wasn't going to be sort of the old bluts and guts patent type.

And the left liked him because because they thought he would be malleable.

And he was a big supporter of climate change, biodiesel fuel.

And that was very, and the woke, I think you remember Jack, and I guess it was June of what, 2021, right before the meltdown in Afghanistan.

He got in it with Matt Gates.

Remember that?

And

about white privilege and white this and white that.

So what did he do?

I think people, you just can't attack somebody without providing some context.

What did he do?

Well, here's what Mark Milley did.

He managed through his unfounded, unsupported attack on white males

by using promiscuous terms like white rage or white supremacy or white privilege to get his own army 15,000 soldiers short.

That's one division.

And the military in general is offering bribes, basically, huge bonuses to get people to join because he basically, as I keep saying,

he told the people who die twice their percentages in the general population in Iraq and Afghanistan that

they're suspect upon

upon volunteering, that they were going to have to be very careful.

He wants to eliminate their propensities for white rage and white supremacy.

And they're not joining as a result of that.

What else did he do?

He called this People's Liberation Army counterpart.

What did that do to U.S.

deterrence?

You think that if you were a Chinese strategist and somebody came in and said, you're not going to believe this, the chairman of the United States Joint Chief of Staff just called me.

And you know what he said?

He said that his own commander-in-chief,

should we get in a crisis and he orders me to put our nuclear forces on alert, he's going to call us first and warn us and not to take it, that he won't allow that to happen.

And I'm sure Chief said, well, did they shoot the SOB?

No, they didn't shoot the SOB.

And he probably was thought, well, send a balloon across the United States then right away.

They have no deterrence with a guy like that in charge.

That's what he did.

And then he went right after the storming of the Episcopal Church right off Lafayette Square, where they burned that historic church in part.

They tried to get into the White House grounds.

And then when Trump walked over there with him, he said that he was used and you can't do that.

This was wrong of me.

That's like saying Colin Powell was wrong because he called up George W.H.

Bush and said, hey, when you got the, you got to send in the Marines to Watts during the Rodney King riots.

And when you do, call me.

I got 5,000 Marines ready to go.

Oh, I shouldn't have done that.

I can't be political.

It was just a farce, a farce.

And when you get a general like that who is ignorant and he tries to act like he's an intellectual, and he's talking about Professor Kendi's pseudo-scholarship, it's really embarrassing.

And,

you know,

I don't know what he, what,

I don't know what we're,

you know, he said that Trump was what?

He said he was,

he basically called trump an insurrectionist and said this was a reichstag moment of january 6th and da da da da da da da da now we know what we know he's going to do he's going to go out he's going to retire i guess he retires what he's 65 coming up he'll retire and he'll do the book thing and then he'll go to a think tank thing and then he'll get himself on either you know raytheon or general dynamics or lockheed or northrop and make his million or two dollars a year.

And then he'll come out of his corporate billet every once in a while to go on, you know, face the nation or meet the press and give a furled brow and say, oh, this is so, you know, that kind of stuff.

We've seen it before.

That's what they do.

And remember what they do, Jack, is to get where he is now

in the last five to 10 years, he had to be woke.

Because this woke thing, before it got on our radio screen, was very prominent.

I was hearing stories about it 10 years ago in the military.

And to get promoted, you have to mouth the correct platitudes, and Millie did.

And so I don't know.

It's

just really disgusting.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

we don't have much time left, but we'll have, we'll make time, of course.

We'll extend time for

to get your thoughts.

about the Iraq war.

We've just had the, I hate to call it an anniversary, 20th anniversary, but get your reflections on it.

And we'll do that right after this final important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

So Victor, a number of publications and, of course, networks have done specials, special issues, et cetera, on Iraq at 20.

Victor,

your thoughts on,

you went over there, you've mentioned this a few times on the podcast.

You were there

over the course of early on in the war.

What are your thoughts, Victor?

Especially now, in the last week or two, we see this news coming up about China.

China becoming the big force in the Middle East, China brokering

diplomatic agreements between Saudi Arabia.

My attitude about the Iraq war was

I wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

I wanted to take care of business.

Why?

It wasn't because of WMD, because I thought we could handle that.

So I watched very intently, I think it was in October of 2002, the Senate and House debate.

on the joint resolution to authorize the use of force.

And they came up, Jack, with 23 writs to authorize force.

And they were not all on WMD.

I think only, I'm doing this by memory, but I think only three or four were on WMD.

They were on, he violated the no-fly zones.

He practiced genocide on the Marsha Arabs.

He had practiced genocide on the Kurds.

He was giving multi-thousand dollar bonuses to suicide bombers.

He was harboring the architects.

of the first World Trade Center bombing, the blind sheikh's legions, not the blind sheikh, but the people who helped.

And he was harboring

Vidal.

What was his name?

One of the biggest terrorists there.

And he

violated all of the agreements by which we had ended

the initial Gulf War.

So to get rid of him in a Jacksonian fashion, I thought was appropriate.

So when we went in there, unfortunately, the Bush and Cheney administration said it was mostly predicated, you remember remember colin powell on wmd and i thought to that degree that he had dmd i thought he would have wmd

but that we had taken out as you remember his reactor i think it was in 1980 during the iran-irq war as we did uh with the the assad reactor not too long ago so we were capable of taking out a reactor i didn't think that would be a problem but uh i thought that he would have large arsenals but that wasn't the reason I supported the war.

And when I went over there, I saw that

these American troops were absolutely brilliant.

And

when I went over for the surge, I could see that they were talking about all the things they were doing to nation build, which was getting a lot of criticism, but that was a veneer, Jack.

What broke the insurrection was they were killing, killing, killing.

They were going out.

And everybody said, well, they don't take the gloves off.

During that period, that at least I went there in 2006 and 207,

they were killing a lot of people and

Baptist, al-Qaeda people.

And then when Al-Qaeda took over, after Obama announced that he was pulling out everybody, which was really stupid to do it so abruptly, then Trump said he was going to bomb the blanket out of Al-Qaeda, and he did.

So now we look at it, and

was wasn't worth the number of lives that were tragically lost, over 4,000.

Probably, I think in retrospect, we could have done something differently.

But it didn't end up like Afghanistan, which was the good war.

Remember, Obama said it was the good war.

He supported that, but the Iraq was the bad war.

But there is a sort of government in Iraq, and I think we have 2,500 troops in Iraq.

And the country is much more stable than Afghanistan was.

And so

it's hard to know how Iraq will end up.

I say that because we had a very viable Middle East plan under Trump.

People out there that are listening that don't like Trump and think he was erratic, that Abrams Accord was a very brilliant stroke of genius.

The idea that you could get Saudi Arabia eventually and Kuwait eventually and Jordan eventually and Egypt to follow some of the Arab countries that were willing to normalize relationships with Israel due to their common fears about

Iran.

And I think we were on the cusp, and you mentioned China, we're on the cusp of being the predominant player in the Middle East, but with some very important caveats.

But we weren't dependent on their oil.

So we were an honest broker.

And if they tried to double-cross us or threaten us with an embargo, we would not go over and beg Saudi Arabia before a midterm election in the fashion of Joe Biden.

We didn't need to.

We had,

as I said, we were scheduled to get up to about 15 million barrels of oil, and we were pumping natural gas like crazy.

And we didn't need to have an optional Middle East war.

And we had a way of getting the moderate Arab 10 or 12 nations on the side of Israel to prevent what Iran was doing.

And that was destroyed by Joe Biden.

And he resurrected that crazy Obama-era idea that we'll take the Sunnis of the Gulf states and we'll balance them off by Hamas and Hezbollah and Assad and Iran, and that we'll champion the Shia.

And then, out of creative tensions, we won't be embedded, we won't be indebted, or we won't be leveraged by Saudi Arabia or Israel.

It destroyed the George Bush presidency, that's for sure.

I don't know how he got elected in 2004.

It was before the worst of the war.

And he had done some good things.

He did a lot of bad things, I think, like prescription drug and no child left behind and all, and doubling the debt, almost, I shouldn't say doubling, it was about 75%.

He increased the aggregate national debt.

Dick Cheney said that deficits didn't.

I thought that was not wise at all.

But the point is that

It was a brilliant military operation.

It was sort of what Russia wanted to do in Kiev, decapitate the government.

And that's what we did.

But then

this idea that we were going to remake the Middle East that way by implanting democracies everywhere in cultures that had no pedigree of constitutional government was a flawed idea.

And it's much better to do something like the Abrams Accord to appeal to people's self-interest.

You're afraid of Iran.

Israel's afraid of Iran.

You have assets.

Israel has assets.

We have assets.

Let's all get on the same team.

And that's all been destroyed now.

It really has under the Biden administration.

The only thing I got really angry was is,

remember that line in The Wild Bunch where Pike Bishop, William Holden, they're all arguing after

that horrific raid on the bank when they dressed up as World War I soldiers has gone wrong.

And then they're all fighting.

And then Pike Bishop says,

when you side with a man, you stick with him.

Right.

So I thought,

okay,

we have this project for the new American century.

That was the Bill Cristo, remember that?

And Francis Fukuyama and all those people.

They were asking in 1999.

I thought it was, I got a letter in the mail from that.

I think it was probably a form letter.

Would you sign on?

I thought that was the most ridiculous thing in the world.

They wanted a war in 1999 under Clinton.

And so they were pushing, pushing, pushing for this.

And when everybody signed on,

guess what?

As soon as the statue fell, 90% of Americans were for it.

They were all on TV and everything.

And then as the insurrection started to mount, they started peeling off.

That,

gosh, Richard Pearl.

Vanity Fair wrote an article on the neocons that flipped, you remember?

And they started blaming everybody.

They blamed everybody.

That Ken

Alderman, he started blaming everybody.

It was almost my perfect three-week war was screwed up by your long screwed-up occupation.

And I thought, when you go over there and there's an 18-year-old kid sitting outside on a Blackhawk next to you with a 50-caliber, 30-caliber machine gun, he doesn't care who said what.

He just wants to stay alive and do the mission.

And when you put him over in that situation and then you back off and say, hey, you're a sucker.

I don't think it was worth it.

I screwed up.

And that's what they all did.

Some of them, I think, I had respect for Fred Kagan and his center because he was a strong advocate.

Things got bad and he tried to work on a solution with the surge, which did work.

And David Proteus, it did.

When Barack Obama entered the presidency, the number of people who were dying each month in Iraq was lower than the accidental fatality rate of the U.S.

military.

It almost got down to nothing.

And so they had solved that problem.

And whether the trillion dollars and all the death and destruction was worth it, I don't know.

But Iraq is a lot better place now than it was.

And it also, I think, sent a message that all of us now, I think, accept.

Because you have to bookend it, Jack, with the disastrous bombing in Libya and the red line, no red line with Syria.

And I think most people now,

I think we've evolved to the point is no matter how good your intentions, no matter how impressive your assets, No matter how heart-wrenching the appeal is in the Middle East, don't go in there.

It is a quagmire.

You will not come out alive.

You will not come out for the better.

They will turn on you the moment you go in there and they will say that you're the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

So

even if Al-Qaeda is fighting you, then

another Arab militia will say, well, I don't like al-Qaeda, but they're better than the Americans.

And it's not fair for the children of

the middle class of America to have to go

fight those wars.

And that's why I vehemently oppose the Libyan war bombing and the Syrian war.

And

I look back and I got so angry that that's one of the reasons I went over there because I thought, you know, anybody who supported this war has either one or two options.

They either have to say,

We've got to win this war or we've got to complete the mission so that the people who died did not die in in vain.

Exactly.

If it's practical, if it's practical.

And it was, as the surge showed, or it's have to be a mea culpa.

And so I, that's when I really broke with the so-called neocons because they were the ones in the late 1990s who dreamed up this idea of a new world order.

And they were the ones who were the driving force in the Bush administration, and they were the ones who bailed on.

And so, right, I

that's the important thing, yeah.

The abandonment, Victor, is so you look at just in Vietnam, like all these boys

dead and maimed.

And then maybe it would have been worth it in one sense if there wasn't the abandonment at the end.

And we've gone through abandonment how many times now?

Well, it's the same thing right now.

When you, when you, when you think right now,

how all of the mismanagement in the Korean War, and there was a lot, there was a lot,

and all of the death and destruction, and all of the politicalization with MacArthur and Truman, and all of going up to the Yalu River in November, and then the longest retreat, and then losing Seoul, exchange hands, all of that mess, 35,000 Americans killed.

But you know what?

We stop the communist aggression.

South Korea is a utopia compared to North Korea.

Thousands, millions of people's lives have been changed, not just in South Korea, but in what South Korea has done for the world.

They make wonderful cars.

They have good products.

They're a law-abiding, positive people.

Their immigrants are wonderful.

So those people who fought, and the same thing would have been true in Vietnam.

Had we not just pulled out after Watergate and the Democrats, I don't know, had 17 resolutions to cut off military.

After all of that death and destruction and tragedy, South Vietnam could have become like South Korea rather than a communist nightmare that it is.

I know everybody said, well, it's enlightened, that it's anti-China.

No, it's not, not like it could have been.

And the same thing

could have been true in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan was a different story.

I think everybody supported going in there, taking care of the perpetrators of 9-11.

But after that, the idea that you're going to stay there and create this,

you know, pride flag, George Floyd Merle's gender study is just ridiculous.

But Iraq still has a chance.

That's what's so weird about it.

It's not under a dictatorship.

It's corrupt.

Yes, they're all corrupt.

It has strong men that try to take in, but

the government is actually pro-American right now.

And that says something compared to the death and destruction.

And Saddam Hussein killed a million of his own people.

And the Marsh Arabs are not being slaughtered.

They're not giving money to suicide bombers to blow up innocent Jews.

They're not going after the Kurds.

Kurdistan, I saw Kurdistan.

Kurdistan looks like Middle America.

They have shopping centers.

And my God, it's very impressive.

They're not being gas is what I'm saying.

And there's potential for people to have a decent life.

It was impossible under Saddam.

And so that was something.

But

do we learn things?

Yes.

Do not go into the Middle East.

Do not put boots on the ground in the Middle East.

Do not get near that place because it's just too

complex and we don't understand it.

And they hate us.

The more we give them stuff, the more we fight on their, the more they hate us.

That's something I took away from it.

Well, Victor, you've shared a ton of wisdom here today.

I'm very appreciative personally.

And

I

think I can say that on behalf of our listeners and to our listeners, thank you for whatever platform you take in the Victor Davis Hansen show, Stitcher, Google Play, iTunes,

Apple.

Thank you very much.

Those who do listen or download, subscribe via iTunes, and Apple can rate the show.

There's a zero to five star system.

Thanks to those who do that, most leave five stars.

And some leave comments.

We do read the comments there and also comments on Victor's website.

But here's one I think worth sharing, and it's from Black Mountain Girl.

All episodes, opening tune.

That's the title.

Thank you for the Gary Owen March.

My father was a first cavalry division officer in World War II.

This is the preferred march for the first cavalry, not she wore a yellow ribbon.

I can almost see my dad astride a beautiful horse marching to this song.

We were at Fort Bliss for a couple of years before his division deployed.

They had dismounted and transitioned to the Jeep before they left.

Black Mountain Girl.

Thanks.

We love the Gary Owen, too.

And we've talked about that on recent show around St.

Patrick's Day.

Thank you, Black Mountain Girl, and everyone else who left comments.

Thank you, Victor.

I want to thank people who have signed up for Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write.

And a lot of people have done that.

I get a lot of emails from folks.

So you seem to be liking it.

The purpose of the newsletter is just to share a dozen or so

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And I think an intelligent American might like to know that the American Conservative has this very interesting piece, or the spectator, or whatever, a

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So you can sign up for it.

It's free.

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Thanks very much, folks.

Thank you, Victor, again, for everything.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

We'll see you next time.