Biden Grifters Diagnosis, Ukraine War Prognosis

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin Anely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne M.

Marjabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Former President Donald Trump may be arrested.

And we will talk about that and the Ukraine and Biden family kickbacks.

And if we have time, some other stuff.

And we'll get to the Trump arrest, looming arrest right after these important messages.

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

So,

Victor, the news is broken over this weekend that the Manhattan DA, Alan Bragg, and a grand jury will likely indict Donald Trump for the

Stormy Daniels alleged hush money, a thing that's been hanging around for years.

Michael Cohen is involved in this, Trump's kind of sketchy former lawyer.

Trump has said that if he is indeed to be arrested, he will not fight.

There are questions of will he have to do a perp walk?

Will there be handcuffs?

Trump himself on his social media platform is calling for protests.

And Victor, this is set against the backdrop of two things.

One, Alan Bragg in Manhattan, he's the Manhattan DA, refusal to prosecute any number of real crimes that have plagued the city of New York.

And also, the Biden family Corleone kickbacks that they seem to be getting from China.

It's

scandalous, in my view.

But Victor, what's your view?

My view is that

The left is getting

on very thin ice.

We're getting into dangerous territory because the asymmetry is so flagrant and so dangerous to the Republic that who knows what's going to happen.

You remember in 1998 when Bill Clinton was in the middle of the Lewinsky mess and

it entered that his team went to Monica and said, I'll tell you what, if you shut up,

We'll give you a Revlon job in New York.

And they set it up.

And she was whining that I think, I don't know what it paid 80 grand and she thought it did not pay enough but the point I mean is it was a bribe that was offered her to keep her silent was that Vernon I can't remember his last name Jordan Vernon Jordan Vernon Jordan right he was he was the African-American fixer for Clinton and he he he set the deal up No one said a word.

I mean, it came up during the impeachment, but that was not one of the accounts of impeachment.

So my point is that

it's just so asymmetrical.

We don't do that.

It would be like right now, it would be right now

as if

Donald Trump had won the 2020 election and there's not a statue of limitations on sexual assault.

And he would have got some kind of federal indictment out from Bill Barr to go after Joe Biden for sexually assaulting Terry Reed as a federal employee, right?

And that this was a federal matter, something like that, just to go after Biden, to eliminate him.

And that would be a lot more.

Stormy Daniels never alleges she was raped, that she was sexually assaulted.

She just said that,

and I don't know where, I thought the statute of limitations on state laws was two years, but I mean, this is seven years ago or further.

She alleges, or much more.

back in history.

She alleges that she had a sexual liaison and then then Michael Cohen gave her some money to keep quiet about it, right?

And then she hooked up with Michael Avenetti, I guess, and he didn't keep quiet about it and

she broke the non-disclosure.

And now Michael Cohen, you know, it was obviously an effort to keep her quiet.

I guess they can call it non-disclosure.

And then when they went after him, he was a sleazeball and he flipped.

to get a lighter sentence.

So if that goes to trial, they're going to put him on the stand and they're going to say, have you ever been arrested?

Yes.

Have you ever been convicted of a felony?

Yes.

Are you giving states evidence to lessen your own

sentence and incarcerate?

Yes.

Did you ever object at all when this happened?

When did you start to object?

Only when he was indicted, right?

And so that's not going to be a credible witness.

And

Trump will probably beat it.

And then we enter the politics of it.

Now, does this make Trump more popular to the base?

Maybe.

Or do the Republican constituencies say, I just can't, do they get in a feudal position and say, I can't take it any longer.

And like that guy in, what was that movie, True Romance?

He just said, I can't take this any longer when he's in that room and they're ready to shoot everybody.

But the point I'm making is

I thought

the left

thought that even though the polls in the preliminary stages favored Trump, that the greater existential threat to their progressive agenda was Ron DeSantis.

So I didn't think they'd indict him.

This is what I was thinking three months ago, because

it would either do one of two things.

It would either empower DeSantis

if he's indicted, or it would make him a victim.

But it wasn't a good thing to get into.

But, you know, the hatred is such that they've got three indictments.

They've got the special counsel

and they've got the Georgia phone call.

The funny thing about it all is that it's all asymmetrical.

I don't know how they would indict him on the documents when he's president of the United States and has the right to declassify them when you have a vice president who's got boxes and all these residents.

It's just so flagrant that

it's just really eerie.

The United States is

sort of like Colombia or Venezuela.

It's just

bizarre.

And it's the country's,

it doesn't exist like it used to.

Right.

And so I don't know the politics, whether it hurts Trump or helps Trump, but I thought the Democrats were afraid of Ron DeSantis.

They went after him on his statement

that was pretty good, I thought.

And

he said the word territorial dispute, and I'm thinking, well, what was the dispute about then?

Wasn't it about territory?

You know, they went crazy about that line.

I thought it's about territory.

It's about the Don Boss and Crimea.

You and I will talk about that.

But

I don't think it's going to hurt Trump.

Right.

Well,

there are, he did call on his social

media platform, did call for protests on, we're assuming Tuesday there'll be an arrest or sometime this week.

So, you know, there could be some drama out there, Victor, that changes the dynamics in one way.

Well,

the left has sent a message.

I don't think there will be, because the left has sent a message to the United States.

The message that the left sent was this.

If you go out for 120 days and you burn down, blow up, destroy a federal courthouse, a police precinct, a historical church, and try to kill the president and storm the White House grounds, and you commit $2 billion in damage, and you kill 35 to 40 people, and you injure 1,500 police officers, and you loot and commit arson, these are going to be infractions.

You're going to get off.

But if you

demonstrate on behalf of Donald Trump and there is any resistance, you could be shot, you could sit in solitary, and that's going to be a deterrent.

So I don't know where they would assemble to protest, but

I don't think Donald Trump should have done that.

But if they go into Washington, I think that they'll call out the army.

And they want this to happen.

They would love to say Donald Trump is now he's the real insurrectionist.

He shouldn't have done that.

The day Bragg was elected, district attorney,

was also the day of the presidential election, and where he represents Manhattan.

And we should remember that in November of 2020, stores were putting,

boarding up their windows in Manhattan, anticipating

possibly Trump might win and there would be riots.

Not from the conservatives, but from the left.

So this is the whole thing.

The whole thing is a circus.

The whole thing is a circus.

You have Maxine Waters today saying he's trying to stir up another insurrection.

This is a woman that got on,

went out to a mob and said, if you see any of these Trump cabinet officials, get in their faces, follow them to the store or gas station, calling for violence against them.

And so I don't know.

I don't know what's going to happen because I think a lot of people are stunned that the country that they knew and they felt at least that jurisprudence was symmetrical and they see it's just so

haywire and warped.

And they're going to see this in three indictments, that phone call to Georgia and that crazy woman that was on the Georgia

grand jury that went around and blabbed about how much she hated Trump and giggled, and that was that just showed you the caliber of intellect of the people on that grand jury.

And then

you have this special counsel who's got, you know, his wife's got ties with the Obamas, who's not neutral.

And he's going to, they keep saying, is going, most special counsels have to come up with something,

either by leaking or an actual indictment.

But when he does, if he were to do that, then everybody's going to ask, is he going to do it

to Biden?

And so, and I think the left feels so emboldened, Jack.

I think their attitude is,

well, we're going to make a crime out of a prominent politician either offering some incentive or paying person

a contract not to talk about an embarrassing situation.

I don't know.

I guess Michael Cohen did this in 2015,

you know, seven years ago, but the actual incident was way back.

So, and there's no, and that would have, they'd have to convict half of the politicians in Washington for that.

They really would.

I mean, it's pretty clear that Joe Biden took an aide, Tara Reed, and he digitally penetrated her because she not only told other people at the time that happened, her mother called into a talk show and said, what will I do when a prominent prominent U.S.

senator has sexually assaulted my daughter?

I don't know if that was to Larry King's show or somewhere like that.

And the point is that there's a record of that.

And there is not, I don't think there's a statue of limitation on sexual assault.

And no, no, are they going to, is that what we're going to get down to?

And

I don't know where this is all going, but it reminds me of a Latin American junta.

And that's what the Biden administration is sort of like.

And then we just heard we just with these people, I mean this

Karine Jean-Pierre says the border is secure and to the degree it's not, it's because of Donald Trump.

And then Mallorca says yes, the border is secure.

And you have these pictures of people swarming across.

It doesn't, it's just surreal.

It's Orwellian.

These people are revolutionaries.

I don't think we should use the word woke anymore.

These are Marxists.

Joe Biden, I don't know what he is because he's non-compos mintes, but these people are Marxists.

And they believe in any means necessary to change the united states they want to make it into a marxist country and everything they touch turns to dross they have the on-midas touch touch the border touch the energy and industry touch the banking system touch the university they destroy it and i don't know with i don't know what percentage is incompetence and and sheer meanness nihilism but

They're very dangerous people.

If there's anybody out here listening and you thought that you're a never-Trumper

and you voted for Joe Biden and you didn't understand that he was an empty vessel that was a tool of the Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the Obama squad nexus to present a false veneer that he was old Joe Biden from the 1970s or 80s.

It was a moderate.

And then you're culpable.

because that was obvious.

And if you ever vote for this guy again or these people, then you're doubly

because you're,

I don't know, you're fooling the bonfire of the United States.

Well, Trump said it with his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination.

This was a Trojan horse.

Joe Biden's a Trojan horse, and he has proven to be a Trojan horse.

So a nasty Trojan horse.

Yeah,

that's a very good adjective.

Everybody should realize he is not a nice person.

He is a mean SOB.

He is a racist.

He cannot finish a sentence.

He's already, as president, called two African Americans boy.

When he was running, he called an African American a junkie.

He called another, you ain't black.

He said that Barack Obama was the first black man that could basically

was clean.

And

everything about him has been illiberal and just bad.

And

so it's not just that he's non-compos mentis now.

He was always this way.

Yeah.

St.

Patrick's Day.

He came out and said, I may not be Irish

because I don't drink and I don't have any relatives in jail.

He just can't help but want to insult people.

He always insults people.

He does it all the time.

He said, remember, I may be a white boy, but I'm not stupid.

And

he's

the thing about it all is when he starts yelling about the rich and they don't pay their fair share and he's sitting on this multi-million dollar family syndicate extortion team that has extorted millions of dollars and the homes that he has and the lifestyle that he enjoyed are not explicable by his salary or his pension or his speaking fee.

And he's gotten a complete exemption so far.

But he's got a rendezvous with Nemesis.

Well, that's like, you can see Fauci,

because of these hearings that are going to go on, they all have, eventually they have a rendezvous with Nemesis.

And what they're doing,

brick by brick, as they tear down this edifice of protocol and rule of law, they're inviting retribution.

Because once you start indicting former presidents,

and once you start impeaching them twice, and once you start trying them in the Senate as private citizen, and once you start that, and you take the House, and you start not allowing people to serve in committees that have been nominated by the minority leader,

and you set these presidents and they boomerang back, because if the Republicans can get their act together and win the Senate, and it looks like they've got a good chance in two years, and they can get a good candidate, then they're going to unload on these people, and they should know that.

Yeah.

Victor, you mentioned the crime syndicate.

I think I might have said something similar at the beginning of the show.

And let's talk about Biden and Moolah coming up right after this important message.

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Victor, the House Oversight Committee,

late this past week has come across documents and evidence that a Biden family associate, a business associate, Robert Walker, received $3 million from some Red China energy company and sent over a million dollars of that $3 million in incremental payments to various Bidens.

One was

Hunter, Uncle Jimmy,

Hallie, who I think is the sister-in-law or Bose

widow,

and Biden.

The last one was Biden.

No first name.

And

these payments, I think the payment from China came two months after

Joe Biden term ended as vice president.

So maybe, Victor, there's more of this coming.

Your thoughts about this House Oversight Committee and what it's digging up.

This is the first real disclosure that shows that there are all of these people in the Biden circle and Hunter Biden himself, I think his cut was about $600,000, got money from a Chinese source.

And for what we don't know, I think James Biden got a third of a,

I don't know what he got, he got a third of a million dollars.

And this is just a minor, this is the first document, but this is just scratching the surface.

But it's the first pretty hard evidence.

And there's going to be more of it.

And this is going to raise a political question among the left than the Democrats.

And that is, are these disclosures valuable or are they dangerous?

And by valuable, I mean, is this a way of getting Joe Biden off the ticket?

Or

you can't get Joe Biden off the ticket because you've got Kamala Harris.

And then they weaken the top of the ticket because they show him what he is.

He's a crook.

He's always been a crook.

And that'll be an interesting question to see how they're going to react to it.

Because

everything about it, you know, I know that the widow of

Bo, I think, didn't she only get something like $25,000?

And then that was sorted when

Hunter left his wife and then started to have a physical relationship with the widow of his his own brother.

But then she, then she really creepy, really.

But she was in on it.

She was getting money.

And what's the common denominator?

Can anybody tell us what the Biden family was doing for the money they were receiving?

Did they have a company?

Did they make widgets?

Were they financial advisors?

Were they drafting joint oil production projects where their legal expertise was necessary?

What did they do other than say to a bunch of Ukrainians and Russians and Chinese, hey, my dad, my brother, my uncle, is vice president of the United States, and he's kind of a crook.

So if you want to meet with him

and he's got a lot of foreign aid that he disperses and he's got a lot of

influence with corporate America, he's a donor class, then we want this amount of money.

And I can't think of much else they did and then when joe was in that critical period from 2017 during the trump four years that's when he really went to town at least for the first two years before he was worried about becoming a candidate so in 2017 2018 he they were still at it

and the left knows all that this is a weird topic Jack, because we listen to the left and they act like cultural Marxists and they fool us.

But they are the party of the grasping and the elite and the money hungry.

Here in California, I don't want to go off topic too much, but we have Gavin Newsom who made calls to people in the Biden administration to make sure that the Silicon Valley Bank was bailed out.

He did not disclose

that he had three companies that had sizable multi-million dollar holdings in the Silicon Valley Bank.

He did not disclose that his wife was given her charity, quote unquote, that pays her enormous salary, was given money from the Silicon Valley Bank.

He did not disclose that his personal banking is with, all he said is it's with a trust.

And he talks to the trust people, obviously, all the time, or he wouldn't have made that phone call.

And yet this is a guy who tells us that we're racist, we're sexist, we're going to pay for abortions for people to be, if they have to come all out of state, we're going to give 500 million to illegal aliens during COVID, or he supports reparation.

And this is what I think all of our listeners are so bewildered, that these people talk about redistribution and taking from the wealthy and giving to the poor.

And this whole Marxist ideology is coming out of the mouth of very, very wealthy people.

And

it's not the subtext.

The overt message is, screw you, lower middle class idiot.

You didn't make it like I did.

So I've got enough money that I don't mind paying these taxes and I don't mind redistributing your money because it doesn't affect me.

Because when I have all my money and my bank's threatened, I just call a guy up because

I'm Joe Biden.

I'm Joe Biden on one end and I'm Gavin Newsome on the other.

And we can do whatever we want.

And that's what gets people really

that's the one common denominator about all these issues are these very very wealthy people who have all of these agendas and it never affects them so they're all talking about ukraine and we're going to give all this money and janet yellen's going to fly over there and the performance art her i'm giving you ten billion dollars okay janet how about just some money for the east palestinian

people in ohio right it just it just

well let's talk about that a little, Victor.

You said you didn't want to go off, but I think it's appropriate with the bank.

And first of all, I'll plead ignorance as I should on most things that Biden, with

what, a magic wand, removed the federal law for the federal deposit insurance up to $250,000.

Now everyone's covered.

I mean, that is a massive thing.

That is like staggering action.

I know.

And there's only $170 billion in the fund.

It doesn't have very much at all.

It can't even cover some of these banks, one bank.

And so when he said it's not coming out of the tax powers, they're either going to charge a percentage deduction for depositors, or they're going to have to come out of the general revenue because they don't have enough money in the fund to guarantee

these people.

And

it is incredible.

Well, the suckers are going to pay for it.

The suckers, you know, you're talking about make Marxist, not illusions comparisons it is so dead on we are the kulaks we

uh there are real important parallels between what's going on here and what happened in the soviet union and it's hatred for the kulaks bleed them dry take all their food it's it's staggering it is and and

you know when you when you look at all of this you can say on the one hand kibberly strassel has an article in the wall street journal and a lot of people opposed it, but her point was that

we know what caused it.

These people in Silicon Valley were flush with COVID cash and the Zoom culture was making people very wealthy and these tech concerns were banking their money there and they were getting very little interest.

And the bank wanted to have, I guess, a stable supply.

So they were buying

government bonds that paid them about

percentage and a half, maybe 2%.

And that was fine as long as you, you know, you didn't have inflation and high interest rates.

But when the inflation and high interest rates went up, two or three things happened.

These people in Silicon Valley startups couldn't make it because they're laying off people and the economy is going into a nosedive.

So A, they weren't making as many loans,

and B,

the depositors were wanting competitive rates.

So they were wanting 4%, 5%, 6%.

And when there was not a lot of income coming in, and most of their money they had on hand was tied up and would have to be sold at a loss because it was only getting 1.5%,

2%.

It wouldn't even, and they had to pay out, I don't know what it would be, 4% to 6%.

They were in a cash crunch.

I guess they'd still be okay as long as they didn't have a wonderful life run on, you know, the savings and loan and a wonderful life kind of scenario, but they did.

And so Kimberly pointed out that

behind all of this was that these people were not sound bankers, that they were social justice warriors, that their view of how to bank was that either we're going to loan money out to these startups because they're green or they hire diverse people or are risk assessment people.

people.

Is the first risk assessment person for the bank was, I guess she was gay and a person of color and female.

We had to hear that.

And then we were told they gave how many millions of dollars to BLM?

And these,

you know, the left said, well, that doesn't matter.

It was just they were caught.

Yeah, it does matter because it does show you that the people who were running that bank were idiots.

You don't tie up all of this money at a very low interest thinking thinking that's always going to be low interest when the people you voted for are printing five trillion dollars and there's a supply crisis and the inflation.

Anybody doesn't know what was going to happen with inflation.

You and I on this show talked about me trying to go into get Romex wire to rewire my house.

And I have one roll in the barn from three years ago.

It's $33.

I go into Home Depot.

It's $175.

And that inflation then went on.

And what happened, yell, and all, and

all the people at the Fed said, oh, it's moderate, it's transitory.

And when it wasn't moderate and transitory, they freaked out and they raised interest rates at a faster rate than we've ever experienced.

And all of a sudden, Mr.

Bank Depositor said, you know what?

I'm going to get, I'm not going to go play around with real estate.

Real estate's crashing.

It's not selling.

Maybe I don't have the expertise, but I either going to get out and try to sell now before it crashes, or I'm going to get out of the stock market because you can't really beat 5% or 6%

guaranteed money.

And so I want that.

And when that bank said, how in the hell am I going to pay 5% or 6%

interest

when all of our money's tied up at 1% or 2?

And the loans that might give us 7% or 8% aren't there.

But behind all of that dilemma was the idea these people were not competent because they had interests and concerns that were not financial.

They were social and they were, I don't know, environmental.

They were, you know, ESG or right.

Well, they weren't up to being

there.

There was hardly anyone on the board who had real chops when it came to banking.

Right.

One guy was a wine.

It's not to say people with non-banking jobs shouldn't be on the boards of banks.

We've had enough of expertise.

But honestly, I think there was just one guy who

was like the Theranos board, Elizabeth Combs that collapsed.

You look at the people aboard, I knew some of them.

They all had one thing in common.

They knew blank, blank, about her Edison medical testing device.

miniaturized device to take a couple of drops of blood and give instant readout.

They had no scientific background.

They did not, they were not medical people.

They were on that board for one reason.

They were marquee names, and some of them had a lot of money.

And the point was that they were going to be able to

lure investors into that company.

And that's why the people go on that board.

And, you know, this whole environmental, I guess I don't quite understand it.

Environmental, social, corporate governance, it's basically this faint guy in BlackRock, and they were the biggest, they've convinced everybody that

they're going to warp the capitalist market so supply and demand and

the rules of capitalism are not going to be fully implemented or active because you're going to spend money that doesn't make environmental sense it doesn't make financial sense on green projects so if you want to make a solar farm out in the San Joaquin Valley of California and somebody tells you well wait a minute we have an excess of electricity produced in the day, but we don't have enough at night.

So why would you want another one of these farms?

And they say, it doesn't matter, it's a good investment because long range, we're going to save the planet.

Or you say,

you know, if you're PGE and you are hiring people on the basis of their race or United Airlines, you're hiring people.

50% of your new trainees are people of marginalized, supposedly backgrounds, but maybe not a Navy flyer that happens to you know had eight years of flying in the Navy and yet you're going to invest in those companies because they're social or corporate governance the certain corporations will protect Disney so Disney may not be doing very well but you know what they have a good trans policy so you're going to invest in them That's not capitalism.

That's not what made this country really wealthy.

That's socialism.

That is commissariat.

commissariat.

And

everything, I think everybody should realize that everything

that the Soviets touched in Russia destroyed Russia.

Everything

that Mao touched in China destroyed.

Everything that Castro touched destroyed Cuba.

I was at a, I chaired a conference, Jack, on military history and

contemporary conflict that was devoted to Ukraine the last two days.

And I can't disclose because it was off record, but I will say one thing.

One person made a

point.

I won't reveal the context of who the person was, but he said somebody had mentioned Russia, and he said, there is no Russia.

There is no Russian of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Sochi.

It doesn't exist anymore.

Everything was destroyed by the Soviets.

And it's a dictatorship.

And maybe the Tsars were tough, but they had enough, the Soviets wiped wiped it out.

And there is no Chinese culture like there used to be, a Confucian culture.

It was destroyed by the communists.

And there is no Latin America great Cuban writer.

They were destroyed.

And that's what this woke is doing in the universities.

You look at all these,

if you're a writer, or you're a filmmaker or you're a

classical scholar, whatever it is, you're not going to be able to express yourself.

You're not going to be able to pursue your talent.

You're not going to be able to paint

a canvas or you're not going to be able to compose a song unless there's a social commissariat, Soviet message in it.

And you look at, you can just look at the last five or six Oscar-winning movies and look how they did in the box office.

Jack, they're not Gladiator.

And they're not Braveheart.

Yeah, they're not like those movies and they're not, you know, top gun two.

These are esoteric psycho-melodramas.

They usually have gay scenes in them or feminist issues or trans issues or race issues or something.

But the purpose is not to appeal to a lot of people with a profound message that, you know, in Aristotelian sense and, say, Aristotle's politics, it excites our emotion.

It doesn't do, that's not the purpose.

So it's going to be mediocre because it's geared toward satisfying an unspoken or maybe an explicit now requirement that you have to be woke.

And boy, I feel bad for young assistant professors.

Every time they're going to apply for a job, they have to fill out a McCarthy icon.

What have you done lately for diversity, equity, inclusion?

Right.

And if you want to come up for tenure, if you want to get published in a poetry magazine, if you want to become a young filmmaker, it's you want to be a doctor and we've got to just strangle this woke snake before it strangles us i mean it's just

it's scary and that's that's the subtext it's more than a subtext behind this bank

right

well you know victor what

Mao did, what Stalin and the other henchmen there did in the Soviet Union, what Xi is still doing, they destroy civil society.

I work for American Philanthropic or Anvil and our objective is to strengthen civil society but the the the um

without civil society you just have government and and then you have oppression it was an interesting piece in today's wall street journal about one of the kagans i for i i forget which one robert or etc but uh but he he wrote a piece about um

iraq and and that uh saddam hussein one of the things he did was the he destroyed all civil society, all those institutions.

And that's why trying to

nation build,

restore Iraq, it was impossible.

There was just not the fabric there to do it.

So this is the real risk we face.

I think it's happening to us.

Yeah.

I mean, if you walk into San Francisco,

what are the hallmarks of civil society?

Is it safe?

No.

Can you park your car without assurance?

There was this weekend, a CNN producer was doing an interview and hired a security crew to watch your car and it was still broken into.

And can you walk down the street without seeing somebody inject, fornicate, urinate, or defecate?

No, you cannot do that.

I just talked to a visitor.

I had dinner with him Friday night, a very renowned doctor, and he said that.

I said, what was it like when you were in San Francisco?

He said, I saw two people defecating.

And so,

and it's, can you walk around that downtown at night and feel without being assaulted?

No.

Can you get a permit to do anything?

No.

You're after,

is your school going to give a competitive education?

No.

They took it, you know, they made a desert and they destroyed civil society.

And it's sort of the same thing.

I was driving home today from Stanford across the great San Joaquin Valley on the west side and

stopped at some communities in which I would make the estimate that maybe 80, 90% of them are not legal

of the community.

And I saw things, you know, when driving across the country that I hadn't seen since my 1950s.

As far as, you know, what I'm talking about is a trailer.

that has Romex strung all over it and six wrecked cars and then some dogs out in front and then just trash everywhere with maybe 30 people living in a compound like that

and the roads have big holes in them they're not fixing the roads and it just it's kind of like road warrior it really is a society and right I don't know what would take

how you would fix it but you'd have to have somebody who was unyielding That's when I would listen to DeSantis.

He does seem to be unyielding.

He doesn't,

he has a point of view and he's convinced it's the right thing for the state of Florida.

He's not going to be intimidated.

And

part of the problem is that we is this rhetoric, this we're going to do this and we're going to and Trump did a lot of good things, but when he had all of that rhetoric, we're going to do this and this and this, it would have been much better to be very quiet.

and carry a big stick and just say, you know, the border's going to be problematic.

We're going to do our best

Rather than saying Mexico is going to pay war, we're going to do it and just then quietly get on the phone and say, listen, you SOB,

to the President of Mexico, you either stop the immigration or we're taxing all remittances 10%.

That's the first thing.

Number two, we're going to build this wall.

Number three, we're going to deport 20 million people.

They're going to be dumped on your doorstep just like you dumped them on ours.

And number four, we're going to tear those cartels that are bringing billions into your economy, a terrorist organization.

They're going to be shut out of all banking.

Now, you've got about 60 days to stop it.

And then he said, I'm working with the president of Mexico.

It's a very problem.

Why couldn't he do that?

Rather than say, well, we're going to stop it and then not do it.

And that's what I think people miss in a politician: just to be very calm,

just say that you're doing your best, and then do it.

And

another, Joe Biden is far worse than Donald Trump on that.

He just talks about all these things he's going to do in this bluster.

You know, it's all corn pop 24-7.

And he does nothing.

Border Sakira, we're going to do this.

You know, we're going to help Ukraine.

We're going to do this.

And it's just, you know, it's just all just raggedaccio.

You know, Putin just basically said the other day, hey.

might have been in that predator might have been in reaper or whatever it was it might have been international airspace but we've already declared this special military operation has special rules.

So, you know, that's what happened.

He's a hero.

And so

what it would be, it'd be very, it would have been much quieter, you know, just to,

if you believe in deterrence, you would then do something to Putin.

And that might be,

I'm not a fan of getting involved in Ukraine any more than we are, but you could do something to Putin or Hooterman and then not talk about it.

Just not talk about it

and see what he does.

Just,

you know,

and

speed up a shipment of Abrams if that was what you want to do.

But just

understand that he went in there.

He went in in the first place because we didn't do anything.

And he will do things until he stopped.

And when he stopped, he will be a nice thug, but not unless he stopped.

And he has contempt contempt for people who don't stop him.

But when Biden gives all this tough guy stuff and he doesn't do anything, it's, you know, and I mean, think about it, Jack.

One of the first things he did when he came in is he told Putin, please don't

hack these four entities.

If you're going to hack us, don't do these.

They're hospitals and stuff.

Or, you know what, I wouldn't get mad if Putin, it depends on whether it's a minor incursion or not.

And then the Afghanistan.

And then we're all supposed to sign for World War III in Ukraine when you got a president like this.

It's not logical.

You know, on Afghanistan, Victor,

I think I might have sent you a link, and I didn't say this ahead of time to raise this issue on this podcast, but there was some congressional testimony this past week by a general warning that

with the growth of a re-emergence of ISIS in Afghanistan, now hundreds of American lives,

whether diplomats or workers

abroad,

he believes hundreds of American lives are at risk.

It could be much more.

I must say, I just saw the headlines, but this is tough guy Joe Biden's actions

are now putting Americans at risk.

Again, nothing to do with Afghanistan.

I mean, excuse me, nothing to do with Ukraine.

No,

I saw that, and

I think his name, was it Carrilla?

He said that there's a major, he was a two-star general, and he said that we're six months away from

really big trouble.

And,

you know,

he had a distinguished career, as I remember him, in Iraq.

And as a colonel.

That was another, that was Eric.

I think it's the same one.

You know,

he was a war hero in Iraq.

There was a lot of people that wrote incredible stories about it, what he did in combat.

But he warned us, if it's the same guy, and I shouldn't, you know, I shouldn't, but he was warning us that Afghanistan is in a

well, and I guess the thing I would say, Jack, is why wouldn't it be?

We left them with billions of dollars of weaponry.

We fled.

We left our friends in the Afghan government and military there to be.

There's still Westerners there.

And

this

Michael Kirilliff, it's the same guy that was in Iraq.

He's got, he was a very tough guy.

And he was one of the most decorated officers in Iraq.

And he's, I think he's the head of CENTCOM.

And he basically said this Islamic State

is ready to, what, in six months, attack Europe and Asia.

And the weird thing about it was, that's exactly what Biden said, Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan said wouldn't happen.

Oh, the Taliban, we're talking to them, they're not ISIS.

They will keep ISIS out.

No, they won't.

They'll go to ISIS and say, give us some money and we'll give you a chunk, you know, we'll rent you a chunk of Afghanistan like we did bin Laden.

That's exactly what they're going to do.

They hate our guts.

They hate us from the day they get up to the morning they go to bed.

They hate everything about us.

They're

medieval jihadists.

I downplayed what he said, by the way.

It is General Michael Carrilla, and he didn't say hundreds.

He said hundreds of thousands of U.S.

citizens are going to be vulnerable in the next six months.

It's so, wow, so discouraging.

Well, yeah, and

there was a, you know, there was a

a series of stories about him.

And I think I'm pretty sure that, and I,

I know our listeners are going to say, you know,

maybe

you've got the wrong guy, but I'm pretty sure that

he was in,

he went into the, he went into Panama, he went into Haiti, when

Kosovo, he went into Bosnia, he went into the Gulf War, and he's been all over.

And I know that when he was in Iraq, he was wounded and he was in Mosul.

And there was a, I'm trying to remember who wrote about him, but a very famous journalist was embedded with him.

And I mean, the guy was just heroic.

He was a lieutenant colonel.

He fought side by side.

So this is one of the most experienced.

Maybe it's Michael Young.

Michael Young, absolutely.

He wrote a whole series of dispatches.

I wrote about it.

And I think his name was Eric, but his real name is Michael, Michael Eric Corelli, the lieutenant colonel.

And it was some of the most phenomenal battle spatches you'll ever read about fighting head to head with this lieutenant colonel was taking on all of these people.

This is a guy who knows what he's talking about.

He's fought jihadist his entire life.

The only thing I can't figure out is how did he make major general?

I mean, he's a two-star general when usually people like that with...

battle records like that are passed over because of the bureaucracy.

And what they, you know, they like to

promote woke people, not people that went out and almost got killed fighting for the United States.

Right.

Yeah.

It was a striking thing that you're right that somebody,

even think a guy like this

would not have elevated through the ranks of the modern army.

Hey, Victor, we have time for one more significant slice of your wisdom.

And I think that should be about Ukraine.

And we will get to that right after these final important messages.

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

I apologize to listeners, not only for my stupidity, but if you hear any snoring in the background, it's two dogs that I'm babysitting.

So, one of them is

snoring like an old man.

So, Victor,

you mentioned you were at this significant

gathering

this past few days.

What can you tell us

about

any wisdom from it?

I can't tell about it.

Did it change your views at all about what's going on in Ukraine?

Okay.

No, I may put it this way.

It didn't change my views, but it enlightened my views.

And it gave me a lot of information that I didn't know about.

But I think

generally it confirmed what I thought.

And what I think is this, that while it was good for us to give defensive weapons that turned the tide and allowed Ukraine to push Russia almost back to where it started on February 24,

that there have been about 120,000 Ukrainian.

and over 200 Russians.

And for every Russian dead, there's about 0.6 Ukrainians that are dying.

And Ukraine has an original population jack of 40 million, but they have 8 million refugees.

And they're able to call up about 700,000 more people, but the Russians are going to call up 200 to 4 million, 2 to 4 million.

They've got 145 million people.

And that's number one.

So at some magical date in about 12 months,

if somebody doesn't stop this,

Ukrainians are going to run out of people.

They're going to be slaughtered if this keeps up.

Number two is: I really get sick of this stuff of people that I work with and people in this community that keep telling us that Ukraine is winning because they stopped the Kiev.

We all want Russia to get out.

But why don't you just take a deep breath and do two things?

Look at the GDP

of Ukraine and the GDP of Russia,

it's 10 times larger, Jack, in Russia.

Let's just look at the population, it's 3.5 times larger.

Let's look at the territory.

It's 30 times larger.

The only reason Ukraine is alive is for two reasons.

One, they've got very brave defenders.

And two, the combined GDP of Europe which is almost the same thing as the United States.

It's about 17 trillion, we're about 22 trillion, has been supplying them with about $150 billion of military hardware.

But you need people, and two things are happening.

That resolve as the economies go into a recession and Europe is short, and this thing

doesn't end, and we have a $33 trillion deficit.

That's not going to be sustainable for us to give, Jack.

That's about the GDP

of Ukraine for a year.

So Europe, the United States, and most of the United States are giving them their entire GDP.

And how long do the American people want to do that?

And I know that everybody got mad at DeSantis for a territorial dispute, but it's a territory, and it's a dispute.

So that's one thing that you got to be realistic, that the strategy of Russia is attrition.

They don't care how many people they lose.

They want, they took all the Wagner group prisoners, about

They're dead.

And what did they do?

They probably killed 5,000 Ukrainians.

That was a victory for them.

That's how they look at it.

They want to destroy the infrastructure of eastern Ukraine.

That's number one I took away.

Number two,

can you think, Jack, of one person,

one person, I asked this question of a lot of experts.

One major person

in the bi-coastal foreign policy establishment who said

2014, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 2020, 2021, 2022,

before Russia went in on the 24th of February, 2021, did anybody say, my God, we've got to get Crimea and the Donbass back?

That's our mission.

I'm Barack Obama, and this is now, my God, it's been two years in my administration, and they're still in the Donbas and the Crimea.

And that's, we got to define victory as getting them out.

And then Trump came in, and this whole team said, we got to get them all out.

What's happened now?

That's the position of the United States and Ukraine, that we're going to get every single Russian out of the territory they stole in 2004.

That wasn't the position before.

And I understand that positions changed during war,

but that's that's not going to happen.

Another thing that

was discussed, and a lot of us had made this point, but it was very, I won't say who said it, but it was very

well chronicled, is here is Ukraine.

In 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany invaded Poland, as you know, and they carved off areas on both ends.

And then the war was lost by Germany.

And the Soviet Union came back.

And the Soviet Union said, we're not going to give that back.

That's part of Ukraine.

And

the Poles said, well, what do we get?

Well, you're going to get some of Prussia to make up for it.

The point I'm making is that about a quarter of Ukraine in the West was Polish until 1939.

And so whether you like it or not,

the idea that Ukraine, Western Ukraine, is forever Ukrainian has always been, is much less invalid

than Russia's claims on the Donbass and Crimea.

You may not like it, but it was an 18th century dictum that those were parts of Russia.

So what I'm saying is I get really tired of all these people saying, oh, Crimea, that's Ukrainian.

Yes, it was.

It was.

And Khrushchev gave it to them.

But he gave it to them on the idea that it was part of the Russian Soviet Union.

And if you're going to take that logic that you're going to fight to the last Ukrainian, then you're going to have to say, you know what?

All the borders don't matter.

History does not matter.

We're going to get every Russian because this was Ukrainian before 2014.

Okay.

And before,

what are you going to do with Western Ukraine if the Poles say,

we want that?

You know, we want that back.

And then the Poles say, we want that back.

It was Polish for a thousand years.

And then you get Stalin stole it.

And then all of a sudden, the Germans say, well, if they want it back, East Prussia was German-speaking since 1200.

We want that back.

And so that's another thing to keep in mind.

The third thing is

that you've got to be honest what you're willing to do.

So

there's a maximalist and a minimalist.

Most people are in the middle.

They just want to give Ukraine enough to defend itself, but they don't want them to sink the Black Sea fleet or to go into Russia.

But all these my former friends in the neoconservative movement of the left that want to win, you know, they define what is victory.

So, right.

That was the question that came up.

And there was a lot of people that are in that school because it was a very diverse group.

Every type of opinion was voiced.

And they were very honest.

They were intellectually honest.

I really admired them.

They said this,

that

what we're giving them is nothing as far as tanks.

They need 1,000 Abrams, 1,000, Jack, of these five, they need six or seven billion dollars worth of tanks from us.

Right now, a thousand,

two hundred tanks in a brigade.

They want five brigades.

Okay, and they need as many F-16s as we can give them so they can conduct bombing raids inside Russia.

And they need harpoon missiles to sink the Black Sea fleet.

And I said to one of them in the break, okay,

what does Russia do when you do that?

Oh, it doesn't matter.

We've got, we can shoot them down.

And I said, so you want to get in a war with Russia over Ukraine?

And you're criticizing Ron DeSantis because he said it was a territorial dispute.

And when it wasn't worth going to a nuclear standard, but that's what you say it is worth.

Well, it's not a territorial dispute.

It's about, I said, yes, it is.

They're fighting over the Ukraine and Donbass.

And so that was the maximum view.

They want total victory.

And then the minimumist view was,

okay,

let's just have a ceasefire right now.

And I know that Russia will arm to the teeth, that Ukraine can get more arms, and then we will have a discussion about

what Russia gets.

Maybe Russia can just keep on what it had, and then it will be humiliated that it lost 200 to 300 of its people.

It's ruined its army.

It's in bad shape.

And it didn't get one damn thing more than it had when it started.

And somebody's going to say, well,

yeah, but

Ukraine what?

Ukraine has still got all of the Ukraine that it got before February 24th.

And it was heroic and it pushed them back.

And that was the menelmist position.

And I thought the menelmist position was argued more effectively than the more the majority was for the maximum position.

It wasn't the menelmist position.

But

I thought that was

very realistic, that Ukraine is not going to get back to Donbass.

It's not going to get back

Crimea.

It doesn't have the wherewithal to do it.

Europe is tiring of it right now.

And I don't know what the United States is doing, but

it it's not going we're depleting our arsenals.

We're broke.

We've got the border wide open.

We had 100,000 fentanyl deaths, and

we're going to give more.

We're going to supply the entire GDP of Ukraine forever while it kills 200, 300, 400.

So in this spring, these counter, this spring offensive of Ukraine and the counteroffensive, there were some numbers that were,

there were some people who were very acquainted with what's on the ground.

We're talking about another couple hundred thousand dead.

And we we may have lost already 300,000, 350,000 dead.

So you're talking about more people than were killed.

More people will be dead by summer than

all the Americans that were killed in World War II.

What do the maximalists say to that, though?

I mean,

that's a reality.

Do they even accept that that's a reality?

Yes, or they do.

They do.

And these are the tough breaks.

They say this.

One, these are the rules that are being enforced of a rules-based order.

If you don't enforce the rules, Putin

are going to go through, they're going to do it to every NATO country.

I said he's not going to do it to every NATO country because Poland's going to have the biggest army in Europe within a year.

They're arming to the teeth.

NATO is arming.

And

Putin will be in no condition to go into a NATO country.

no matter what happens.

And number two,

they say not only will he go into NATO if he's not stopped, but

number two, there's no threat, not any threat, that he will retaliate when we bomb inside

Russia or we sink his fleet because he doesn't have the wherewithal to do it to us.

And I said, this is not United States 1991 First Gulf War, where we were united and we were rearming and we were confident.

We're not a confident nation.

We're arguing and we're bitter.

And number three,

get this,

that we're bringing together China, Russia together.

Yes.

And

Iran and North Korea and Turkey.

And this is a good thing, Jack, because this is what I'm told.

You're going to get them all in one band and then you can crush them.

You can all show the world that they're the axis of anarchy.

And you're thinking, no, no, no, no, no.

Iran is getting enriched uranium from Russia in exchange for its drone factory it's setting up and it will be protected under the Russian nuclear umbrella while it starts to maybe get hypersonic technology from Russia with bombs and it's going to go it will send a bomb

to Israel and then you've got Turkey who will probably leave NATO because this is the future, they think.

And their economy is booming right now.

They're getting cheap oil.

They're selling every arms they can to the Russians.

They're importing Chinese technology.

They're not even a Western country anymore.

They are in league.

So I thought that was really scary.

That idea that put them all together and then we know what we're dealing with.

And we know who's a friend and who's an enemy.

Yeah, I don't like that new axis that we're creating.

And what else do they want to do?

They think, well,

Putin will be humiliated.

He's lost.

His army is crushed, and we had trided the Russian army.

And they're so weak now, and Putin will be so disgraced that guess what, Jack?

He's gone.

He'll just say, you know what?

I'm Bladderburn Putin.

I'm kind of old.

I quit.

And then we're going to get who?

We'll probably get

an enlightened reformer.

I've never seen it happen before in Russia, but that's what some people are thinking.

And other people said, wait a minute, are you insane?

There's never been a liberal politician in the history of Russia.

You're going to get somebody who's worse than Putin that's going to come in there.

And he's going to come in there and like, I'm going to go send a nuke in the United States.

And you should take the nuclear saber rattling seriously.

And we don't hate the Russian people.

So we want to split Russia from China.

We want to split Iran from Russia.

We want to split Turkey from China and Russia.

We want them scattered.

We don't want them to coalesce.

That's insane.

So there was, this was, this went on for a whole day.

It was very exciting to watch, but I came away with it with the feeling that

all of us, I think a majority are in the, I don't know what Trump says when he says he's going to negotiate in 24 hours, but I think he's a little bit more yank everybody out.

But I think DeSantis, if you read carefully, it's

we're only going to supply defensive arms, and we're going to tell them how they're going to be used.

And we're not going to give them F-16s, we're not going to give them harpoon missiles, they're not going to sink the Black Sea fleet, they're not going to go attack

a Russian sea base or a Russian airfield or blow up Russian or and that's just the way it's going to be.

And so

it depends on Zelensky what he's defined.

He's defined victory as every single Russian

out of Ukraine.

And this is what a lot of people said, including myself, is that, yes, that's his country.

And yes, he has to make that decision, but he can't make that decision without the United States because we give him the stuff to do it.

And so all of a sudden, in the year, God's year 2023, the new position of Ukraine is: every Russian has to be out.

That wasn't 2021 to 2014.

And now he's saying, okay, America, they invaded us, and now that gave me an opportunity to change my mind.

And I want to get all that area back that I never really thought I could ever get back before.

And you're going to give me the wherewithal to do it.

And these are my war aims.

And I'm not going to have a ceasefire or anything that doesn't include Ukraine.

And And

as I said.

Right.

And then

who pays for rebuilding Ukraine?

The people of East Palestine, whether choking and cancer.

Hey, everybody in East Palestine, you're supposed to continue to just be spat upon by the federal government, and all of you people do that.

And then all of you people who are paranoid about your savings, just keep going.

That's not a problem.

All you poor Mexican-American families that live on the Rio Grande, you're being overwhelmed by foreign invaders.

All you people that you're scared because the president of Mexico said that he wants everybody to vote Democratic and he has 40 million people in the United States and he's tired of what we're doing, that's okay too.

And if you're a parent of a fentanyl kid that went to a party and he thought he was taking, I don't know, he thought he was taking Xanax and it turned out to be a fake Xanax pill that was fentanyl, That's his problem.

That's the attitude.

We're supposed to pay for this.

And I just don't, I don't know.

I was very surprised that there were these people,

I mean, they were some of the most gifted people.

I direct it, but all I say is I want conflicting opinion.

I don't want orthodoxy.

I want heterodoxy.

And I want excellence, excellence.

I want excellent people in the military.

I don't care how they're treated by the military but i want from their publications and their careers i want the best i want the best military historians i want the best uh analysts i want the best financial people and they were all there at once and it was just amazing to watch these people and victor what's the name of this overall project and we know that strategica is the publication arm of yeah we can talk about this issue we just did one on tanks next time yeah but yeah what's called C.

Yeah, go ahead.

It's called the Military History Working Group, and the formal title is Military History and Contemporary Conflict.

So, what we're trying to do in every discussion of a crisis today is not to get into the 24-hour news cycle with these ignoramuses, but to try to talk about prior historical exemplars.

So, every time there's a question,

and I would call on a person, the person would reference the Spanish Civil War or the Crimean War or the Chechnyan uprising or the demographic.

It was all data-driven.

There wasn't just bullshit.

And that was what was so good about it, you know.

And when one person with a PowerPoint pointed out

where he had different sizes of Ukraine, and Ukraine does not look like Ukraine at all in 1938.

It doesn't, the Russian Ukraine doesn't look like it does now.

It was much smaller.

And Poland looks enormous, you know,

in exchange.

And the people in Western Ukraine were

not Ukrainian speakers.

And so for everybody to say that

in the 20th century, Khrushchev gave Crimea,

you know, he gave Crimea.

to Ukraine and then they gave up the Donbas to another federation and at that time it was like a state of the United States in the sense that they never in their right mind thought the Soviet Union was going to be broken up, right?

So when they gave it to Ukraine, that was just a stop to stop Ukrainian nationalism because they knew it was part of Russia.

But by the same token, they stole.

They also gave to Ukraine.

I mean, they didn't want to help Ukrainians by stealing Poland after.

as part of the shakedown of the Allies when they said, yeah, we were on the wrong side.

Yeah, we helped Hitler start World War II.

Yeah, the

Molotov-Ribbentrop thing, that was a bad idea.

Yeah,

we invaded Poland for no reason.

Yeah, we stole all that land.

You know what?

Screw you.

We're not giving it back.

If Poles feel bad, they've lost their terror.

You go steal it back from the Nazis because

they invaded in the West.

And you got to give all that back, and you've got to give Prussia too.

And that's what happened.

And so for all of us to say, hmm, Ukraine's biased, well, Ukraine is a fluid entity.

It expanded and contracted.

And if you want to go back and find a magical moment in history where you have equality and fairness, good luck.

But I don't know whether it's 39 or 45, 46, or 60-something when Khrushchev did it, or 2014 when he invaded.

or 2000,

you name it.

But this idea that Lelensky is going to go, what is Defense Minister on to Red Square?

On to Red Square.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

Victor, that's

tremendous

observations here

on Ukraine and everything else you talked about today.

We're about out of time here.

Thank you for everything.

Thank our listeners for listening.

I want to encourage them to visit, if you don't mind, civilthoughts.com.

And when you go there, it's very simple.

You can sign up for the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society at Amphil.

It's called Civil Thoughts, and I give over a dozen recommended readings.

Here's the link.

Here's some excerpts, things I've come across in the previous week.

We don't sell a list.

There's nothing transactional here.

So it's just stuff I think you'd like to read.

So that's civilthoughts.com.

I know many people have signed up and are enjoying it, and I thank you for that.

To those who

listen on to the podcast through Apple

or iTunes, thank you very much.

Thanks to everybody, no matter where you listen, but you can leave comments and ratings on

Apple.

Zero to five stars.

Most people do leave five stars.

We thank them for that.

Some leave comments.

Here's one.

And last week

we talked about the Gary Owen,

which is the theme song of this podcast.

It's also the theme song of the Fighting 69th.

And this one was titled Theme Song.

Please keep the Gary Owen March.

I look forward to hearing it every time I listen to the show.

Thank you, Victor, for sharing your wisdom on so many things.

Your fans in Montana, Fran T1Q.

Thank you very much, Fran T1Q, for that.

Victor, thank you for, again, for the great

thoughts you shared here today.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Thank you, everybody.

Appreciate it.

See you next time.