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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

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

His official home on the aforesaid World Wide Web is VictorHanson.com.

You should be subscribing to that.

I'll give you a little more information about that later on in the podcast.

Victor, let's start out today by talking about one of the great, great war movies, and that, of course, it's come under the microscope of wokeism, and that's Zulu.

And Michael Caine, who first, that was his first big role, is lashing out at the woke monsters overseeing our culture.

And we'll get your thoughts on that, Victor.

Maybe your thoughts on Zulu too as a movie.

And plenty more right after these important messages.

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Victor, we're back.

So I do want to, before we talk about Zulu, I just have to say, give me a minute here.

You know, the theme song, song, you picked it for this podcast is the Gary Owen, which was the song of the Fighting 69th, the Irish Brigade.

It's still the theme song for the

U.S.

1st Cavalry.

It's an Irish diddy.

It came from the Limerick area.

And some people have complained about the song.

I don't know if

there's general ignorance of it, but as you recall, the first song we had used as the intro to the podcast was the Battle Cry of Freedom.

And some people thought that that,

that was the most,

well, we won't get into who.

We won't know.

I had a memo, please cease and desist because of the racist nature of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

I just wrote a polite note back, wrong side.

Right, right.

I mean, they equated it with Dixie.

Anyway,

the Gary Owen is just a great, great tune.

And it's appropriate just to mention that.

You remember that

movie They Died With Her Boots On?

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, also

there's a scene in there where he says, and we have this song.

I want to hear it play for you.

And that's our theme song.

Yeah, he met some old British

officer who started playing it.

And

it had its own montage.

Wasn't Olivia de Havilland in that too, I think.

Yes, of course.

Well, they were, I think they were in nine movies together.

They were not married, but

Harold Flynn was such a great, great actor, like Robin Hood and just terrific.

Speaking of great actors, by the way, Victor, Michael Caine is a great actor.

The first big movie he was in was, I think it was 1964, Zulu.

And we've talked in the past about your favorite war movies.

And I think about, you know, I love war movies.

And of course, I'm typically thinking about Battleground or American movies.

And Zulu always escapes

my recollections.

But I think that movie is phenomenal.

It's just a beautifully done movie.

Oh, it's very accurate, too.

It's historically pretty.

I mean, Bromwell and Charred were Stanley Baker and Michael Caine, and they were just lowly, one was an engineer lieutenant, one was a lowly lieutenant.

And they found the day after the massacre at Islawando.

I mean, that was a great massacre.

They had 1,700 British troops.

I wrote about, only reason I know that, I wrote about it in Carnage and Culture in one of the chapters was on Rourke's Drift, which is the basis for the

1964 film you mentioned.

And yeah, it was

a wonderful film.

And it was accurate.

After Islawanda, the British Army had these crazy bureaucratic rules that they locked the armor boxes

with a key so that they wouldn't waste ammunition.

And when the Zulu horn came around

the British position.

They thought, you know, we have 1,700 people and they may have 4,000 or 5,000, but they're Zulus and they don't have modern weaponry.

They had got some Portuguese muskets and stuff, but mostly they were the Asagis and the spears.

But they were very fast and they were the dread of indigenous warfare

forces in Africa.

They were so deadly because of their speed.

And when they started to swarm the British position, they came out over a rise and they ran basically a 200-yard dash and people said, give us the weapons.

And that was another thing about the British Army.

You know, they had been using, they, meaning forces armies, had been using Spencer

and Sharp's repeating rifles in the Civil War that had anywhere from six to eight to 10 shots, you know, lever action, repeating rifles.

And so

that technology was known for at least 12 years.

but the British Army felt that they needed a breech, you know, if you're going to have a breech-loading kind of a bowl, kind of like a lever type of gun, it was a single-shot jack.

It had a huge, it had a 303, as I remember, charge when I wrote the book.

And kind of like a 30 out 6 would have fit, but it had a huge, what I'm getting at, it had a huge powder charge in it, the shell.

And it was deadly at up to a mile, and it was very accurate.

High velocity, big punch.

So the British said, you know what, we're not going to use carbines.

We want to get stopping power in our colonial warfare.

And that came back to haunt them because they had a slow rate of fire and they couldn't get ammunition.

And they were killed.

They were wiped out.

Just a few escaped.

And then they

warned this little tiny, I think it was a missionary station.

Isn't Jack Hawkins?

Yeah,

you're all going to to die as he is uh you remember him yelling as he's uh his wag goes off but yeah it was a missionary state station and a hospital also yeah and he uh they they were

what i'm getting at they for in one direction from missile wanda they were the collecting grounds they were an engineer they were supposed to be building a little bridge uh and all of these people came in and said they've been wiped out they've all been wiped out an entire british army 1700 what are we and some had escaped and they these two lieutenants were very lowly they it was amazing and they just took control and they brought anybody in that would and they even had a couple of South Africans anybody who wanted to form they got up to about 180 people and they took this little

They had just a few hours.

And, you know, they had these mealy bags, as I remember.

These were bags of fodder and oats and stuff for horses.

And that was a supply depot.

And they made the, the, they're kind of like sandbags, and they planned out a fort.

And it was very successful.

And for a whole day and a half,

they fought off somewhere between four and five thousand Zulus.

They probably killed over a thousand of them.

And before the battle, he went out and hammered stakes every hundred yards so that everybody would know the exact half inch drop rate of the bullet or a quarter inch.

And so they were magnificent sharpsmen and brave.

And that

movie, the funny thing, and I'm trying to remember the guy's name who was the

Stanley Baker?

No, he was a great actor, as Enfield.

I only remember that because it's the same name as a no relation, but it was the name of a Lee Enfield rifle.

But he was a the guy who directed that.

This is what I don't understand about blacklisting or getting angry about this movie.

He was a communist,

a flat-out communist, and he was in Hollywood and he left

and he couldn't get a job.

They had blacklisted him, canceled cultured him, ostracized him.

So he went to Britain and he didn't have a lot of effect, but he got fascinated with Africa and he made this movie.

And then you remember that there was a sequel called Zulu Dawn.

Right.

And he was the, he couldn't be the director because it was going to be made in the United States, but this was 64.

I mean, this was years after the McCarthy period.

He still was not.

Cyanfield.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's who it was.

Yeah.

Well, anyway, he made another, it's not as good, but it's much, it's very long.

And it's about, it's the prequel to the, the wipeout of this Land.

I think it was made for TV.

I saw it when I was in high school or grammar school.

It was anyway, it's a movie.

It's very good as well.

But

they don't want

Michael.

I mean, they're trying to ban Zulu because

too many Zulus get killed.

No, here's the headline.

So this is Daily Mail.

Sir Michael Caine hits out at bull, I'm not going to curse, suggestion his 1964 Zulu incites extremism after it was included on list by governments.

This is the British government's prevent scheme, prevent for, quote, encouraging far-right sympathies, end quote.

And Victor, not only is this movie, but of course they,

whoever these prevent people are, this is a function of your, of the Tory Conservative government in Britain coming up with this commission to find things in their culture which are, you know, inappropriately woke, this movie being one of them.

They also listed, there were these British comedies, yes, minister back in the 50s, a movie, I can't, I've only seen it twice, The Dam Busters, which was a military movie.

That's a good movie.

I've seen that.

That's one of the things.

But

that's on the prevent list.

This is a this is, and by the way, that was when they had those skipping bombs that hit the rural valley.

Yeah.

And not only movies, the complete works of William Shakespeare are on the prevent list.

Yeah, complete.

This is insane.

So, Michael, Michael Kane is, you know,

catches your attention.

Michael Kane says, BS.

But what's weird about it is that these weren't, in the case of the Dambusters

and Zulu, they weren't made up.

They were actual historical events.

Right.

And I remember Richard Todd, I think, was in the Dam Busters.

It's a great movie.

And they all, you know, they're trying to break up the Ruhr Dams and flood it.

And they were successful.

And they did these techniques of bouncing a bomb across a lake.

But it was an actual event.

I mean, it was an elaboration, but it was an actual event.

So what these censors in Britain are doing is saying, we don't want to talk about the actual

reconstruction, a reconstruction of an actual event.

We don't like that part of history.

But I don't know why the dam busters, because they're killing Nazis, right?

You'd think, you'd think, well, let's not be mean to the Germans was a

song right after the war.

I don't know if there, I can't remember if there was any,

you know, bias expressed among the crews.

I mean, and Doctor Strangelove, it's a joke when Slim Pickens said we don't discriminate between race, religion, or something something with you know that that was something but yeah uh well you know who's not complaining about this so the

zulus yeah they're they're they're was it bookawazi is that the kid the guy that was their head he was in it i remember that when he was a kid yeah he played the zulu leader

yeah he is now according to the story he's now he's 94 but he's cool with with the movie and what the hell is this it actually if you've if if you haven't seen the movie i I really encourage it just as a great, and it's really entertaining.

But

anyone that would watch it would come away with great respect for the Zulus, even though they lost the battle.

There's no dissing them.

I don't know.

I can't get where we're.

People should realize that

it was a pretty.

Sesiawayo, the king, you know, it was

part of the colonization of South Africa.

And the Zulus were one tribe that was being supported by the South African.

And so, and today, the Zulus are the most conservative of all African peoples in South Africa.

And because they're very independent, they had tribal lands.

But in the

actual narrative, it was pretty tough when they came.

It was kind of like the Sioux,

Little Bighorn, because when they came back, many of the British soldiers had their genitals cut off and then stuck in their mouth.

That happened on Okinawa as well, with Japanese soldiers doing that.

So it wasn't a play sport.

It was deadly serious.

And after Warwick's drift, the British went in and they didn't mess around.

The next series of battles, they had a Maxim machine gun and they basically destroyed the entire military architecture of the Zulus.

But if anybody wants to read the history of the Zulu nation, you better be very careful and brace yourself because it's one of genocide, of killing everybody

that was an opponent of the Zulu king.

It's killing children.

It's a pretty tough culture and it institutionalized violence.

So it's not exit.

This is a black-white morality tale.

It really isn't.

Victor,

I was interested in the technology and why

indigenous troops that had access to Portuguese weapons from Mozambique for years

by 1879 and they outnumbered

basically

well over 200 or 1,

a small little group of engineers that weren't really first-line troops and were ad hoc, how technology and discipline and the ability to draw on a military tradition

was of advantage to them.

And that could nullify the huge numerical advantage of the enemy.

Right.

Who had guns, by the way, I think they picked up guns from the battle.

They did.

They didn't know how to use them, though.

That's the point.

It was like the Native Americans had weapons that were sold to them, but they didn't know how to fix them

to maintain them.

And they were not,

they learned to be very good shots, but there is a science, as everybody knows, to marksmanship.

And that science was developed over a long period of time in the West.

So, my point in that chapter in Carnage and Culture was: while they were shooting, these acquired weapons or the ones they had purchased, before the battle, Chard and Brumfield had people put spikes out in various directions.

So, when they were behind their little stockade and a Zulu was running toward them, they could calibrate at

what

distance he was from them, and then they could make the necessary adjustments on aiming high for the drop in the bullet.

Whereas, from what we know from diaries, they were walking around, and the Zulus had the high ground, and the bullets would typically go two or three feet over their head.

Because if you don't know how to operate a very heavy weapon, I think they weighed eight or nine pounds, a Martini-Henry rifle.

Then they,

when I had my daughters and I would teach them to shoot shotguns, or I had a 30-out six,

they would always shoot high.

Everybody shoots high.

Victor, one last thing about this.

Again, I'm looking at a Daily Mail article, and towards the end of it,

and this is disturbing.

Again, the British government has been under the control of alleged, you know, conservative/slash Tory governance for the last dozen plus years.

And it's still a hotbed of

wokeism and hunting, like

General Milley hunting for these white supremacists in the army.

Well, the British rep, and here's what, in addition to the other, you know, complete works of Shakespeare, the taxpayer-funded document, this is the Prevent document, included references to The Lord, Lord of the Rings by Tolkien, Huxley's Brave New World, Joseph Conrad's A Secret Agent, 1984, and the poems of G.K.

Chesterton.

It also also referenced films, including Bridge on the River Kwai and Great Escape, works of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Middleton.

If I could go through some of them that our audience knows, so Chesterton, I mean, he wrote a poem on the Battle of Lepanto, right?

He wrote books, I mean, poems about, but they're not, I mean, I guess they use derogatory.

He says in that poem, as I recall, the Turk rather than the Ottoman.

Is that bad?

What would be the Great Escape, though?

Because

I mean, I'm thinking back through that.

Maybe there were no blacks in the movie.

I don't know the criteria they used in the report.

Like, why is it bad?

Or is it the racial balance and things, or is it just the

war is high?

I don't know.

I know Lord of the Rings, when the first movie came out, I wrote an article for National Review about people criticize the black orcs, remember?

And in the two towers and the return of the kings, the orcs appear white.

You remember that?

They're white orcs.

And I notice in the Hobbit sequel, most of the orcs are white.

But Tolkien, I don't know who he thought.

If you think he had a contemporaneous group of people, I don't know.

You'd have to look at it linguistically.

When you speak orcish, which language does, I think it's more attuned to Arabic.

I'm not sure.

And they have scimitars.

So if you're going to have a stereotype villain that is insensitive, it might be Arabs.

And I know that

there's people with the elephants and they come from the south.

Maybe they're from India, supposedly.

And there have been people who said it was anti-Semitic because the dwarves are fascinated with money and fixed data.

And some of the renditions of them in some of the movies were anti-Semitic, supposedly.

I don't know.

But the point is that a person has a complete freedom to write what he wants, and people have a right to read what he wants.

And I don't know whether this is just a recommended list or it has applicability to censorship in the schools or what.

But

remember, Jack,

it doesn't go both ways.

Right.

Never goes both ways.

So if you have particular pieces of literature or things that are very discriminatory to other people,

or they're pornographic, or they mainline certain sexual activities that offend people.

It doesn't matter.

You can't ban that.

You can't complain.

I think everybody just wants a

fair playing field.

Just let it go out.

Let people decide.

Well, Victor, enough of Michael Cain and Zulu.

But thanks for the history lesson there.

I was hoping we'd hear that from you.

I think next we should probably get your thoughts, Victor, on the Twitter files hearings, and we'll get to that right after this important message.

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

First, let me just recommend to our listeners, especially if you're a new listener, to visit VictorHanson.com.

That's Victor's official website.

When you go there, there will be links to everything Victor writes.

and his appearances, not only these podcasts, but appearances on radio shows, other podcasts, links to his books.

When you look at the articles, you'll click on some.

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If you like what Victor writes and you do, you should be subscribing.

I mean, there's a lot of

ultra pieces.

Victor writes two or three a week, exclusive to the website.

So that's VictorHanson.com.

So Victor,

Matt Taibbi, which I remember from a previous podcast, you have a little history with him, and Michael Schellenberger, two journalists who have exposed through Twitter, the Twitter files about government censorship, government coordination

with Twitter, pre-Musk Twitter, to suppress

people who's Donald Trump, the president of the United States and others, whether it's we don't like your politics, we don't like what you're saying about COVID, we don't like what you're saying about school education, et cetera.

So they were called before Congress to testify.

And the Democratic members of these House committees just, I think, kind of made fools of themselves.

Anyway, I'm sure you've seen some of this back and forth, Victor.

What are your thoughts?

And you may want to tell us a little bit again with a lot of new listeners about you.

You do have a little relationship with Taibbi from the past.

Well, Taibbi and a fellow, I guess he had a pseudonym called, I think it was Becker,

and he was called the War Nerd.

And they were,

you know, living in post-communist Russia.

And they had

a magazine.

And

they would be kind of deliberately over the top.

And

I think

they wrote stuff in there that was pretty wild.

And remember when he had a book tour

during the Me Too period, they said that they had admitted to having gratuitous sex and made fun of women, some of whom were underage.

Those were allegations, not proved, but it came out of their work and they kind of blacklisted him.

And so he was fired or left Rolling Stone.

He was a persona non grata.

I had no personal thing against him, except that I had written in support of when we were winning the war in Iraq.

And they were, the war nerd created an artificial persona that he worked at the Fresno IRS.

And that, so anyway, at one point

he wrote that he was going to burn down my vineyard and they wrote back to me that I was inarticulate and couldn't write.

I don't know which of the two wrote, but as I said, I did have a fire on the side of the road.

I don't know if that was somebody who read it and got an idea.

And I did have an FBI agent come to visit me about that and

told me that and gave me some information.

It's one of the two had entered the country at that same time.

I never pursued it.

I did write about it, though.

People are welcome.

But my point is, I never, I never bore them any ill will and I wrote them a personal email.

They were kind of snarky when they wrote back.

And what they did to Talibi, I mean, I don't know the responsibility in that book that memoir because i didn't i just looked at the excerpts but i don't

i don't believe that he was i think it was he was making fun of women he had sex with supposedly something like that but i i didn't care about i would and then he reappeared again and since he's reappeared i thought he's done very good work he's you can see by the testimony that

He was kind of baffled because,

I mean, is that Representative Gonzalez-Jack didn't know what Substack was and she didn't know

who

Barry Weiss was a New York Times which is okay except you're you're supposed to prep yourself right and then she said they were a threesome

right and Schellenberger and these are all people everybody should remember we're talking about people on the left Barry Weiss Schellenberger Tlivey, they're all Democrats or to the left of Democrats.

And these are free speech advocates that the Democratic Party is going after these messengers because they have information that reveals through Twitter

released by Elon Musk, another man of the left that they all worship

until he purchased Twitter.

And Tesla was their mark of green fee days.

So put all that in context.

And now they're very angry because they have embarrassed the left.

They have shown that Jack Dorsey's Twitter and, by extension, Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook were working hand in glove with the FBI and other government organizations.

That's the formal title they use for, I guess, the participation of the CIA.

And Zuckerberg said that the FBI came to them.

And

they're in the position as leftists of defending

federal investigatory agencies that are spying, are trying to

harass, are trying to suppress the expression of American citizens.

And that's usually what they accuse the right of doing.

But this is not the Democratic Party.

This is the totalitarian left that hijacked the Democratic Party.

Not that there weren't Democrats in the past that did it.

So that was what was ironic.

So there were two or three of these.

This Goldman was very rude.

They were very rude, and they said they weren't journalists.

You're not a journalist.

You're not qualified.

They went, you know what, I was angriest about, Jack, they went after an 80-year-old Nicholas Wade,

who I used to read articles in science and nature by him.

They were very good.

He's a man of the left.

He wrote a very, as I said with Sammy, just we touched on, he wrote a very incisive article

opening the discussion to the chance.

It wasn't definitive.

It just gave all of the evidence and said at this preliminary date, the evidence weighs more for a leak from the lab than from a bat

transmission.

And they really went after him because he had written

a book along

12 years ago about genetics in which he tried to sum up the general state of genetics and said it had reacted against the anthropological culture and was now starting to incorporate nature again.

And he quoted, and it wasn't like Charles Murray's bell curve at all, but they really went after him and said he was a racist.

And then the embarrassed scientists said that, not that he,

no one found that he had misquoted them, but they wanted to distance themselves as cowards.

So they attacked him.

And they were bringing this up.

I think the guy's name was Ruiz.

He was an MD from New Mexico.

And I mentioned to Sammy that and Mufuni,

or

Kwezi Mufuni, the ex-head of the.

In Fume, yeah.

Infume, yeah.

And my only point is if one wanted to engage in reciprocal tactics, it would be very easy to do so.

That Mr.

Mufumi was let go by the NAACP for serial sexual harassment and

finally for having an improper liaison, which I think they had to pay a large settlement.

And he was asked to leave.

And I think, you know, Talibi could have said, okay.

Well, then let's ask what you do.

He could have said to Dr.

Ruiz, weren't you a campus Marxist and you were trying to lecture people about the wonders of Mumia, the cop killer from Philadelphia?

So, my point is: if you're going to go after the messenger, make it reciprocal.

And that's why we don't do it because it's nihilistic.

It just goes down deeper and deeper into the trough.

But that's what they did.

And they did not want to talk about what the testimony was, that left-wing, left-wing, left-wing social media was working with a left-wing, left-wing, left-wing hierarchy of the FBI and by extension,

the CIA and possibly people in the medical profession, the Fauci team as well, to suppress what people had access to.

And why did they want to do that?

Because they were told or they sensed or they felt, fill in the blanks, that this is what was good for the Biden 2020 election team.

Right.

End of story.

Right.

Killed also integrity of some of those science journals, too.

Science, literally, the journalist of Lancet.

Nature.

I don't think Lancet's going to recover.

I really don't.

They're all becoming so politically

correct.

That's even an archaic word.

So we'll be right back.

Yeah, there's going to be a new generation.

It's a big debate.

I think all of you listening, you have a big debate.

It's,

do we we just give them these institutions that we help create?

Do we give them Stanford University?

Do we give them Lancet?

Do we give them the Oscars?

Do we give them the NFL halftime show and just say, you know what?

I don't watch it anymore.

Or do you fight for the institution?

Or do you say, Victor, Victor, Victor, they've been taken over.

It's kind of like Constantinople that the Ottomans took over the cities there, but it's not the same city.

And so we've got to create alternate universities, alternate journals,

alternate

online platforms.

And that seems to be the strategy now rather than fighting within Substack and on Herd and things like that.

Spike.

The more difficult aspect of that, Victor, is

the financial aspect.

Like, I need money.

What if everything, you know, they know you're every we're not going to sell you.

My wife was saying this earlier.

We're not going to sell you the car, Mr.

Fowler, because we have on record here that you're, you know, you're, you give this podcast, Davis Hans,

already.

You saw that statement by Devin Unes at Truth Social that they were getting just a fraction of their regular advertising revenues because firms,

corporations, concerns that advertised on Truth Social were then being boycotted by the left.

And so they felt as a business decision, it wasn't worth it.

And so they were withdrawing.

And so absolutely.

And

I once told my wife, I said to her,

this was about 20 years ago, I said, the country's gone crazy.

And here are the revenue streams.

that we depend on to live.

And I went through writing and books and articles and other stuff.

And I said, I expect two or three of them to dry up every two years,

whether

I'm getting attacked.

I said,

and then I have to open up new ones.

And that's been pretty accurate, that it becomes impossible to write for, I won't mention the venue because they kept, syndicator kept,

you know, censoring everything.

I would get back my 750-word.

column and it was track changes.

It looked like it was bleeding to death.

And so I think everybody understands that.

You have to be flexible now and protect yourself, but you can't just concede.

You just have to have options.

So whenever I write or where I work or whatever institution I'm at, I always say, what is the fallback position?

Right.

So that you're not put in a position of those.

Maoist apologies that people are forced to give.

You can just say blank, blank you, and then go back and retreat to the inner wall.

I was reading about Constantinople.

You know, the Theodeson wall was the land wall at Constantinople, and it was a triplex,

very hard to get over.

They did it in 1453 the first time, but

it there, if you, if you broke the moat, went through the moat, you went to the outer wall.

If you went through the outer wall, you had to go through the pavilion.

If you went up the pavilion and you got over the inner wall, which was 40 feet high.

Well, that's what everybody should think about in your profession.

You have to have three walls or so.

And then when they break in, you've got to be somewhere else.

Wow.

Well, you know, there's some heartening things in these regards, like the, of course, homeschooling and the creation of all these classical

Hillsdale College.

Hillsdale.

But you look at the one that, so there are a few existing colleges, right?

And Thomas Aquinas, we mentioned these names before, Christendom, etc.

But the

outrage over New College of Florida,

we don't take away one of the several thousand colleges that we have, you know, but DeSantis and Chris Rupo and others are the beginning stages of trying to turn this one college around.

And of course, it's just unleashed,

you know, the usual fur.

Good luck to them in that.

I think taking over the institutions is a much more difficult task than building new ones.

But then you have dual societies.

I mean, is that good for America?

It may have to to be the new America.

By the way, Victor, just talking about congressional hearings,

did you see the hearing, the

Christopher Wray testifying before Congress?

Any thoughts on

his

relentless avoiding of answering questions?

Well, I mean, he still doesn't believe that Hunter's laptop is Hunter's laptop.

I mean, he said that he was operating on the idea that was Russian disinformation.

He couldn't rule it out.

But I mean,

Hunter's, if Hunter's attorney is suing the owner of the repair shop to get back Hunter's contents as he did,

and then within a nanosecond of 24 hours later, he had to amend that request because it was a frame of fascia admitting that Hunter's laptop was Hunter's laptop.

And then he said, we want back the,

I'm paraphrasing, I want back the laptop,

or I don't want you to reference the laptop, which has been alleged to be Hunter's.

And so, but as if the Russian, so I mean, Hunter knows it.

He's never denied that it wasn't his.

So if he denies, he won't deny it.

Why can't the FBI just come out and say, yeah, it was Hunter's laptop?

And I don't know.

And everything he tried to, when he was asked, he said, that's an ongoing investigation.

Finally, she said, Stephanie said, it's an ongoing investigation with us, too, but we can talk.

Come on.

And he won't disclose.

I don't know why he

got mad because they called Mar-lado a raid.

He said it was just a,

you know, it was a warrant.

And then they asked him about who did the warrant and all of this stuff.

It was,

he's way over his head.

And

I just, I think conservatives, they look back at Robert Mueller and his

amnesia when he was under the Senate, the House Intelligence Committee testimony under oath, and he said he didn't know what the dossier was, and he didn't know what Fusion GPS, which somebody reminded him had prompted the investigation and his appointment.

And then we had Andrew McCabe, who lied four times under oath,

according to the Inspector General's report.

And then we had, of course, James Comey earlier, who 245 times, can't remember under oath.

And then he

what, memorialized a private conversation with the President of the United States and then went out and leaked it via a third party to the New York Times.

And then this is a guy who

agency offered a million dollars if they could find one thing accurate in the dossier.

And when they could not, they still submitted it to fool a judge.

And if that wasn't enough, they had their lawyer, Kevin Kleinsmith, forge the document, alter it, tamper with it, felony, conviction there.

And then we have Christopher Wright.

It's not getting any better.

And that's why you look at the polls, it's overwhelming.

I think it's 55% don't have confidence in the FBI, and the people that do are hard left.

You look at the people who voted for only people who have more than half confidence are the people who voted for Joe Biden because they see it as a valuable instrument of the state,

as long as they're in control of it.

Victor, another, my little hobby horse for the FBI among many is

we haven't discussed this.

I'm not putting you on the spot but that um antifa in atlanta uh crashing into this area where they're building a new police station and and engaged in its usual destruction i know there were some arrested but how the hell the fbi has not infiltrated this

and it is an organization it's an ideology oh you know but yeah it's an ideology but it's also an organization and like they

um

um

you know infiltrated the mafia and helped many places break it up i mean it's just staggering this the antifa has wrecked so much havoc across our country and it just does not seem to be in any way a priority for christopher ray and the fbi or his predecessors it's kind of no it doesn't they it's always an act of commission and omission why they're as you say they're spying on parents or they're going after latin mass people in catholic church

or they're conniving with Twitter.

Then, you know, we have a neuroscientist from the PLA working on the faculty of Stanford University, or we have TikTok, or we have the

intelligence failure on the CIA about Afghanistan, or Mark Milley assuring us while he's hunting out white supremacists, assuring us that Afghanistan won't fall in June and then assuring us in February that Kiev will fall in a week.

So these people are not just doing bad things, but they're incompetent and they should be doing other things, and they're not.

And that's what I think everybody should remember when you have an

Pete Buttigig, when he's talking about the racist history non-stop of the clover leaf, the highway, or he believes America's construction crews are all white working in people of color neighborhoods when

the

Hispanic workforce is 30% of all construction construction crews, even though they're only 15% of the population.

Whites are about 60%, and they're about 70%

of the population.

So he's got his data all wrong.

But the point I'm making is when they're doing all of this, like commissars in the Soviet Army or Maoist

Red Guard, they're not doing other thing.

And that's what's happening to the country.

And I think everybody got to remember that it's not just the English department that was ruined by these people.

And we all laugh about who cares whether the Stanford History Department or English department can turn out a competent person anymore.

They can't, but who cares?

Right.

It's now filtering down to the pilot, the air traffic controller, the baggage handler.

We get five near-misses that we've had.

We have train derailment.

You have power outages from green orthodoxy.

You're going to have investments that are polluted by ESG.

And the very stuff of American life is going going to be affected.

So, and

I've written about it, but I really do believe that it's existential, it's civilizational, and I can see it where I live.

These were all landmarket developments, what I just will list right now, the mosquito abatement

program, the dog licensing program.

These all happened in the 1950s, and their idea was to stop rabies or a reoccurrence of some kind of yellow fever or malaria that had been there in the 19th century where I live, or there was mandatory garbage pickup, whether you liked it or not.

If you were in the country, you had to have a garbage carrier.

And all of that's been destroyed through illegal immigration.

So if you go where I live, there's dogs with no licenses.

None of them have been vaccinated.

There is garbage thrown all over the roads.

The roads are the garbage receptacles.

I mean, I mean it.

It can be 10 feet high, appliances, car seats, upholstery, wet diapers, you name it, kittens, you name it, I found it all there.

And when you look at

this big, we've had a lot of wet weather and you can just see all of these things collect water and when it gets warm, we're going to have a lot of mosquitoes.

So it's civilizational reverse is what I'm saying.

And you can see it in San Francisco.

You can see it in Washington, D.C., LA, Chicago, Cleveland.

It's quick.

The stuff of civilization is slow and ponderous, but man, to dismantle it, tear down a statue is a lot easier than sculpting it.

And

so I don't know where it all ends, but I think everybody that's in retreat and they're finding their kind of equivalent of the late 4th, 5th century Roman farm where you say, we can't stop the Goths across the Rhine and Danube anymore.

The Vandals have already made it in, and we're just going to go out and fortify a farm.

You can't do that anymore.

Right.

You can't cede the culture to these people.

They're destructive, and they don't like you, and they don't like our civilization, and they're trying to destroy it.

Yeah, not only trying to get their own DACA, but

for their own comfort, but there is a visceral hatred of the you's and me's of the world.

By the way, Victor, I'd like to draw our listeners' attention to a piece you wrote along these lines.

I think it's the most recent piece for American Greatness, Life Among the Ruins, and they can find that on Victorhanson.com.

Victor, we have time for one more topic.

We barely talked today about Joe Biden, and I think we should give him some due, especially since he delivered this insane budget to Congress.

And we'll get your thoughts on that, Victor, right after this final important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show on, we'll call it St.

Patrick's Eve.

I don't know if it's ever been called that before, but by coincidence, it is this year.

I'm going to make a little quick picture of myself, Jack Fowler.

I write Civil Thoughts, a free, free weekly email newsletter that I write for the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, which is now called Amphil.

We help nonprofits with their fundraising, but we also have a goal of strengthening civil society.

The very things that Victor just been talking about are in decline.

We need to strengthen these institutions to protect our freedoms, protect America.

And that's what we're about.

But civil thoughts, you can sign up for it at civilthoughts.com.

I offer between 12 and 14 recommended readings, great articles I've come across in the previous week.

It could be about art, culture, et cetera.

If you're an intelligent person, I think you'll like it

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There's no charge.

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So check it out.

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So, Victor, two headlines from my friend, my

increasingly my favorite website, just because it's got great, it's on top of the news all the time, the Daily Mail, the U.S.

edition.

President's new budget mentions equity 63 times, transgender eight times.

Queer, seven times.

Second headline, Biden's budget only allocates for 350 extra border guards.

That's the same president who created 87,000 new IRS agents.

We only have 350 new border guards.

I don't know if they come with whips when they buy these, create these new positions.

Victor, quite,

you know, an insane budget.

Maybe he knows it's not going to be passed by this Congress and just wants to let his ideological freak flag fly.

What do you think about what Joe Biden has done here?

And by the way, any other thoughts about Biden in the last week?

I mean,

he had a bad two weeks.

Well, he's had a bad presidency, but he's had an especially...

terrible two weeks.

Remember he said that

when he was laying down, that a nurse had blown into his ears,

and she was very intimate, and this had made him get well.

And then earlier, I went back and I noticed he'd seen the same story, but only that iteration she had blown into his nostril.

And then he said that they'd taken, what, the top of his head off twice

in an operation.

I don't know if you've heard that.

Yeah.

And then he fell for the third time on the ramp up to Air Force One.

And then he said a very strange thing to black history audience.

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

And

he said, and then he had these lies.

He said the other day, as I mentioned, that even though electricity is skyrocketed and natural gas is skyrocket, that he lowered

your heating and cooling bills for climate change.

And then he said all these statistics that when he came in, you know, that he's lowered the price of gasoline.

And if you look at the data,

it's all gone south, even jobs that he keeps bragging on when more people are working.

But it was only until last month that we reached the number of 131 million

of the people working before COVID.

Right.

And he got down to 3.4.

Well, that's what Trump had it down without the inflation, without the high interest rates right before COVID.

So I think he's very confused.

And he's going, it's, I keep saying it's geometric.

It's cumulative.

We're going to see increasingly days where he is physically frail.

He turned around this week.

Remember, and he didn't know where to exit.

He sticks out his hand like there's a ghost there that's going to shake it.

And he has these little tiny little steps that he does.

And then his wife was out.

Oh, my God.

Kind of like what you see behind, don't look behind the curtain type of comments.

You know, he's robust like a 30-year-old, he's not done,

which translate into, I get to be

Jill, Dr.

Jill, for another four or six years, so I'm not going to give it up when I've got kind of like a musical chair as I'm in it, and I'm not going to get up when the music stops.

So lose my seat.

And so it's, I don't know, it's just another question of how strong the Republic is to endure this.

And meanwhile,

you know,

we haven't talked about this, but I'll just finish today by we're going to have a

monumental primary fight.

It's going to be very interesting as this election cycle approaches because on the left, there is no qualified person.

It's not Buttichig's a joke.

Camilla Harris is a joke.

Joe Biden is a joke.

Kevin Newsom

destroyed what was left of California.

It's a joke.

They have no, but on the right, they have a lot of very talented people.

They have Pompeo, they have

DeSantis, and then Trump, and then Nikki Haley, and they're all, I don't know what's going to happen.

It's going to be messy.

And it's going to be a DeSantis-Trump showdown.

And I don't understand the left because, I mean,

this DA in New York is going after Trump on the Stormy Daniels non-disclosure form.

He hushed up the fact that they had a sexual encounter, and then they've got the special counsel that now is suggesting that there may be indictments, right?

And I don't know how they're going to, the special

counsel is going to indict Trump when they just had another disclosure of more boxes that were taken out of the Biden office of perhaps

illegally so with, you know, top security documents that Biden shouldn't have had access to.

And then we have this crazy woman that was the head of the jury, grand jury down in Georgia, that went on all the airwaves bragging how they were kind of vindictive and trying to

get Trump for that phone call.

So you put it all together and

it's crazy.

I don't know why the left thinks anybody

is going to believe all this when you go after for Stormy Daniels or you go after his taxes.

And we've already had them released by the Democrats and the House Ways and Means, and there was nothing there.

And then we have the whole Biden conglomeration conglomeration where we know they've got millions of incomes and likely they didn't report it.

And we know about the documents,

it's similar or worse than what Trump did.

So I don't know how it's all going to work out, but it's going to get nasty, nasty, nasty.

And I don't know how much the Republic can take after 2016 and then going after Trump for four years, two impeachments.

And

what lurks behind all this, Jack, which is fascinating from a historical point of view on every topic,

The exposure is on the left.

It's not on the right.

It's projection.

Racist.

Joe Biden said, boy, he just called the governor of Maryland, boy.

He called

one of his aides in Louisiana, boy.

The corn pop racist stories, the racist comments he made about Obama, put you all in chains, junkie, you ain't, he's a racist.

And yet he's the point man on calling people racist.

Sexism.

Tara Reed is much more convincing than anybody that appeared at the Kavanaugh hearing.

We have a lot of confirmation from her friends at her time.

Her mother went on a radio show to say that her daughter was being

harassed.

It's pretty graphic, her description of what Joe Biden did.

And then he has this history of blowing into the ears of young women and hair, many underage, squeezing them too long.

And then he admits that the nurse, what, she did things to me that she wasn't trained for.

Why didn't feminists get angry at that?

And then blow into my ears or blow into my nostrils?

It's so creepy.

It's creepy, it's projection, too.

Yeah.

And then, you know, then it was, well, Trump was not, he was non-compost meant to, well, he took the Monterey assessment.

Why don't, I mean, Montreal assessment, why don't they have Biden do the same?

So it's, I guess, what it's a reminder of: the left is never about issues, it's only about power and aggrandizing and maintaining and expanding power with a collar that they're never subject to the consequences of what they impose on other people.

And everybody should understand that they have no principles.

All the people that were attacking Schellenberger and Talibi all had rendezvous in the past with racism, sexism, all kinds of problems.

And no, but I think that's

we're getting to a point where the only

thing that will save the country is not a close election again.

The Republican candidate's going to have to win by five points, and they're going to have to take back the Senate by six or seven seats, and they're going to have to get a 40 or 50 margin in the House, and they're going to have to do something.

And I mean it, really do stuff.

And if they don't,

I don't know how we can keep going like this because financially we're broke our military is

in 10 years they've i won't mention names but i i remember a very prominent four-star general

who was a democrat lecturing at a lecture i went to why women in frontline special forces units and marines and combat units was a bad idea because they couldn't fulfill the physical requirement right and you don't hear that at all now no you don't hear that at all

well he won't get he won't get his job on

a Raytheon board if he says something like that.

Yeah, it is.

So everybody's got a, I see a little, just in on a happy note, I see the Bank of America president said we're capitalist.

And, you know, it's not going to be this ESG

stuff.

And you're starting to see some pushback on some of the what you're starting to see Vanguard also.

Yeah, Vanguard.

You see,

Bill Maher is, I guess, sick of these people.

People like Dave Chappelle, J.K.

Rowling,

Schellenberger, Talibi, Musk.

You're getting people from the left-wing community

that have surmised that they're going to be cannibalized or devoured by their own if they don't say something.

Yeah.

And they are.

And at some point,

I think people have to use a proper vocabulary.

The woke movement is racist.

It is a racist movement.

It identifies people collectively with no avenue or exception for individuals.

And it stereotypes people.

And

that when Mark Milley says, I'm going to hunt out white rage.

He didn't say some white rage.

He didn't say, I'm going to look at particular soldiers who might incorporate a rage.

He collectively used the adjective white as if that's common to everybody.

And if somebody had said, I'm going to go out and look at crime

over, you know, I'm going to go out and see if who's a murderer.

And I said, I'm going to go look for black murderers.

That would be, you know what I mean?

They wouldn't use that adjective in that term in that context.

And yet

it's not going to continue because it can't continue in a multiracial society for people to just start stereotyping others by their race, always in a pejorative and negative fashion, and mostly from a very elite group.

And then when you see how it trickles down to the real world, Jack, and what happened in

East Palestine, where a whole community was just written off and people didn't want to get near it.

Biden's never been there.

Budijik took three weeks.

They don't like those people.

They didn't want to help those people.

They had it coming to them.

They had it coming to them.

And that's a preview of what would happen to any similar community.

Yeah.

Well, I shouldn't say similar.

I mean, Gavin Newsom went to Cabo

where my little house is, was buried under 20 feet and people were trapped up there in their homes.

We have some people die in Southern California.

Even though there's a drought.

They finally stopped saying that.

Yes, I think that they

now

created a permanent drought and we're never going to have normal rainfall to climate change has created chaotic wicker and we're never going to have regular weather.

And it's too wet now because of climate change.

Too dry, too wet.

Either one, climate change.

Well, Victor, again, we're, you know, this show is

coming out on the 16th, and we're recording on Saturday.

And Lord only knows what's going to happen between when we're talking right now, you and I, and when this show goes up.

And, you know,

I have a funny feeling.

The stock market's an arbiter of the health of the economy that this is going to be a bad week for America, given this

Silicon Valley Bank collapse, which we talked about on a previous podcast.

So hope and pray that our country is going to weather this and all things.

That said,

we thank our listeners.

No matter what platform they listen on, Google, Play, Stitcher, et cetera.

Those who listen on iTunes and Apple podcasts can leave zero to five stars if they feel like rating the show.

And practically everyone leaves five stars.

It's a 4.9 average.

We thank those who do that.

We thank those who leave comments, not only

on Apple podcasts, but also many people leave comments on Victor's website.

And there's some great debate that goes on in some of those comments on your articles, Victor.

It's very entertaining entertaining and informative.

Somebody who left a comment this past week, a name of Daily Wire fan,

wrote this.

Great show.

Love the show.

I particularly like some of the digressions about the classical world, languages, history, et cetera.

Heck, the discussions about farming are really interesting.

Didn't see that coming.

I also like the informal format and then the go

between VDH and Fowler.

Persian

and

Herodotus talk was great.

I like the political content, but the history stuff as a change-up is really, really good.

Wow.

Re-ruptured appendix story.

Great episode.

Yeah, that is a great story.

So glad you survived it.

That's Daily Wire Fan.

Thank you, Daily Wire Fan.

If I could just say one last thing here, Victor, get me and my great-great-grandfather was the Grand Marshal of the

new york st patrick's day in 1917

and it was you know that's a big event in new york and that's that's kind of irish royalty and then it has killed ozio killed it all no no this the parade's happening on on friday this week no it's he hasn't killed it off there were there have been of course attempts to get force uh gay irish groups to march in the parade the parade is a parade of an organization called the ancient order of hibernians uh but we can't get into the, can't get to the

I thought that St.

Patrick was a slave.

He was kidnapped, right?

He was, but you know, you I think the Irish kidnapped him from England, I thought, made him a slave.

And then he was a slave for five or six years, according to popular lore, I remember.

Well, he was

yeah, and you know, there are lots of Italians who get so, because this is as much of St.

Patrick's Day is New York-y, right?

And it extends out elsewhere.

And so many people say, did you know that St.

Patrick was really an Italian and he was brought over to England?

And that's because the Italians, and I'm half Italian also, resent

that two days after St.

Patrick's Day is St.

Joseph's Day.

That's the patron saint.

And there's all kinds of pastries, et cetera.

But it doesn't get anywhere near the attention that St.

Patrick's Day.

So there's a bit of a chip on the shoulder of

Italians.

Anyway, still,

it's a great celebration, but I have to let you know,

the parade my grandfather hosted by history of the parade is the worst parade ever because there were monsoons that day.

And there was only 20 people rode horses 10 blocks, and that was the parade.

But still, he was the Grand Marshal.

Now, I'd like to end by saying this, Victor.

There's a beautiful Irish tune called The Parting Glass.

And it goes, it's just a wonderful song.

Many Irish bands sing at the end of concerts.

Of all the comrades that e'er I had, they are sorry for my going away.

And all the sweethearts that e'er I had, they would wish me one more day to stay.

But since it falls unto my lot that I should rise and you should not, I'll gently rise and I'll softly call.

Good night and joy be with you all.

Thank you, Victor.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

Happy St.

Patrick's Day.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Day.

Thank you, everybody.