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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

You can find the Victor Davis-Hansen Show at VictorHanson.com, at justthenews.com, John Solomon's website.

That's our happy home.

Today, we're going to be talking about,

well, the World Health Organization may be handed over by the Biden administration oversight

of American policy when it comes to health, when it comes to pandemics.

I mean, they did such a great job of it.

when the Chinese virus came out in 2020, but now the Biden administration is thinking of handing over the keys to the kingdom, to this UN agency.

And we're going to get Victor's thoughts on this,

on the Department of Defense handing over files in a partisan and political way, and other matters.

We'll get to them right after these important messages.

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

So, Victor, my friend, I'm going to do something that you know probably talks most of our listeners, but I have to read a little something here.

And this is from the Epoch Times,

the

February 22nd edition.

It's a great paper, weekly.

They carry Victor's columns.

It's really, really very good paper.

The head story, top story in this edition, it's the headline: U.S.

negotiates deal to give WHO, World Health Organization, authority over pandemic policies.

Let me just read the first few paragraphs here, Victor, and you please then give us your thoughts.

The Biden administration is preparing to sign up the United States to a, quote, legally binding, end quote, accord with the World Health Organization that would give the Geneva-based United Nations Health Agency the authority to dictate America's policies during a pandemic, despite widespread criticism of the

WHO's response to the COVID pandemic, U.S.

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Bakara, it's hard to believe that guy is anything, joined with WHO Director General Tedros Adhanman Jebrias.

All we need to remember is he's the Ethiopian commie who's in the total control of Red China.

Former insurrectionist leader.

Right.

And he, so he, we're handing over our policy to this guy.

Let's just finish this story.

In September 22, it was announced that the U.S.

and WHO had a strategic dialogue.

Together, they developed a, quote, platform.

I can't believe this, to maximize the long-standing U.S.-WHO partnership and to protect and promote the health of all people around the globe, including the American people, end quote, the ones that didn't die because of WHO's policy during the last pandemic.

Victor, this is outrageous.

This is our sovereignty.

What are your thoughts?

Well, I would juxtapose that story to two vignettes.

One is Donald Trump took us out of WHO because remember that Teddy or Ted Ross as he's known by

condemned us as unfair or racist when Trump had the travel ban that saved thousands of lives, i.e., no more direct flights from Wuhan to LAX or JFK

or SFO when they were barred from going anywhere in China except to spread it with us.

And he was praising the Chinese the whole time

and then attacking us.

And so, and then we apparently were more concerned about working with this guy than the mayor of East Palestine.

I say that only because Joe Biden didn't even know if he called him, but he didn't call him.

He couldn't even call the people down in East Palestine.

We talk about this globalist project.

And if you look at COVID and superimposed WHO, Tedros,

Fauci,

Francis Collins, Peter Dasek and his Echo Health,

all of the Lancet, right?

The so-called esteemed scientific researchers and immunologists and health experts who went to China and came back and told us that this lab was not the origins and then basically confessed that they were not allowed access and they were there to whitewash it.

And then many of them disassociated themselves under pressure.

And I could get into the Stanford Medical experts that attacked Scott Atlas and Jay Bacharia for being, you know, wrong when they were right.

So my point is that the American elite, bicoastal elite that are so wedded to these international people like Peter Dasick and WHO

and the people in the CDC that and the National Institute of Allergies Infectious that fund that fund gain of function research going on in China, all of those people

were wrong on this.

And there's a lot of people who died that didn't have to because of these people.

And they have no allegiance.

They have no empathy.

They don't have any

grounding or bearing in a particular country or birthplace, except they're anti-American.

And the most anti-American are a lot of the Americans.

So

this

cosmopolitanism, that's, you know, goes back to Socrates, this idea that we're citizens of the world is just a moral dereliction of love and

putting your country first.

And that really has fatal consequences when you lower the bar of what's acceptable here to world standards.

Because you look outside the United States and you see what's going on in the world, and you think that they are going to be a model for us, the way they do business, which brings me back to the late Justice Ginsburg.

Of all the stupid things she said, Jack, remember, she did say that, what's the big problem with abortion?

I always thought we were aborting the right people.

And they hushed that New Yorker interview up.

But she said we have a lot to learn from foreign constitutions, especially the new south african constitution

and that was you know we know where south africa is today so

globalism is really a sickness among our elite it's kind of a it's like the green religion you know the davos globalist mindset and right they have contempt for us they shouldn't be listened to they should be given no power and they always try to put their interests whether it's the paris Climate Accord or the Rand Deal, where they try to circumvent the treaty obligations to ratify those in the Senate and they bypass them, or

they try to use international criminal court to go after American soldiers, or they try to make us abide by particular climate emissions that we more than meet, and then they say nothing when China and India violate them.

They're completely morally bankrupt, and we shouldn't give them.

This administration is.

But then, on the other hand, if you're going to put Sam Bankman in the Department of Energy and you're going to turn over the transportation, Pete Butterjik, they couldn't be worse than these characters on the international stage.

Maybe that's why they're looking for help or partnership.

Victor, I talked to you about this offline, but you mentioned Davos, and I had a conversation with Scott Atlas earlier this week about a project that he's launched,

Global Liberty Institute, which is fledgling, but I'm hoping and praying it will

reach its desired goal.

And that's to create an alternative

to Davos, not an alternative to like a, you know, another the American League to the National League.

They're both essentially doing the same thing.

There's no aspirations for globalism in this in this project, but it's so dire what is happening, what these globalists are doing to

the rest of the world, that there needs to be some forceful presence.

Well, the nice thing about Davos is that all of the conspiracy mongering you could imagine about what they're up to, Klaus Schwab explicitly trumps that.

He just says it.

You know, that we need an international group of elites to

have superpowers over national legislatures and governments.

He believes that.

And he says it.

And he writes a book about COVID and the great reset, basically saying that this panic that was induced by the reaction to the SARS virus is a wonderful paradigm, a model about how to seize control of government from the top down and make these stupid citizens, especially in the West, get rid of all of these ideas and impose instead the Green New Deal, diversity, equity, inclusion, equity, ESG government, you know, environment

governance, all of that stuff that has no constituency, no majority support.

So it has to be implemented by Fiat.

And they look at the United States and they think, you know,

the left did a wonderful job in the United States.

We've got to thank a John Kerry and an Al Gore and a Barack Obama and a Joe Biden, because when we look at East Palestine, that's what they had to work with.

That's America.

We don't like America, people like that.

But you know what?

They took over the universities.

They took over K through 12.

They took over Hollywood.

They took over Silicon Valley.

They took over Wall Street.

They took over the corporate boardroom.

And you know what?

They didn't have majority support.

They had to work with East Palestine people in Ohio.

That's the kind of Americans that they had to work with.

And yet they captured the elites, captured the power of the United States, and they're with us.

And that's what's so bizarre about them.

There is no constituency for that except among the institutional power of these elites that they exercise in the United States.

They can do stuff like this, partner with WHO.

But that is a joke.

He doesn't know anything about it.

I mean, if you want to look at California medical care, just go into any emergency room in a California hospital, and about 45% of all the people admitted for any reason whatsoever are found to have diabetes.

And the one thing you cannot say in California is that

Mexico, according to UN statistics, had the highest rate of obesity in the world.

And when you have millions of people coming across the border and you cling to the idea, you don't want to generalize and say that obesity is endemic in the Hispanic community and diabetes is well beyond the percentages of the demographic.

You can't say that.

And this is what we don't do in California.

So when we have a California,

anybody in California that's related to health issues is disingenuous.

What is sad about it is the narrative in California is, oh, there's all these shrinking white old people and they're all decrepit.

They have a word for it.

They're you croakers.

They're all going to croak.

And we have all the young Hispanic people taking care of them in the rest home.

That wouldn't be that bad.

I mean,

but the problem is that when you look at diabetes and heart problems among the Hispanic community, you have crisis levels of morbidity in people in their 30s and 40s and 50s.

You know what I'm saying?

So you're going to get to a situation where somebody 70 is going to be taking care of somebody 50 unless they address the idea that you don't walk out of Safeway with 48 sugar regular mountain dews.

You don't do that, but you can't talk about this.

And

that's what's so strange about

these national health policy issues.

They're all politicized and they all have certain taboo subjects that you don't get into.

They talk about guns and guns, and that's a public health issue now, but they don't talk about 10,000 African Americans being slaughtered every year, 95% of them by other African Americans, or more than that.

And the culture that allows that to happen is it should be a public health issue.

And what's really scary about the WHO and the CDC and the NIH is how they've gone into social problems and medicalized them, if I can make up that word.

Sure, right.

Do you remember?

No, you're right.

I'll finish this rant.

Do you remember right during the George Floyd riots when

they were brainwashing us that social distancing and masks were going to stop the spread of the infection?

And all of a sudden, 1,100 people

and the quote-unquote medical professionals signed a petition that it would be more injurious to African Americans not to go out and protest George Floyd than to abide by the quarantine that they swore was essential for the survival of the country.

So when we had all of those massive protests, many of which with Antifa and BL Lim at the Vanguard turned violent, our medical professionals were saying that that's okay.

Right.

The guy couldn't be on the surfboard.

He couldn't be surfing in the Pacific Ocean.

That was wrong.

But in Brooklyn, at the height of this pandemic, it was fine to have 15,000 people assemble on a Sunday to protest.

It's so corrupt.

It's ideology.

Again, the theme that we've been talking about

this last broadcast is ideology is a moral corrupter.

It just makes, it just...

renders ridiculous all of your standards and your protocols.

You don't follow them because you give exemptions for ideology.

And ideology in the country today, unfortunately, is

defined largely by racial fixations and obsessions.

Victor, when you take ideology and you mix in

people who want to, just by nature, by their own nature, want to make life more difficult for other people, for whatever reason, the thrill they get.

I have to make a little commercial for, I watched the second season of Clarkson's Farm, which I don't think you've seen.

I've never seen it.

Well, it's on Amazon Prime, and he's tried to open.

And of course, Jeremy Clarkson is popular.

He's wealthy.

So he can suffer some of the blows.

But to

watch government bureaucracy

of an insane level, and you understand this as a farmer, you know, how we didn't understand how much farming was under the control of the government already.

You think, you know, private property really doesn't apply that much to farmers as it does to other people.

But to see the insanity of over-regulation mixed with people who just want to say no to you, to make you suffer, and hold your stones.

That was the two things

I think governed my ideological orientation.

Because I grew up in a Democratic family,

albeit they were Harry Truman conservative Democrats.

But what destroyed me as a young kid was

A, farming full time and seeing these people come out in these nice shiny trucks and these little badges.

And then all the people I saw that were farming were grizzled and they were torn up and they had farm mechanical injuries and they were going broke and they were working 20 hours and these people would treat them like dirt.

and lecture down to them.

And they were so sophisticated.

And they all came from these alphabet soups, Raisin Administrative Committee, RAC, and stuff like that.

And that, and then the academic experience.

But it was very similar, Jack.

You'd go up, I would go up to the academic world, and I'd see these professors, and they were working 180 days a year with a salary.

They may have called it a nine-month contract, but it was basically a salary for the year.

They got paid in 12-month installments.

And we had one of the heaviest teaching loads in the state at the CSU system.

It was four semester classes, but you're still talking about 12 hours a week,

you know, and a 40-hour week, and you're not up on a telephone pole, you're not down in a cesspool, or you're not,

you know, pulling a tandem disc for 15 hours a day.

So when I got up there, I thought it was in heaven, but it was amazing to hear these professors.

Oh,

I'm so tired.

This is so unfair.

I'm so underpaid.

Oh,

that student came in late today.

Or, oh, I was supposed to to write a journal article this year, but I just don't want to do it.

I want to go, you know, to Napa.

It's just constant whining and complaining of this tenured job.

And then juxtapose, you would do that.

And then I would walk, you know, off campus to some bakery or coffee shop, and I'd see some poor barista with a big line.

And she's there from six in the morning making coffee, serving people, working hard.

Or I'd see a guy with a jackhammer on campus taking out a patio, and I'd go talk to him, and they never complained at all.

And I said to myself, there is something sick of the Western professional non-muscular classes of which, Victor, you're a part of now.

And if you ever forget what you've been doing or where you came from, then you deserve to be

ridiculed because these people have contempt.

for what the muscles that make this country move.

And we saw that during COVID, getting back to the original topic of COVID policy.

It was the guy driving the Amazon truck and the Home Depot

delivery guy that brought your oven when your oven broke down.

And the guy when your circuit breaker went out came out two in the morning and worked on your circuit panel and stuff like that, where everybody else was zooming away and making more money than they ever had in their lives.

They were expendable.

They were expendable.

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

So, Victor, I had said on our last podcast that I had hoped we'd have a little time to talk about

Elon Musk and Gavin Newsom.

And we ran out of time.

I just want to bring it up today shortly before we talk about some of this Department of Defense insanity, partisan insanity there.

But so, Elon, earlier this week, Elon Musk was back in California, and he and Gavin Newsom were making goo-goo eyes at each other.

And when last week we left Elon Musk, he was shaking the dust of California off his feet, moving to Texas, where the headquarters for Tesla is, and I believe will remain.

But some deal about opening a big plant in

California.

Some people are suspecting, well, you know, Tesla has gotten Musk, has gotten himself with probably some massive tax break from Gavin Newsome.

Anyway, Victor, the great Californian, the frustrated Californian.

What are your thoughts, if any, about that?

Wow, Elon Musk is a brave guy and all that, but he's a business person.

First and foremost, that's where, well, how he became a multi-billionaire.

So, what's the subtext?

The subtext is that

Elon Musk sells about 45% of all California new cars.

His Model Y car, I only know this because I bought a Model Y, is the best-selling car in California.

Think of that.

Outsells Chevy, Ram pickups, anything.

And he sells way over 200,000 cars a year, Jack, California.

And it's, like I said, it's 45% of the entire, it's the best-selling model in California.

And I think California itself accounts for the

of all, you know, I think of all Teslas and all other electric cars combined, California counts for 20% of all sales.

And so

the bottom line is when he moved to Austin and he took on Twitter, that

market that is the backbone of Tesla was endangered because all of these left-wing people, you could start to see they were selling Teslas or they were going to other electrical competitors.

And he had a lot of bad publicity.

And California's, they thought 25 billion, but 40 billion.

So he's thinking, I'm just putting words in my implication is that he's thinking he's going to come to the rescue.

Oh, you guys are in bad trouble.

i.e., I'm in bad trouble too, because I need this market, because your affluent coastal corridor from San Diego to Boston buys

200 and 100,000 of my cars.

And if I get on the wrong side of you, I'm going to lose that market.

And I can come in and fluff times

and help you.

And it'll be a productive mutual relationship.

And I think it will be.

So far, I mean, I'm watching my wife drive the Model Y.

She drives 35 miles each way to Fresno.

And she just puts, you know, I wired the 220 right side of the wall, and she just drives in, sticks it in.

Two hours later, it's in the garage.

She drives back up

70 miles minimum, maybe 100 doing errors or 150.

And then she's back and she does it for, and

it's about short term.

I don't know about the long term because I haven't done the maintenance yet on tires and all battery and all that stuff.

But so far, for the first 2,500 miles,

it's just a radical reduction in operating cost.

So, people in California are buying that.

It's not good for the, I can think arguably, it's not good for the country unless you can solve how to produce electricity cheaply.

Because you've got to go to, if you're going to do this, you've got to go to nuclear power.

Unless you're, if you're going to ban natural gas and coal, and the only inexpensive way to produce it, we don't have enough hydroelectric anymore.

And the crazy left wants to destroy what we have.

And the solar and wind just won't do it.

So, you've got to do nuclear power.

If you do nuclear power, then maybe if we can solve the battery problems so they're not expensive or they're not

injurious to the environment or whatever the complaints are, then maybe it'll work.

But

short term, it seems to be, and that's what's behind this, this new romance.

I have a feeling that Gavin Newsom has contempt for Elon Musk, and Elon Musk reciprocates that contempt.

But this is a marriage of convenience.

Well,

was there was some

good actors.

The goo-goo eyes were

pretty goo-goo.

Well, Victor, let's move on to this Department of Defense.

Uh, I shouldn't laugh as an intro to this story because it's it is troubling.

Again, I'm going to have to read something here.

Bear with me, listeners.

This is a piece from Hot Air the other day, Ed Morrissey, and the headline is scandal.

Two more Republicans say the Department of Defense, DOD, leaked their files to Dem Op Research Group.

So

here's how this story goes: Drip, drip, drip.

The politicization scandal at the Department of Defense grows a little each day as more Republicans come forward.

Two more have gone public with notices from the Air Force that their confidential files got handed over to Abraham Payton of Due Diligence Group, DDG, a Democrat, APPO research firm that worked for House Democrats in the last election cycle.

Now,

Politico has been covering this, and here's a little bit of a Politico report.

Sam Peters, a Republican who challenged Representative Stephen Horsford, who's a Democrat from Nevada, in November, and Kevin Delleker, who fell short in the GOP primary race to take on Representative Susan Wilde, Democrat in Pennsylvania, both received on February 8th letters from the Air Force notifying them that Abraham Payton of Due Diligence Group made multiple requests for their military personnel records last year.

In both Peters and Delicer's cases, the Air Force identified Payton, a former research director for the Democrat group American Bridge, as having, quote, inappropriately requested, end quote, copies of their records for, quote, for the stated purpose of employment and benefits.

Victor,

this brings to 11 Republicans who had served, who have had their personnel files leaked to

Democrat political campaign operatives.

And Ed Morrissey,

just read this last thing.

He's

not pontificating, he's wondering here.

The claim technique involved here more than suggests that the effort may well go beyond the 11 cases cited by the Secretary of the Air Force.

Want to bet that DDG pulled the same trick on the other service branches, assuming that this is even accurate.

It worked on the Air Force.

So why would Payton and DDG have limited it to just these 11 cases?

They obviously didn't.

The analogous, the perfect simile is we know that.

We are going to know that other people in social media did what Twitter was doing and the FBI was working with, you know, other social, i.e.

Facebook and others.

Because you know why we know that?

Because Mark Zuckerberg told us that, that the FBI was directing what he should and should not do as far as banning information about Hunter's laptop.

And the same thing is true.

If they're doing it in the Air Force, they were doing other branches of service.

I kind of like that Peter's guy.

I think he was the guy.

Didn't he say that if a hitman,

if you order a hit, The guy that orders it is as guilty as the hitman.

He was trying to say that the Air Force knew, is ultimately responsible for giving the weapon to try to destroy a Republican.

But it's part of a larger narrative.

And again, I keep repeating this, but in the Dying Citizen, I spent four or five months in the chapter of the unelected, and it's very scary what's happened to the DOD, the IRS, the CIA, the FBI.

DOJ, they're operating as judge, jury, executioner, independent contractors, basically, and they're controlled by the left.

I don't know why that is.

I speculated, maybe our listeners can, is it because if you're in government, you always want

bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger government, more and more taxes so that they pay you?

Or is it because you have lifetime employment and you develop a utopian view of the universe?

Or is it you hate that private buccaneer, entrepreneur, captain of industry, and so you're a regulatory type of agency, or you're intelligence, or something.

But I don't know what it is.

But

I found this out, Jack, when I was a chifrin professor at the U.S.

Naval Academy.

And I thought I was going to the bastion of American conservatism.

I was just shocked.

It was the most liberal place I had taught.

And I've been a visitor at Pepperdine.

I've been a visiting short-term at UC Berkeley.

I was a visiting professor at Stanford University.

I work at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

I was at the Center for Behavioral Studies.

I've lectured at probably 300.

I have never seen a more left-wing environment.

And there's something,

I don't know what it is.

Excuse me, Victor.

I've done this before 20 years ago, right?

Yeah.

This is not yesterday.

This is a long time ago.

No, it's a long time.

And

these government agencies, but we all think that the FBI, the DOJ,

the James Comeys, the Brennans, the Clappers, the McCabes, the Milleys, all of these people are conservative because of the occupations that they pursue, that these are blood and guts patriots.

No, no, no, no, no.

Their first loyalty is to the state.

And I don't mean the United States.

I'm talking about the permanent Byzantine bureaucracy.

And they become acculturated and they find out very quickly that the left looks at them with envious eyes and the left says, hmm, I can enact diversity, equity, inclusion.

I can enact radical abortion.

I can enact radical green policies by fiat because these are on democratic organizations and they're government and they need funding from me.

So what I will do is I will tell the

Pentagon, we want subsidized transgendered surgeries, or we want you to fly people to get abortions, or I will tell the CIA, or I'll tell the FBI, you know, you can do this and that.

And in exchange for that, I will help grow government and protect you.

And that's what this, that's how it's getting out of control.

Eisenhower, I remember when he gave that famous partying lecture in 1960 about the military-industrial complex, was on to it.

But it just dwarfs the problem then.

At least there was the excuse of the existential Cold War.

We have no excuse other than this thing is a robotic organism that's taken a life of its own.

And these people are very dangerous.

They don't believe in the Constitution.

And when you criticize them, they call you unpatriotic.

That's what's even scarier.

But one of the biggest revolutions I think everybody in our audience is shocked about is that

conservatives, traditionalists, Republicans,

whatever particular label you fall under, you were convinced that national security, armed forces, intelligence,

investigatory policing, these were the bulwarks of law and order and conservative tradition.

No, they're not.

They're on the cutting edge of left-wing revolution.

They have been taken over by an entire new group of people.

And, you know, whether it's you want to call it Lois Lerner or Andrew McCabe or Mark Milley or John Brennan or Bruce Orr

or Peter Strzok or Lisa Page.

We can go on forever.

You know, it's a great

dangerous people.

Yeah, it's a leap for people, Victor, because I think in our old culture, I mean, we watch war movies and we take

civics classes,

things where the fumes from 70 years ago still carry on, but we think we're patriotic and we want to support these

fighting men and women, et cetera, et et cetera.

But why is it not possible to think that, like, the Soviet Union's military and their version of the FBI are Red China right now?

I mean, why is it so difficult to conceive the military?

And

who's a great patriot?

Who is the patriot?

Is it James Comey, who made a fortune in between his government curses working for Lockheed?

And then he goes before the American people under oath and says 245 times, I don't remember, when they ask him basic factual questions, or he interviews the president of the United States in a private conversation, assures him he's not an object of FBI investigation when he knows it is.

And then he goes out and memorializes that on a government device and leaks it to the New York Times.

And this is a man who said his organization basically said to Christopher Steele, we will pay you $1 million if you can find one thing that's true.

And when he couldn't, they took that dossier to a FISA court to delude them to destroy the constitutional rights of U.S.

citizen Carter Page.

That is not somebody that I'm going to stick up for because he says he's FBI director.

Nor am I going to stick up for Andrew McCabe, who lied four times to federal investigators, nor Christopher Wray, who did these stunts from the Virginia parents at board meetings to Mar-Lago to James O'Keefe to Peter Navarro.

none of that.

And I'm not going to stick up for Robert Mueller either.

I'm not going to stick up for Anthony Fauci.

I'm not going to stick up, any of these people.

And they have taken the American trust and they've become very wealthy and very powerful by abusing it, abusing it.

And believe me, if Mark Milley has on his desk a dossier that says a colonel

was worried about Donald Trump or was worried about a superior officer, was too reckless.

So on his own initiative, he called up a colonel in the People's Liberation Army and said, I'm worried.

And according to my station, if I get an order, I'm going to let you know about it because I'm worried about my superior.

They would put him in prison.

They would put him in prison.

And if somebody took a bunch of, if you were, these documents, if you're in the U.S.

Army or Navy, if you're a submariner and you take a picture of a control board, you're done for.

And so I have no sympathy for these people.

And

nobody asked them to be FBI agents.

If they want to be an FBI agent, we ask the minimum that they follow the law.

The FBI, if you just look at the list of all of the infractions and crimes that these agents are committing, it's just striking.

And the disinformation and who knows what we're going to find out about the January 6, 44,000 hours.

But

it's something's happened to it.

And I say that as a former supporter, a big supporter of the FBI.

And I've always paid my taxes on time.

But what the IRS does is frightening.

And the same thing of the CIA and the DOJ.

What the DOJ is doing under Merrick Garden is terrifying.

The unequal and asymmetrical application of the law depending on one's politics

and one's race and et cetera.

So these are rogue organizations and they're very powerful and they're completely out of control.

And the only way that's going to stop them is the Republicans have to win, keep the House and get that up to 40 or 50 seats.

And they've got to

get a super majority in the Senate and they've got to win back the president.

How did we get here was Was in the 60s, this great society bureaucracies.

And I went back and looked at, you know, I'm reviewing a great book by Mark Moyer.

It's volume two called Triumph Regained.

The first one was written 17 years ago, Triumph Forsaken, about Vietnam.

And there are about 600 pages, so it's going to be a monumental trilogy when he's finished.

But between volume one and two, he wrote a lot of other books, but now he's returned to it.

And it's pretty disturbing.

But what it was getting me about LBJ, when he came into office,

he had a supermajority in the Senate.

He had 150, Jack, House member majority in the House of Representatives.

He had the presidency.

He had the liberal war in court.

He had everything.

And that's how they push through the great society and all that stuff.

There's nothing comparable.

And the only way you can stop it is to achieve that dominance in government.

And the left knows it.

And that's why we're going to have

billions of dollars,

sort of like what Molly Ball predicted in Time, bragged about in Time magazine, how

Zuckerberg and everybody else did what they did.

Victor,

we've got you've you've written about the Super Bowl.

We're a few weeks out from that having happened, but you have written a two-part series about this for your website, victorhanson.com.

And we're going to talk about what prompted you to write this and more right after

this important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So, Victor,

oh, I just want to say about VictorHanson.com, which we're going to talk about this in a second.

That is your website, the official home of you on the internet.

Victor writes

some select and exclusive articles, not some, several times a week.

It's a copious amount of material that you write exclusively for the website.

And if you like to read Victor and you don't subscribe, well, guess what?

You're not going to be able to read much of what this man writes in the course of a year.

So at victorhanson.com, why don't you consider subscribing?

It's $5 to check it out, $50 for the year, and you'll be able to read the ultra articles.

Those are the exclusive pieces, two of which are titled the most recent

ultra pieces are our

Neronian Super Bowl, parts one and two, where,

you know, Victor, you're a guy, like I'm a guy.

And I, by the way, I used to be a statistician.

for the Elias Sports Bureau, and I used to be an NFL statistician.

I cared deeply about the NFL football and a great Yankee fan.

and

the New York Rangers.

I was a sports nut and I could give a rat's petute anymore

in part because of

the wokeification of our sports.

But then also how our sports are being used to

become events that denigrate our culture.

Also, which we see.

So this, I think, is part of why you wrote the idea.

I had your attitude on a lot of people in our audience.

They don't watch the NBA, the NFL, and they feel that it's Nero's banquet at Super Bowl time, at halftime.

It always is.

But I wanted to say, you know what, Victor, you're getting into a rut.

You've got to go back to be empirical.

So just wash your head of any preconceptions.

Sit down and watch the Super Bowl and watch the halftime show.

And what did I experience?

The first thing I noticed was all these people were bragging about Lift Every Voice and song.

I like that black, a spiritual song, but not as a separate national anthem.

So we had two national anthems.

You know what I mean?

We had the black ant national anthem, and then we had, I guess, everybody's national anthem.

And I said to myself, that's a sustainable proposition, isn't it?

That you take one racial group that makes up 12 to 13 percent of the population and you have a separate in national

global audience, a separate national anthem.

That will work really well.

It worked really well, didn't it, in Rwanda and Yugoslavia.

And that's where we're headed.

And I thought to myself, well, if Bull Connor and Lester Maddox were here today,

they would say, well, you know, until we had that war in court, we had Plessy versus Ferguson.

That was a pretty good Supreme Court rule.

We racists thought we could be separate but equal.

So when we have our football games, we'll have the black folk.

folk, they'll have their separate anthem, and we'll have ours.

What would have Martin Luther King said to that?

And yet, this thing was gaga by the announcers.

And then we go into it, and I'm not, the game was,

you know, the game was excellent, very exciting.

But

they're suddenly bragging that they have, you know, 110, 112 million viewers, and it's back.

And I'm thinking, well, I remember in 2015,

they were bragging that they had, I think, 215 million.

In other words, when we had 15 or 20 million more people in the country, eight years ago, they had a bigger audience.

So, and they were saying this is the second greatest.

And it's like the NBA was saying, well, we got 8 million people.

And I thought,

you know,

25 years ago, you had 20 million viewers with a much smaller country that, you know, had millions less people.

I think 30 million less people.

So it was just disinformation.

And then, you know,

I think, you know, this is a meritocratic.

I look at these great athletes and they are disproportionately African-American.

And I think that's great because it's based on merit.

that each person who's African-American has proven themselves to be superior in that position regardless of race.

And that's the way America works.

Because I really do not think that a coach puts a African-American player in the defensive backfield and says to himself,

oh, I've got four African-Americans as defensive backfield

in my coverage.

So I better get three white guys.

I just don't think they do that.

I think they go by pure merit.

So then when I was watching this, I thought, well, this is funny because this is very American, that this is what we're doing, but we don't do it anywhere else, except in sports and maybe Hollywood.

Why don't we?

And what are the arguments why we don't?

That it's a racist, unfair country when this is the most lucrative, prestigious, illustrious

pathway to riches and fame in the country to be an NFL player.

And so then I thought, well, calm down.

Let's watch,

you know, let's watch the halftime show.

And I,

you know,

I don't know what to say.

I

am,

I don't know what I, I don't know,

still beyond.

I don't know, Victor.

I don't know anything about Beyonce and Jay-Z other than Jay-Z says some anti-Semitic stuff once in a while, like many rappers do.

But this Rihanna,

I thought, you know,

first of all, I I was very fair to her.

I said, all of these people that go on that Super Bowl rely on fireworks and hydraulic platforms and

sexual innuendo and spectacle in lieu of talent.

It's not going to be Mark Knopfer or James Taylor or an Otis Redding type of singer that gets down with his guitar and just plays and is good, right?

Right.

Or even somebody I don't like, Barbara Streison singing.

It's not going to be that.

They don't have the talent to pull that off.

So they substitute the fireworks and the distractions.

Okay.

And that's what they did.

You know, they dim the lights and then they have all these crazy people.

So this Rowana person, whom I told, I'm told, you know, has sold what, more records than,

I think she's the second

best

in history.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, more than Elvis.

I think she.

Really?

Yeah.

I think, I don't know if it's Beyonce and Jay-Z or are ahead of her or what, but

the first thing I noticed, she gets up there and

she's lip-syncing.

She can't even lip-sync a cordially, you know, you can see her mouth move with the music and it's not coordinated.

And I thought, wow, you're in front of, you're bragging about 112 million global people and you've spent millions of dollars on all of these props.

How hard would it be?

How many times has she sang her signature song?

10,000 in practice and in performance?

Don't you think you should?

Is there nobody who knows anything about acoustics or electronic amplification in the Super Bowl that they couldn't amplify her song?

Why couldn't she just sing, Jack?

Why does she have to have lip sync?

I never understood it.

And how did I know it was lip sync?

Did I listen to any?

No, I just watched it and I could see that she couldn't, she couldn't do it.

And then I thought,

wow, most of the performance performers try to be almost semi-nude.

I was thinking of Janet Jackson and the, you know, the malfunction, wardrobe malfunction, right?

But this woman obviously was covered.

And I thought, this is unusual.

And I said to myself, Jack, she must be pregnant.

And she was.

She's out there and I gave her credit in my mind for motherhood and being out on stage pregnant.

But then she starts, she can't leave it alone.

So she starts in, how does a pregnant woman who's advanced in her pregnancy

then start to dance and put her hands as if she's masturbating in her crotch on national TV, on global TV?

Right.

But what is the purpose of that?

There's one thing that we all know: that motherhood and pregnancy and public masturbation are not a good mix.

I'm sorry if that sounds sexist.

It's the same.

I think it's sexist.

I think you've hit upon a fact there.

Well, if you had a father that came out and said, Guess what?

My wife's pregnant, and I'm going to grab my penis on national TV.

That's not right.

And so

this society, what I finished that article with on the ultra was, never has a society been more Victorian at the same time and prudish and the same time pornographic.

And that's our problem right now.

We're all shocked that if somebody goes on a date and they say something or they go to the workplace and they say, hey, nice legs.

We're shocked.

We didn't do that in the 50s.

Well, in the 50s, they didn't have deep throat for 30 years.

And in the 40s, when they made ill-considered remarks at the water cooler, there wasn't something like the Super Bowl where people were emulating masturbation while pregnant on TV.

And so, yes,

it's wrong to have sexual banter, but there is sexual banner because

sexuality inundates this popular culture in the most raunchy and disgusting manner.

And then to turn around and act like you're going to have, you know,

some type of hysterical attack because you hear something sexual in other venues,

it's just crazy.

And so

I,

you know, professional sports, I've written them off and the entertainment industry,

and it's nothing to do with race, because I think probably of all people that I have listened to my life,

probably my favorite performer was Otis Revne.

That guy had the most talent, and he could write songs.

He could play them.

He had a beautiful voice.

He was a wonderful performer.

And I think back in my childhood when I was in a farm, you know, staying up late at night, listening to Kyno Radio, and when they would put on

Deion Warwick or Smokey Robertson or the fourth, I thought that was just wonderful.

What's Kyno?

Is that K-I-N-O?

Is that a station?

It was a very famous rock station.

Okay.

And it was at that time, there's a really well-known, you may have, when you've come to Fresno, the best talk show host, or I should say,

he's very good, but he has the best ratings.

Ray Appleton had a long history.

He was at other K-Fig and these types of radio radio stations, but he was in his 20s.

It's kind of a prodigy.

And he knows more about popular music of that era.

But I would, as a high school kid, you know, 14 years old, my brother and I shared a small little room and we would listen to the radio at night.

And I would listen to all of these wonderful songs by black entertainers.

And then this whole idea that

you have to have 55% of African Americans in commercials and we have to do all this is really insulting to the Black community.

Because when I was growing up, it wasn't just Sidney Poitier a Black actor.

Man, I look at that guy in Lilies of the Field.

That was one of the most brilliant performances I've ever had.

It was terrific.

It was stunning.

And I listened to Otis Redding.

It's stunning.

And,

you know,

it's, it's, why can't we just let people do what they do and they will excel?

And if they excel in music or if they excel in one in the National Hockey League and they're in order, so what?

And I don't understand it.

But when I watch this

Super Bowl and I, the announcers, it's this rah-rah stuff.

And

it's, I don't know.

I think people are just now,

you know, inundated.

And I was thinking,

do you really think that

Denzel Washington needs help?

That guy is the most brilliant actor of our time.

He really is.

I know that I keep pounding this movie, Man on Fire, but when I watch that guy in Man on Fire, the way that he interrogates in that brutal scene, that Mexican narc official in the

Hermada, the Brotherhood, that is one of the most chilling, eerie, but brilliantly performed performances I've ever seen on the screen.

And he's a genius.

And the idea that African Americans are,

if you're on an open playing field, can't compete is crazy.

And yet

I don't understand it that

Stanford University has all of these efforts to encourage particular races to be disproportionate, but the NLFL doesn't have to do that or Hollywood doesn't have to do that.

Why don't we just let it go?

And then, when people in the African-American community say, you know what,

I want more of us to go to Harvard, then people would say, well, what was the successful formula that we dominated the NFL?

And what was the successful formula that we dominated popular music?

Oh, it was discipline, hard work, intact family.

Well, let's apply that paradigm to college admissions, and then we wouldn't have to worry about it.

But we can't do that.

We can't do that.

And part of the reason we can't do it is this white, bicoastal, upper elite elite that doesn't live among people who don't look like themselves.

Or if they do, they live with very, very wealthy, unrepresentative minorities that are just like themselves.

The Don Lamones of the world or the Ophas of the world or the Whippy Goldbergs of the world.

I don't care where they come from.

I'm talking about where they are now.

Right.

And that's why this whole dysfunctional racial dialogue has proceeded, or I should say, descended as it has.

But that's a long rant, but boy, I that

NFL is part Nero's Rome,

it's part Petronius the Satyricon, it's part kind of a Soviet state-run athletic event, you know.

Victor, layered on to on to this and sports is

the suppression of uh masculinity in the sense of manliness, which is considered virtue?

And it's, I, I, I have

on the side when I, when I want to be really distracted, I look up NFL this week in the NFL in 1968.

And it's a really different

Ray Nitchen, Dick Budkus, and

Jim Brown and Big Daddy Lipscomb and all of that.

Well, let me tell you, when Jim Brown scores a, or Gail Sayers

know score a touchdown there's no um bizarre kind of a dance that goes on or if if ray nitschke tackles somebody there's no chest thumping it's it's kind of like men were men and knew it didn't need to do this uh

uh outrageous bravado and this is what the nfl is and in its way the the you know major leagues baseball have similar things and to me this is what really takes away also from sports in America is.

Man, I just,

you hit the nail on the head.

You remember in the early 60s, I would wait all week to watch the NFL on Sunday and the LA Rams for one reason, Jack.

They had those guys called the Fearsome Foresome.

And it was those huge linemen that were.

Yes, Lamar Lunday.

I remember Merlin Olson.

He had a PhD from the University of Utah, I think.

And then

Deacon Jones and Rosie Greer.

He became kind of a community.

They were these huge,

and they were modest and they were wonderful at what they did.

And it was ecumenical.

And there was no racial question.

Merlin Olson and Deacon Jones.

And they just excelled.

And those guys didn't make any money at all, hardly.

And yet they were professionals.

They were true professionals.

And I don't remember any of that weird dancing in the end zone or spiking the ball or one knee or any of that.

I don't remember any of the cult of the personality.

You know, I like Tom Brady, but this whole idea about his marriage and this and that, I don't really care.

Joe Namath kind of started that, but

he did it in a different way, even he did it in an understated way compared to the present.

But it's become,

it's, you know, it's become,

I say, Nero in the golden house and what, you know, what Nero did when he went to the Olympics.

It was the same thing.

And he went to Greece and competed.

And even the Roman, the Hippodrome and Constantinople or the Circus Maximus at Rome, it's the same kind of weird spectacle.

Only we don't kill lions and elephants anymore.

But

I'm sure we'll get to that soon.

But gosh, somebody needs to tell the Super Bowl, you know what?

You don't need to do this.

You need to get talent.

So

go find a folk singer or someone who's able to perform without lip-syncing, without a bunch of costumes, without pornographic gestures, without 50 people who dance around and also grab their,

you know, and we don't need that Madonna torn off.

We don't need, remember Miley Cyrus and all that stuff with her.

The wrecking ball.

Yeah, it was, it was horrible.

It was talentless.

It was awful.

And we don't need all of these athletes.

We could have a simple rule that when you intercept a pass and you run 80 out, you just take the ball and put it down

in the end zone and you understate it.

And we'll get the message.

Understate is right.

Yeah.

Less is more.

Less is more.

Hey, Victor,

we have a little time left, and I want to.

I want to talk about something I saw on your website.

I was kind of surprised.

And I hope folks

won't think this is a commercial, but

I was on it the other day and I saw

an ad,

the link for

a historical tour.

And I thought we had last, and I'm not, you're not being accused of anything here, but when you went to Israel last year, and you used to do these annual tours and got screwed up by COVID, but

I thought, well, that was it.

And here I see you are doing a a tour in 2024, May of 2024, to

Chantilly to Versailles, but it's basically a tour of a military tour of Normandy and the landing beaches, etc.

And it looks

really,

really cool.

You're saying,

what the hell happened, Victor?

No, no, what the hell happened.

Whatever the hell happened, you're doing it.

So what you're saying is what happened was going to happen on this.

I thought, you know, I had done, I think, 17 or 18 consecutive years

and

also

you got to put this in context that i was gone because i had to do the pre-tour the post-tour so i was gone 17 days at the end of may until mid-june for 17 18 years in a row and then on top of that I was going initially four and a half weeks, and then I got down to

Hillsdale over from September 1st.

So I had not been,

I have a small vacation home.

I hadn't been there in June in 17 years.

And I hadn't been on Labor Day with my family

in 21 years, 20 years.

So I said, and you know, they used, my daughter used to have a birthday.

I hadn't been on, I've been alone on my birthday for 20 years.

Not that I'm lonely and weepy and vulnerable, although I probably am.

Maybe you are.

And yeah, people are listening.

Hey, Victor, we listen to you.

We know better than you your shortcomings and narcissism uh but my point is i thought i needed a break so then covet came and i had long covet and i said to al philip who is my partner and he's he's absolute genius he's an austrian and he's fluent in european languages he's a he's a brilliant tour and he and i have put this on and he I do the content and he does the operational aspect of it.

And believe me, at least the way I look at it, the content and what he does is much more arduous and time-consuming.

You know, I ran the National Review cruises for years, so there is some heavy lifting going on.

You know, that the guys like us who showed up to talk had it easy.

But my point is, he wanted to do, so when I got COVID, I said, see what happens?

I was very ill in Israel.

I mean, I couldn't even walk across the room.

And I say that as somebody who feels almost completely well now.

So I feel it's a gift gift from God.

I really do.

That

long COVID for me was a 10-month phenomenon of hell, but it didn't go on like a lot of people that I have great empathy for are still suffering from it.

I have neurological problems and eye problems and fatigue and stuff, but not like

it's minor compared to what it was.

So I said in the middle of that, I said to Al, I think I'm done.

I can't do this anymore.

And I'm, you know, I'm 69 years old.

So, and I'm under contractual, my

Hillsdale cruise this year.

So I said, and then he just, you know, kind of kidding around, said, well, what if we did the 80th anniversary of Normandy and we went to Utah and Omaha and St.

Mary Aglise again?

And like we did way, way back 16 years ago, we do the Hall of Mirrors and the Versailles Treaty, and you can lecture on D-Day and amphibious operations and the pre-bombing and the

Lundstedt versus Rommel on whether we used the panzers and what was, how many tigers were there, all this weird and the fillets leading to the fillets, all this stuff, right?

I wrote about it in the Second World Wars and then I've been there a lot.

And then he said, you know, we're going to get Tom Conner, who's just one of the sweetest, most confident military historians there is at Hillsdale.

He's retired now.

He's wonderful.

And we'll get Tom Conner to come.

And he knows it backwards and forwards.

So I just just said, oh, come on now.

I'm old.

I'm tired.

And he just went ahead and planned it.

So he just called me one day and said, it's all planned.

It's all ready to go.

All I need you to say is maybe.

And I said, maybe.

And then the next thing, his brilliant, talented daughter, who's

internet, had it on.

And I'm going to do it.

I'm getting excited for one more time.

One more.

You know, I don't want to sound

comparing tiny things to great things.

I don't want to sound sound like a Tom Brady type of person where it says, just one more game, just one more season.

But I'm going to, it's been very, it's been very successful from the idea that you could start a tour with nobody knows who you are.

You're just on the merits of you're going to have an intellectually rigorous 12 days and you're going to have five-star hotels and you're going to cut out all the ad expense that most tours have, the overhead.

There are going to be no administrators.

You're going to do it yourself.

You're going to finance it yourself, and you're going to get the best prices.

And every single morning, these people are going to have a 45-minute lecture

from

Bruce Thornton or Tom Conner and visitors.

We've had, you know, we've had people from the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

We've had Joe Joffe, editor of Zai.

We get all sorts of

Europeans usually, and we will again this time.

Right.

But and the group is just wonderful.

30%

have gone on at least one, 30% have gone on every one, and 30%

are new.

No, yeah.

And this time, I think we're almost already sold out.

Oh, wow.

Well, I must say, Victor, anecdotally, I hear people all the time,

lots of anecdotes.

A, you're lucky to host this show and talk to Victor and even know Victor.

I give my IT for that.

Or,

oh, my gosh, it's too bad he's not doing one of those again, because

I would, that would be the highlight of my life to have gone on one of those

victor tours.

People should check it out.

If you feel that way, I check it out.

I have a lot of friends.

I say there's 30 or 40 people over the years that have gone on them that I'm very close to.

And they write or call me or I see them and they're very dear friends and they're very nice, wonderful people.

One of the,

I was.

incorporating my daughter who helped on four of them and she had all these wonderful ideas about how to bring scooters to the disabled, Susanna.

And she was kind of an

empath.

She was always coming up to me and saying, Dad,

Mr.

Smith has got a bad leg and you're letting him linger.

We need to go get a limo for him.

Or Mrs.

Jones gets tired very easily, and I want to leave earlier and take a taxi and take her back to the, she was that kind of person.

She was running it.

She, you know, died very unexpectedly from leukemia.

But

that was part of my idea that I would kind of get her involved, and then one day she would be able to take it over.

But

so, but my point is, I met all these wonderful people.

There was a guy in Chicago, he's a businessman, John Bailey.

And my God, he's one of the sweetest guys and most knowledgeable, successful entrepreneur.

I'm just picking out a name to show you where kind of people go.

And he was so nice to my daughter about giving her advice about business.

And he's just a wonderful person.

And I say that because

these people are very successful.

I don't mean money-wise, but just in life in general.

They're independent.

They're autonomous.

They tend to be conservative,

obviously.

And I'll tell you one story and then I'll shut up.

So

we try to, I don't try to do it

mischievously, but I have a little bit of that in my character.

So I try to go to European institutions that are very left-wing.

They like the EU, whether it's in Brussels or Strasbourg or the NATO headquarters outside of Brussels.

So I took them all there.

And I hired this, you know,

we called up and we got this very, very eloquent British guy, right?

And he's the NATO propagandist.

And he's going to give a little talk about NATO.

But of course, the Europeans are all left-wing.

And they had, I think she was from

Slovakia, another person.

And they go in and they can't help it.

And every American audience that goes in there is probably pretty well off and left-wing.

So he goes in about the American role in NATO.

And unfortunately, they, you know, we must, we have a nuclear return, but you Americans were the only people to ever to use a bomb in combat.

You have to live with that burden of Hiroshima nagasaki and then you know and you were putting missiles in germany and subjecting and and so that the and then very

i said to myself i just thought oh my god this guy is going to get it big time yeah so he said should any questions like like the group just i mean i've never seen anybody devour them wow you know you want to have a million dead or you want to start pay the japanese back for killing 16 million people in China?

And then the next question.

And you know what?

So we had, so we put Germany under our nuclear umbrella.

So we sacrifice New York if the Soviets go into Berlin and we're supposed to feel guilty about that.

And you don't want the Persian missile, take them out.

Let them, you can deal with the SS-10

Russian.

Fine with us.

And if you don't want 330,000, you should have taken them out, American troops from day one.

And oh, by the way, these were different questions.

Like one question.

I'm mistaken, sir.

Did the United States transport without one person lost 2 million people between 1917 and 1919

to win the war and then to keep the troops their occupation?

Oh,

I'm mistaken.

I somehow thought that the United States had to do it all over again in the Second World War.

And

did the United States help?

Who won the Cold War?

And so this guy just,

he came up to me and he was just, I felt sorry for him.

And this has happened in different venues in Austria.

And our guys are so great, but they're so talented and bright.

I mean,

I couldn't have done as well as they do.

So they're business people.

They're in the real world, right?

They're making decisions.

They all run businesses or they're doctors or lawyers and they deal with all these different types of situations, but they're not how hot house academics but anyway that just to finish it the guy comes up to me afterwards and says

uh mr hansen i got to talk to you i said yeah he said

who are you

he said who are me oh i mean you you people who are you people

where did you come from i could in in 100 lectures i've never seen any americans like you that they don't exist where did you come from i'm treated with respect and nodding.

These people were furious at me.

What did I do?

And I said, you met real Americans.

This is America.

It's not the people that you, that get from, you know, the universities or Hollywood or whoever you talk to.

Get used to it.

This is America.

And we're not going to, we're proud of what we did.

And we're always going to be proud.

And we didn't appease Hitler.

And we weren't, we didn't give up 70 miles of Belgium in World War I.

We didn't crumble.

You know, we didn't cop out on the Cold War.

We did these things.

We're not bragging about it, but you brought it up.

Right.

And, you know, probably used to those, you know, the Ivy League alumni travel programs where they, that's probably what he had.

Well, you know, that's funny you said that because when I...

talked to Al and we decided this, what I did was I looked at the Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, you know, alumni tours, and I gave him the list of hotels where they were staying because sometimes they advertise it.

And I said, can you beat the hotels?

You know what I mean?

If they were class four, I want luxury class in every city.

He said, yes, I can.

And then I said, these are the speakers they have.

I can get better speakers.

And they're having eight lectures.

I can give 11.

So, and then I said, I want this to be 60% of the cost.

And I said to Al,

why are they charging so much?

Well, advertise.

I said, we're not going to advertise.

We're no money on advertising.

We'll do it through our website.

And we have no administrators.

Everybody that's on this tour works.

Right.

And we had, you know, two young women as aides, and one was my daughter.

And we had

Rebecca Dell as an administrator at Hillsdale, who was wonderful.

And gosh, we did it at very little cost.

And we have a very, it was very competitive.

And the only tragedy is the last five years, we've had to limit the number of people that could come because we've tried 100, and it's not the same intimate experience as 50.

And we've got two or 300 that want to go.

So, yeah, we've had people that call and want to buy it.

And I thought, it has no value.

You know what I mean?

What am I going to do?

And one guy called me and said, Well, why don't you do like we'll buy you out and we'll run nine or ten of these.

And then you can, you can be be Rick Steves and fly around for one day to each one of them.

And I said, I'm no Rick Steves.

I can't do that.

Right.

Anyway, that's the story of the VDH tours.

We'll have one last one.

Well, again, if anyone is interested in what that last one is, go to victorhanson.com and you'll click on the link for it.

It's really wow.

We'll have a great lecture on tanks.

I promise all of you.

We're going to talk about the Panther

versus the Sherman versus the late entry

Pershing versus the T34 versus the Stalin and what their role, if any,

was in the Normandy campaign and what the fables and exaggerations are about them versus the reality.

That'll be very interesting.

And stuff like that.

Those are the types of discussions we have.

Right.

Well, Victor, I'd like to thank our listeners for doing just that listening.

Very loyal listenership here.

No matter what platform or website you listen to the show on, thank you.

Those who listen on iTunes and Apple can leave zero to five star ratings, and nearly everyone leaves five stars.

We thank you.

And some of those folks also leave comments.

I'm going to read two here quickly.

One is titled Great Show.

I began listening after my dad gave me the Savior Generals, which I enjoyed.

Upon finding the podcast, I recommended it to my dad.

We now both listen and discuss the show regularly.

Great and balanced insights without demagoguery.

I learn a lot every episode.

And this is from Union County Dad, and then another one titled Best Overall Commentary.

In my humble opinion, there's deep analysis, great historical fluency, and measured critique of public policy and cultural trends.

Highly informative.

VDH is a gentleman and a scholar, a rare find these days.

That's from Read More Poems.

Thank you.

Read More Poems.

Thank you, Union County Dad.

Before I say thank you to everyone for listening, I do want to remind our listeners that Jack Fowler, the guy who's babbling with the Bronx accent right now, every week writes a free email newsletter called Civil Thoughts, published by Amphil, the Centers for Civil Society.

And it has a dozen plus recommended readings of things I've come across in the previous week that I think you, dear intelligent American, would appreciate knowing and maybe even reading.

Click on the link, read the excerpt.

So you can sign up for that at civilthoughts.com.

And thank you for those who do that and those who send kind notes about that they're enjoying the newsletter.

So thank you all.

Thank you, Victor, again, for sharing all

the wisdom you did today.

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

Thank you, you, everybody, for listening.

It's much, much appreciated.