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Hello, this is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin Annely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is also an author, a scholar, a political commentator, and we've got lots today on the news that we're going to be looking at into Biden's recent trip to the Ukraine and some of the other current events happening in our nation today.

So stick with us.

We'll take a break and come right back.

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We're back.

Victor, I always ask you how you're doing.

I hope you're doing well.

It seems like, you know, California weather, maybe if we could address that for a second.

Very, very strange.

I'm out here with you in California and we are getting some very cold, strange, strong winds and very cold mornings and days in particular.

What were your thoughts on these storms that are hitting California?

Well, I have a lot of thoughts.

I mean, I get my weekly water report

and this is the wettest

season

that we've had in about 50 years.

It's also the coldest.

And this is, but what's so What's so unusual about it is

with all of that bounty that we had, 160% of normal, they let it 90% of it go out.

It's not there.

They let it go out to the ocean.

And that was Gavin Newsom and his bureaucracy.

And yet they did that because they said we're in a drought.

We're still officially, they say, in a drought.

And he's still talking about water rationing.

So you have all this water.

So why not fill up the reservoirs or send them through the irrigational systems, irrigation systems in the Central Valley, and all these saturating ponds are everywhere.

There's one right now on our old place.

Why doesn't he just do it?

But he didn't.

And it's still global warming, global warming, global warming, global warming.

But if you believe in global warming, then stock the water so you can survive it.

But they don't want to, because if you can survive it, then they think you've overcome global warming and you cannot be into like a COVID-type lockdown emergency where, you know, never let a crisis go to waste.

So we have this Orwellian situation where it's wet, wet, wet, cold, cold, cold.

And you're right, it's five days now is going to start with another record snow spell, four to six feet in the Sierra, and they let it go.

And if you look at San Luis or Folsom or New Milones or Millerton, where we are, they're only 50 to 60% full.

It makes no sense.

And so even Gavin Newsom finally came out and said

this has to stop.

Well,

what he means is that you have these automatons in the Department of Water Resources that just think that they have their agenda about fish and riparian restoration, and we're about 1850.

And damn it, they don't care.

They're going to let all the water go out and say, look, it's a natural running,

just like our great-great-great-grandfathers used to talk about.

Sea, see, see, and the little smelt's going to get a lot of new fresh water out in the delta.

That's all they think about.

And so,

you know, this is, there are contracts with California Agriculture, with the California Water Project, and they're only getting on this year 25%.

It's incredible what they're doing.

It's almost as if they said, we're in a permanent drought.

It's going to be hotter than usual.

Very little rain,

very little snow.

We've got to go into water rationing.

Agriculture is going to have to idle acreage.

We've got to put our first emphasis on people in the the city and restoring the ecology of California.

Oh,

yes, this is the wettest, coldest month, but that doesn't mean it's not global warming.

Believe me, it's cold and it's wet because of global warming.

It's called global chaos.

That's how they think.

It's a suicidal impulse.

It really is.

What would you say to somebody who says, well, they're looking at the snowfall and they're just preparing for the summer so that their reservoirs are not too full, that they get into trouble as the spring moves on.

Yeah, they told us we were,

that's what they,

that's what they've been saying.

But

they, but at the same time they've said that, they said, well, it hasn't rained.

It hasn't snowed in two weeks.

So don't think we're out of the drought.

So what is this latest series of storm?

I'm looking out the window right now at a beautiful almond orchard in full bloom that's going to lose a lot of its blooms.

Last night it was 32 degrees.

They're out there spraying fungicide on it.

It's too cold for the bees.

Bees have to have 55 degrees.

They're snugly in their little hives.

Speaking of which, I got stung three times on the ear the other day walking through the almonds.

And I never had a reaction to bees, but I had a terrible reaction to it.

So my point is that

they're anti-empirical.

They don't care.

All they want to do is shut down 5 million acres of agriculture, import food from dangerous places like Mexico or South America or other places and take that water,

drive out the farmers and take that water and say that you know, you can fly fish in the Kings River, you know, down by, I don't know, Fireball or the San Joaquin River, the Sacramento River are just like they used to be.

They don't even know what used to be is.

So these people,

it's just what people have warned us, as I said, from Aristotle to Plato to Tocqueville, even Jefferson, that when you create an entire group of unelected people that are not subject to audit or elections,

they start to run the country.

And so you've got a bunch of tenured, lifetime government employees that can't be fired with little alphabetic letters after their names denoting some type of wisdom.

That would, if you put them on 100 acres and said, you've got to make a living, and they would fail.

And you give them $150,000 and

all they do is make life miserable for everybody else.

And they hire people just, yeah, and they hire people just like themselves.

They do.

They do.

They do.

They hate.

And so here you have all of these talented farmers that are feeding the world.

And the wealthiest, Fresno County is the wealthiest county in the world as far as value of its products produced.

And they're strangling it.

They're going to leave.

These people are, I mean, we lost 500,000 people from California.

They took an aggregate revenue of about $17 billion in goods and services out of California.

The only thing that is making this state survive is Silicon Valley, and they are laying off 100,000 people in Silicon Valley.

What else is there in this state now?

It's just government, government, government spending and it was Silicon Valley and it was farming.

They destroyed timber.

They destroyed minerals.

They're doing their best to destroy gas and oil.

We were number two for a while in the country.

We're number five, six.

So they're destroying all of these industries, and you're going to end up with just a bunch of people with inherited money in the Bay Area, and they're going to be in some huge castle, and all of us peasants are going to be out there working a search for them, I guess.

Yeah.

They seem to be destroying also small business.

I know I've talked to a number of small businesses leaving because they just

can't get around all the regulations here enough to even hire.

I remember you were telling us one guy came and went to the business.

I was riding my bicycle the other day, and there's a guy out filming.

I saw him.

He had a camera and a tripod.

He was a contractor.

I mean, a big housing development in Fresno.

They were

filming it.

In other words, every house that's built, they know they're going to either have a regulator come and say, oh, take that out.

That's against, or they're going to be sued by somebody.

And so they want to film how they build it.

And it's crazy to film how you build it.

It's like a policeman with a body cam.

And yeah, there's too many regulators, but they don't have, it's like the so-called victims, the identity politics victims.

There's too many of them.

There's not enough victimizers.

Well, the regulators, there's too many, and there's not enough people left to be regulated.

They killed, killed, strangled, decapitated the golden goose.

There's no more eggs.

Yeah.

And that's why people are leaving.

God, if I was younger, I would leave.

I hate to say that.

I'm looking out right now out the window.

This land was, you know, bought from the railroad 1872 of my great

Pauline Davis's father, Rhys Davis, his father, Cyrus Davis, his mother,

Luciana Davis.

She came out here and to give it all up.

But

it's insulting to live in this state because you get 13% income, 11% in many counties sales taxes, the highest gasoline taxes, and then you get the worst infrastructure in the United States and you know 27 percent of the population of this of the residents were not born in the United States so you would think that there would be a huge state program of language immersion assimilation acculturation integration and it's just the opposite It's just

every little tribal group and finally you get to the point they're all coming here.

Hello, they're all coming, they, they, they.

They're coming from Oaxaca State, they're coming from India, they're coming from Southeast Asia,

they're coming from Taiwan, they're coming from Korea,

or what?

To get away from something, not to reproduce it here.

So, if you don't give them this culture, and then it's so strange.

I listen, you know, every once in a while, I turn on to CNN or MSNBC or read the accursed New York Times, and and it's all white rage, white supremacy, white privilege.

But if it's so bad, why is everybody coming to absorb that culture?

They don't have to do that.

You can have indigenous culture in Mexico.

You can have a very different paradigm in Southeast Asia.

It's a wonderful culture in India.

But why come here and say that this white toxic culture is pernicious, but I want it under no circumstances to leave?

Or I want to change it radically so it resembles the culture that I just left.

You see what I'm saying?

Yeah, I do.

It doesn't make any sense.

It's a suicidal impulse.

Well, the sense of it is, is that the people who are saying that are getting dividends from saying that.

It is.

It's all a money thing.

They're making

money.

It's a day job.

So

a guy goes out and lives in nice suburbs.

I'll just use reference where I am.

So he lives in in a suburb, say, of North Fresno out near the foothills.

He bought a home he could never afford in the Bay Area, probably 2,800 square feet.

He paid $500,000 for a beautiful home.

And then he drives with his Tesla into, I don't just pick a name, Cal State Fresno or Fresno City College.

And he spouts out diversity, equity, inclusion, how racist it is, how horrible.

And he gets his $150,000 and goes back to the suburb.

That's it?

Yes, yes.

And you know how I know this is not, well, at least I have an example of it.

That I think he's from Turkey.

He's a basketball player, and they won't let him play.

And he said that last night on Tucker.

I think it was Tucker.

He said, Yeah, I go into the locker room.

None of these guys believe that stuff.

They will say straight to your face in the locker room, I'm just saying it because my PR guy tells me I have to say it.

Yeah, that's

he's

what is his name, Ennis Friedrich?

Yeah, yeah.

Didn't he change his name?

I think his name was Ennis Cantor, and he renamed it Freedom.

But he's that tall guy.

Yes.

Yeah, he's always saying that these people are hypocritical.

They trash the country that birthed them and enriched them, and they do business and praise China that would destroy them.

Yes.

And they do this all as a front, that if you went into the locker room with them, like he's been there, they'll just tell you they don't even care about the things that they're saying.

I go back to that scene that's imprinted, it's singed in my memory.

It was in 2020 during the lockdowns, right after George Floyd and I went on campus

and I parked and I walked across the campus through a parking lot and two young men got...

parked their BMW convertible and it had they had flip-flops cut off and it said BLM and I had a fist And then they got out of this BMW and they walked to the Stanford campus.

And then I saw all this BLM and Antifa activity, you know, posters and speakers.

I thought, wow, this is so strange.

All these people are so left.

It's like Bankman Freed, you know, he was so far left.

Yeah.

And yet, that nexus between all this money and this overweening desire to have material luxuries and affluence and satisfying the basic appetites appetites and then obsessed with prestige and status and then this phony little Marxist

plaything, you know, that they dress up like Marxists or they act like Marxists during their day jobs.

It has consequences because

these people are serious.

This upper middle class that thinks that this country is so bad.

But,

you know, just driving, if you came from outer space, you said, okay, here's California,

its percentage of the state budget has just exploded from about 7% medi-cal health for indigent to about 40%.

So we have no money to make the 99 six lanes from Sacramento to the Grapevine or 101 from, you know, Ventura all the way up to Northern California.

We don't have any.

money to make that six lanes or even four lanes as a freeway.

But we're going to have 27% of the drivers who are not born in the United States, then you know what's going to happen.

It's going to happen when Victor was driving the other day to Fresno, and there was a person who was in the center lane with her head right next to the steering wheel going about 40 miles an hour wide.

Big semi-trucks, 20-ton trucks were trying to go in and around her, right?

Oh my God.

Yeah.

Or another person was driving with about 25 limbs in the back of his panel.

I don't even do that when I was farming.

That's stupid.

And it was just a question of when that limb comes off, is it going to fly over my car or impale me?

You know, just driving like, ooh.

And you drive on the side of the road and you look at all the trash in the Central Valley.

It's just amazing that flies off cars or people throw out the window.

It reminds me of living in Greece in the early 70s when, you know, you'd be in a bus and the bus driver would say, don't get my bus bus dirty and he'd come by back as we were on an archaeological trip and he would get a big plastic bag and he'd make you throw all the stuff you were eating in it and then as he was drawing he'd just roll down the window and throw it out the window on the road yeah same idea

retrogression and civilization yeah and you know i i i see it every day out here on the farm i look at piles that grow of trash and people i saw a person the other day he came in

and just as I came out with the dogs, he was in this alleyway adjoining my place.

And I said, can I help you?

And he had, I looked in and he and his wife had six big garbage bags.

You know what I mean?

Just junk.

In other words, he was saying to me telepathically, hey, you idiot, I can go onto your place and I'm going to dump six bags of trash and you're so stupid, you're going to pick up every one because you don't like that more in your landscape.

And I don't give a blank about you.

So I said, well, what are you out here for?

He said,

I lost a bicycle, a blue bicycle.

I said, a blue bicycle?

You lost it out in the middle of nowhere in an orchard?

And he said, yeah, I'm out looking for it.

And I said, I think I know what you're looking for.

And it's not a bicycle.

It's a place to dispose of something.

Oh, no, man, I get you.

I'm with you.

I'm just turning around now.

And so then i turned into i had the dogs with me and i turned into the orchard and he looks around and then he goes right back to where we're talking so then i turn around and walk back and then he turns around and takes off

it's like cat and mouse and what he's basically the message he's sending to me and almost everybody who's listening to this is f you i have a right to go into your property understand that i have a right to go i don't need to speak english i could barely understand him you know because he didn't speak very good english and i have a right to throw trash all over your place and there's i have a right never to face consequences if you're so stupid enough to call the fresno county sheriff or the salma police they're not going to do anything to me they're going to hang up on you understand that and that's why i'm doing this and you know what if you start arguing or yelling you don't know what i have in this car

i don't that's true that's that's the message the message of the culture that he's in

is that somebody's Somebody's sending him that message.

I know.

I was losing my temper, and I thought, wow, you're not armed.

This guy's covered with tattoos.

He barely speaks English.

I'm thinking, hmm, that would be a nice way to die.

I'm working on this book, and I'm writing the chapter on the Third Punic War, and I'm translating Appian into Greek.

I take a break.

I'm translating Appian into Greek, and I go out onto my property, and I'm shot by somebody who argues that he has a right to to dump trash all over my place.

What a life.

Sounds like, you know, you reminded me, didn't Plutarch write in Greece in like the second century and it was

going downhill like that?

He wrote a really sad thing.

I think it's in the beginning of the life of Demosthenes or Alexander.

He lived in a place called Chaeronea,

which is famous because of the battle of 88 BC, but especially 338, where Greece lost its freedom to Alexander.

Alexander's first great battle.

He was 18 years old, and they destroyed Greek freedom on the plains of Chaeronea.

I'm going off on a tangent, but when I was 20, I wrote an essay when I was studying Greece on it, and I camped out there.

It was stupid.

It was in February.

It was very cold.

There's a train station there.

The modern Greek pronunciation is Haronia.

Heronia.

And they have the lion of Chaeronea.

It's so sad.

Over the battlefield,

Philip of Macedon, the victor, erected, it's controversial who's underneath it, but there were 245 skeletons exhumed, I think, in the 1890s by

his name was Soterides.

We haven't discussed this before, so I'm doing this at a talk.

Anyway,

the sacred band of so-called lovers that were anchored in the Theban right wing, they were wiped out to the man and they were buried there.

And guess what?

2,400 years later, they excavated, and I think think 1892 or something found them oh really and they and they of course brigand brigands in the early 19th century tried to break up every monument to see if there was gold and they broke the part the poor lion but it was reconstructed it sits there over the battlefield today you can go there but cicero uh

plutarch in Roman Greece had a little schoolhouse there and he laments that he has to go all the way to Athens to find a library to work because he has no resources.

He was a Boeotian and he's very proud of Charindia.

It's very close to Labadia, the turnoff

to Delphi.

That's my favorite part of Greece.

And everybody says, well, Victor, it's ugly.

Compare it to Makronica or Wolos or

the islands.

Yeah, but it looks like the San Joaquin Valley.

I kind of like that.

How far is it from Athens?

Just so I can get an idea of how far Pluto is.

Well, I can tell you.

Yeah, it's 50 miles over the pass at Cathyron

to Thebes.

If you do what the old road traces the ancient route that comes in by Eleusis, not the new one that goes around,

you know, by Delium and that one.

So it's another 15 miles from Thebes to the north, and it sits below, you can see Helicon, Mount Helicon.

Yeah, and Hesiod lived up in the, I've hiked up there to his birthplace at Askra.

And then way off in the distance, you can see Mount

Parnassus above Delphi as you go through the Boeotian Valley up and on your way up to

Thermopylae.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we need to take a break and then we will come back and talk a little bit about the Biden trip.

So stick with us and we'll be right back.

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We're back.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor has a website, VictorHanson.com.

It's called The Blade of Perseus, and you can join either with a free subscription and get onto our newsletter list, which is very helpful for the new things that come to Victor's site.

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So, Victor, our president, it's hard to to say

that word, but anyways, our president, Biden, has just been on a trip.

And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your reflections on that.

And, you know, comparison to other presidential trips is sort of of interest to me.

Yeah, well, why'd he go on the trip?

Okay.

So

he went on the trip.

because he's now going back down again.

He went up to a high of 43%

approval.

And he's going to, and some polls are coming out, which are going to lower his average to 39.

And so people are,

he doesn't know what to do.

He can't say, I'm going to go to the border, can he?

He's not going to go to East Palestine

because he's written those people.

These were the dregs and the chumps and the irredeemables that he and Hillary have

and Obama, the clingers, that they have disparaged for years.

And he doesn't want to face those people.

He doesn't care about them because,

what, they're white working-class Trump supporters.

He didn't care if they're polluted or not.

So, he goes all the way over there, and of course, they tip off the Russians so that the Russians don't send a strike.

That's kind of an understood Cold War relic.

You don't try to take out the leader of a bipolar rivalry.

And then he

arrives, and of course,

he's out with Zelensky, and the air raid sirens start to blare.

Uh-oh, the commander-in-chief is in battle, kind of like Hillary when she landed, what, in Belgrade?

But of course, a CNN reporter of all people says, This is kind of funny.

You know, we haven't had an air raid in five days, and there doesn't seem to be looks on the sky, there doesn't seem to be anything going on.

And then, of course, the MSNBC and all of those people, Washington Post, this is very courageous.

The commander-in-chief

brave fire, he went into the combat zone, unlike other presidents.

No, Donald Trump went with millennia, remember, to Iraq.

And of course, they trashed him.

They said he put people in danger.

And he went,

he did that surprise.

Was it Christmas?

I think it was, in Afghanistan in 2019.

And Bush went right in during the surge to Iraq.

He went in right after the statue fell.

So Bush went all the time, but that's just blotted out in our Orwellian media that Joe Biden is kind of like he's, I don't know, just Putin's the new corn pop, and he's cut off a piece of chain and he's yelling and screaming up there about what he's going to do for Ukraine.

And

it

begs the question, what are we doing?

And what is the strategic plan that Joe Biden has?

And we know what the strategic plan of Vladimir Putin's is.

Vladimir Putin was,

I'm going to send in my special forces.

They're going to decapitate the government in Kiev, and I'll just swallow with very little

bother eastern Ukraine, consolidate it, and then I'll take western Ukraine in a couple of years, just like I went into Ossatia, just like I went into the Donbass, just like I went into Crimea.

And that didn't work.

So everybody said, wow, we beat him.

Haha, Putin.

He's a creep.

He's a monster.

No,

he's got 10 times your

GDP.

He's got three and a half times your population.

He's got 30 times your territory.

And they don't value human life when it comes to war.

25 million people.

That famous anecdote in World War II when

Eisenhower was meeting with

Zhukov.

And he said, how do you go through these German minefields?

Because they stymie us.

And Zhukov says, we just send a bunch of troops through and they get blown up.

And then whatever happens, we follow where the bodies are they they're kind of like human mind sweepers and ike i think that's in victory in europe he a crusade in europe he writes i don't think this would be practical in the u.s army with our different value system but anyway that's what putin putin's uh strategy now is the meat grinder right

The meat grinder.

We're going to use our greater population, GDP.

We're going to have a late winter, early spring offensive, and we're going to grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, and try to kill as many Ukrainians as we can and keep sending rockets and missiles and drones and artillery and blow up and destroy their country and make it uninhabitable.

We've got rid of 8 million of them that have left.

It's propped up by Western money and Western arms, and then the West will get tired of this.

That's the strategy.

We laugh at it and we say, oh, it's not working.

It's not working.

We have sanctions.

No, he's selling oil, all the oil.

He's pumping almost at a record level.

And who's buying it?

His new friends, China, India,

Turkey?

And we can see what's happening.

He's going to be selling enriched uranium to RA to jumpstart their bomb, which they'll probably get within a year or two.

They haven't already got it.

He's got North Korea off its leash, acting insane again, bragging about it.

It's got enough missiles to hit, overwhelm our defenses.

Turkey, I don't even think it's a NATO.

I mean, it's NATO member de jure, but de facto, it's selling stuff to Russia, buying Russia

Russian oil.

Every oligarch in the world that's scared to set foot in Cyprus is now going to Turkey, Greek Cyprus, that is.

They're all leaving England.

They're all going to Turkey where they have immunity.

And so they've created a pretty nice little alliance.

And it's about half the world's population.

They've got a lot of resources.

And that is something that we don't even think about.

We never think about.

And so Joe Biden's, my biggest criticism is that he's, besides that he's an idiot and he's a blowhard, and he always was a blowhard, half-educated and loud,

is that he's

He doesn't understand that you talk quietly with a club rather than a twig you yell at somebody.

So he is pushing when he said, I value Boglund is just not going to do, he's not going to have one inch of Ukraine and I'm going to defend every inch.

Okay, we understand that.

But you might put something in your speech to the effect that what we want to avoid is a confrontation between two nuclear superpowers.

And there has to be a mechanism by which we can avoid that.

And so while we are fighting to

the Ukrainians are bravely fighting to protect their territorial integrity and we are sending a lot of substantial help to them, this does not mean that we seek a war with either China or Russia.

But rather than saying to China, look what we said to China yesterday.

If you send weapons to Russia, that's a red line.

Now, what would that red line be?

Oh, no.

Oh, last time we had a red line, I think it was Barack Obama said, if they start moving gas around and stuff like that in Syria, that's a red line.

Remember?

And then Assad said, hmm, that's exactly what I'll do.

Good idea.

And then John Kerry, you know, they said, uh-oh, we might have to bomb.

And all of a sudden, they called the Russians up.

And they said, you know,

you haven't been in the Middle East in 45 years since they kicked you out.

And Sadat said, come on back in.

Come back into Syria.

We're kind of, we don't want to get involved.

You can tell us whether they got gas or not.

Then they put out Susan Rice four or five times to tell one of her serial lies.

Oh,

we got rid of it all.

That's how they operate.

And so

they don't have any respect for them.

They don't have any deterrence.

And they're giving these threats to the Chinese that told us basically in Anchorage, Alaska, in March of Biden's first year, screw you.

We're not going to listen to you anymore.

And so what would be the red lines that China is facing?

What is Qi going to say?

What are they going to do to me?

Uh-oh.

They're going to do,

are they going to flee like they did in Afghanistan?

Or are they going to turn the woke brigades, all of the transgendered people that are going to be attacking me from the Pentagon?

Are they going to get, I don't know, their Orwellian vocabulary to have verbal blast at me.

What are they going to do?

And so they don't fear us.

But when you threaten them with Joe Biden's He-Man talk or Blinkens or Sullivan, there's going to be consequences.

What are the consequences?

Are you going to tell Michael Bloomberg, hey, you can't

get that $10 billion out of there?

Are they going to say to the NBA, get that $5 billion investment out of there?

Are they going to tell Bill Gates, you were wrong about China having a wonderful COVID policy?

Get your Microsoft out of there.

Is that what they're going to do?

Are they going to tell Fauci and all those people no more money to the Wuhan lab?

No, they're not going to do any of that.

They're going to talk, talk, talk.

As you're talking, I'm reminded of Tucker Carlson, one of his monologues where he said,

America's power is evaporating.

I was wondering, so you must, do you agree with that, with Tucker?

Is America's power evaporating?

Yeah.

But I don't just say that.

I mean, I try to

find what we have to, our listeners demand, you know, we have a very intelligent, demanding audience, and they demand data.

So let's look at the data.

We're

$32 trillion in debt, and we're spending $450 billion, and it's going up because T-bills are up to 4%.

to finance that debt.

And he's spending

a trillion and a half a year.

And as we know, the Congressional Budget Office just basically said Joe Biden is a liar.

He's the biggest spender in history.

These programs will cost $4 trillion that we don't have.

Okay, so financially, we're in a mess.

Secondly, this country is in a virtual civil war, cultural war.

where two things are happening.

We've never seen anything like the migrations that are going on.

This is much greater than the Oklahoma diaspora of the 1930s, what Steinbeck chronicled.

500,000 people left California.

300,000 left New York in a year.

200,000 left Illinois.

People are leaving these big urban blue cities.

And it's incredible.

It's incredible disruptive.

It's changing the nature of the country.

And we're getting this blue, blue, blue, red, red, red hostility as if they're two different countries.

That's what's going on.

And then when you look at the Pentagon budget and you look at the huge overhead, just the other day, there was more of this diversity.

Biden has a new five-year plan to impose diversity, equity, inclusion on all of the federal bureaucracy.

We look at the Pentagon and they've got all of these diversity officers, et cetera.

And the message is going out to all of your captains and your majors and your lieutenant colonels and your colonels and your one stars.

And if you can show us that you were champions of diversity, equity, you're going to get promoted.

And we don't care how many, how well your men perform on the battlefield or in training.

We're interested in this one ideological commissariat.

And that's, that's what, and the Chinese know that.

I think the Chinese are saying,

you know what, you guys, we copied you because we did the Comissar thing

under Mao, and we lost a million and a half men in Korea, and it doesn't work.

So we copied you guys, at least for as far as the military goes, we have a meritocracy as much as we can under this corrupt regime.

But you guys are acting like Maoists, and that's great news for us.

So

financially, culturally,

you pick up the paper, you turn on the TV.

What is the news of the day?

It's always wokes.

They're after Abraham Lincoln this week because

they found a letter or he said that

people should go back to Africa after the Civil War.

Did he deport people to Africa?

No.

He just threw off some thought, and now that's proof that Lincoln was a racist.

And now we're

BMI or is a big story.

They took away Stonewall's

statue of the math instructor at VMI right before the Civil War, great Stonewall Jackson.

And there's a big argument and fight over the diversity, equity, inclusion, new superintendent.

And it just goes on and on.

It's like a revolutionary France, maybe, the 1780s or 1848 in Europe.

Or it's kind of like the 60s, but much worse.

And so we're in turmoil financially.

We have no border.

It doesn't exist.

There's 5 million people came across.

And you just, and then we'll get to the cabinet members in another show, but

they're explicit about it.

They don't believe it should exist.

They think that their values override statutes.

Mallorca said, well, it's our values.

We don't turn anybody away.

It's our value.

No, there's a law, you idiot.

If I was in Utah right now, I'd quote him and say, you know what?

It's our values.

We put people ahead of three-toed lizards.

So I don't care if that SOB lizard is on the endangered species.

I'm building this shopping center right over his little burrow.

And I'm going to ignore federal law.

Is that what kind of world he wants?

Because that's what he...

These people don't understand the consequences of their ideology, or maybe they do too well.

But yeah, this country

is not ready

and then you'll say well give me some actual

excuse me give me some actual data

okay look at Afghanistan the greatest military humiliation in the United States since we left Saigon 50 years ago and

what else could we look at

how about culture what is the what are their cultural references how are they doing How is the NBA attendance?

It's lower than when Michael Jordan.

I think we had in the last game

of the playoffs when Michael Jordan, 91 or 92,

they were so,

I think there was like 38 million people watched it.

And now they're very happy that last year, the last game is 11 million, or it went up from eight.

It's got a quarter of their audience when we have 50 million more people in the country.

And then ditto the Oscars are done.

They've been destroyed.

Nobody watches them.

Their audience is non-existent.

Same thing with the Tony's, the Grammys.

And look at CNN.

That used to be in every, I mean, that was, you could call it left of center, but Ted Turner had a, that was a radical idea to have a cable news network with 24-hour news.

And they've destroyed that.

You got a character like Don Lemon or Lemon or whatever his name is.

I mean, he's just a joke.

So that whole, they destroyed that.

And

I don't know,

I'm trying to look at,

I see strength in the economy.

I mean, we have cutting-edge products still.

We make good tractors,

we make good software.

But when I look at the engineering pro, I think 45%

of the STEM PhD programs at Stanford

are not U.S.

citizens.

And so

I just

look at the

transportation.

We'll get to that in another talk, but with all these near-misses and train derailments.

And

so I think that the country is in real bad trouble.

It reminds me of what my father said.

That was in 1971.

He said, we dropped.

I had a twin brother, Dew, and he said, he's going to Stevenson College, you're going to Cal College.

So I had an older brother there too so they were in the same cluster and i was going to go by myself said i'll walk over with you we'll we'll find out where your room is so you know he's kind of a guy he looked like he was a stranger in a strange land right you're kind of embarrassed of your dad with polyester pants on and

yeah i got the picture yeah you got the picture and all hey man like where do you want to go man like hey how'd you do you want to tote man that kind of stuff and you go into your dorm and it's like he looks around and he smells marijuana.

And then he goes into my room.

And I like my roommate, but the guy had, I won't mention his name.

He turned out to be very successful.

He had long hair and he said that he didn't bathe.

And he said to me, I hope you don't get upset.

I haven't bathed in a year and I will not bathe.

So I said, okay, I'll just spray the room with Reitgard, which I did.

I did.

I did.

So we were walking around.

And then, as I said, my dad went into a bathroom and a girl and a boy were in the boy's bathroom

in Cordeus in the shower.

And of course, my dad was looking at the girl.

So he comes back and we got the room and we walk back for lunch.

And he's going to go back to Selma.

And he says, you know,

This country is going to be in a hell of a fix when these people run it.

And it looks to me like they all got money and they all got connections and they're going to run this country.

I am very scared for your country, your country.

I won't be here.

He was absolutely right.

I read my alumni news and I see these people and I see the titles, you know, professor of this and director of this bureaucracy and this screenwriter, this foundation head.

And then I have this image of them as students, right?

Out in the amphitheater with the students for a democratic society or calling

ex-president a blood monster, bloodthirsty monster.

And I thought, these people are running the country.

And they had the same attitude as they did when they were students, only they're rich now.

Well, they were always rich, but now it's their money.

So, yeah, I think the country's in really big shape.

And that's why I get really angry about this East

Palestine.

I mean,

it's just the most overt thing I've ever seen in my life.

It's just this toxic plume.

They have dead fish.

They've got chickens that fall over.

They've got all this oil rings in the streams.

They've got people that have nosebleeds or coughing.

And

they wheel out the governor DeWine every once in a while.

And he says, well, our tests show there's nothing wrong.

And then they bring the guy from the EPA and he said, well, we're here to help you.

And they refuse FEMA, you know, no FEMA help.

Wow.

You know, you think that on day two, they would have flown in a C5 with,

I don't know, a tent city, kind of like they set up during COVID that nobody used for New York.

Remember that?

Yeah.

The big hospital with tents and nurses, and they would have had everybody in there to inspect.

They would have had a whole team living there.

They didn't do any of that.

Nothing.

It's only now that FEMA's gone in there.

So, and why is that?

They hate those people.

They hate them because

they're not in the news.

They're not taken with Joe Biden.

They don't care about diversity, equity, inclusion.

They're not racist.

They don't care what a person looks like.

They just do their job.

They get up every morning.

They do their job.

They make the country run.

They don't bitch.

They don't complain.

And they don't have the wherewithal of the bicosto elite that cashed in in globalization.

And yet, there's a nobility about them that this president won't acknowledge.

He hates them.

And I can feel the hatred that people have when I'm out of my malu here and other places on the coast.

I can feel it.

And

so.

Can I take us back to Joe Biden

in the Ukraine for just one second?

Because

given all that you're saying, that Putin is settling in for a meat grinder strategy and the American cultural, political, to some extent, economic malaise as well.

How seriously should Zelensky

take it when Joe says, quote, our unwavering and unflagging commitment to

Ukraine and,

quote, as long as it takes, unquote.

Well, nothing he says, you can take because he lies all the time.

I mean, he lied about the budget.

He lied about the border.

He said the border was secure.

He lies about a man that will lie about his own son dying in Iraq to gain sympathy, or lie about a noble truck driver that had tried to avoid his wife who pulled out in an intersection.

and unfortunately tragically killed them and then will tour the country and claim the guy was a drunk driver that killed his wife and destroy that person's reputation.

He'll do anything.

So he cannot be believed.

He never could be believed.

This is is the guy, remember,

that praised segregationists.

He praised Robert Byrd.

He said that James O.

Eastland, the segregationist, was his mentor.

And he said,

what I liked about him, he never called me boy.

He never called me boy.

He called me son.

Of course, Joe Biden called people boy.

He did it when he was president.

He just did it the other day.

He called the governor Maryland, first African-American governor.

He called him a boy.

And he said the same thing in New Orleans about one of his aides.

I got a boy down here.

And so that's who he is.

And so I don't believe anything he says.

I wouldn't trust anything.

He's committed $120 billion in cash and military supplies.

And we've taken the Ukrainians and by the end of the year, they're going to be the best equipped army in the world, probably.

With our most sophisticated weapons.

And the Europeans, you know, are

bringing stuff.

Let's not, let's be honest and just prune away all of the

verbiage.

When you look at NATO, it's not this juggernaut.

You have all the NATO members are coughing up three tanks here, five tanks here, arguing.

The whole attitude can be summed up by you first.

I'll give you my four leopard tanks if you send two challenger tanks.

If the United States sends some Abrams, then I'll give them up my leopard tanks.

I'll give some anti-tank weapons.

You see what I mean?

Yeah.

Because they're all thinking, uh-oh, I don't want to deal with Putin on my own.

So it's not an alliance that you would think.

And it's underarmed and underperformed.

And they just have been,

you know,

the alliance was based on Russia out, America in, Germany down.

Russia is in, we've kind of out, and Germany is up.

And that's the antithesis of what it was supposed to be.

So I don't think NATO's done to you look at us.

The country, if you look at the polls, Biden loses about 1 to 2%

every two or three weeks in the support for Ukraine.

And he does it for two reasons.

One, there's a lot of attention turned to the budget now.

There's a Republican House, and everybody's talking that we're broke and all we do is borrow money.

And he just writes a check to anybody who smiles at him overseas, and we don't have any money and the second they don't know where it's going to end nobody says i think mark milley has a press conference says hey this is general milley

and in accordance with my plan when i assured you that kiev would fall

and because i was so right when i told you that afghanistan was secure And when I made my call to my People's Liberation Army counterpart, and when I attacked the president for having me in a photo app, given all of that, I want to assure you, nobody's going to listen to that.

He's got zero credibility.

Nobody has a strategy.

Why don't they just say, our strategy is to do what?

Choice A,

we want to push the Russians back, and they're almost there to where the 2014 Russian border is, and then we will negotiate or make them a demilitarized zone.

Or B,

if this is their strategy, we want to expel every Russian back to the 213 borders.

That's not going to happen, Sammy.

They're not going to give up Ukraine.

And the amount of wherewithal to put every Russian out of Ukraine, as all these people keep bragging, how are you going to do it?

You're going to need a lot more than we're giving now, and you're going to have to stage attacks inside Russia.

hit their fuel lines, hit their freeways, hit their supply depots.

You're going to have to start attacking Russian assets in the Black Sea that supply Crimea.

I don't think that's going to go unanswered.

So what is the strategy?

Just tell us.

2013 borders, 2014 borders.

Just tell us, which is it?

And what is the plan to achieve?

The end.

There's an end and there's a means.

And this is how much money, blood, treasure we're willing to spend.

They don't talk about about that at all.

I'm going to get everyone.

He said the other day, Vladimir Putin's not going to have anybody in Russia.

Okay, just tell us how you get Vladimir Putin out.

Well, he's lost 200,000 people.

Can you imagine that?

200,000 people.

Well, he's got about 30 million people of military age.

And if they think we're attacking Mother Russia, and that's what he's trying to do every day long with his propaganda, convince Russians that that it's not about his aggression that started the whole damn thing, but it's about the West attacking Mother Russia, then they will join up at 100,000 a month.

And so

we heard all these lies, the sanction was going to cripple them, and this and this.

And as I said before,

There's something uncanny and eerie and almost inexplicable about how the left has turned into this bloodthirsty, we're going to get every Russian out of Ukraine and fight to the last Ukrainian.

And the fact that you've lost 200,000 dead people, probably 400,000, if you add the wounded, they don't care.

It makes no impression on them.

They just want to keep going.

And

they don't explain what the strategic goal is or what the mean, as I said, to achieve it.

I've never seen anything like it.

As I said earlier, it's, well, we were wrong on Russian collusion.

We almost got Russia.

We almost got Trump and Putin.

And then we kind of blew it with the Russian disinformation laptop.

Ah, but now we got him.

And only there's no Trump there.

And only no conservative ever said that Putin was not a thug.

But they've transmogrified into this new thing as if it's their latest cause celebrities.

And it's almost like global warming with them.

It's a religion.

And this is, you want to talk about the 10-year history of the Biden family and the Ukrainians and burisma and the corruption and the interference in the 2016 election with ukrainian ambassador writing op-eds about particular candidates and i won't even get into the role of lieutenant colonel vinman in the impeachment and it's it's not black and white it's very complex what's going on and given the history of anti-semitism in Ukraine and the treatment of the Jews in Ukraine.

And as you remember from the interview with Ido Ido Netanyahu, who corrected me when I mentioned Babayar, that the Ukrainians had killed over 30,000 Jews, he pointed out that it went back to the 19th century, bomb grams.

So it's a very complex issue.

And yes,

yes,

Vladimir Putin is an evil person.

And yes, he should have never invaded.

And yes, I wish he would get out of Ukraine.

But that's not what we're discussing now.

We're discussing how to stop a war before we have a nuclear war.

This is like the Spanish Civil War.

I wrote a column that six months ago that, you know, 36 to 39,

if you think about it, it wasn't just there was an experimental laboratory of death where they were trying, you know, Mischersmith's,

Stuka die bombers, Mark I and Mark II tanks.

uh the russians the italians the nazis etc but it was also a prelude of how the sides lined up for World War II, because it wasn't all clear that Italy was going to join Germany, for example, or Japan was going to join Germany, or that the Soviet Union was going to be on the side of the democracies, at least in the sense that they wanted the democracies and the fascists to knock each other off.

And what I'm getting at is there's a parallel here that this is the warm-up, I'm afraid, not just with IMARS

rocketry or sophisticated drones or improved javelins or the use of cyberspace and internet in the next war, hypersonic missiles and these devilish

weapons that they captured the other day that blow up the atmosphere with explosive gases, the Russians use, but it's also

a precursor to the new alliances, just like the Spanish Civil War.

You're starting to see it's going to be NATO and the United States, and it's going to be China and Russia, and maybe Turkey and Iran, and India is going to be opportunistic and maybe help them.

And that's scary.

Yeah, that sure is.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break.

We're with Victor Davis Hansen on his Victor Davis-Hansen show, and we'll be right back after these messages.

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I would like to remind everybody that Victor is available, or you can connect with him on social media at the Morning Cup on Facebook and at V D Hansen on Twitter and also Getter.

So he's got lots of different, I guess, can I call him handles?

I'm not sure on social media.

Victor, we were just talking and you were saying that the war is bogging down and we don't see either side winning.

But the way you were describing it to me sounded a lot like Vietnam.

I know that you said the Spanish Civil War, but it sounded a lot like Vietnam to me in the sense that

the strategy isn't clear and we keep pouring some

arms in, you know, some help of some sort,

and are not too sure what we're doing.

And that's why

the strategy in Vietnam, and I'm reading volume two right now of Mark Moyer's wonderful new book, second volume, Triumph Regain, was Triumph Forsaken, Triumph Regained.

And this is the war from 65 to 1968.

And what he shows is that on the battlefield,

the U.S.

Army and U.S.

Marines just were devastated.

I mean, it was a tragedy.

We lost 58,000 people, but they killed over a million North Vietnamese.

They just devastated the enemy.

And the reason that we didn't win is that we could not translate those tactical victories into a strategic resolution.

And when we almost did,

Richard Nixon, and that's going to be his volume three,

was facing an impeachment, so resigned.

He resigned, and then he lost, the Republicans lost control of the Congress, and they cut off 34 resolutions to cut off all aid to South Vietnam.

And they lost it.

So they won on the battlefield, and then they said, we're sick of it.

And the Soviet Union and China said, we're not sick of it.

Our guy has lost a million guys and your guy has lost 200,000 and you're winning.

But if you want to throw away the victory,

We're happy to go into Haiphong with our ships and we're happy to supply the North Vietnamese, and they're going to go right in and take Saigon.

That's what happened.

So their problem that we had

was a political problem, and it was we were in a proxy war with Red China and the Soviet Union.

And

if you read Mark's brilliant book,

I want to make a plug for it.

I think you should all look at it, Triumph Regained.

It came out,

it was supposed to be published in a three-volume set.

I think, I don't want to speak

on a field that I'm not absolutely sure about, but by Cambridge University Press.

And then given the woke movement, I don't think wokesters want to publish something with Triumph Regained, you know,

the Vietnam War, 1965 to 68, especially when Mark's first volume was a revisionist history about how we really

made some terrible political mistakes, but militarily we were always superb.

But you can really see that

when you read this book,

it's tragic because this is a military history of every campaign from 65 to 1968.

Even Tet, Khe San, it is no exaggeration to say the United States won every single one of those campaigns, overwhelmingly.

But they weren't able because they never quite knew what the Russians or the Chinese were going to do.

Were they going to invade?

No, they were not going going to invade.

We know that now because they lost a million men in Korea.

They were terrified of American artillery and air power.

Was the Soviet Union going to threaten us?

No, they were not.

They were fighting with the Chinese.

We didn't know all that.

But what I'm getting at is all the people, and I feel bad because in Carnage and Culture, I wrote a chapter on Tet and I was very critical of search and destroy missions.

I think the grandson of General Westmoreland wrote me a very impassioned letter because I thought that that was a bad strategy to send people out into the landscapes of the enemy where they knew the terrain and they were ambushing us.

And I think it was a mistake.

But the point that Mark Moyer is making is whether you think that was successful or not or the

remedy of that under Creighton Abrams,

whatever tactic we used,

It wasn't a question of defeating the enemy.

It was just a question of how many people we were going to lose to defeat the enemy.

Westmoreland defeated the enemy.

Abrams defeated the enemy.

The Air Force defeated the enemy.

Everybody defeated the enemy.

But when you look at the councils and government, and he draws on the memoirs of all of these Walt Rustow, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Avril Harriman,

my God,

when you start to read what Clark

Clifford and Robert McNamara were saying, it was the worst possible combination of,

we can't lose, so let's keep fighting, but let's not put too much in there.

Because then, you know, they might kill too many people and the CBS News will run another report, or the Russian ambassador may call us.

So they put all of those American boys out there in the field, and they were winning, and all they needed to do was extend the bombing and really take it to the North Vietnamese and get the damn thing over with.

And they pulled back all the time.

And it was, and Johnson was,

you all had this idea that LBJ was this tough guy.

No, he was a wavering guy.

He was a Joe Biden.

He had this crazy idea that he wanted to bankrupt the country with a great society, the butter, and he thought the guns was taking money away from it.

So it is a lot like

Vietnam, and in the sense there's no strategic resolution

because you've got two nuclear players involved as the patrons and their client, you know.

And the only difference is, and I said that to Jack, is I don't think, and I want to, some of you listening should correct me,

that we've ever had

since the nuclear age,

one nuclear power fighting a war on its own border with a former incorporated territory backed by another nuclear power, an adversary.

And that's what's new.

Ukraine was part of Russia.

It broke away.

Now Russia is fighting it.

It has nuclear weapons, and we have nuclear weapons, and we are using it as a proxy.

And we're doing it on the theory, as I understand it,

of, well,

well, well, Victor, in the Korean War, there were Russian pilots flying MiG-Alley with MiG-15 shooting down F-80s until we got the F-86.

Hey, you know what, Victor?

In Vietnam, there were 40,000 Russian quote-unquote advisors that were manning sophisticated Sam batteries in Hanoi that were shooting hundreds of American planes down.

And there were Chinese pilots in MiG-17s.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I understand that.

And I understand Putin was helping the Taliban, but

this is a war right on a nuclear.

This isn't a third party.

This is directly involving one.

It would be as if the

United States is fighting Mexico or Canada

on our immediate borders and Russia is starting to fuel Mexico to make sure that they can defeat the United States.

It's that kind of war.

Forget about morality and who started that.

Those are different questions.

I'm just talking about the facts of proximity and geography.

We're in new territory.

And whatever we know about...

So the left is basically telling us that if you have a tiger and it's wounded and it's in its cave and it's growling really loud, then it's okay to go in.

It doesn't matter.

He's a perfectly rational tiger.

He just, you know, I,

you know,

yeah, when I was a little boy, my grandfather would pay me $5,

no, excuse me, $1

if I shot possums.

And so I would sit with my little 22, 1893 Winchester pump 22 with a little scope on it, and I would wait, wait, wait, and Mr.

Possum would come by on the wood pile.

He'd look around and I'd shoot him.

And

I quit because he would scream like a human.

A 22, and sometimes I use shorts to save money rather than longs or long rifles.

In those days, the 22 would shoot all three variations.

But anyway, when I would go over there, it would still be alive.

You know, they're big and they have razor-sharp teeth.

Have you ever seen a possum?

They're sharp.

And that thing would be thrashing around.

I would say, well, that would be the metaphor for Putin.

So I would go over there and say, well, he's weak.

He's weak.

He's not going to bite me.

He just is grinning at me and he's sticking his tongue out and he's gnashing his teeth, but he's not going to do anything.

Well, I wasn't that stupid at nine years old.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Because my grandfather had said, if you don't shoot that thing, don't get near him.

He'll bite you.

And you'll have to go get, you know, some kind of shot.

Rabies.

Yeah.

I don't know if they carry rabies or not, but.

they probably are capable of it.

So we keep saying that Putin is wounded and he's corralled and he's shamed and he's talking about

nuclear weapons.

And yesterday he got out of a treaty, the START treaty with us.

And we think, yeah, he's just talking.

I don't think so.

I think, and somebody's, and then the next group, people, what would he do with letting off a tactical nuclear weapon?

I think he would show us that he's crazy and his craziness has now been reified on the battlefield.

And he's capable of crazy things.

So far, he's rational in the sense he says, you know, I armed your enemies in Vietnam and Korea, and I armed your enemies in Iraq, and that was the rules of the game, and I accept that.

But you guys are doing a little bit too much.

You're right on my border, and I'm losing, and you guys never really lost.

You quit, but I'm going to lose.

And I'm going to lose because of you.

That's his attitude.

Yeah.

But the self-righteousness, too, every that's a really tip-off in a war when you get that

zealous, sanctimonious war is

awful.

It's just, and it's terrible.

And

there is a good, a better, everything has a 51% edge over the other side.

You know, we were the right side in World War II, et cetera.

But this idea that

all the Russians are evil people, it's not true.

And they're captives of their government.

And this idea that you're going to demonize all these Russians, it doesn't make any sense.

I mean,

I don't know why we have 370,000 Chinese students in this country when they've got a million people in concentration camps.

They absorbed Hong Kong.

They destroyed Tibet.

They've stole almost every technological breakthrough we've had over the last 30 years.

They're going to invade or take over or absorb Taiwan.

And we just shrug.

And

we're getting rid of Russians.

They can't come.

It doesn't make any sense.

No, it sure doesn't, Victor.

And we're getting close to the end of our time here.

And it's not like Russia sent a balloon.

I can see it, Sammy, if Russia did something crazy, what they say he wouldn't do.

What if he sent a 250-foot balloon with the most sophisticated

2,500-pound payload, and it went right across the United States, taking pictures of our missile launchers and everything?

What if Vladimir Putin did that?

That would be something.

That would be an aggression.

Well, you know, now that you're mentioning it, I just want to say one thing that it seems to me both the Ukraine and China seem to have Biden by the balls.

And it may be something that they have on him.

I just don't, I can't understand the policies he has otherwise.

Well, we'll see because everybody says that.

They said Hunter is so conflicted and compromised with burisma and that Joe fired the special prosecutor when he bragged.

Remember?

Yes.

I just told him, he looks at my watch, I'm leaving in 20 minutes and son of a bitch,

he stopped.

You know, they fired him.

So he brags about that.

But we're getting to

a critical mass.

So if he is compromised, then and he's still

very tough on Putin, then we'll see, because then

Putin will say, well, here it is.

And, you know,

the CIA will have to tell us for the nth time it's disinformation.

But

I don't know whether he is or not.

But

I think

he's just a veneer.

He's just a specter.

He's just,

this country right now is being run by the bi-coastal foreign policy consensus.

And that's basically Elizabeth Warren,

the squad types of part of the Democratic Party, the Obamas.

Joe Biden is the filter.

And Joe Biden gets on that stage and yells.

You ever seen when he, like yesterday when he was talking about Ukraine, his eyes get very beady and he gets, he starts to grimace, he gets angry and he just yells.

And then after about 30 seconds, he's out of breath.

So then it's just kind of a spittle and he just, is mush.

You know what I mean?

It's just

slurring.

Yeah, slurring his words.

I don't know if that's because of reflux or congestive heart failure or arrhythmia or what it is, but it's so

and he comes to life.

He only, I guess what I'm saying is he only comes to life when he was attacking somebody.

And everybody says that's fine.

He's attacking Putin.

Okay.

But he does the same thing when he attacks.

the ultra mega and the semi-fascism and all that stuff.

It's just, he's, it just reminds me of the way in 1991 he conducted the Senate judiciary hearings when he took on Clarence Thomas and started just showboating and lecturing and pontificating

and trying to humiliate Thomas.

It was horrible.

Yeah.

And

so he's never been, I don't want to be dwelling on this, listeners, but

It is true that he's non-compos mentes.

It is true that he's lost cognitive facilities.

It is true that he would flunk the Montreal cognitive assessment.

But this is just an intensification, as so often happens with Alzheimer's, of a pre-existing personality.

It just becomes emphasized when one has the filters off, or the restraints off, or the blinders off.

It was this way always.

He was mean.

He was a blowhard.

He was a pathological exaggerator, I should say, liar, and he was not a nice person.

And now, with his challenges, that has been accentuated, but it hasn't, it's not out of character.

It's not new.

Yeah, that's for sure.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of our time.

We've been talking about Biden's recent trip and Putin's strategy, and the

what else did we talk about?

Oh, and all this weird weather in California and its implications.

So, thank you very much for all of the words of wisdom on those things.

Well, thank you.

And I thank thank everybody for listening.

We really covered a lot of ground, and

let's hope things don't get too scary in Ukraine.

Yeah, thanks to the listeners for listening.

This is Victor Davis-Hansen and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.